I have chosen this quilt (posted In January, 2009) as my entry in the Park City Girl’s Fall Quilt Festival.

This pattern is from a 1976 quilt booklet, “Stitch ‘n Patch Quilts.” I love these old pattern books — instructions are minimal and usually take up one page or less. I always use templates to draw my quilt pieces & scissors to cut them — rotary cutting and quick piecing don’t work well for the type of scrap quilts I make. Sometimes these newer techniques waste fabric (and vintage fabric is precious), or add extra seams (to eliminate set-in pieces) which I believe detract from the original design. I draw my quilt pieces and also my quilting designs with a #2 pencil, which is another thing I love about quilting — it doesn’t require a lot of equipment. I use a large hoop for hand quilting. Quilting in a frame is so appealing, but I had one years ago and I never quite got the hang of it.

Much of the fabric for this quilt came from an old brick pattern 1940’s quilt top purchased on ebay, together with some large pattern vintage prints that I was desperate to use in a project. The brick blocks were not quite wide enough to form the center pieces of the lantern, so many of these larger pieces are pieced themselves. The small yellow border is vintage, the larger red border is reproduction fabric. The lanterns are quilted in vertical and diagonal lines — the spaces are quilted with diagonal lines and motifs from the book “Japanese Design Motifs.” This book is a wonderful resource for quilting patterns. Some of the quilting designs were probably overly elaborate, because after the quilt was washed, I found it was difficult to make out some of the details.

Lantern Quilt
Martha Dellasega Gray, 2006
machine pieced, hand quilted
75″ x 87″

japanese-lantern

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Stitch ‘n Patch Quilts
Copyright 1976
Graphic Enterprises, Inc.

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