Handkerchief Challenges

Lately I've had some creative challenges with my hanky quilts and pillows.  The previous post talked about my challenge using round hankies.  This time I had some lovely hankies that had one embroidered corner.  I wanted to sew it my way which is, of course, rag quilted, but if I did it the usual way the cut seams would have cut through the lacy embroidery.  So here's how I handled it.

I centered the designs on a piece of flannel and sewed them down then ragged only the edges of the pillow.  I think it turned out great.

Another challenge I had was what to do with all white hankies in a quilt.  I always use white flannel when making my hanky quilts.  I tried to use different colors of flannel but that changed the color of the hankies and didn't look very good.   So when a lady asked me to make a quilt out of her (almost) all white hankies I handled it in two ways.

• The first was to layer the hankies.

This is a good technique to use when you have very large hankies with a large amount of white space in the middle and very small hankies.  I would sew the small hanky centered right in the middle of the large like this:

• The second was to frame each hanky with a colored print.

For this quilt I picked a pinkish coral keepsake calico fabric with roses and lace design.

 I centered each white hanky on an exact size piece of white flannel (so the design of this fabric wouldn't show through) and then sewed it onto the calico fabric.

Then I rag quilted it in the same way as always.  Here's how it turned out:

It's really hard to see the beauty of these hankies in this picture but you can see how each hanky is framed by the fabric.

What to do with a Round Hanky

A lady gave me a whole bunch of hankies and she said I want you to make me pillows with these.   I had made hanky pillows before.  I would rag quilt ('cause that's what I do) 4 hankies together and voila -- a hanky pillow.

 Once I had a beautiful pink hanky that I just couldn't use  in a hanky quilt so I sewed a pillow cover with just that one hanky in the rag quilt style.

So I knew what to do to make her the pillow covers.  However, in this bunch of hankies there were two very pretty round hankies that I just didn't know quite what to do with.  I looked up making pillow covers for round pillows and while there were tutorials for them, I didn't think it would work very well for hankies.  Then as I was ironing all the hankies to see which would be the best to use for the pillows I noticed some plain jane lace embroidered edge white hankies.   Nothing fancy, a little boring.  The kind I usually pass over when picking the perfect hankies. This time though I wondered if I could use plain jane with the beautiful round hanky.

I sewed the plain jane onto a piece of white flannel then I sewed the round hanky on top.  I added another square of flannel beneath and quilted the two layers together  in circles following the design that was on the round hanky.   I sewed the two backing pieces on and clipped the edges all around.

This is what I did with a round hanky:

Here is the second pillow.  I didn't have another plain jane hanky that was big enough so I backed this round hanky with more flannel.