A Tale of Two House Dresses

Vintage version

 A house dress is a foreign concept now--what the hell WERE they?--but when I was a kid in the '50's and '60's my mother wore one every day.  

2014 version

A house dress was a washable, cotton number that mothers could run up on their Singers from a Simplicity pattern.  My mother wore hers when she did housework and went to the supermarket. They were sort of shifts (remember shifts?) with a belt.

My Aunt Kit, who lived in England, wore house dresses, and when she died about 20 years ago, my cousin Sue rescued a couple and stuffed them in a drawer.

When we were in England in 2011, Sue mentioned that I might want the house dresses to cut up and use in a quilt.  Sure, I thought. Why not?  Sentimentality and all that.   She said she'd dig them out and give them to me on our next visit.

But last year when we were in England, Sue forgot to give them to me.  No problem, because my friend and neighbor Leah was going to be in London in the summer, and she could collect them.

I sent a photo of Leah to Sue, so she'd recognize her when they met.  They connected at Victoria Station and spent an hour chatting in a cafe.  Then Leah flew to New York with the two house dresses.

I was in New York about a month later, and I retrieved the dresses from Leah.  (These are well-traveled house dresses).  Here we are during the hand-off at her apartment:

Greenwich Village, September 2013.  

Note the two dresses slung over my arm. 

I brought them back to Berkeley and examined them:  two nondescript dresses, a pocket here and there, no piping.  I cut them up and put them in this bin in my studio closet:

A few weeks ago, I was writing an e-mail to Sue and I thought, really, I need to do something with those fabrics.  And a bunch of other DFP's:

An aerial view of the DFP box

I cut the dress fabrics into strips and played around.  I tried this and that.  I found myself adding more interesting fabrics.  My friend Claudia A. sent a possible pattern that reduced the DFPs to very narrow strips embedded in larger-patterned prints.

Stacked Strip pattern that  just about hides the DFPs

But I'd  already cut most of the fabric into wider strips, and I was determined to work with them.

I tried and tried, and then I discovered I can deal with DFPs only if they're reversed:

Right side

Wrong side

Here's a draft (ignore patches of white design wall):

Draft, with the house dress fabrics just about lost in it

So my plan is to use the dress fabrics right-side-up only on the back of the quilt.  It's the best I can do.  And when the quilt's done, I'm going to give it to my cousin Sue and not tell her which side is the front.

My cousin Sue in 2011, the year she told me about the fabric.