Secret Windows

This quilt, "Secret Windows", spotlighted the Smoky Mountain Quilt Guild Show at the 1998 Dogwood Arts Festival.
It was begun from a collection of scraps back in 1994 when I was a new quilter. A classmate in a one week workshop with Nancy Halpern was throwing out scraps of material that were larger than the fabric samples I had brought to work with. After I had made a fuss about finding them in the trash barrel, she consented to save those scraps if I found a bag in which to collect them. During the week after I got home, I sewed every scrap into "crazy quilt" squares. Originally, I had set them together to be a child's quilt that would be donated to the Ronald McDonald House
My husband and friends protested it being given away. So, through the next few years I'd occasionally make more crazy quilt squares from my own scraps. It grew into a full-size quilt that ended up being a Christmas present for our younger son and his wife.

It still looks good all these years later as you can see in a photo taken this summer.
I like to piece the backs of quilts.
The hand quilting is more easily viewed from the backside.
The crazy quilt squares set on point are quilted with satin-stitches using two strands of variegated floss. There was no way I was going to hand-quilt a running stitch across all those seams.
The portraits were cut from a shirt sewn by my mother-in-law for my husband with fabric featuring artists from the Expressionist period. It was a great shirt for the 1970's ... worn with chains at the open collar plus a wide belt with a big buckle and platform shoes. Woo Hoo! Let's do the Hustle.
This is the first quilt in which Elvis made an appearance.
I still have some of the home decorator fabric that was cut apart for the triangles around the crazy quilt squares. The printed squares are two and half inches.
Maybe I'll make another window quilt with crazy quilted blocks from the many bags of scraps collected in the ten years since this quilt was begun.