Thursday 20 November 2008

Large Underground Railroad Quilt

As promised, here are some pictures of the other Underground Railroad quilt I made using the 12" blocks from Eleanor Burns book, "Underground Railroad". Sorry about the poor quality of the pictures, but it was a little big for my design wall and is quite close to the fluorescent light at the ceiling. That seems to throw the colours off a bit and it's not hanging straight either! At least you get the idea! We had a huge pile of snow today, so I can't go outside and take a picture :-). Hopefully, someday I can get a better picture and I will add it to this post then.

This quilt was done as a group project with 6 ladies that I met while living in Ancaster when DH went back to University to get his BEd degree. We lived in an apartment and came home on weekends occasionally where our son was 'holding the fort' :-). I worked at the Quilt Rack in Ancaster for those two years and met a lot of wonderful quilters. Getting together to sew in the evenings was great while DH was studying and attending classes. Each of us chose two blocks and made 6 identical ones. I did the basket block and the flying geese block. We sewed the log cabin blocks together one evening and each person did their own label block. I didn't have quite enough of the border fabric so had to get creative with the corners. I ended up having to piece the last 1 1/2" tan strip as I was running out of fabric! I put a solid blue strip in the center of each border and just managed. There are many fond memories in this quilt!

I love this block! In a moment of insanity, I thought it would cool to handquilt a cable in the sashings! It took quite awhile to do this, but I really like it. But, now I really should handquilt the border too! I may quilt some feathers in the outside border.


One of the blocks that I sewed:

The label was copied onto fabric at a copy shop using the same process as printing on a Tshirt. I added leftover bits from my mini Underground Railroad quilt to make the block 12".


Picture is a bit crooked, but here you can see the corner block. The colours are much more accurate on this picture.

3 comments:

Christina said...

The picture seems ok to me, but I know what you mean. I hate those lights in my sewing room, they really change things. I really love this quilt. I went to the Gees Bend show here in Washington last summer, I learned so much between that and the PBS special I really have a love for the quilts from there and from underground railroad. For a while I couldn't get enough to read about those. But I don't have the EB book and plan to get it. Thank you so much for posting this.

Caroline said...

Do you know the name of the block in the picture with your cable quilting? Bravo on the hand quilting, by the way. We don't see nearly enough of it lately. Someone has to know how to do it in order to pass on the knowledge!

Thanks for help identifying the block name. I might need to make a quilt with that block...

The Cozy Quilter said...

Beautiful quilts, Jacqui! My daughter spent quite a bit of time learning about the Underground railway after reading a book about it in English class in public school. While in the US last March, we had dinner at a very old restaurant in Gettysburg that had a hiding spot for people on the underground railroad off the main staircase. Customers at the restaurant could look into the hiding spot and imagine what it must have been like.