My Boston Streets

For my LQG we have a vintage pattern challenge this month. We have to use a vintage pattern to make something new. I already had made a quilt top from Link to the 30's, my Chain Link, but I wanted to make something special for this challenge.

I was looking through some vintage quilt blocks online and came across a block that I really liked called Boston Streets. You can read more about it here. Basically, it's a quilt design from 1936 from Nancy Cabot's column in the Chicago Tribune.

Aptly described as: "BOSTON STREETS is one of the most perfectly named quilt blocks in existence. It was named by an elderly woman of Colonial days who tried to find her way down the old cowpaths to her homestead after visiting friends. This pieced pattern is an ideal one in which to utilize all the odds and ends of material accumulated during the course of years of quilt making."

I decided that I wanted to blow this block up and make it into a wall hanging. I set about mocking it up in Touch Draw, my favorite drafting app and started looking for a color scheme that I wanted to try out.



My intention the whole time with this piece was to make something from a vintage pattern but to make it feel modern and new, so that's why I chose to use solids and to use an updated color scheme of white, red, tan, brown, and robin's egg blue.



Once I put the top together I knew I wanted a simple border and I wanted to make a statement about the modern reference so I decided to frame it in all white. I also decided to border it off-center to again play to the non-traditional point of view.



Looking back, I wish I would have made bigger borders to emphasize the off-centeredness even more, but hey, hindsight is 20/20. I wanted to keep the quilting very clean so I went with a 1/4in on each side of each seam to make a grid. I bordered it in brown to frame the piece and hand stitched the binding on my trip this weekend. The piece finished at 36"x36".



And of course the fur children decided they wanted in on the photo shoot as well...



Overall I am happy with the piece and am excited that this is this first piece I am actually going to hang on my wall as "art"! I hope the ladies in my guild get what I was going for, if not, at least I like it...

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