Here is another quilt made by Grandma S. This is the only quilt I have seen that she machine appliqued. I know she was quite proud of her Pfaff Dial-A-Stitch machine and it was ancient when I entered the family. I am guessing this was her first shot at machine applique and it is charming! Sorry for the bad pics. This is a big quilt and I didn’t have a good place to photograph it,

She used all different colors of mini checked ginghams for the animal bodies.  She used a narrow zig zag on the edge and not a bit of fusible! Even the animal names she did in a very narrow black zig zag. She must not have had enough of one yellow because there are two different shades used in the border. Here is a close up of the “squirrel! block:

All the embroidery was done by machine. The batting is cotton. It is fairly thin but heavy and in pretty good shape.

Grandma lived with my mother in law for a time when I first started quilting. I learned everything I knew from library books and Kay Woods PBS series! One time, my mother in law had to go out of town for a week and I went and stayed with Grandma everyday while she was gone. I had just started quilting my second quilt. It was a queen sized Amish bars style quilt (terribly ugly!). I was quilting it using a large hoop. Grandma had never quilted anything without a floor frame. I bought an extra hoop for her to use and brought it over and asked her to help me quilt, She worked on one end and I worked on the other. Over and over she said, “I just never heard of doing it this way.” I could tell this really rocked her world! But I loved being able to work on a quilt with her and will always cherish those memories. (BTW, her stitches were the nicest part of that quilt!)

Until next time….