My mom was a collector of things. Many things. Many many things. Some of those collections will always remain a puzzle. “What was she thinking???” as she collected umpteen million purple cow sugar/creamer sets? The ceramic chickens? But some of them, I really get it. The kitchen tools. The sewing machines. They carry the ghosts of the women who worked with them. The old cardboard templates, rough on the edges from being traced countless times. The fabric stash.

Many many were the times I would be with her in a fabric shop, she’d bring her selections to the counter and say, “I’ll take to the end of the bolt.” That woman loved fabric. She left behind a room full of tall file cabinets, each drawer filled with lengths of fabric carefully wrapped around cardstock, easy to flip through, sorted by categories: pin dots, animals, nature, stripes, solids, florals, western, so many categories I couldn’t list them all. It’s quite the inheritance.

But one of her collections that pulled on my heartstrings more than the others, were the tiny vintage pieces collected from the odds and ends of many different early twentieth century quilting projects, leftovers or perhaps never made it past the cutting stage, belonging to many different seamstresses.

Having gathering instincts of my own, and my own crush on vintage fabrics and lost causes, I brought boxes full of these bits to my home. As I explored them, I determined that a lot of the pieces were intended for a pattern called Double Wedding Ring. For this particular pattern, the seamstress would cut wedges from many fabrics, sew them together in an arch and then sew those arches to a football shape. I have never made this pattern because it takes precision in cutting and sewing, and as I worked with the pieces, and looked at the cardboard templates that was included in the nest…I came to the realization that the template was off and all of these pieces had been carefully cut to the wrong size.

My Mom gathered these from estate auctions and flea markets and thrift stores. Going through her things after she passed away is a bittersweet exercise in touching things she touched, handling things that she selected. Of course I knew about most of her collections, but also, there were things that I didn’t know about. I knew she had vintage fabrics, and I wasn’t surprised that she had these pieces but I didn’t know if she had a plan for them. As I was going through her things I found several nests of cut pieces and templates.

So now what? Would I be able to make adjustments to make it work as a double wedding ring? I had my doubts so I continued playing with the pieces. I realized that if I’d alternate the blocks, skinny end up, skinny end down, I could balance the angles and make strips. That was as far as my plan went, but it was enough.

I began this project in December of 2014, two years after my Mom passed away. I was looking for something to make. I was craving a project that was both repetitive and creative, with a lot of “drone” elements but also with some challenging puzzles that I could figure out along the way.

I started by sewing my wedges together in pairs, and then those pairs into strips of four, the fours to eights, the eights to sixteens. Stitching and doubling my lengths until finally I had one huge length. I considered sewing the strips together into squares but opted instead to make my blocks into rectangles.

I then set to work on the bits that were more rectangular in shape, more or less 1 1/2″ x 3, 3 1/2″. I used the same chain piecing process, where I sewed the bits into pairs, then the pairs into strips of four, the fours into eights. I laid these strips out around the rectangles. I liked it. But it needed something. To play up my Tumbling Thimbles blocks, I decided to outline them with a thin sash of black. (The black piece was the only piece that was purchased after 2000)

But I wasn’t done–I still had a box full of equilateral triangles in bright solids. Again with the chain piecing! This same technique resulted in enough length to make a large outer frame.

I was really pleased with the finished top. I took it to my favorite local quilt shop where they did an excellent job of quilting it.

Due to the fragile nature of the old fabrics, this isn’t a quilt I’ll use on a daily basis–too much cause for worry with all the four legged friends around here.