CA-bound #6: Simply squares

Quilt #6 sent to Robert Kaufman for the #quiltsforCA drive:

60" x 76"

This was an experiment. The large print was from a stash of polished cotton(?) light-weight upholstery fabric I've been carrying around for decades. My former sister-in-law worked for a while in a fabric store, and would often bring my mother and me upholstery fabric and sample swatches from discontinued lines. I had several 11"x12" rectangles of it, far too many to use up in this quilt (the rest were used in CA quilt #7). Counting the border, 25 rectangles were used from this stash.

To the upholstery squares I added grey fabric I purchased over 30 years ago to make curtains (or perhaps I cut up the curtains themselves--hard to remember the history of that hunk of fabric in its drawer). I remember being pregnant with my second child, crawling around the floor of our military housing duplex measuring and cutting the panels to construct those curtains for our master bedroom (I couldn't find anything I liked ready-made, and there was a discount home-decor fabric store nearby). The tan was some of the original fabric I bought when I was trying to start a quilting stash and didn't really have a sense of what I wanted or needed.

In another quirk of happenstance, I had a long stringy length of this checkered fabric which worked perfectly for an inner border.

The backing had its own story. A few years ago, a quilt store went out of business in Austin. I heard of its death throes from a chorus member, and visited during one of its final All-Things-Must-Go! days. It may sound silly, but I felt slightly guilty for the demise of this store because I had never, ever visited it as a customer before that day. Truth be told, I had never even heard of it before my chorus member told me of it (that lack of public presence may have accounted for the fact that it went out of business).

So to assuage my guilt somewhat, and because I really didn't want to stock up on a random assortment of fabrics just because they were at cut-rate prices, I decided I'd concentrate on flannels for backing. But not just any flannels: I chose the bolt ends, the pieces that were too small for a full back and would be a PITA for the store to sell. I basically gave the potential orphans a good home.

This back was the result of using up 2 of those too-small-to-back pieces (the navy and the olive). As you can see, every scrap of the olive was used, as I had to piece the 5th square. All of the navy was used up as well--getting that completely gone was the goal and dictated the number and placement of the other 2 flannels.

"Modernish #3"

The quilt washed up nice and soft--the lightweight upholstery fabric wasn't a problem at all. Besides, it's usually the backing that's placed next to someone's body.

 Hastily hung and snapped moments before mailing. It had spent several days bunched up on the guest bed.