QUILT # 15 - DRUNKARDâS PATH BASKET BLOCKS - ORIGINAL DESIGN
Pieced but unquilted quilt top
Size: 86â x 106â
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The history of this quilt top is over thirty years in the making.
During February 1983, I was snowed into the New Jersey home of my friend and fellow quilter Richard Zimmerman. There was a block contest for basket blocks at the âWorld of Quilts #4â in Somers, NY, a show we both usually attended, driving in from opposite directions to meet there. We sat down with pencils and erasers and scribbled away, trying to come up with something original. Basket quilts can be pretty boring.
For some unknown reason, I decided to play around with Drunkardâs Path blocks which have an inside curve that I could piece quicker by hand than machine. After some experimentation I came up with a basket hung on the square (that means a square hanging from one point, diamond style.) It would have an appliquĂŠd handle, and not all of the squares (sixteen three-inch squares in a twelve-inch block) would be Drunkardâs Path pieces. It seemed so simple that I came up with three different versions of it that could utilize striped fabric cut on the bias to simulate basket weaving. That was as far as I got with it during that snowstorm. Richard would use the design to make a block for me and enter it under my name. Both our blocks were chosen for the quilt to be made of the contest winners, and since the blocks were made of coordinated browns (Richard adores tiny prints as a foil to my usual theatrical splashes of color), the two blocks were placed side-by-side at the bottom of the finished quilt.
Somewhere about the time of the making of the Double Wedding Ring quilts I started formulating a quilt top design using the blocks. I originally came up with a top of thirty baskets alternating with  twenty muslin squares and  eighteen muslin half-blocks, and originally rejected it as âtoo formal.â I changed my mind, however, when I found a plastic quilting stencil of a basket that would fit into the plain square, maintaining the basket theme throughout. I started looking around and found I had quite a collection of blue fabrics. I was preparing designs for a âJesse Treeâ - another all-blue quilt that never materialized, and I had many left over blue scraps from the making of quilt #14. I decided to make the variations on my baskets. I started cutting the blues and the muslin and as I had done many times before â packaged them in small plastic zipper bags. I started working on them in my spare time â thirty blocks are a lot to make by hand. I know I did not find a lot of time to work on them. For three weeks in September 1985 and 1986, I pieced blocks while working at the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield, Massachusetts, where I was working as the stage manager for the Ronald McDonald Show and pieced probably one square a day, including the ironing and appliqueing the handles down. It was how I whiled away the time I had alone, since I was stuck there at night while everyone else partied. It seemed as though piecing the blocks was unending.
In May of 1986, I took a vacation to San Francisco and brought blocks with me to piece while flying or whenever I had some down time (carrying a scissors on board a plane was an allowable thing in 1986.) I remember that I had three or four blocks pieced and in their bags in my shoulder bag, and my host and I stopped to eat at a restaurant in Chinatown. We had a nice lunch and took home the rest in those cardboard containers â which leaked all over the contents of my shoulder bag! The blocks were a total loss, so I threw them away rather than try to wash the liquids out. When I returned home I re-cut more blocks to replace them.
Sometime in the winter of 1986 (after spending the summer in professional theatre) I must have finished piecing all the blocks and remember laying them all out on the floor to decide on the placement for color and for the best placement of the three styles of baskets. I had the muslin blocks and half-blocks all cut out and pinned the top into long diagonal rows, numbering each one. I did complete the individual rows and started to assemble them into a top, starting on two opposite corners and joining them in longer and longer rows. I knew I would probably never find the time to hand quilt this quilt and spent some time trying to locate a quilting society or church group that I could pay to complete the top for me the way I wanted it finished once I finished piecing it.
As I wrote the above notations, it was late January 2005 and the unfinished top is still folded up carefully, with pins still in place, a spool of thread and the plastic quilting stencils still in the bag. This top had never been completed. In May 2005, about two weeks after my fiftieth birthday, The Quilt Project was 98% completed; all I needed was a picture of one of the hoops and a picture of this unfinished # 15 top. I opened the folded top up to see just how far it actually was complete; it was not as complete as I had remembered. There were still two diagonal rows of sixteen blocks to be completely assembled. There were five long diagonal seams and the top would finally be completed. Should I attempt to finish the piecing for old timesâ sakeâ twenty years later? Did I want to revisit the past one last time? I sat down and had a long think. There would be approximately forty-four feet of hand stitching â one needle-full at a time. Most of the tools I would have used â the bent needles, the quilterâs thimble - who knows where they went in twenty years? What happened to my Japanese quilting needles? I never threw anything away (the fact that this top stayed preserved for twenty-plus years is testament to that.) The last time I did piecing was pre-bi & trifocals â could I still piece this top without going blind? There is still a box of still shining silk pins in the parcel. There is even the spool of thread I was using â with a 69-cent price tag with a used, threaded needle stuck into it. I still have the ball of beeswax for the thread in my sewing stuff. I wonder how my arthritic hands will deal with this type of work.
I decided to finish piecing this top. In late April 2011 I started to hand-piece the last two rows together, spurred on by having created a quilt and two wall hangings between January and April (and designing two other wall hangings!)
I am seeking a quilter to quilt the top (for a reasonable price).
