FAMILY QUILT

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20675, 13 March 1937, Page 10 (Supplement)

FAMILY QUILT

PINK AND WHITE AND MADE IN SQUARES Quilted bed-covers and patchwork quilts are both familiar, although we never tire of them. So. too. are embroidered quilts. But a novelty would seem to be the combination of all these

three forms of handwork in the making of a single bed-cover. One seen recently offered opportunity to the needle-woman who has a sense of colour and design.

It was made from softest, unstarched calico in pure white and strong blot-ting-paper pink, alternate squares being cut from each of these colours and arranged chessboardwise. Each patch measured almost a foot each way. The pink squares were left self-coloured, but a basket of vari-coloured flowers was embroidered in outline in the middle of each white square. All the baskets were the same size, but the shapes and the flowers were different in each one. The embroidery, which was done with coloured silk, was simply executed. Indeed, each child in a household could easily have done several without growing tired so long as the pattern was traced. The patches were then sewed together till the whole was large enough, and the single material so formed was laid over a thin padding of domette or other washing material to give thickness and warmth, while these were backed with the same soft white calico which went to make the white squares. Next came the quilting of the three layers together by hand with running stitches, even, but not too small for speed. Each stitch, of course, had to go through and through, but the softness of all the materials made this simple enough. The pink patches were quilted regularly in squares, each square of quilting being about an inch and a half each way. But the white patches, having embroidery in the middle, were quilted in curves to make variety. A margin of white was sewed round the whole, this also being quilted to the linings which projected from it,

and it was quilted in wide, sweeping curves. The edges were scalloped with the same wide curves, and bound with a narrow band of the pink to secure all together and finish off the coverlet.

The result is extraordinarily good and will last almost forever, improving in the wash, which flattens and blends the embroidery parts. Different colours could, of course, be chosen for any colour scheme. Nor need the patches be square. The whole point is to have only two colours , for the patches, and to have only one set with an embroidered motif in the middle. The motif npuld be anything at all, and it would be great fun for any considerable family to contribute so many of these from each pair of hands, and thus to form a family quilt, which would also become a family heirloom. The embroideries might consist of different interlaced initials. It would be difficult to imagine any more delightful present to a grandmother than a bed-cover which represented the work of all her grandchildren.