Working on my grandmother Boo’s quilt has been an interesting journey. I undertook this project in part because I knew the individual quilts would take so long. I know that sounds odd, but I looked forward to the opportunity to think about each of the individuals while I made their quilts the way that I did while I made the one for my father and my great-aunt Gracie.   I’ve estimated that it will take about a year and a half to complete the entire project working half-time on it.  That includes the quilts, bios and accompanying material and a catalog for (at the moment) 9 women in my family who have passed.  The indulgence of being able to spend the time remembering these women, or in the case of those who passed when I was very young or before I was born, getting to know them better or for the first time, filled me with excitement.

My mother leant me my grandmother’s hand-written recipe book to use for the project. I decided to photograph the pages and print them out to use for the lights in the quilt blocks. I didn’t have the heart to destroy the original book itself – it just seemed so precious – plus now I have a digital copy for myself. The recipes themselves are wonderful, many calling for just “spices” or cooking for a certain time in a “moderate oven” indicating a certain degree of heat in a wood oven. Here are the prints, and pages about to be cut up:

Prints and pages ready for cutting

These aren’t really colors I would have ever chosen on my own – they are the colors I thought of when I remembered Boo’s cakes, and so that is what I went with, pink and red flowers with green leaves on yellow cakes.  This was a fairly straightforward cutting job – all squares, rectangles and triangles so all done with the paper cutter and rotary cutter with ruler, straight edge and angle – straight geometry. Some quilts involve the use of, or creation of a stencil. But with the block quilts it’s all geometry, and I love geometry. I just go by the block quilt pattern and subtract out the selvage (the part that’s sewn together on a ‘normal’ cloth quilt). After cutting up the pieces from the prints, the Cake Decorating book and the recipe book I hand dipped the book pages in wax. I then lay out all the pieces and set up one square as a guide (having done the quilt thing a few times now I have a system).

Pieces ready for sewing

Then I sew the individual pieces together according to the pattern. I lay the pieces out on a square of interfacing (a.k.a. pellon-the stuff that makes the collars and button bands on your shirts stiff for the non-sewers out there) and overstitch them together with a zigzag stitch. For this quilt I decided to flip the squares on end so that the individual squares will actually be diamonds and use the pages of “The Homemakers Pictorial Encyclopedia of Modern Cake Decorating” to fill in the spaces on the sides and top. So this is how the first square is looking:

!st square done – Cake Stand pattern

When this is all sewn together I will choose buttons from Boo’s button collection to hand sew onto he top of each of the red triangles. Each one of these seems to offer their own unique challenges. This one seems to be that the lovely red triangles were printed a little too thick and want to keep coming off on the sewing machines’ presser foot. I have to keep taking the foot off to clean it to prevent it leaving little red smudges everywhere.

In each stage of this process I had to look at my grandmother’s handwriting over and over again. This is a time intensive and somewhat monotonous process (and I have even gotten to hand-stitching the edges on this one yet). I couldn’t help but think about her as I held these pieces in my hands. She really was an awful cook, she boiled the last bit of color and flavor out of everything, but she meant well, she loved us, and man could she bake. I love you, and I miss you Boo.

Next week I hope to have a finished quilt to show you.