Showing posts with label Underground Railroad quilts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Underground Railroad quilts. Show all posts

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.

Monday, 17 November 2008

Underground Railroad Miniature Quilt

It's about time I update my blog! I have several projects I could post, but hadn't taken any pictures yet. Finally got around to photos of this Underground Railroad Mini quilt I finished. I started this quilt when I worked at the Quilt Rack in Ancaster three years ago. We were teaching classes using Eleanor Burn's Underground Railroad book incorporating readings from Underground Railroad history and having speakers and special guests in to augment the classes. As we made the 12" sample blocks for the quilt, I made the 6" miniature version of the blocks. I finally got the quilt finished in time for our guild show two weeks ago. However, I'm not really happy with the quilting in the sashings and I'm thinking of taking it out. And, I've finally come up with a brainstorm for a quilt design in the border, so I hope to get at that soon.


Some closer up pictures of each corner of the quilt:






The label was printed on cotton fabric at a copy shop using the same process as printing onto a T-shirt.