Laundry Quilt

A clothesline quilt, hanging on my mother's clothesline. Made in 1976 by my Auntie M and my Unk J for my big brother.




I love the simple graphic quality of this thing. I think the design and execution are just brilliant. I don't know if they made up the whole thing or used a pattern or had an inspiration from somewhere, but it doesn't matter - they made it, and this quilt is sharp.



I realized yesterday that it belongs to a family of quilts that Hillary at Wee Wonderfuls has made: kid quilts with large representational graphics. Here's snippets of her cars & trucks quilt, a tree quilt, and a barn quilt.

Butterflies in Mom's Basket

This is a quilt my Mom finished on 7/7/07. It was partially inspired by a African stripe basketweave quilt by Kaffe Fassett in his book Passionate Patchwork (I think that's the right book).



It's prettier than "Japanese Beetles In My Bucket," which is another composition of my mother's that I had a good laugh about. While I was at my mom's, just before we took these photos, we walked around her garden together on the daily "beetle walk." She has a sharp eye for them, and she holds whatever leaf they're on and tips them into her bucket of soapy water, where they drown. I suppose there's no way not to make it sound morbid, but they're a pest. It's a whole lot nicer than spraying a bunch of toxic chemicals on everything, and otherwise they ruin the trees and bushes and grapes.

One excellent feature of this quilt is that it becomes two sided. The backing is a light color, and my mother quilted all the stripes in colors that match the fabric of the stripes, so the pattern of the basket shows through on the back, even without this much sunlight streaming through.



Nice job, Mom!

Quilts, Quilts, Quilts

I actually have three quilts to post, but they are all so very deserving of their own posts, I'm going to spread out the love.

First things first: My First Completed Quilt. For real. For DollQuiltSwap II.



Mailed off a bit after the deadline, but the recipient should definitely have it by now.



I'm still waiting to receive my doll quilt, but she who sends late must not have impatience for the tardiness of others.

One more picture, just because I'm so pleased with myseslf. I hope Miss Rita likes it!



With a big thanks to the organizers of the swap - it gave me the impetus I needed to start and finish a whole (tiny) quilt.