Quilt Shot Block #37 ~ Mother's "Real" Charm Quilt

         I usually feature a quilt square on Saturday, but I wanted to show off one of my Mother's quilts she made when I was a child.  It's not made of quilt blocks but of "charms" of fabrics, and they aren't even squares as you would find in a charm pack you buy today.  
          Yep, way before "charm packs" were ever dreamed of, folks made Charm Quilts out of fabrics they had laying around the house.
           I mentioned in a recent post, "Jelly Rolls of 6 Shirts," that once upon a time folks did not go buy fabric to make a quilt top. Mother used fabrics from our dresses & Dad's shirts. 

 

I remember all the fabrics above in dresses I wore.

The blue fabric above came from a favorite and 

most comfortable, cool dress I believe I ever had.

 Daddy's sweet green plaid shirt is at bottom right.

Some of our linen dresses & part of a worn table cloth to far left.

           Mother also used beautiful fabrics from chicken feed sacks.  

 The red fabric above was a beautiful piece of feed sack.

They also made great absorbent dish towels.

          Chicken feed for some reason came in designed muslin sacks.  Maybe it was a selling technique to get folks to buy them instead of plain white muslin?  (I think friends across the pond call it calico, while we use that name for a 3 or more colored small print fabric.) It was always fun to see what would be printed next.  Unfortunately, the sacks stopped appearing in the early 60's.  We had stopped raising chickens anyway. 

          Surprisingly how bold some of the feed sacks were as in the red piece to the left in the shot above.  The yellow piece is feed sack fabric as well.

          These charms are a lot more expensive to me that some "charm" pack someone cut off bolts of fabric and laid a large price on the pack. This quilt can NEVER be reproduced nor have as much meaning to me as another "Charm" quilt.
       Therefore, this quilt will not live in a chest or closet.  It will sit right here on the chair in the living room where I can look at it everyday I'm home.
        I hope you reconsider NOT going to a store, and spending a bundle of money on cute fabric, but rather make your family a "charming" quilt that will provide memories for a long time to come. Make memories.

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Sharing at several Linky Parties.

Thanks to the FREE program:

Photoscape for downsizing & watermarking photo