I just finished this quilt top.  I love my modern quilts and projects, but there is something about thirties quilts that really get my attention.  Maybe it is the link to my Grandma and I certainly have quite a few of her vintage fabrics in thirties prints, but I just love them.

I bought a package of preprinted quilt squares that needed to be embroidered.  They were called nursery blocks and I liked them because all of the scenes with Sunbonnet Sue were different.  I gathered my embroidery floss and began to embroider.  I usually sewed in the winter and took it along with me when I could do handwork, still it took forever.  I missplaced it a few times.  I wondered what I was going to do with them.

This year, I started an informal hand sewing group in my Modern Quilt Guild.  We are called the Mod Squad and we meet at a local eatery, have dinner, and then spend a few hours working on hand work like knitting, crochet, embroidery… you name it.  Kind of interesting that I was working on Sunbonnet Sue in a Modern group!  Who cares?  Well I got so much work done in that group that I finished the squares.  Hooray!

Then Club EQ hosted by Barb Vlack on Electric Quilt challenged folks to design a 30’s quilt.  I designed one with a Sunbonnet Sue Center.  It gave me an idea to adapt it to use with my embroidered quilt squares, I just needed to match the 8′ squares.  I had a very old jelly roll of 30’s prints and I was off and running. So I designed the quilt in EQ7 and it was a big help in figuring out placement, how much background fabric I needed and what to stitch together.

I just grabbed the 30’s print fabric squares randomly and sewed them into 4 patch blocks to begin with.  Then I joined them to create 8″ blocks and the other parts of the quilt.

Here, I am starting to get the rows pieced together.  Don’t you love how it starts to take shape when you get everything lined up and ironed?

The random squares of 30’s fabrics just seem to have the right combinations to match up with the embroidery colors on the squares.

Here is the finished quilt top.  My next step will be some handquilting and then I am planning on using prairie points around the outside edge.  That quilting will take a while since I am still working on handquilting my vintage hole in the barn door quilt right now.  I still have a lot of the 30’s print jelly roll left too, so I think another quilt will be in order.  Do you love 30’s prints?  What have you made with them?