let freedom ring

Some things endure, like my love of American flags and house quilts. They're timeless, authentic classics. And while my taste in fabric has changed over the years, I still love basic, vintage designs. As I work on the Homestead house blocks and the Butterscotch Tart blocks, they're really just a fresh update of my early quilts.

These were two of the earliest quilts that I made in 1999. The pattern is from the book Little Quilts All Through The House by Alice Berg, Mary Ellen Von Holt and Sylvia Johnson. I customized my quilts even back then by adding the outer ticking print border. I tea dyed them like the authors suggested. Yeah, that washed out fast. And so did the dye... the red bled and turned the cream stripes into pink. I'm happy that today's fabrics have much more stable dyes, because I never prewash my fabrics.

These two flags were on a wall in my kitchen until last fall. I think that I was just too lazy to remove them. But they also served as a remembrance of 9/11. Many of us in the city wore red, white and blue ribbons right after the event, and I pinned them onto my flags. My little flag quilts truly became a symbol of freedom. 

I'm so glad that I signed my quilts even back then. Today I like to create labels, but back then I just wrote directly onto the backings.  Check out the date that these were completed!

Happy Fourth of July!