Parasol Ladies Vintage Quilt Story

This quilt top has quite the long and traveled story.
It was made by my great-grandma, Gertrude Cooper, back before my parents were married in 1965. 





Grandma Cooper gave it to my mom as an unfinished top and big enough to be a bedspread.
She never did anything with it and then somehow I ended up with it. It sat in my cedar chest unfinished, and I hauled it around for who knows how long, before my sisters, mom and I were trying to decide what to do with it. Here we had kept it for 50+ years as just a quilt top and nothing had been done.


We contemplated cutting it up into pieces and quilting it as individual wall hangings and still no one was thrilled about it.  As a bedspread, for sure no one wanted it.  Finally our mom decided that she would use it as a quilt in one of her spare bedrooms.





We cut off all the excess border that would be the bedspread and Emily found some cute vintage sheet material and had our favorite Lynn quilt it for us.








I think that Emily bound it up and off it went to our mom.








Detail of the quilting.





Some up close and personal pictures of the parasol ladies.





Since it is so old Lynn quilted it pretty densely everywhere.
Also, Grandma Cooper had just done a topstitch zigzag that wasn't too tight and pretty small.  We didn't want anything to come apart.





Close detail of her embroidery and applique.





I had actually started to re-applique the ladies, but after one I stopped because I didn't like how it was turning out.  Unfortunately I also couldn't pick it out without wrecking her applique.


I'm glad that we got this quilt top completely put together as an actual quilt.
It is a fun little piece of our ancestry and heritage and probably one of the few things that we have that belonged to great-grandma Cooper.