It is time to get out the charm quilts for their photo session. I'm hoping to have digital pictures of all of my quilts soon. Charm quilts have had revivals a couple times. They started out more than a century ago and had a revival in the mid 1980's. Our local guild wanted to do a charm quilt so another lady and I started cutting my fabrics into kits of 3-1/2" squares and 5" squares. About halfway through she had family matters to attend to so I finished the cutting myself, about 880 different fabrics. I took the kits to the guild meeting hoping to sell some and one of the kits was used to make a charm quilt at the meeting. None of the kits sold!
Now I was on a mission to show them what could be done with a kit. In 1981 an antique version of the quilt above was in the Quilt Engagement Calendar. In Jan. 1985 someone published an article in Quilters Newsletter Magazine telling how many light/med, light/dark, and med/dark combination squares you needed to make it . In 1986 started pairing squares, drawing the line diagonally, sewing on each side and cut the marked line. But now I had 2 of every combination and each fabric was supposed to appear only once. That is how the second quilt below was born,
from the other half of the pieced squares. There was a black and white drawing of this block in a Barbara Johannah book so I converted it to lt/med/dk so I could use the 3 value ranges. The top quilt has 864 different fabrics, the bottom one 936 different fabrics. I sold most of the kits. More tomorrow.
Now I was on a mission to show them what could be done with a kit. In 1981 an antique version of the quilt above was in the Quilt Engagement Calendar. In Jan. 1985 someone published an article in Quilters Newsletter Magazine telling how many light/med, light/dark, and med/dark combination squares you needed to make it . In 1986 started pairing squares, drawing the line diagonally, sewing on each side and cut the marked line. But now I had 2 of every combination and each fabric was supposed to appear only once. That is how the second quilt below was born, from the other half of the pieced squares. There was a black and white drawing of this block in a Barbara Johannah book so I converted it to lt/med/dk so I could use the 3 value ranges. The top quilt has 864 different fabrics, the bottom one 936 different fabrics. I sold most of the kits. More tomorrow.