Old-Fashioned School: Quilts

This week we explored quilts for old-fashioned school. First we took out all of the quilts in the house to talk about the colors, shapes, and patterns they used. The yellow quilt is a lone star quilt made by my grandmother. It was fun to pick out what fabrics might have been a dress or a shirt or a pillowcase.

Then we checked out this blue and purple log cabin quilt made by cousin for our wedding. I recently learned that traditionally the center square of a log cabin is always red to symbolize the hearth of the home. Pretty cool!

We've been reading quilting books. Some of our favorites were:
Eight Hands Around: A Patchwork Alphabet by Ann Whitford Paul
Each letter of the alphabet stands for a different quilt pattern square and tells the history or symbolism of the square.
The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco
A quilt tells the story of several generations of Russian immigrants and their lives.
The Quiltmaker's Gift by Jeff Brumbeau
A quiltmaker teaches a king to give up his selfish ways by giving away everything he owns.

We also colored some fun quilt squares from Making Learning Fun! I thought Ella might like the challenge of the color-by-letter and color-by-numbers, but I should have guessed she is not a color-by-the-number kind of gal. I mean, before we even started our lesson, she had sat down and designed and drawn her own quilt.  Instead she asked me if she could just color it however she wanted, and I said yes. Also, a certain little person has decided she's big enough to color too.

The next day, we did some quilt math with the Quilt Square Challenge from Mathwire. We did a four-square challenge. You print out a page of squares that are made of a black and a white triangle. Then you try to rearrange the squares to make the quilt square on the page.