Aunt Ruth's quilts

My husband's  Great-Aunt Ruth was a prolific quilter until her eyesight gave out.  I haven't had the opportunity to get to know her personally, since we have never lived close by, but I do have some of her quilts to admire.  I thought you might appreciate a peek at her work.

The butterfly quilt was her wedding gift to us.  It is hanquilted, and I check the stiches on it occasionally to see if I'm getting my stitches on my quilts as even as hers.   I'm sure you noticed the prairie points too.  I measured those to give me a place to start when I was auditioning point sizes for my leaf quit.

The quilt below was a gift for my son when he was born.  It arrived complete with the first place ribbon it won at the Stanley Fair.  I love the brown border.  It wouldn't have occurred to me to use such a colour for a baby quilt but it frames "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" perfectly.

I also have my husbands baby quilt that Aunt Ruth and Aunt Beth worked on together, but I haven't figured out how to photograph it properly.  It is a handquilted whole cloth reversible quilt, pink on one side, blue on the other, with alternating pink and blue prairie points.  I haven't gotten the lighting right to get the quilting to show, but it's a wonderful quilt.

Thank you Aunt Ruth!  I'm off to quilt on my daughter's quilt now, striving for even stitches just like yours!

Prairie points

I started making prairie points for this quilt top that has been waiting its turn for about  a year now. 

I cut out paper squares of various sizes and folded them to audition sizes, then cut 86 4-inch squares out of 14 fabrics leftover from making the leaves. The squares are folded twice on the diagonal to make tidy little triangles.

Next I started to lay them out along the edge of the quilt.

Next, thunderstorms came rolling through again. It was the 3rd night in a row, and they go on for hours, and after 7 years in the Midwest they still wake me up. I'm getting a bit cranky from reduced sleep... Anyway,  I didn't want to leave my machine plugged in during the storms so the points didn't actually get sewn to the quilt.  They got picked up and put away so the kids could curl up down here if the storms turned severe. 

For those of you not in the Midwest, severe refers to damaging winds and/or hail.  Last night's storms weren't "severe" but coupled with the previous two nights of heavy rainfall they caused two rivers to overflow their banks and cause record flooding in parts of town.  Happily we're OK where we are, though currently we have no running water (the kids looked at me very srangely when I told them not to flush the toilets...)

So easy cooking tonight - sandwiches and whatever doesn't create dishes to wash :)  And as long as the power stays on to keep the A/C running to keep the heat at bay (105 F/41 C with the humidity factored in) I can keep quilting. There aren't supposed to be any storms tonight...

The package is in the mail...

Mom,  your runner and placemats are almost in the mail!  They're in a box and addressed and everything short of being actually in the post office's custody.  Monday, I promise!