Charm Quilts

It is time to get out the charm quilts for their photo session. I'm hoping to have digital pictures of all of my quilts soon. Charm quilts have had revivals a couple times. They started out more than a century ago and had a revival in the mid 1980's. Our local guild wanted to do a charm quilt so another lady and I started cutting my fabrics into kits of 3-1/2" squares and 5" squares. About halfway through she had family matters to attend to so I finished the cutting myself, about 880 different fabrics. I took the kits to the guild meeting hoping to sell some and one of the kits was used to make a charm quilt at the meeting. None of the kits sold! Now I was on a mission to show them what could be done with a kit. In 1981 an antique version of the quilt above was in the Quilt Engagement Calendar. In Jan. 1985 someone published an article in Quilters Newsletter Magazine telling how many light/med, light/dark, and med/dark combination squares you needed to make it . In 1986 started pairing squares, drawing the line diagonally, sewing on each side and cut the marked line. But now I had 2 of every combination and each fabric was supposed to appear only once. That is how the second quilt below was born,
from the other half of the pieced squares. There was a black and white drawing of this block in a Barbara Johannah book so I converted it to lt/med/dk so I could use the 3 value ranges. The top quilt has 864 different fabrics, the bottom one 936 different fabrics. I sold most of the kits. More tomorrow.