Blast from the Past

A co-worker friend of mine was at a yard sale last weekend and scooped up some quilting items she thought I might be interested in.

You never know what you're going to find, right?  It was quite an interesting collection of some things useful, other things just interesting:




These are iron-one transfers of some sort as far as I can tell.  And look at the lower left hand corner of the envelope on the right:  15 cents!

I wonder if they still work?










There were also some groups of fabric earmarked for a particular project.

The fabric was in a bag with this pattern, in a Better Homes and Gardens Patchwork magazine dated June 2008.

I'm hoping that since there is only a little bit left over that this was a completed project for this Mystery Quilter.

There's also a single completed star block from a Fons and Porter "Sew Many Quilts" magazine dated November/December 1998.


There were also more pieces of Christmas fabric that had been cut out but not pieced.

That magazine is particularly interesting for it's extensive article about The Internet and how it's The Latest Thing for quilters!  It's hard to imagine now, but we were all Internet Newbies in 1998! 

I need all the help I can get!

A really useful item from this haul:  a piece of white-on-white polka dot fabric nearly 6 yards long. This will be the backing for many, many projects, particularly the placemats and table runners that I make for my Etsy store.

Finally, the most intriguing item:

This binder is absolutely bulging with papers, envelopes, and fabric bits.

The Mystery Quilter had planned an epic project for 1995:

A Block of the Month quilt with 12 pieced blocks and ----brace yourself---- a background of 2" finished squares in a watercolor quilt style.  In case you were wondering (I know I was) I checked the pattern instructions and the background alone requires 757 squares.

But this quilter was as organized as she was ambitious:

Tulips for March

Each month's block is set in the binder, along with all of the templates and fabric swatches for all 12 months.

Well, I will not be making this quilt with 12 pieced blocks and 757 squares of background.  But some of the blocks are really cute.  So I will go through this notebook page by page and see what is useful in 2015.