If you know my cousins and you're reading this, don't tell them about any of this, because one of them is getting this quilt for Christmas!! (I don't have any reason to think she reads here, but her mother might.) I have been looking for this quilt ever since Mama died, and and I finally found it, in the very very back of the last closet I emptied - behind the ski boots and the bad oil painting, in a paper bag underneath a quilt I really dislike. Mama hid it well, although I doubt that she did it on purpose. I didn't even look in the bag at first, because what was on top was so unprepossessing.
Anyway, this is a quilt made over 10 years ago, shortly after my grandfather died, out of fabric cut from several of his shirts. There is one of my cousins in particular who I know would treasure this, so she's the one who's getting it. Anybody else who thinks they know who I'm talking about, just hush up til Christmas, ok?
Quilt made by Billie Standley, in memory of her father, W.C. Novosad.
Well, the quilt's not actually new, of course, but the picture is. (I found a bunch more quilt pictures, actually, I just haven't had time to scan them.) Anyway, this appears to be one of her scrap quilt efforts, and I think it's the best of the bunch. It has sort of a watercolor effect that's very nice.
Quilt above by Billie Standley.
Quilt above made by Billie Standley.
My mom made so many quilts that I'll never really have a real count of all of them. This one, for example, is long-gone - I think it may have been another community service quilt, but I'm not sure about that, either. I remember now seeing it at the time she made it, but I had completely forgotten its existence until I came across this picture in her stuff. I am not really particularly big on patriotic-themed stuff, but this one is cute. For one thing, I like that border fabric more than I like a lot of flag fabric. And that huge red star really pops.
I'm not sure if "double X' is the right name for this pattern but I'm pretty sure it's what my mom was calling it. And y'know, I never thought I liked the pattern but it looks pretty good here!
Quilt above by Barbara Baume.
A while back I posted a picture of a quilt of my mother's which at the time I called "Eagle Medallion" since I didn't know its correct name. Later I found out that it was called "Ever Vigilant", and that the pattern was by Barbara Baume, and was published in Quilters Newsletter in July 2002, so I went back and added that info to the original post. And apparently Barbara found that entry, and she wrote me a very nice e-mail about it. I love it when people do things like that. (She said, among other things, that the eagle's wings are so short because that was all the fabric she had!) And she sent me the link to her version, which is the one above. Click over and look at my mother's quilt - they are very, very similar. It's interesting to compare.
It occurs to me that I have talked about my mother an awful lot, and you have seen her quilts but you may never have seen my mom herself. So I have been scanning pictures again, and here she is. (Somewhere in Australia, to be exact, in 1993.)
More sawtooth stars, this time with an applique center. I forget where this pattern came from - maybe another Fons & Porter pattern?
Quilt above made by Billie Standley.
Wallhanging by Billie Standley, from a pattern in the book "Easy Seasonal Wall Quilts" (see link below).
I put up a picture of the April Showers quilt, so I thought I'd put up March Winds, too, just for completeness. My mother did a number of wallhangings out of that book - here's the Thanksgiving one and there's also an Amazon link there to the book itself, although I don't know how hard it would be to get hold of these days. Anyway, I particularly like this one.
Quilt above by Billie Standley, begun in a Karen Combs class.
There are a bunch of new pictures of Mom quilts over on Flickr - if you click on the picture above it should get you over there. (It's late and I'm too tired to figure out the link right now.) Mostly they are not actually new pictures, just things that had never gotten added to flickr before. It turned out that there were a lot of those. It makes me sort of sad that my mother made so many quilts that I don't even have pictures of, because she turned things out so fast that even after I got methodical about taking pictures, she would make things and get rid of them before I could even have a chance to take a picture.
(So if anybody happens to have some of my mother's quilts, this is your hint to send me a picture. quiltsgalore(at)gmail(dot)com. I'd be forever grateful.)
One-block Sunbonnet Sue made by Billie Standley. I don't know where the pattern came from, exactly.
This is a detail picture of Mom's Roseville quilt. This is just the center, which has (and I remember this from when she was making it, it impressed me so much) over 300 pieces in this block alone. I think that makes this quilt an heirloom.
Quilt above by Billie Standley.
So the quilt I brought home last weekend was this one. The center applique block is one of Sue Garman's patterns - I think maybe it goes with the "Mama Said" series of patterns. But my mom changed the hair-color on the girls to represent my sister and me, because I always had dark hair growing up, and my sister was blonde. (I think the rest of the blocks were from a kit, although I'm not 100% sure about that. The fabrics are mostly by Robyn Pandolph and Sandy Gervais.) My mom also wrote the sweetest inscription on the label, something about memories of her little girls, which I don't remember having seen before at all. It almost made me cry.
This quilt is made out of Robyn Pandolph's "Moondance" fabric, and the pattern is one that I believe was published along with the fabric, but my mom and I thought at the time that this block was called Radiant Star. I like this quilt, although I think it's too low-contrast to show off that pretty block. (I haven't come across this quilt so far; it may have been one of the ones she sold at some point. Or it may just be buried deeper than I have so far ventured into her closets.)
Another one of Mom's quilts that I brought home - it goes well with the big batik quilt that I have on the bed, and it's a beautiful piece in its own right, isn't it? You can see my husband's hands holding it up, it's not big at all. Mom kept it on a chest in her bedroom, and it's laying across my couch at the moment.
I need to find out who's running the guild quilt show next year - somebody had suggested that they have an exhibit of my mother's quilts, and if they're interested in doing it, I need to make sure the ones we might want for that stay together, or at least stay where we can get to them! (On the other hand, there's no shortage of her quilts to choose from.)
