For the month of April, I have taken up Frédérique's Quilting Patchwork and Applique challenge to blog daily (except Sundays) on a quilt topic related to a letter of the alphabet.
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I started quilting in 2002 and right from the beginning, I was instructed that it was important to Label your quilts. As we have learned from the antique quilts we admire, often the information about who made a quilt and why is not handed down with a quilt no matter how cherished it may have been at the time it is given or over the years it is used. Now that quilts are also accepted as art, it is interesting that quilters are the artists least likely to "sign" their work.
Many quilters think making a label is a chore. I think of it as either another part of the design process or another opportunity to bring some creativity to your project. I usually try to incorporate a label area into the back of my quilts as part of the design for the backing.
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| Valor |
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| Sweet Land of Liberty |
Other times, I take it as a challenge to figure out something cute or related to the quilt.
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| Spring Basket Blues |
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| Scrappy Trips and its label |
I admit I've even gone overboard on a few labels!
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| High Strung + 2 |
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| And if you want to know why, check out this post! |
But a label can be as simple as a sewing a piece of fabric onto the back of your quilt or even using a piece of selvedge as your label.
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| Lincoln Obama Embroidery |
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| Merrimac Dresdens |
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| Adding the label |
In 2016, the Quilt Alliance, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to document, preserve and share the quilting heritage, asked quilters to make a pledge to label their quilts. At the time I had about seven quilts that I had not yet put labels on. I wrote a series of posts on bringing the labels for those quilts up to date. I also compiled sources of other interesting ways to make labels which you can see if you scroll down to the end of those posts here, here and here.
Make sure that if your quilt lasts through the generations (whether with your family or not) that quilt historians know your quilt's story!
Linking up with Frédérique and the other Challengers at Quilting Patchwork and Applique. Bonne journée!
2 comments:
Pretty and creative labels featured here! Thanks for this great post about them, I agree with their importance. I'm going to click the links too.
You have made some very creative labels! If I label mine, I usually just write on the back of the quilt, rather than sewing on a label. But mostly I don't even do that. I know I should!
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