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The Road from Malden to Lowell is Strewn With Broken Dishes
At the same time my mother gave me the fabric, I eventually used in The Ugly Quilt, she also gave me 6" squares of other fabric, probably from the 70s or 80s. Not having any ideas of what to do with them, I just decided to pair them and make half-square triangles. Every morning I sat down at my sewing machine at 6:00 to mark, sew, cut or trim 10 pairs of the squares.
I allotted a day for each step in the procedure:
- The first day I would mark a big X going from corner to corner of lightest of each of the pairs of fabrics.
- The next day I would sew to either side of the X.
- The following day I would cut the blocks into squares, and the on the diagonal between the sewing lines.
- Finally, I would press the squares open and trim them to 2-1/2 inches.
Depending on how much free time I had, some days I did all these steps on the same day. More usually, though, I did only one or two of the steps on the same day.
I put the finished blocks in a basket, and stirred them around, thinking to make a scrap quilt of some kind.
At
night, while watching TV, I played with the HSTs to see if I could
come up with an interesting block, but I noticed that the more
different fabrics I combined into a block, the "muddier"
it seemed. I liked the bright colors of the original fabrics, so
I tentatively decided to make pinwheel blocks. But after looking
at a dozen or so pinwheels, I found that I wasn't all that
enthusiastic about the quilt. I needed a block I hadn't done
before, so I thumbed through more block books and found a line
drawing of the "Broken Dishes"
block.
After sewing the Broken Dishes blocks together, I ran into the same problem that had plagued me from the beginning: combining the fabrics made them look muddy. The block itself was totally lost when sewn together. Frustrated, I put the quilt away.
Three times a year, there is a huge antiques and collectables week in the central Massachusetts town of Brimfield. Everything you can imagine is sold there, including sewing supplies, vintage fabrics and quilts. I usually go and look for vintage sewing and lacemaking supplies, Fiestaware and depression glass.
Soon after I put the quilt away, I found a Broken Dishes quilt at Brimfield. Every other block was just a plain square of fabric, and the Broken dishes blocks (unlike the diagrams) were 2-color instead of three.
When I got home, I went to my stash and found the red and blue diamond fabric and FINALLY the blocks did not appear muddy. Soon after, I located the matching red-and-blue paisley I used on the back.
I brought the quilt to
my sister's for Christmas and both she and my mother agreed that
it needed a border. The day I was to leave to go home again, on
the way to the airport, as a matter of fact, we stopped in at a
local quilt shop (Archangel's in Raleigh, NC) where I found the
inner and outer border material.
I had alot of trouble thinking of a quilting design that would work with the blocks. Originally, I wanted to quilt circles in all the blocks, but the Broken Dishes blocks had too many seams. The compromise was circles in the plain squares and sort of a X in the Broken Dishes squares. (I dubbed this "hugs and kisses" quilting.)
I put no quilting in the inner border, and "finger" the same width as the Xs in the outer border, and framed it all with a bright green binding (a similar color can be found in several of the fabrics used for the Broken Dishes blocks.
The reason I named the quilt "The Road from Malden to Lowell..." was because I started the quilt when I lived in Malden, Mass. and finished it a couple of years later, after I had moved to Lowell.