simmone star: embroidery

16 Mar 2014

Cleaning my little creative space

Unearthing forgotten pretties

I am a material girl

I had a big clean up of my fabric stash yesterday, spent a couple of hours folding, sorting, decluttering, binning, bagging up fabrics to donate & generally tiding my little space. I discovered I have soooo many doilies & bit and pieces of beautiful embroidery that it may just be time to cease collecting for a while. I have a fab growing collection of vintage sheets, with a few boxes still left to sort.

I have decided to cut up all the scraps and off cuts from the past few years of work and create a postage stamp quilt. I was explaining to my little girl that people of yester year used to fashion their old clothes in to squares or hexagons & hand stitch them together to make quilts & bedding. She was quite interested then asked to join in with the sewing, she sat at the machine & with my help stitched 9 little squares together :)

Postage stamp squares

It may take a very long time, but won't it be so pretty!

A Crazy Quilt

They do not make them any more,

For quilts are cheaper at the store

Than woman's labor, though a wife

Men think the cheapest thing in life.

But now and then a quilt is spread

Upon a quaint old walnut bed,

A crazy quilt of those old days

That I am old enough to praise.

Some women sewed these points and squares

Into a pattern like life's cares.

Here is a velvet that was strong,

The poplin that she wore so long,

A fragment from her daughter's dress,

Like her, a vanished loveliness;

Old patches of such things as these,

Old garments and old memories.

And what is life? A crazy quilt;

Sorrow and joy, and grace and guilt,

With here and there a square of blue

For some old happiness we knew;

And so the hand of time will take

The fragments of our lives and make,

Out of life's remnants, as they fall,

A thing of beauty, after all.

Douglas Malloch