Quilting Makes a Difference

Recently a customer brought me a small quilt in which she had assembled nine quilt blocks found in her mother’s sewing room when clearing out her mom’s house. I am always intrigued by older blocks, and found this particular block both unusual, in that I had not seen it before, and challenging, in that I was quite uncertain about how I was going to quilt it. After researching this block, I discovered it was an adaptation of a Carrie Hall block called “Rose”, documented in her The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America. Rose was later documented by Ruby McKim in her One Hundred and One Patchwork Patterns.

I set about redrafting this block in Electric Quilt, since it was sewn differently than the old version. Then I opened its picture in AutoSketch, my preferred quilt drawing program. My mind tries to see the shapes in the block before I start drawing, and then accentuating these shapes with the quilting. I thought it would be fun for you to see the unquilted block, and then the quilted block, to see what I came up with in this particularly challenging block. I have also added the block pattern to my store, under Educational/ Free and Educational in case you would like to make your own “Rose”.