Crazy Baseball Quilt
These block pieces were purchased on ebay in 2002. They fabric scraps were hand stitched to a foundation of 1943 newspaper pages. The stitches were not as close as I would have liked, but I couldn’t figure out how to go over her stitching. In the end I just removed the newspaper — then soaked, pressed and re-cut the pieces. The original shape would have created a kind of rounded square with the four muslin pieces, but I decided to cut the curve more deeply which makes a nice circle when the muslin pieces are joined– the baseball. I machine stitched around the outside of each piece before hand stitching the muslin pieces into the curves.
Because I was a little worried about the structural integrity of her stitching, I decided to do a fairly close quilting design with horizontal and vertical lines. The binding and backing are the same cadet blue fabric. I like the way it turned out, and the stitching has held up just fine. It’s actually pretty gratifying to complete another quilter’s unfinished project.
Crazy Baseball Quilt
Unknown Quilter, 1943, and
Martha Dellasega Gray, 2005
hand pieced, hand quilted
57″ x 81″
Quilts
Embroidery
Family-Made
Vintage Finds
Vintage Fabric
Children's Books
Work in Progress
Other Needlework
Other Things
jan wrote,
I think you are very brave to finish another quilter’s work that is over 60 years old! It is beautiful, though – such tiny pieces saved to make an overall effect of an explosion of color! I just love looking at all the different prints!
Link | September 27th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Ann Champion wrote,
You did a wonderful job on the finishing! It feels so good to make an older top into a usable quilt. I like to think of the person who started the project and hope they’d be happy with the results? I swear, sometimes I can almost feel their presence as I work!
Link | September 28th, 2009 at 7:28 am
mb. wrote,
really appealing! Not a pattern (or endeavor) I would dream of attempting but it is gorgeous.
Link | September 28th, 2009 at 7:36 am
Ann wrote,
I haven’t seen a quilt like this before. I LOVE IT! The combination of the scrappy foundation pieces with the baseballs is striking. I continue to marvel at how the internet has changed our lives and world. What would have happened to those pretty blocks before? Probably nothing. It is SO great that you got them and worked them into this beautiful quilt!
Link | September 28th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Mom Wald wrote,
What a wonderful thing to do! Not only did you give these blocks a new life, you put in extra effort into it.
The fabrics are wonderful. It must have taken hours to stitch them all together. To think they could have been lost forever.
Bravo!
Link | September 29th, 2009 at 5:27 am
pratima wrote,
So beautiful! You did an amazing job. It’s hard to imagine the amount of patience required to handle such a task…
The prints are very very cute.
Link | October 1st, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Susan wrote,
This is just lovely. You did such a beautiful job of restructuring it. I like the “baseball” shapes. The whole thing is very cohesive, which isn’t easy to do when reworking a piece.
Link | October 1st, 2009 at 5:09 pm