Ta Da! Sound the Trumpets! I'm Finished!

I did it. I did it! I finished my last page of BJP 2007.

This is my May page. It's based on my Grandma O'Keefe's wedding ring quilt. You can see my posting about that quilt here . The quilt caused a bit of a ruckus in the family with some thinking it was a valuable heirloom and it didn't help when my dad said two (that I know of) granddaughters would get to have it when he died. Well, with it almost hitting the trash bin as we were cleaning Dad's garage out, I somehow brought it home and still have it. We didn't get much from our grandmothers as other grandkids managed to get it instead. Grandma O'Keefe's stuff I'm afraid to say, probably went for drug money. Sad but that's the way life goes sometimes.

I wanted to see if I could do this like a charm quilt where every piece is a different fabric. I succeeded. I couldn't do fringe or too much texture as I was emulating fabrics - old fabrics. Some of the ugly-coating-coming-off pearl beads were the last from my mother. I figured this was a good place to use them. The two hearts in the middle are for my grandmothers. The fabrics are from their aprons we saw them wear so much.

I was going to sew all of these pieces from the year into a round penny rug table topper. I have changed my mind. I always cover up a table with junk and projects so it would never be seen and I didn't feel anyone else would ever want it in that form. Instead I am going to put them in three groups of four and sew them, still penny rug style, to a backing and put them in three matching frames. I think this will be a better way to display them all.

And now, I can go on to October 2008 guilt-free. Yay.

Old Quilt

I have been trying all morning to get these pictures uploaded. I
finally checked my camera to find it was set on the biggest file size. I changed that and then went and cropped my pictures to make them smaller. That helped but I still had to upload them one at a time as evidently Blogger couldn't handle them even two at a time (I tried).


Sue at From the Magpie's Nest shared a picture of her great-grandmother's Wedding Ring quilt so I thought I would pull out my grandmother's quilt and share pictures of it plus take a poll to see what you all think I should do with it. (That's if I can get the poll thingy to work. If not I'll have to amend my post).


My grandmother was not one for communication so we know nothing other than that she made this quilt - sometime! It's in one piece but as you can see the edges and some of the pieces are a bit ragged. The quilting is gone in large parts of the quilt. The only way I see to restore it would be to requilt the whole thing, replace a few patches and rebind it. I don't feel like it would be Grandma Minnie O'Keefe's quilt anymore. I don't like leaving it sit folded up in the linen closet though.

Oooooh, I just figured out what my May page for the BJP is going to be! Yay, I didn't have a clue what to do and now I know. Stay tuned!

Let me get back to Grandma's quilt. I think she used pretty colors in the quilt and you can see some of the patterns in the fabrics. I really wish she would have shared more of herself with us.


I have some sisters who think this quilt is valuable and would bring in a tidy sum of money which in their way of thinking would be divided among six of us....yeah, they just really don't know it is only of sentimental value but they don't do any crafts at all so they really wouldn't know.

Okay, go take a look at the poll.

Baby Quilts

I thought I would share pictures of the quilts I
made for my grandchildren when they were born. The green one is the first one. It was made for my grandson. This picture was taken last summer when the quilt was 13 years old and I can say the quilt has been in constant use all these years.


Next comes the big-star quilt. It was made 11 years ago for my first granddaughter.

The small-star quilt was made next but the squares were made by hand as a portable project I had started a couple of years before. I pieced the blocks together by machine though.


And last comes the 7 year old quilt for the baby of the family. Good ol' Attic Windows. The kids are all pretty attached to these quilts.


My daughter, thank goodness, didn't relegate these to the awful status of "family heirloom" meaning no touching, no attaching to, but instead felt the kids should use them even if they wear them out. I sooo agreed with her on this but we lucked out and the quilts have held up very well.