Thank you, Marian R!

The Harvest Quilters, the local guild to which I belong, was contacted last week about a fabric stash. A woman in a nearby town was being moved into assisted living and her descendants had the unenviable task of getting her house ready for sale - which means cleaning out a lifetime of collected items. Long story short, I loaded up my car with 8 or 9 very heavy garbage bags full of fabric and  took it home to sort through, to separate the cottons from the polyesters.

The reason I am blogging about it is because in among the yards of salmon-colored doubleknit (what is it with salmon "pants suits" - I've seen this color fabric in many stashes at estate sales and such) were these two finished quilt tops (I laid them out on my bed in order to take these crappy photos of them) (click to embiggen):

If anyone can tell me how old you think these are, I would appreciate it. I am terrible at knowing the era of various fabrics. The blocks themselves were pieced by both hand and machine, and then the blocks were assembled by machine.

I'm not sure how the guild is going to find homes for these tops - we may raffle them off at our show in March. I know I'm not going to keep them, because I don't know how to restore the fabric (it's very stiff, most likely from starch, and has some stains on it - I know I'd be terrified putting these in the washing machine)

The rest of the donation consisted of a lot of solid fabrics, and probably 60% polyesters of various weights and ages. There were also a lot of those holiday project panels: stuffed santas, tree skirts, holiday motifs to fussy cut and appliquee, and lots of small floral prints.

The funniest thing for me was finding another panel with parrots and cockatiels that I purchased at a neighbor's house sale (when they were downsizing to move into senior housing). I thought this was a one of a kind thing, but obviously, Marian R shopped at the same stores as my former neighbor did.

I'm hoping to finish another quilt later today, so I may put up two postings today.