Category Archives: Quilt Blocks.
Designs, descriptions, and ideas for quilt blocks.
Grandmother’s Flower Garden
Hosted by Anna and Peter Semowoniuk, 5338 Longwoods Road, Southwest Middlesex, ON
The Grandmother’s Flower Garden pattern made from hexagons is characteristic of English patchwork brought here by early settlers. English quilters called them “honeycomb quilts”. The hexagons are known as “sixes.”
They were a reminder of the beauty of England. Violets, geraniums, primrose and dahlias mixed with herbs. Medicinal Echinacea, yarrow, tansy, chives and dandelions — the first greens after a long winter.
Grandmothers’ Flower Garden is the most familiar pattern to North America. The hexagon patterns could be made of the smallest of scraps. I remember Grandma saving all the scraps in a basket and saying: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
Honeycomb, a one patch quilt, was made of hexagon patches sewn together without any attempts at colour arrangement. But few quilts were random. The six sided patches demanded experimentation at the hands of the colour-loving women who worked with them. Even the oldest tattered remnants of hexagon quilts show attempts at arranging colour. In time, more elaborate mosaic patterns evolved.
A typical pattern as featured on the Semowniuk barn shows a centre circled by six contrasting hexagons and another twelve around that, and a fourth circle of 24. The yellow centre represents a flower’s centre surrounded by petals; then a background of green representing the garden; followed by white reminiscent of the picket fences of English gardens.
This pattern mimics the amazing honeybee hive — six-sided cells filled with sweet golden goodness — perfectly shaped architecture serving the purpose of reproduction and food storage.
Bees were brought to this area by the Moravian Delawares in 1793 from the USA for pollination and honey products. The honeybee soon escaped man and made new homes in the backwoods across North America. Settlers learned how to find these “bee trees”. Some even became professional bee hunters.
On hot summer days Grandpa, Dad and I would take some wax and honey and melt it on a stone. Soon some bees would appear and we followed them to the hoard. Sometimes we smoked them out, robbing them of their honey. Other times we cut down the tree and sectioned out the trunk where the bees were using it as a hive.
Grandmothers Flower Garden is one of our best loved vintage quilts but very few new ones are made. This is a very labour intensive quilt pattern usually pieced and quilted by hand.
Written by Laura Hathaway, February 2012
Sources:
http://www.womenfolk.com/quilt_pattern_history/mosaic.html
Jones, Robert Leslie, History of Agriculture in Ontario 1613-1880, 1977, University of Toronto Press, Toronto and Buffalo
Geese in Flight
Hosted by Carr Farms, 4833 Longwoods Rd., Appin, Southwest Middlesex, Ontario
My name is Susannah Reynolds and I am six years old. I love to watch the geese fly over in the fall. They are so noisy I hear them long before I see them fly over the tree tops. I think they are playing Follow the Leader like I do with my sisters.
Father watches the geese too and we talk about the delicious roast goose we ate last fall. Sometimes I think Father is angry with the geese. He says that every year it’s a race. ‘Who will harvest the corn first? Father, the deer, the coons or the geese?’
Father explains that the geese know that winter is coming and so they fly to a warmer place. I remember all the work last fall getting ready for winter: taking the wheat and corn to Uncle Chris Arnold’s mill for grinding into flour. Chopping wood. Drying apples, berries, meat. Storing vegetables. So much food I didn’t think we could fit it into our small log home.
But by spring most of it was gone and many days we just ate cornmeal mush. We girls had fun playing in the snow but some days it was too cold to go outside and even our food froze inside the cabin. Many people get sick in the winter. It is so hard to get our outdoor chores done let alone go for help, medicine or supplies.
At the beginning of the war it was exciting to watch all the people pass by on the river, especially the Indian warriors. But each day more and more passed. Father said there were thousands. They looked so sad. Families with children, soldiers, prisoners and wounded. Some stopped for food and shelter.
Many tried to pay with whatever they had but most had nothing left to give. Mother cautioned us girls to stay close because some of the people were not nice. We watched our possessions carefully so that none would go missing.
Some time after Uncle Christopher’s Indian friend Tecumseh died in October at the big battle, things slowed down and I hoped we could go back to our old way of life. But I knew that was impossible.
“Winter will be different this year,” Father says and although he does not explain, at night I hear my parents’ anxious whispers, Mother crying. We once had fields of corn, gardens, chickens, geese, pigs, a cow, a pair of oxen — all are gone. We cannot even find a cob of corn. It makes me think of that story in the Bible about the locusts that ate everything.
All the people have destroyed our farm. They even burned the fence rails that Father worked so hard to make. We have nothing left. Yes, winter will be different this year. I wish I was a goose. I would fly to a better place.
Written by Chris Crawford, February 2012
Source: When Chatham Was Woods, Reminiscences of the Pioneers by John Rhodes
Farmer’s Wife – Margaret Ward
1918 Longwoods Rd., Wardsville ON. Hosted by Bladek Farm and sponsored by J.H. Sales & Service. Great Windows!Along with daily chores, I plant and weed the vegetable garden, hill potatoes and each spring I help with sugaring-off when the maple sap starts running. There is a quilt that will have to be tied because there will be no time to quilt it properly before the cold weather arrives. I have most of the blocks cut from old trousers and two coats are waiting to be cut into more blocks.
There are vegetables to harvest and dry before they are stored in the root cellar. Apples are still hanging on many of the eighty trees in the orchard and I must dig potatoes. I also wash and mend clothes and prepare meals for travelers who stop over at the Inn.
The well-known saying, “A man works from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done,” has proven itself true in this wilderness.
Based on excerpts from Rosemary Cranney’s “Through the Eyes of Margaret Ward.”
Double Irish Chain
1789 Longwoods Road, Wardsville ON. Hosted and sponsored by The Thamesville Community Credit Union 519-693-9936
Video: Wardsville Barn Quilt trail
The Double Irish Chain was a popular quilt pattern used in the early 1800s. The history of this quilt pattern connects the life of George Ward to his humble beginnings in his native country of Ireland. The Irish people who settled here in the early 1800s influence this area.
The Irish Double Chain quilt pattern was one of the many brought to Canada by Irish settlers such as Margaret Ward. Eventually the Irish double chain would become part of not just Irish heritage but Canadian heritage as well. This quilt block pattern reminds us that Canada’s people came from different backgrounds and countries.
