Cabins Across Time

The Golden Triangle Quilt Guild in Beaumont, TX, is having their quilt show this coming Friday and Saturday, February 7 and 8.  We have two art quilt categories this year which is especially exciting and I can't wait to see the entries.
Also, a few antique and old quilts will be turned on a bed and each viewed while their story is told.  My quilt and its story is shown below.  The photo was scanned from an old print taken in 1997 with a throw-away camera so the quality of it, I'm sorry to say, is not good.

Cabins Across Time                          64" x 64"

Pieced by:  Quilter Unknown

Hand-quilted by:  cmf

 

 

I bought a log-cabin quilt-top at International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, in 1996.  The vendor said it was from the 1890's. The fabric was very brittle to the touch.  It seemed fragile almost to the point of being useless.  I batted it with unwashed 80-20 cotton/poly and used a new, unwashed, reproduction fabric on the back.  I began hand-quilting it in 1997.  With every stitch, the fabric would shred away from the needle.  I did not know if I would get a quilt out of it at the end but I continued quilting it over a 3-month period until it was done.  At that point, I decided to wash it and dry it in the dryer thinking that the thread would shrink, the batting and backing would shrink and the small rips around each stitch would shrink.  It worked!  When Jane Hall, a nationally known quilter able to date old fabric, saw it, she said, "Connie, you know what you did?"  I said, "No", imagining I had ruined its value.  She said, "You saved the life of this quilt-top!"  Because it was pieced by an unknown quilter around 1897, according to Jane, and I quilted it in 1997, I called it Cabins Across Time in honor of my connection to the unknown piecer and the 100 years between us.