Grecian Square

A friend of mine wrote and asked me why the Grecian Square blocks in the "red, white, and symbolic" quilt I recently wrote about have that name.  What is Grecian about them?

Deer Creek Fen quilt at home

My zoologist friend visited me in June and picked up the landscape quilt I made for her.  It is a portrait of the fen where she does her fieldwork.

The quilt is now happily hanging in its new home.  My friend just sent photos, and here they are.  I am so happy to see it in situ.  The colors really work well with the rest of the room, I think.  And my friend can work at her desk and dream about being out in the kayak - gliding through the grasses and visiting the bog buckmoths, the turtles, frogs, and dragonflies, all the while watched over by the deer and hawk.  Yea!!

The complete story of this quilt's creation starts here with her photos and fabric selection and creating the landscape, and continues with creating the animals, more detailing and adding the borders are here and here, and finally, photos of the completed quilt.  I'm really grateful to my friend for the inspiration to create such a detailed and exciting quilt.

Family History

While writing the previous post about my refrigerator quilt, I took advantage of the "interwebs", which didn't exist to such a great extent at the time I made the quilt, to research this postcard from Germany.  It features my last name in the original German spelling.  "Wasser" is the German word for water, pronounced "vah-ser".  

My Refrigerator Quilt

I used to belong to FACET, a critique group of art quilters.  Besides meeting monthly for critique sessions, we also created a couple of traveling shows.  The one I'm going to talk about in this post was created in 2000 and called "Narrative Portraits".  We always tried to come up with a theme that would be flexible enough to inspire all our members and include all the varied techniques represented in our work.

My portrait concept came to me one night while chopping veggies for dinner.  My kids were 10 and 6 at the time.  We got, and still get, our veggies with a subscription to an organic farm.  I do a lot of chopping.

Goodies

Gleanings from this weekend's estate sale shopping:

more buttons

Red, White, and Symbolic

This one-of-a-kind quilt recently came to me for repairs.  The center four blocks need no explanation.  The rest of the quilt is comprised of Grecian Square blocks, and sashing with red squares at the intersections.  I estimate that it was made in the early 1900s, quite likely 90 years old, maybe nearing 100.

The main problem was a lot of wear along the edges, especially the red rectangles, as well as some of the white fabric and the floral print backing.

Red-Letter Day

Many crafters collect supplies like there was no tomorrow.  And then discover that they still never have the right things for the next project and head out to the store.  Right?  

Well, this little hat proved that old adage wrong.  This is a repair job I'm doing for Basya Berkman Vintage Fashions.