These seven strips of blocks were in the quilting stuff I bought at the estate sale last Saturday, longish strips with six or eight blocks (small or large respectively), "on point" and edged with half-squares. I was impressed with the piecing, and even more so later when I realized that they are all hand-sewn.
Most of the folks I talk with on a regular basis about miniature needlepoint always laugh at themselves that the first thing they do when looking at petitpoint -- theirs or someone else's! -- is turn it over and look at the back. There is probably a slight touch of the competitive kind of curiosity about it -- as in "whose backs are neater, mine or theirs?" -- but most of the time that really is only slight, and instead it's more of a curiosity about what stitches did they use ("did she use basket stitch for the background? should I try that next time?"), etc -- like a car lover checking the engine, it's just something you do! You don't very often get the chance to see the underside of quilts, though, of course, since most of the time once it's out in public, as it were, it's already bound and quilted and therefore impossible to do! Even quilting bloggers rarely if ever show this -- I don't think I've ever seen it -- and so I will take up a rather long post now to show some details of the backs of these lovely and carefully-stitched blocks. (And I've left those photos bigger than usual so that you can see up close if you like!)
I am assuming that this is Betty's work, since it is clearly not antique and probably not particularly "vintage" -- there were some large scraps of the two background fabrics folded up along with the strips, and the brown one still has "Marcus Brothers" on the selvage.
It took me a few moments to realize what it was, but one of the things that struck me the most about these is how very little fraying there is! That certainly goes a long way to explaining the air of tidiness about the backs of these blocks. The fact that there are few loose thread ends also contributes.
You can see the traces of pen lines, on both the pieces and the border triangles, that Betty marked as sewing lines. This here looks at first like machine-stitching, but the thread she used is cream-colored, and the pen line disguises that. (She used running stitch, by the way, not back-stitch.)
I was particularly interested in the stars, having just completed a dozen of a similar size, and not been terribly impressed with my results. Here is one of mine, it all of its shabbiness --
It's easy to see here what I mean about the fraying! There is essentially none on Betty's. It's possible, looking at the one below, that she cleaned it up, either as she went or while pressing it, as you can see where the fraying would have been, but still -- gosh!
Sometimes she marked on the back of the fabric the center of a motif that she wanted to "fussy-cut" -- she didn't on the center square of the above block, but did on at least three of the four light brown prints, presumably with a window template --
She was careful, certainly, but not obsessive about pressing particular seams in a particular direction on the same kind of block -- sometimes it's towards the lighter of the two fabrics, sometimes it isn't --
Comments