Mother's Scraps

I came across some scraps that I gathered from my mother's things after she died. It was a surprise to see these fabrics after such a long time. I don't know what my mother had been intending to make from them, but I love the colors. I guess we have similar taste. No surprise there.

You can see on the backs of the triangles that she had used a pencil to trace around a template and then cut them out. She had a cutting mat. In fact the green mat you see in my pictures is the one she used. She didn't have a rotary cutter. She had one plexiglass ruler, a six-inch square. I wonder how she used the mat without the accompanying tools. I wish I had been able to teach her how to use these more modern tools that would have given her better success in her projects.

I decided to include some of these fabrics in my house quilt. There wasn't enough of every fabric to cut the pieces needed for a house block. I decided to piece some of them in order to use them. You can see a couple of them above. It is very unlike me to compromise the quality of a project like this. However, it now seems very important to me to have some of my mother's fabrics in the house quilt.

I have been thinking about the process that my grandmother went through to make her quilts. It is amazing to me that she managed to accomplish what she did without the advantage of the tools that I now take for granted. I have never had to 'make do' as my grandmother always did. I make quilts as a hobby, not as a necessity. I don't think my mother ever completed a quilt. In fact, I have a set of Grandmother's Flower Garden blocks (hexies) that I have attempted to finish for her in the past. I haven't looked at it for a few years. I think it is time to get it out again and work on it some more.