Vintage Radishes: A 22-year Quilt UFO

A long time ago, I subscribed to a monthly packet of reproduction fabrics from a mail-order catalog (I told you it was a long time ago). Almost none of them got used for patchwork in the style of their era. But in the summer of 2000, when I was grooving on a new “machine-applique” class I had taken, these 1930s “flour sack” style fabrics fit an idea I had.

My dedicated readers will recognize this quilt because I have been using bits of it as background images. Other readers will recognize the dark outline stitch with pastel fabrics as a big trend in the 20th-century Great Depression.

(It’s hard to find good images of antique quilts on the internet these days; everyone wants to sell me a new pattern or tell me to look in an out-of-print book. These puppies and bunnies are exactly what I’m talking about here.)

And–just like in the 1930s!–when I ran out of green for the sashing, I pieced scraps together. It’s only visible upon close inspection.

After completing the top, I put it in a box to wait until I got better at fancy machine quilting. In 2000. It languished in one box or another since 2000, until one day last year when I was looking for something else.

It took another seven months to give up on the idea of finding a matching fabric for the binding. I chose a plain Kona cotton. Then another six months passed before I gave up on “fancy machine quilting” and settled for straight lines in the ditch. I’m sure I’ve seen hundreds of vintage quilts in antique shops with this same philosophy: Usable is better than fancy. (The lies we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night, amirite?)

The binding is a stinknormal double-fold binding with an attempt at mitering the corners. This is my least-favorite finish, because I can never miter more than three corners correctly, but the perfect has been the enemy of my good for too long.

The funnest thing about the stinknormal double-fold binding is: no matter where on the quilt I start or how long I leave the tail at the beginning, the place where I join the ends together always falls where I joined the fabric strips together to create the binding. Always.

Anyway. Here it is, on my couch with Uncle Nutsy, a squirrel I made in 2019:

What UFO will fall on my head next? Stay tuned!