Check Out This Beautiful Dresden Plate Quilt Featuring Embroidery!

Quilt name: Dresden Plate,

Maker: Susan Pope Chinouth of Johnson City,TN.

Hand Embroidery with several of my own created designs(tree,house,rainbow, Rocky Mtns) (Patent Pending)

Won 3^rd prize in a California quilt show

Hand Quilted. Quilt as you go method. 

My fabric: Scraps from apparel and my job

Hi, I’m Susan. I wanted to share my quilt and its story with you. I made this quilt between 1972 and 1974. I was 17-19 years old at the time. I lived at home and had my own room and a walk- in closet, but I could not walk in it! It was filled with a GIANT PILE of fabric scraps.  (You see, back then, there were no storage totes in existence in the 70’s). My mother, older sister and I sewed clothes. I sewed the most and I had a summer job at a placemat and fabric napkin factory in Wappingers Falls, NY. They let me bring home their scraps for free! Between the job scraps and my apparel scraps, I was in quilt heaven! BUT, WHAT should I make?

I had Ruby McKims bestseller book, “101 Patchwork Patterns” and I poured over it night after night before falling asleep. HOW do you pick just one pattern? During the day I embroidered on my jeans and pillows. 

Finally, the lightbulb went off! I could quilt AND embroider a quilt if I made the Dresden Plate pattern. So, my two year project started and I had NO idea that it would take so long! But I was young and time was very available. I embroidered while watching TV old movies that I watched with mom (she knew all of the old actors’ names). I used some iron-on designs and others I designed. One of the designs is the Crosby, Stills and Nash song called “Our House” with two cats in the yard and a house!

There were no plastic templates back then, so of course I used a thick piece of sturdy cardboard for my Dresden plate template. Man, did I use that thing! It did become frayed from all of the tracing with a pencil. I machine-sewed the plate seams together and hand sewed the curved ends of the plates to a large background square. The middles are all different scenes and hand-sewed on. They have embroidery trim over the circles. I just wanted this quilt to be different. I decided to sew together hundreds of 1″ squares together for the lattice strips. Finally, it was ALL set up with the squares on the diagonal!

IT CAME FROM MY HEAD when I was a teenager and it is just full of all of the stuff that girls DREAM about before they get married! There I was with overalls on in front of the TV watching romance movies WITH MY BEST FRIEND, MY MOM! She passed away 7 years ago. 

I just have to say, I have been sewing for 56 years and I have not duplicated such an ambitious project since! A career eventually took up a lot of my time! In retirement, I now sew every day  and make many quilts and apparel.

Thank you!

Susan

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