Hi everybody it’s Jenny from the MSQC.
And I’ve got such a fun project for you today.This is really fun for me.
For most of you who don’t know I’m a scavenger.
I like to paw through second hand stores and antique stores and garage sales.
I just love it.
So every once in awhile you come across something like this.
I got this whole pile of these grandmother flowers to make a Grandmother’s Flower Garden.
They’ve been in my drawer of things to do.
I have a drawer actually marked secret projects.
It’s not so secret when you mark it that.
But anyway I have had this in there forever and I kept thinking someday I would learn
how to make those tiny little hexagons and put this all together.
And then I realized that’s not me, that’s not who I am.
It’s not who I’m about.
And so I decided rather than put these all together normally I would look at this a different
way.
So what I did was I took a look at them and I decided to mount these little beautiful
flowers on individual squares.
So let’s take a look at this quilt behind me.
Isn’t this fun?
I mean this is the sweetest thing.
It’s beautiful.
I love it.
I love how it came together.
And I didn’t have to cut any tiny hexagons so, so I really love it.
So I want to show you how to do this, what I did because sometimes when you get these
old things or you find something that your grandmother left you and you don’t just
want it to sit in a box.
You really want to be able to use it.
So this is just a way to do that.
So the first thing I did was take a look at my flowers.
And because everything is hand pieced something what I really want to do is iron it really
well.
And make sure it’s nice and flat and all the seams are pressed out.
I just want to make sure it’s that.
Then what I do once I get this ironed nice and flat and I have a square all ready cut
and ready to go that I want to put it on I’m going to flip this over.
And I’m going to put some, I use this Easy Steam Too.
And it’s just basically little strips of iron on adhesive.
And I want to do it, I want to put some of it on so that I can hold my square or my flower
onto my square.
So I’m just going to iron this around here and you know put, I kind of put it on all
the, all the little straight sides like this.
Now this is something else I have to tell you too, hang on a minute, I have to concentrate
. It’s hard for me to talk and really concentrate.
Ok wait.
Alright, hang on.
I’ve got to get this, make sure this comes up there.
There we go.
Alrighty.
Now we’re going to take and we’re going to scoot these over here.
And we’re going to take this square.
And you kind of want to iron on your strips and let them cool a little bit.
And then you’ll peel them off.
And all the adhesive will be stuck on the flower and it will enable you to iron it on
and iron it down.
And then it will stay in place because what I’m going to do with this is I’m going
to sew a blanket stitch around the, around all the edge of it.
You’d think that’s a little more time consuming than it is but it really isn’t.
And I love, I love the relaxation of that.
This kind of project is something I do for myself.
You know, if I have enough of these I might give one to all my jealous children who really
want one of these because it’s so cute.
But right now it’s something I kind of do for me.
What I do is I try to center it up.
Now I can see that this is not quite centered because it is a little closer over here.
And so I’m just going to slide it over a little bit.
Make sure it’s centered on there.
And I make sure that I have, this goes three in a row and it goes in rows of threes like
this.
And so either this is going to be your top right here where the little point comes up
or the little flat side is going to be your top.
I would suggest deciding which one of those is going to be your top and then setting your
blocks that way.
So now what I’m going to do is I’m just going to press this down again so that my
adhesive holds it on there.
So then once you get it all nice and ironed on there we’re going to go to the sewing
machine and we are just going to blanket stitch around this, all around the whole thing.
And because, I think, I just use the same color, creamy kind of, creamy white thread
on here and it just blends with it.
So I just go around it and stop at every little turn.
Go up the other side.
And then stop and go.
And then I’m going to go around this whole thing like this.
Honestly I do about four of these a day.
It’s something I do for myself because I love these old blocks.
To me that’s one of fun parts of quilting.
The older our pieces get, the more we treasure them.
Alright well I think you have the idea and I have some more of these sewn together.
So I’m going to come over here and show you a finished one.
I actually have a little stack of them going there.
And see you can barely see the little stitches around the edge of these.
Then what I did was I just kind of decided if I wanted this to be a big quilt or several
small quilts.
And I think you’re going to decide what you want by the pieces you have.
Now there’s one thing that I want to say.
These aren’t the only blocks out there.
There are lots of awesome little quilt blocks that sometimes they get put together but they
don’t get all put together.
You know or all the pieces didn’t get finished, or you know, I mean I don’t know why people
stop with those little blocks but sometimes they do.
But any little piece remember just cut a square that is a good size for your block.
And go ahead and mount it on there.
And you’re going to get something completely different than your grandmother thought of
but it’s going to be something really beautiful.
And you’re going to preserve one of these older blocks for another generation.
So once I decided how big I wanted my quilt to be I went ahead and put my blocks like
this together.
I just sewed them right next to each other.
This is also a great time to go ahead and add a sashing if you want.
You know you can do so many things with these blocks.
But I decided to set mine together.
I put five across right here and six down so I used 30 blocks.
And then what’s really cool to me is that these are all old 30’s blocks and we have
that reproduction fabric.
I mean they make that now.
So we can actually put a border on that really goes with and blends and works with the quilt.
And so we put a border on out here.
And our border is a six inch border.
And it’s the Aunt Grace Floral Pink.
And so we were able to just add that border.
It looks like the same timeframe and it just works perfectly with our quilt
So I hope if you have some of those old blocks, this is fun for you, it just, you know gets
your mind going and makes you think of some ways to use them.
And we hope you enjoyed this tutorial on doing something different with a Vintage Block from
the MSQC.