{Garage Sale Temptations} I Bought a Quilt Top

On my way up to The Starlight Stitchery last Saturday, I stopped at two garage sales and a rummage sale. The least promising of the three was over the hill from our house and I'd already driven past it five or six times without stopping because it looked like mostly children's clothes. 

Don't judge the sale by what you can see from the road. I do that all the time, but I shouldn't. They had some great vintage stuff, even at the end of the second day. 

I'm not in  the market for old quilt tops, no matter how much I love looking at them. But these are that elongated hexagon that reminds me of coffins. (And even though I'm not counting down to Halloween yet, that sort of  thing is niggling at the back of the brain.) What's the proper name for this shape when it appears in a quilt -- is it an elongated Hexagon?

There were three like this one and a fourth quilt top that I think had squares in it. It was late in the day and I was hot and I definitely wasn't in the market for four quilt tops. If I was going to buy one...and I really thought I wasn't...it was going to be one of the three.

The others had brighter colors and more varied fabrics. I thought for a brief moment that the first one might be all double knit and would have snapped it up in an instant if it had been, but there was also wool and I know from sad experience that they weren't going to play well together. Someone I knew used to make quits with anything and everything and gave them to family members who didn't realize what would happen when you tried to wash a quilt that had heavy knits and wool and thin satins and I still feel awful about how that ended.

All of the fabric in this quilt is close to the same weight and I think I can get away with washing it carefully once it's quilted. 

Do you see the seam in the blue plaid? That's got to be a piece of clothing. And the bit to the right of it is embroidered. I can find several other patches that were cut from that same piece, but not enough to figure out what the embroidery might have been.

I'm so intrigued by this thing that I can barely stand it. I really want to know the story of these three quilt tops. Were there others that did get quilted and used? That's a crazy lot of hand piecing to just let sit and gather dust over what's got to have been a lot of years.