Throwback Thursday - Noah's Ark Baby Quilt, winter 1991-2

36.5 x 44 inches, including the 2" eyelet ruffles

I found this long-missing quilt with the Umbrella Girls quilt I shared last month. It was the fifth quilt I finished, and I made it during the winter of 1991-2 while I was pregnant with our oldest. 

I bought it as a prequilted panel at the JoAnn Fabrics store where I was an assistant manager. It was done up in that chicken coop motif just like this one:

I didn't like that at all, so I took all the quilting out, tossed out the skimpy batting and plasticky-feeling shim that had been inside. I soaked and dried and pressed the fabrics to get the needle holes and indented lines out, and relayered it with a high-quality poly batt that was a big splurg for us at that period.

I hand quilted it! (The last hand-quilting to happen until our youngest was in high school!) I used a hoop, and just followed the outlines of the figures with black thread and then added background work in white thread in the central panel and also to define the inner borders. You can see that I'd left the border backgrounds untouched and fluffy, which is still just fine with this batting. 

I didn't bind this quilt. I'd wanted a pretty ruffled eyelet trim on it. I attached it by machine right-sides-together to the front of the quilt, right through the batting. when I turned the edge, yes, that batting wanted to flip out unattractively. So I remember that I hand-basted the batting edge down onto itself to lay pretty along the finished edge.

I also remember the TV time I enjoyed while I sat there and hand-rolled the edge of the backing under and hand-stitched it down to the eyelet so that it just barely covered the seamline. Sandy brought it to mind to look up which shows I would have been watching that winter, and they would have been Star Trek Next Generation, Home Improvement, Dinosaurs, Murphy Brown, Fresh Prince of Bel Aire, Designing Women, Cheers, Cosby Show, Murder She Wrote, Northern Exposure. I didn't like Married with Children, Dallas, or Full House for some reason. I also didn't care much for daytime TV other than Regis and Kathie Lee.

This quilt is in excellent shape. Heather never used it actively - it was put up on the wall as a nursery decoration. 

I'm going to make a label for it and stitch the ends of the eyelet ruffle together - I find it funny that I did so much other handwork on this quilt and failed to tend to this detail.  :)   

What a great find in my old quilts!! It's going to be wonderfully fulfilling to gift it to Heather when they're expecting their first child.

~*~*~  Linking up at Sandra's Throwback Thursdays

Throwback Thursday - Grandma's Sweet-16 Quilt for me, "Umbrella Girls" (1983)

Sandra has re-started Throwback Thursdays, and just when I found an old favorite of mine that's been missing since we moved in 2012. :)

This is my Sweet 16 quilt that my paternal grandmother made for me in 1983. I loved it then, and I still love it. I've captured close-ups of some of my favorite girls.

This loved quilt is what made it so very fun for me to quilt up the Bo-Peep vintage top that Great-Aunt Helen's grandmother had made for her in the 1930s. 

My grandmother really liked doing up tulip quilts and these umbrella girls, even though she was quilting two generations later than the Bo-Peep ancestor (different family lines).

My Umbrella Girls quilt is 68 x 88 inches and has a soft, puffy poly batt. 

Most of the fabrics are cottons, and that green is almost identical to the Kona Candy Green. I think there are a smattering of polyesters on the girls' dresses, though. 

You might be able to see that she zig-zagged her applique and used a permanent marker for their arms. Time-savers that did their jobs, as they're still holding up. None of the dresses/umbrellas are pulling up anywhere. 

My 20yo daughter's favorite right now.
She's the only one with her arm fully colored.
The Umbrella Girl, not my daughter.  ;D

But then Grandma hand-quilted it. I love that.  :)

My grandmother has been gone for several years. She lived to be 91, and in that time she made quilts for all her many children, grand-children, and great-granchildren. I personally got a baby quilt, a Sweet-16, and a personalized wedding quilt where she quilted the building we were married in and our names/dates/etc. 

Most of us brought as many of our Grandma quilts as we could to her funeral. There were probably 100 there. That's when I my quilting bug got kicked into overdrive. I want a legacy like that.

And I hope some day some of my descendants will love a quilt or two of mine the way I love this one.