St Patrick's Day, National Quilting Day, Thomas Fire Quilts

Happy St. Patrick's Day, a little late. I barely set out my decorations two days ago, but will let the greens and golds linger for a while.  I parked these two sweet vintage "lucky" postcards on the sideboard. (Ruffle edged plate is from World Market)

I found these at my favorite vintage mall downtown.  It's fascinating to me that these have survived intact, both are over 100 years old.

The top one was postmarked in 1912, and the lower one 1910.  The addresses are a marvel, not even a street name or number.  The top one I think is a rural delivery route in Havelock, Nebraska (near Lincoln), but the bottom one just gives the town, which with a little snooping on Google is Dresser Junction, Wisconsin, a tiny town NE of Minneapolis, now called Dresser.  I love these embossed postcards and always pick up a couple when I find them.  

As today is National Quilting Day, I spent it working on quilts--Thomas Fire quilts.  Our guild has received masses of blocks, over 600 came in one week alone, so we are no longer collecting blocks or making blocks.  The focus is on getting the blocks into quilt tops and those tops made into quilts.  Guild members at QuiltCon were gifted all of Hobbs Batting booth's leftovers that they didn't want to ship--incredible generosity!   It will be quickly used up, though, by the hundreds of quilts still in process. Sew-ins are going on every weekend and we are working as fast as we can to get finished quilts to victims of the fire and mudslide.

Today I laid out our Perkiomen Valley blocks and sewed two tops.  It is fun to  play with this block, so many different layouts are possible. 

 

Those black and white squares pop out at you, don't they?  I liked making them asymmetrical in this 30 block quilt. 

The next kit had 8 blocks the same so I decided to feature them together.  Another asymmetric setting of 30 blocks.  I have one more set to sew up and think I will do them how I originally laid out the above set, in pinwheels.  

This would be really effective if all the blocks were the same, but we deal with what we're given.  

I also want to share a special quilt which was made by Preeti, of Sew Preeti Quilts blog.  She called her gorgeous green and blue Perkiomen blocks quilt Savanna, the charming story is in this post.  I luckily was able to find her quilt in our packed storage office and had another guild member take a photo of me with it.

This is for you, Preeti, with many thanks!  Her straight set layout really emphasizes the diagonal and the fabrics and patterns just shine.  We have a gallery of Thomas Fire Quilts on our guild website and Preeti's is there.  It was claimed last week, no doubt, when half the shelves in our storage office were cleared for a pop-up giveaway at a local church. 

I hope to get the remaining block kit into a top tomorrow, get a kids quilt package quilted, and finish the binding on a huge quilt I took home from our regular guild meeting.  Then it will be more of the same until there are no more applicants to receive a quilt.  Many of the burned homes' lots are now cleared and graded and rebuilding will soon begin.  Lots are for sale all over the hills, a lot of the older homeowners will not be rebuilding.  I've seen a couple of view lots that are priced in the $500K range, can you imagine?  We will remain flatlanders forever!