Going Coastal Fabric Collection

May 12, 2011May 12, 2011 Elizabeth E.3 Comments

Emily Herrick of Little Old Ladies fame, has designed a new collection of fabric. Usually I’m a scrappy, find a piece-here-and-there sort of quilter, but I am quite taken with this line. She has a giveaway going on now (leave a comment, have a chance to win the collection) that I thought you’d like to know about, but really–this is quite a cool line of fabric. And I don’t say that just because I live in Southern California.

When we lived on the East Coast, I wanted to make a memory quilt with all things beachy. We stopped in a quilt shop on our way home from the shore and I found a little lonely fat quarter in the bottom of the bin, bound with a rubber band–but nothing else. There are lots of fabrics of flowers, cars, baby things (is it just me, or does there seem to be an explosion of baby-themed fabrics lately?), holiday lines–but no beach line. Until now.

Here’s the orange-y colorways, with that fantastic Bermuda shorts plaid we all associate with the beach. (Click to enlarge.)

While I love it all–the dots (of course), the stars and the kelp (so Northern California!) and those fabulous bottle caps–the grays remind me of our days at the shore. It’s the color of the beach just after the sun sets and we’re waiting for the traffic to clear so we can go home. We’re picking up our beach chairs, shaking out the towels, fighting the gulls for our trash so we can throw it away. We sit on our coolers, soaking up the last of our day at the beach.

She also has quite the story about how she came to create this line. She writes: “Last year while I was going through my Radioactive-Iodine treatment for Thyroid cancer I had to be in complete isolation for 10 days. I set up camp in my bedroom with my laptop, a few DVDs, a stack of mags, and some drawing paper. I was flipping through magazines and I saw a picture of a throw pillow with a huge crab on it. I was in love with that crab. I thought, I wonder if there’s a quilting fabric with a crab on it and so I started searching.”

Sometimes I find the stories behind the lines as intriguing as the fabrics themselves.

Quilts

Spring Is Sprung

May 3, 2011May 3, 2011 Elizabeth E.Leave a comment

Spring’s here, and in Southern California that means hot weather has arrived–like in the 80s and 90s. So it’s perfect day to get a call from my quilter. . .

. . . telling me that my Spring/Life’s Alive quilt is all done. This is Cathy of CJ Designs and yes, she’s does mail order and best of all–she’s good and gets things done in a timely fashion. (Leave me a comment if you want her contact info.) The pattern we chose was “Calm Water” for the quilting, and I thought it turned out really well. Here’s some candids of Miss Quilt:

You can really see the quilting pattern there on the flannel backing.

Okay, that’s all until I get the binding on. I may sleep under it tonight, binding or no binding, because even though the days are warm, the nights are still cool-ish and the window fan blows the cool air in from outside all night long. It’s how I’ve managed to enjoy living here, an hour east of Los Angeles. While we still have really hot summers out here, the ocean air floods inland in the evening, cooling things down. We rarely run our A/C at night, unlike the time I lived in Texas, where it ran clock-round for months of the year. My hat is off to you Texans.

Spring also means our Silk Oak Tree gets orangey-yellow new growth on it. The little teeny tiny birds LOVE this stuff, and they snuggle deep into the strange-looking blossoms and wiggle around. I wonder what they smell (I can’t smell anything, but the color is certainly neon-ish).

It also means I just spent a weekend grading research papers from my English Comp class. For some sample lines from the papers that made me weep, I’ve put up a post *here*.

Happy Spring!

This Quilt Is A Mess

May 1, 2011July 23, 2012 Elizabeth E.Leave a comment

Whooey! Another tempest in a quilting teapot! (And this quilting disaster–explained at the very end!)

I love all this controversy. I love that we are talking about quilt issues, digging our hands deep in the loam of the quilting garden and really talking about things that bother us and that delight us. Rachel of Stitched in Color was quite frank one day about Saying Things She Didn’t Think She Should. Bammo! Millions of comments–some, mostly rants–about one aspect of the quilt world or another. I should have expected as much from all of us women who run blogs. Then her next post was about Things We Should Say, and the issues of it’s a subjective world (quilting) that some are trying to categorize objectively (skill levels, style labels).

Here’s my .02:

I’ve read all the posts and it seems like the conversation/comments has generated a healthy discussion, re: the labels of modern vs. traditional quilting. More about that at the end.
But about the other–the “dumbing down” stream. I’ve read all *those* original posts and realize that it had its genesis in trying to describe levels of skill. I think this is sort of one place where there is no subjectivity, and that’s kind of what set off the whole alarm bells and craziness. Either you have the skills to make successful HST (Half Square Triangles) or you don’t. It’s meeting an objective standard. For some, HST are intimidating. For others, they do them in their sleep. I do think it can be successfully argued that there are certain skills that come with practice and after having achieved them, a quilter can objectively say s/he’s got those down. I consider myself a master quilter, having done just about every technique in the book (some while I was majoring in CloTex in college, some afterwards as I took quilt classes to become more proficient). The point is I was still learning, still trying. And as I want to improve myself, I’m now trying to master more applique techniques. So even while I may have objectively met some unnamed standards of skill level, there is always more that can be learned, can be perfected upon.

Now: my .02 on the “modern” quilting business. A while back ( a year ago?) I read a blog post putting forth the idea that *modern* was one leg of a three-legged stool, the other two legs being *traditional* and the *art quilt*. I was happy with that idea–that we were all finding ways to be creative. I love the injection of fresh! new! that the modern gals have brought to the industry. I started quilting in the 1970’s when I was 21, and personally, I thought we were all getting a bit old and musty. Something had to change. I wasn’t ready to go the art quilt route because I still love a good cuddle under a hand-made quilt. So I was happy to see some fresh ideas, another way to contribute to our big wide world of quilting. It’s not an either/or. It’s all of us together, doing what we love.

On that note, I present to you. . . This Quilt Is A Mess.

I don’t think that this was its original name, but it is certainly the name it has now. I’d recently been on a trip to Venice and like so many other quilters, fell in love with the floor of the main cathedral. I bought the POSTER of the floor (they wouldn’t let us take photos) and started to sketch it out. This quilt was supposed to be one of those very clever quilts of using one block yet coloring it so many different ways that the quilt would be chameleon-like. Yeah, right.

It started out that way–I think that section is kind of in the upper right. Then I got tired. Then I started piecing things every which way. Then it sat, like an ugly gnome in a room of beauty queens. Here’s where the class thing comes in. I had to have a quilt to take to a workshop with Hollis Chatelain, who was just hitting the circuit after her very successful painted images (then quilted) were winning big prizes. I knew I would be experimenting with quilting, so grabbed this. She talked to us about spray basting (so I did that) and brought the “glued-together” sandwich to the second day of the class. I realized that I had to be plain-jane with the quilting, not swirly.

So the quilting consists of eight billion rows, one-quarter-inch apart, some in black thread and some in red and occasionally switching directions. I was never so happy to be done with a quilt. I put the binding on, a sleeve for hanging, but basically it is STILL an ugly gnome in a room of beauty queens. It rarely sees the light of day.

So, even though I execute flawlessly in objective skill level (well, okay, maybe not ALL the time), subjectively I can say: This Quilt Is A Mess. To this day, I’m still not a complete fan of tight row stitching, but I have learned from Red Pepper Quilts that there is a fresh, modern way to adapt that technique so it’s not so painful. So to all you bloggers & quilters out there–keep sharing, keep showing, keep writing. It’s good for us all. Even the tempests in the teapots.