How old is Vintage?

Isn't it funny when you have a themed piece to create it seems the topic "Vintage" seems to seep into everything creative you have in mind or are working on? Do you find that too - suddenly everything you look at making is an opportunity to explore the theme? 

 

When "Vintage" was first picked I imagined a sewing room with a tailor’s dummy and a quaint desk with a featherweight sewing machine. Then I imagined a vintage typewriter which brought me to these expensive digital typewriters. I really like the yellow one! 

Too many thoughts and sketches living as only sketches until I saw a workshop advertised "not for beginners". That caught my eye and curiosity got the better of me. River of Dreams is an annual quilt exhibition held in Limerick, Ireland and for the last two years the organisers have provided workshops in the middle weekend. This year there was a two-part workshop - drafting in the traditional method of graph paper with pencil and compass on the Saturday and making the design on the Sunday. The class was led by Emer Fahy, and she brought us through the drafting and construction of the LeMoyne star in her design of a 28" block. 

I thought this could be a fun way to look at Vintage. How old does something have to be to be vintage? Google tells me 20+years but less than 100 for vintage and over 100 is antique! Barbara Brackman has the LeMoyne star design going back as far as 1894 so maybe this is not quite vintage but older again.

What I didn't know is that this type of block is based on a circle and doesn't evenly divide into an evenly spaced grid. Rather the diagonal measurement of the corner blocks equals the width of the two centre diamond points. That's what makes the drafting of it a little bit more complicated than an 8-pointed sawtooth star made from Half square triangles. Sewing it together is all Y-seams. 

Emer added a mitred border to up the difficulty level with more Y seams so this was a get as much as you can done in a day and finish it at home type of project.

Selecting material with vintage in mind I went straight for calico - that cream speaks of olde worlde to me and the little flecks in the fabric add character. Whenever I think of vintage photographs or books I think of a yellow tone to the whites and a sunny washed our effect on the colours, so I was trying for that in the pinks and blues with the creamy calico.

Instead of having a border same colour either side of the accent colour as in Emer’s design of pink-blue-pink, I changed them up to give a bit more room for the centre star using inner border as background fabric and then the blue to frame the design with pink leading into the colour change. In the second border I used background fabric with pink as the inner colour to frame the pink stars.

This finishes quite big, and I was a bit stuck on what to do with it. I don't have anywhere for it as a wall hanging and was thinking of making it into a bag to carry a cutting mat and ruler but at 28" it’s a bit big for my 5ft nothing height! I think it needed to become the medallion in a bigger quilt. Do your pieces talk to you sometimes like that telling you what they want to be?

 

So, I went medallion hunting and bought a few books(from the 1980's so I think these count as Vintage too!), lost hours on Pinterest and the Quilt Index looking at some really old quilts and came to my senses and remembered to keep it simple. 

 

Sticking with 45-degree angles that the LeMoyne star is based on I decided on square in a square and flying geese.

As this has turned out quite a bit bigger than intended, is now going to be a 70" quilt  and I changed my mind on the colouring, I didn't get it finished but I hope you enjoyed hearing about my exploration of Vintage - I certainly enjoyed learning new skills and letting my curiosity follow where the theme led. 

So I'll leave you with two vintage quilts of Emer's that she brought for show and tell, no idea who the makers are only that they are vintage Irish quilt tops.