The Quilt Show

Last Friday I helped to hang some of the quilts for our guild's show. I was assigned to work with a member named Diane, to hang the quilts which needed special handling. The first was a group of small quilts which had been pinned to a piece of black felt, part of a group challenge. Diane got stabbed with a straight pin, so I set off to find a bandaid for her. Let this be a lesson! No straight pins!
Other quilts we worked with were small ones, which needed to be pinned to a sheet. First a sheet had tob be hung up, as you would a  quilt, and then the quilts had to be pinned from the back. This was definitely tricky to do, and getting them straight was a real challenge.
We also hung another group of small quilts, with a water theme. These were cleverly joined together with safety pins which had beads strung on them, so that all you saw were the beads. Diane informed me that this was from her small quilt group, and I was able to ask her how she did her block.
The afternoon was fun, and it's always nice to be able to help out. I found time to see most of the quilts in the show, and got to have a close up view of a quilt from the mid 30's, which seems to have been made by the members of a ladies softball team in Nebraska. They each embroidered their names on the blocks, and some even included a date or the position they played (second bace was one, and that's just how it was spelled). Back in the thirties every factory and workplace would have had a baseball or softball team, so that employees could have some socializing and sport after work. This particular quilt was part of a collection from the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles How lucky we are to have this great museum so close by!
The softball quilt was a version of the LeMoyne Star. It took some searching but I found the block in one of my books, America's Favorite Quilts, by Leslie Linsley. I finally figured out how to draft it, and might try to make a version some day.