Fabric Museum within the Mallory-Neely Mansion

We toured the Mallory-Neely Mansion in Memphis, TN. It has a large collection of old clothing and fabrics stored in a separate room but the expert wasn't around to discuss inventory. Still, I love that someone is doing that.

Some of the clothing in the collection gets displayed on mannequins, apparently on a rotating basis.  One of the staff went by carrying vintage under garments for some display or talk she was giving, though I can't find any reference to it or the collection on-line.

This old Wilcox & Gibbs sewing machine has personality. It is not original to the house but in keeping with the period.

Fabrics and Embroidery in Old Mansions

We toured the Bingham-Waggoner Estate and the Vail Mansion in Independence, MO. I was allowed to take pictures in certain areas. I especially loved the collection of old wedding dresses on display in the Vaile Mansion. The red dress below, unusual in that most people don't think of red as a wedding dress, was my favorite. 

The below are closeups of the embroidery. 

The below ivory wedding dress was my second favorite, due to the style.

And this one I loved simply due to it's location under the staircase, near the reflections from the lamp to it's right. It made it come alive. 

In the Bingham-Waggoner Estate, where nearly all the furnishings were originals to the Waggoner family, I loved the pillow in this rocking chair. 

Here is a close up of the pillow on the rocker.

Needlepoint on the back of a chair. 

I love the below design in that it was on a voile shade. The green is from the grass outside.

I'm not sure what this stitch is called, but I like it and will research it further. 

I guess this is the early version of a rag quilt?

I miss my collection of vintage hats that I had while living at Shangri-la (our beautiful home on a hill in the woods near Annapolis). I had a few dozen hats. I gave several to friends, and some some to another friend (she insisted on paying for them because she resells).  I miss my hats.  But not enough to work full time.

There were several framed needlepoint bouquet collections, some with human hair, which was popular, by necessity in days of old.  

Learning to Quilt - Memory Quilts and Making Knits Work

I have been cutting squares from my sister's clothes, to make quilts for her children. She died January 19th. She has five kids and each one wants a quilt. Her clothes were divided up into bags, chosen by her kids for color scheme and memories, each bag with the initial of one of her children. There were 15 or so large bags.  

The below picture is my beast of a sewing machine, an old Kenmore, dating back 30-some years. The automatic bobbin winder doesn't work anymore. I had it fixed once, but it quit working again less than two weeks after getting it back home, supposedly fixed. The arm with the thread spool has broken off three times now, too. When I took it in to have the bobbin winder fixed, the guy glued the arm back on as well, and it worked just about as long as the bobbin-winder. I've since re-glued it a couple of times.  I try to be the only one who moves or stows my sewing machine. It's a beast, like me, but showing signs of age. 

Set up and cutting squares while house sitting for friends in MD.

These are just a few of the bags of my sister's clothing, sorted by color scheme, chosen by each of her five children.

These bags, and the container, are full of all my fabrics and old jeans or other items waiting to be made into something fun. 

These are all the cuttings for my sister's youngest daughter; mostly a pink and brown color scheme.  I sorted them all into baggies in order to stow them in an organized way and reducing bulk for the RV.

I've gone back and forth on how best to manage the process of making five quilts from 15 large garbage bags full of clothes, weighing several hundred pounds all total.

Part of me wanted to go all the way from start to finish with one quilt in order to see what would work best, enabling me to adjust and improve on the remaining quilts from what I learned. I've never made memory quilts, though I've done two rag quilts made from repurposed denim. I thought rag quilts would be the way to go with these fabrics since they cover the range of cottons to polyesters to faux fur. Rag quilts would be faster too.

I decided the smartest thing to do was to get all the bags cut up into squares with the simple notion of reducing the bulk that needs to be stored in the RV as we move from point to point, from house sitting to traveling.

When I'd finished cutting squares from the largest collection of color scheme bags for my sister's youngest child, a freshman in college now, I hadn't realized there were five bags in this collection when I started. I hadn't yet sorted the bags into each child's groupings. I probably would have started with a smaller collection of bags. Also, I did this first group, cutting them into small squares (4 1/2 inches).  Then I purchased the larger squares (6 1/2 inches) to do the rest, in order to save time, but also thinking that the larger squares will make for a nicer finished product, showing off colors better.

I started cutting the squares in a friend's house in Maryland and worked for about two weeks cutting squares in between seeing our kids, grand kids and friends and doing some baking.

Then we traveled to Connecticut to Dave's brother-in-law's house and I brought all the uncut bags and continued cutting squares when we weren't seeing family. I got all but three bags done.

Then we moved to North Carolina with our RV, to a friend's house who is a master quilter. She convinced me to bypass the rag quilting idea and to do a quilt by piecing the varied fabric squares together on the machine, but to finish it by hand stitching through the layers (including batting and backing), by stitching-in-the-ditch and doing decorative touches such as buttons.

Below are the stages we went through.

We laid things out to see how to attach and in what order. 

We attached the center part and lined up all the bagged extras to see what the border should look like, color-wise.

Here it is with the border partially attached. 

Here we have laid it out on the bed to see what it looks like and in different light. 

Now it is laid out on the table with the backing, so we can pin it. 

Getting ready to pin.

And now I am hand stitching in-the-ditch. 

My friend's sewing room - awesome.  She set up an extra table set up for my machine too! She uses the antique black machine on the far left. It is an old foot treadle machine that was converted to electric.  With all the quilters using fancy, expensive machines, my friend goes at it the old fashioned, hand-crafted way. 

Now we are both hand stitchingin-the-ditch with our quilts.  My friend is doing a memory quilt as well.  Her's is all cotton.  

I'm stitching in the ditch while my husband drives us to KC where we will attend a wedding.

I am glad I've had this first lesson in how to quilt something besides rag quilts. It is a wonderful skill though I can't say I'm skilled yet. I am in love with the idea and have lots of plans for future quilts and fabric arts ideas. However, doing five memory quilts this way, using knits, will be hard and very tedious. I might revert to rag quilts, or at least try one, to finish up the others.  I want each quilt to tell me what it wants to be. 

RV Slipcovers

These are the slipcovers I did for Magnus Agnes, our 5th Wheel RV.  

I did all that but then, we decided the love seat you see on the right in the picture above was not comfortable so we went to IKEA and got some lightweight, comfy chairs and put the love seat in the attic of a friend. But not before pulling the slipcover off and repurposing it yet again for the new IKEA chairs, as shown below.

Unfortunately, we don't have room for the beautiful Ptolemy Time ceramic mosaic coffee table that was made by an artist friend, David Crane, from Virginia. We are storing the coffee table for whenever we stop riding around in an RV, or if we get a different one and have room for it again. 

Loft Closet Curtains

Even before we put memory foam over top the mattress in the loft, getting things out of the closet up there was difficult.  Try learning across a bed crammed into a space with about 4 feet of height, while standing on a wobbly metal ladder (or better yet, leaning across the bed with your legs suspended in midair) and digging things from a small closet. Then add a couple inches of memory foam on top of the nasty little RV-stock mattress, which lifted the height of the mattress to the point of making the closet doors difficult to open.

So I had my husband pull the doors off.  He stowed them on their sides inside the closet.

This is after the closet doors were pulled off and stowed inside.

And I made little curtains for each opening, each on a tiny curtain, with the hardware mounted inside each opening.

Ta Da!  Curtains!

With the curtains, it is easier to access items in the closet.  I can just push my hand through and grab things.  I no longer have to muscle the mattress downwards while trying to pull the door outwards to me. I don't have to be laying on the bed facing the closet to get to the items inside. I can learn across the bed from the ladder to the loft for most things, without my legs suspended outwards in midair.

The denim rag quilt in the picture was recently finished. It lies on top of the loft mattress and memory foam.

I love the "nesting" I am doing,  of taking this RV, Magnus Agnes, as we call her, and changing all these little things to make her more livable for us.

New Denim Rag Quilt and Preparations for Memory Quilts

Denim Rag Quilt for the RV. So here is my second try at a denim rag quilt. It is being modeled by a gorgeous day bed at my friend's house.

As I was on Pinterest yesterday, pulling ideas onto my board for future projects, I realized I've made a couple mistakes with my two denim rag quilts:  I didn't have a wide enough seam allowance between each patch, and I didn't clip into those seams allowances so that the frayed seams fray more or less evenly and create that nice ragged look between patches.

I didn't realize that until now because the first quilt I completed, I gave to my niece before I'd even had a chance to wash it and let it fray more. And of course, she would never say if it was less than perfect, being very polite.

So I did my second quilt pretty much like the first one. As I was washing it, I was looking at Pinterest and realized my mistake. And sure enough, after pulling it out of the dryer, it was pretty tangled with thread knots here and there; long threads and varied lengths rather than that nice even look.

I remember seeing how the rag quilts were done by studying how the rag quilt was made when my daughter-in-law had purchased one from Etsy.

But I'd forgotten a couple of details.

Oh well.

Unlike my first rag quilt for my niece, which was made with dove gray fleece (and thus very heavy and bulky), for this one I'd purchased a queen size sheet, cream colored with green leaves on it. I wanted it to be lighter weight and to blend with the colors in our RV, and easy to wash in laundromats.

Even though in the picture above, my quilt is shown on a daybed in a house (my friend's house where I am house sitting for two weeks), it was made for the top loft in our RV.

Memory Quilts Begin. Below are pieces I am cutting from my sister's clothes while house sitting at my friend's house in Maryland. I have put them in ziplock baggies of various sizes.  I did this to keep them in order and to keep them from becoming wrinkled or frayed.

I have about 18 bags of clothing, and five quilts to make from them. I live in an RV, so I need to figure out how to get this done while moving from place to place for various commitments. All the bags were stored in the loft bed area of the RV when we left Iowa after my sister died. They took up most of the loft space. I don't know what the total weight was, but those bags were heavy. So I wanted to reduce bulk first, knowing that I wouldn't be sitting in one place, with enough space to make all five quilts.  

Though this is a tough process, to be going through and cutting up my sister's clothes, I am glad to do it for my sister's children instead of asking their Mom's church ladies to do it. Even though those ladies knew my sister and surely would have said yes, when I mentioned this possibility to my nieces, they said they preferred I do it. It is my continued gift of time and love for my sister and now for her children. It is a way to fulfill a commitment to my sister to look out for her children. 

In the house where we are staying, taking care of our friends' cats, it is great having a huge, glass-covered dining room table to spread things out. The nine-fireplace, 1790's era manor house is quiet, and except for ghosts, I am alone with my thoughts and my sister's memory as I begin cutting squares from her clothes. I started with the bags of clothing that her youngest daughter had selected; a color scheme of pinks, browns, some blacks, a touch of aqua. There is a lot of elegance in the fabrics chosen for this quilt. I admire my sister's, and my niece's tastes. I love the feel of the fabrics. 

I don't know whether this will be done in a rag quilt fashion or if I'll save it for when I go to North Carolina where another friend, a master quilter, has offered to teach me to quilt in the traditional style and to help me. I am not sure how to begin but I've already made a denim rag quilt for my sister's oldest child - I did that one in January during the days after spending 12-15 hour night shifts with my sister in the hospice room in her final days. So because I made that quilt for her oldest daughter, I decided to this time to start with her youngest. Her oldest daughter will still get a memory quilt made from her mother's clothes, but I will do that one last. 

Lightweight Denim Frames for Artwork

I made these denim frames for prints I'd bought in Alaska.  The prints were inspired by a marathon there and seem to have Klimt's influence. I've always loved Gustav Klimt's paintings. 

I used to have these prints framed in black wooden frames. But I took them out since glass falling in an RV will not have a good result, and the likelihood is that would will fall sooner or later, or often. So I made frames from cardboard, covering them with padding and repurposed denim; using just scissors and glue. It was messy. The prints are protected by heavy plastic - not as protected as the glass would have been though.

These denim frames match the Bohemian look in our RV, but I do have to say that the black ones set the artwork off much better. They were stunning before, and mesmerizing. I used to have them in my office at work and frequently people would comment that their eyes were constantly drawn to the work, as were mine. They had more "energy" with the black frames. But maybe our RV has enough energy in the rest of the look that the frames soften things just right.