Vintage Series III - Grandmother's Flower Garden

THE MOST POPULAR QUILT PATTERN

Welcome back to the Vintage Quilt Series!  Today we're going to explore one of my favorite vintage quilt patterns, Grandmother's Flower Garden.  

I'm not the only one enamored with its beauty. Barbara Brackman reports that the Grandmother's Flower Garden was the most popular pattern after 1925. She tells us, "...many women who never made another quilt finished a Grandmother's Flower Garden."

“Modern" quilters loved the endless color combinations and ways the blocks could be set together with this pattern. 

She relates, "Another matter of pride is the number of small hexagons in the finished quilt, often many thousands." 

Although many Grandmother's Flower Garden quilts do not contain many thousands of hexagons they still represent a great deal of labor.  

The most common way Grandmother's Flower Garden quilts were made was with a central hexagon and rows of hexagons surrounding it with an interconnecting row of white or in some cases green for grass.

The size of the hexagon used can be varied as well. Earlier quilts tended to use hexagons an inch or less across while 20th century hexagons tended to be larger.

The vintage quilt top featured here had thousands of 1" hexagons pieced by hand. Desiring to use it, I needed to quilt it up king-sized, so I added yellow borders. The hexagons were quilted in continuous curves, the flowers in a floral pattern, and the borders in luscious feathers.  Quilting by machine was an arduous task - I can't imagine quilting it by hand.

FYI:  The backdrop for this post was my friend's late 19th century home, the same that was featured in the Vintage Series I & II.  Pictured at right (and above) is the carriage house situated at the end of her back yard.  More than 100 years ago it served as the shelter for the master's carriage and horses, as well as two small rooms for the groomsman's family.  On a post is a hand-written record certifying the birth of a baby in 1896 and a solemn statement, witnessed by another man, to the father's promise to quit smoking in the same year!  No doubt the mother didn't like smoke around the newborn baby!