Jack and Sonya Presberg Family Q

Jack and Sonya Presberg Family Quilts

My father, Max, was the youngest of 4 children born within 5 years and then his little brother Jack was born when he was 15 years old. Jack and Sonya married and had 3 daughters - Amy (1949), Carol (1953) and Sue (1956). They each married and had 2 kids. I just realized that I've made a total of 11 quilts for this branch of my family!

	Amy and Michael Hathaway Wedding Quilt (1978) I had seen photos of Amish quilts and liked their simplicity since I was still a beginning quilter. This quilt was machine pieced and hand quilted minimally. The names and wedding date were quilted in block letters around the border. By 1989, the quilting stitches had begun to break. I took the quilt home, re-stitched the broken areas, and added another row of quilting between each original row in the body of the quilt. That's when this photo was taken. The white marks on the photo are polyester batting fibers migrating through the cotton/polyester blend fabrics on the front of the quilt. Since then, I've switched to all-cotton fabrics (more readily available now than in 1978) and all-cotton batting, also readily available now.
	Sam Hathaway Baby Quilt (1981) This quilt has a diagonal rainbow of 6-pointed stars on a white background. The pattern is called "The X Quisite." The original back was white flannel and the binding is nylon satin blanket binding. The stars around the edges have 3-dimensional points so a baby can pull on them. Sam refused to go to bed with the quilt hanging on the wall so it was given to him and became a security blanket. He often stuck his finger into a space in the corner of the binding. By 1987, the flannel back was all worn out since it was loosely woven. And by this time, the white fabric looked more like unbleached muslin. Six-year-old Sam allowed me to take the quilt home and put a new back on it of sturdier muslin but he said I mustn't change the binding corners at all. The quilt was pieced, bound and mostly quilted by machine for sturdiness. Sam's name and birth date are hand quilted into the white corners where there are no stars. This photo shows the finished quilt being held up by one of my baby sitters with my boys "assisting."
	Ben Schatz Baby Quilt (1983) Carol asked for a Baby's Blocks quilt but I did not want to do a traditional one since I had already done that for my own son, Ben, in 1975. She asked for "weather" colors so I chose sunny yellow and sky blue. I drafted the pattern on isometric graph paper (with equilateral triangles) from a tiny advertisement I found in Quilter's Newsletter Magazine in January 1983. The quilt is machine pieced and hand quilted. I discovered that I could fit a letter or number on each face of a baby's block so the quilt has Ben's name and birth date quilted on it.
	Aaron Hathaway Baby Quilt (1986) After Sam's quilt got dirty and worn out, I decided that Aaron's quilt would have darker, sturdier fabrics. As luck would have it, he chose a knitted baby blanket to drag around so this quilt held up much better than his brother's. The close-up photo shows the hand-embroidered name and birth date at the bottom of the quilt. The pattern is called Variable Star and it is all machine pieced and machine quilted for sturdiness.
	Annie Schatz Baby Quilt (1987) I decided to try designing another quilt on isometric graph paper and found I could put 6 houses around a hexagon the same size as Ben's quilt. As family genealogist, I pretended that each house belonged to a family member and labeled them in ink for the baby's parents and grandparents. The center hexagon has the baby's name, birth place and birth date written around the edges. The quilt was machine pieced on vacation on Andros Island in the Bahamas and hand quilted at home with a fence around the border and a big sunflower in the center. The houses have quilted clapboards and roof shingles, lace inserted around the roofs and for window curtains, a quilted tree between each house and a quilted person in each doorway. Annie's big brother Ben is quilted between the yellow and orange houses, playing with a balloon. I was so pleased with the results, I had the quilt professionally photographed by a neighbor and submitted it for publication in Quilter's Newsletter Magazine. It appeared in conjunction with an article on family history quilts on 2+ pages along with all my patterns and instructions in issue #205 in September 1988. I was paid $50.
	Sue and Rob Greene Wedding Quilt (1990) This flower basket quilt has a greater variety of fabrics more randomly distributed than in my previous quilts. The pattern drafting was a geometry challenge solved by the use of the square root of two. The design was planned long distance by mail with drawings and fabric swatches sent up and back several times. It is machine pieced and hand quilted with hearts in the border.
	Claudia Greene Baby Quilt (1991) Sue loved Annie's house quilt and wanted me to make one for Claudia. The basic pattern is the same but this time I pieced the fence around the border to make it more visible and used brighter fabrics for the houses. The roofs and background are darker greens. There is white piping outlining the roofs and the writing is all hand-embroidered in white instead of written with a pen. The windows all have lace curtains and there are people quilted in each doorway. The machine piecing was done on vacation in Bonaire and the hand quilting was done at home. A letter and photo of the quilt was sent to Quilter's Newsletter Magazine and published in Issue #244 in July/Aug 1992.
	Teddy Greene Baby Quilt (1993) Again, Sue loved Ben Schatz' Baby Blocks quilt and wanted me to do the same for Teddy. The fabrics for this quilt are less "busy" than those in the previous version allowing the 3-D optical illusion to be clearer. I decided to hand embroider the letters and numbers on the faces of the blocks so they are much more visible in this quilt. I used my Macintosh computer to enlarge and skew the writing to fit the diamond shapes in a font reminiscent of real wooden baby's blocks. The quilt is machine pieced and hand quilted.
	Sam Hathaway College Quilt (1999) I saw this Letter H pattern in a quilt finished by Becky Herdle from vintage blocks on display at the Quilter's Gathering and saved it for future use. Sam has always been interested in music so I used a musical note print as the background fabric. The quilt was machine pieced on vacation in Grand Cayman and professionally machine quilted (for durability) by Elizabeth Roy in Harvard, MA. This photo was taken at Camp Timberlock after I finished hand-stitching the binding.
	Carol and Mark Schatz Bed Quilt (2003) The plans for this quilt were drawn with Electric Quilt software and sent up and back to Carol by e-mail. I machine pieced the top in just 3 days while I visited Carol, Mark, and their kids in St. Louis in the summer. The "Jacob's Ladder" pattern was chosen by Carol and we picked out the "tropical vacation" colored fabrics together in a quilt shop in St. Charles, Missouri on the way home from the airport. The quilt was professionally machine quilted in a custom pattern to look like "water on a Caribbean beach" by my friend Julie Crossland in Hudson, NH. To read the whole 3 page story of "An Itinerant Quilter in the 21st century" click here. Some day I may submit it to a magazine for publication.
	Jack Presberg Piano Quilt (2005) This quilt was made in just 2 weeks from idea to shipping. I saw a quilt with piano keyboard fabric at the opening reception of the Quilters' Connection show on Thursday evening and asked fellow-member Stephie Karp where she found it. On Friday evening I got directions to Sew-fisticated Discount Fabrics in Somerville, MA. On Saturday I taped 6 sheets of paper left over from an Amazon.com shipment together, visited Margaret Baltz (a Carlisle piano teacher) and traced the top of her baby grand piano. Sunday was Mother's Day and I celebrated by shopping for fabric in Somerville. I got the keyboard fabric and a white background music fabric for the back of the quilt. On Monday, I found all the rest of the fabrics at once at Fabric Place in Woburn. By Wednesday evening, they were all prewashed and ironed and ready to cut and sew. A week later, both front and back were pieced, stitched around the edges, turned right side out, and machine quilted "in the ditch" and around the edge. The label tells why I made the quilt.