antique

This entry needed to be made separately from the other one I just did, because it has a more limited audience. You guys know me; every now and then, I spot an antique quilt top that is the right combination of appearance + price, and I bite on it.

I bit on this one.

It doesn't have a name, and it doesn't have an owner.

The workmanship is solid but not spectacular; it took me looking closely to see that some blocks fudge here and there. I liked both the pattern and color sense; it is a classic pattern executed in a way that feels classic without being modern.

1930s-1950s. I don't feel a need to try to date this too closely. Not sure why; there is something about this quilt that made me say, "it is what it is, and I'm okay with that."

Sometimes, sweetness strikes you when you least expect it. As most of you undoubtedly know by now, I held a quilt contest; the person who had the closest guess to Jeff’s raw hospital bill at UAB won a quilt. Susanna, a co-worker of mine, won it by guessing $550,000, getting her just a little over $7K away from the true number.

I fully expected to be constructing a new quilt for her, but she asked if she could have an antique, instead. She said that she’d never gotten a quilt when she married, and that her tenth anniversary was coming up this summer, so why not make it a real antique? She loved Depression-era quilts, and quickly settled on a Depression-era double wedding ring quilt, preferably with feedsack fabrics.

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When we were over at Hallie and Remy’s a few months back, she asked if she could show me something. When we went to the back bedroom, she pulled out two sets of quilt squares.  One was hexagons** and the other squares.  There were 29 squares in all, not enough for a full adult-sized quilt, and she wondered if anything could be done with them. I said yes.

A few months later, she announced she was pregnant with her first child.  (A girl, or so the ultrasounds say so far.)  I don’t remember who suggested the idea of turning these unfinished squares into a quilt for her baby, but it seemed right and perfect. I took the squares but wasn’t sure what to do.  The fabrics are old, but I don’t know how old, and they have that aged cream-and-tan patina that only comes with aged cotton.  Modern prints would look out of place and jarring, and white would only make the fabrics look even more aged than they already were.