Documenting
Historians and conservators of textiles admonish those of us who quilt to label our quilts with our names, dates, and place. I try to do this, making the label for the quilt when I finish the top—using up bits and pieces of the quilt top to frame the label. Since my hand-writing is not so neat, I use the word processor in a nice font (Lucida Hand-writing is my favorite), print it, and then trace the information on the prepared label.
But then there are the photographs and in this digital age, documenting virtually.
Here is a vintage spiderweb I quilted this past month during quarantine. It has a huge variety of types of fabrics, precisely pieced but so lumpy and bumpy it was hard to quilt in any sort of pattern and so it has wavy lines. But it is now finished and bound.
I have no information about the original stitcher; she had an incredible amount of scraps, perhaps she was a professional seamstress like one of my great-grandmothers.
Here is one I pieced many years ago and this past year quilted it. The older fabrics are so soft.
the pattern is more or less a snowball with rail fence blocks. I think I started it in a guild workshop many years ago.
And finally here is a Bonnie Hunter mystery quilt from a couple years ago called Good Fortune. Her quilts are all scrappy but I used a controlled palette as my life at the time was too unsettled to hunt for the proper colors. All of these fabrics are related to birds.
Yesterday I spent my afternoon piecing backs for the remaining tops. there are three more backings ready. It does feel like a real job these days, but a job that I can look back on and see progress.
Sylvia Weir Art 