Vintage Haberdashery

This interesting vintage haberdashery / tool set was given to me recently.  It is in great condition and has strange needles and implements (upholstery? Leatherwork?)

I can identify what I think is a button hook but there are many mystery items.  Any ideas?

This belonged to my friend's grandmother and she kept it for many years.  What a great present.  

Red Geese

Red is not my favourite colour and you won't see a lot of red on this blog. But I love red and white in a quilt.  I'm also fond of the traditional flying geese pattern.  Fabadashery's red and white Nearly Insane Quilt has been fun to follow, and I enjoyed reading the saga of her Red and White pinwheel quilt which, I am pleased to say, had a happy ending. 

Although no one around here actually "needs" another quilt,  a visit to my local quilt shop tipped me over the edge.  I came back with 8 fat quarters in reds, cream and white.

Cutting and piecing has commenced.  I am using the "no waste" method of making four flying geese at once.  I would love to meet the genius who came up with this idea. 

My geese finish at 5 inches by 2.5 inches so a useful size quilt will need 15 columns and about 25 rows. Does that really make 375 flying geese?  That's a lot of geese to make and trim. I might make is smaller.  But the cats don't need another quilt either.

Next, to consider layout. There seem to be about a million options.  Well, there will be time to think about that while making 375 geese....

H quilt for Harriet

I have been knitting hats and gloves this week so I thought I would record here my first ever machine made quilt from last spring. Before that I had only made one full sized quilt, and that was done by hand. I saw Kaffe Fassett's quilts at the Life In Colour exhibition in London and I noticed his S quilt.  I did not take any photos myself but there is a great post  on Quilt Candy's blog.

I had this box of Liberty fabrics - not at all like Kaffe's zingy colours but more the sort of thing I thought my daughter would like.  I added one solid in a hyacinth colour which is her favourite.

Construction was very straightforward - the H shapes were built up in 4 inch squares.  I had to be careful not to muddle up the rows so I drew the layout on graph paper. 

I intended to use a sheet for the back of the quilt, but was lucky enough to find a length of an old Liberty print called Hibiscus in a lovely dark navy.  I pieced this with a few leftovers including another favourite, Dragonista.

It was quilted along the seams using an ordinary machine foot as at that stage  I did not own a walking foot.  The quilt inspector found one or two puckers but that's life.