{"id":23620,"date":"2015-12-31T00:01:51","date_gmt":"2015-12-31T08:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=23620"},"modified":"2015-12-31T00:01:51","modified_gmt":"2015-12-31T08:01:51","slug":"the-baby-quilts-are-ready-now-all-we-need-are-the-babies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/the-baby-quilts-are-ready-now-all-we-need-are-the-babies\/","title":{"rendered":"The Baby Quilts Are Ready — Now All We Need Are the Babies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Quilt<\/a>
This one goes to the first grandchild. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

Grandchild No. One is due in February, and this time the\u00a0quilt will be ready.<\/p>\n

Faithful readers\u00a0of this blog will remember the story of the 40-year wait my brother and his wife had before I finally delivered their hand-made wedding gift to them. It was a crazy quilt made of colorful, flowered calico, pieced together on an old Singer sewing machine by me back in my hippie days.<\/p>\n

Crazy quilting, it turned out, was way crazier than I expected. On their wedding day, I gave my<\/p>\n

\"Sue<\/a>
Sue Mary Fox in her Berkeley, California, quilting studio figuring out how to fit together the stray pieces of calico I’d purchased in the 1970s. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

brother and his bride, not a finished quilt, but some pieces\u00a0awkwardly stitched together in the shape of a diseased kidney. That and a promise that I’d get the thing pulled together by the time they returned from their honeymoon.<\/p>\n

Didn’t happen.<\/p>\n

The half-made quilt, scruffy and misshapen, lay forgotten for the next forty years in an out-of-the-way drawer, reproaching me every time I happened\u00a0across it.<\/p>\n

Finally, a year or so\u00a0ago, no longer impecunious and definitely no longer a hippie drop-out, I splurged and hired a Berkeley quilter to finish the job for me.\u00a0We pared the sprawling thing<\/p>\n

\"Four<\/a>
Sue Mary hung the four piecings\u00a0on the wall so we could match the tops with the backs she’d\u00a0created from\u00a0the leftover fabric. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

down to a quilt about the size of a baby blanket, and I presented it\u00a0to my brother and his wife.\u00a0Yes, they were still married.\u00a0And no, they hadn’t forgotten that I owed them a quilt.<\/p>\n

There were lots of random pieces of the quilt left over. I decided to save\u00a0them\u00a0— in case I ever had grandchildren.<\/p>\n

When I found out that our first grandchild would be arriving, I headed back over to Sue Mary Fox’s studio in Berkeley<\/a> with\u00a0my crazy quilt\u00a0scraps.\u00a0Sue Mary\u00a0figured I had enough material to<\/p>\n

\"Author<\/a>
Four quilts. Photo by Jon Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

make four baby quilts. \u00a0Why not go ahead and make up all four, she proposed. It would be so much more efficient to do\u00a0them all at once.\u00a0That’s what we did. The first baby quilt was presented at a baby shower earlier this month. And now I’ve got not one, not two, but three extra baby quilts, ready to go.<\/p>\n

All I need is three more grandchildren.\u00a0No pressure, kids.<\/p>\n

Don’t miss the first two installments of my 40-year quilting saga at “The Quilt From Hell — Forty Years Later It’s Still Not Finished”<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0“A Crazy-Making Quilt — Finished at Last.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Vintage<\/a>
Sue Mary Fox, right, bundled the last remnants of my vintage fabricfor me . . .<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Sue<\/a>
. . . Is there another quilting project in my future? Barbara Newhall photos<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Author<\/a><\/p>\n

Grandchild No. One is due in February, and I’ve managed to finish the baby quilt in plenty of time . . . Make that four baby quilts. Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23639,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[653,1565,1214,34,1610,1125,82,1611,1388],"class_list":["post-23620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-changing-family","tag-arts-and-crafts","tag-babies","tag-berkeley","tag-dont-miss","tag-grancchildren","tag-grandmothering","tag-on-the-funny-side","tag-quilts","tag-sue-mary-fox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}