My Head’s in a Book. . . or Two

August 25, 2012 Elizabeth E.4 Comments

I should be annotating the readings I assigned to my students with my brand new colored pencils, but instead my brain’s rebelled. It is Saturday after all, and I need a break.

Remember the exhibit I was all gaga over at Long Beach? Well, the twelve-by-twelve group has put out a book, Twelve By Twelve: The International Art Quilt Challenge, and it arrived in my mailbox this week.

There’s so much in here, and I’ve just barely started reading. They have an overview of each theme, and have featured one quilt from that collection and the artist that created it. We get to learn about her methods, ways of working, how she approached the idea and how it percolated in her mind.

Some of my favorites from the exhibit are featured, as well as an overview of how they all got together. The Leader of the Pack found a website where six quilters had embarked on a similar project. So she then asked twelve quilt artists that she knew to try this themed approach to working. I’ve been chatting with Rachel and we think we’d like to try, and although we know we are certifiably nuts to add one more thing to our lives, the idea of trying new techniques and ideas in a small space (a quiltlet, if you will) is appealing.

We all have Too Much To Do, for sure, but I keep thinking of that old refrain I have heard more than once–something about the worst thing to live with is regret. I’ve settled some of my ghosts–doubtful I’ll ever write a novel, or climb Mt. Everest (really doubtful on that one), or go bungee-jumping. But to pass up on a chance to push the creative edge may be a regret I don’t want hanging around. I think Rachel and I are still wondering if we want to jump off that Quiltlet Cliff, but if you want to walk to the edge and jump with us, leave me a comment and we’ll start to put together our own group. You have to agree to a deadline, but it will be well-labeled.

The Gentle Art of Quiltmaking is the second book that came this week (banner week for books, I know!) by Jane Brocket. Betty, a reader, and I were talking (“emailing”) about a quilt titled the Swimming Pool quilt, shown here on the cover, a lush compilation of Kaffe Fassett fabrics. The whole book is filled with quilts like this, in moody atmospheric settings. I mentioned to Betty that sometimes these illustrations drove me nuts as I wanted Full! Color! Pictures! of the quilts so I could really study them.

But the quilts are so beautiful I put up with this inconvenience. She’s quite descriptive in her ideas, methods and even fabric lines used.

At the end of the book, she includes this visual index of the quilts, but. . . I still wanted them larger, esp. since it’s a hardback book. It’s published by C&T, which publishes most of my favorite quilt books.

And lastly, I have my 100th quilt back from the quilter, and am sewing the binding, sleeve and label on.

More photos when I can get my husband to finish his Donna Leon book–we’re feasting on them currently, our heads always with Detective Guido Brunetti, solving crime in Venice. My husband is on #12 in the series; I just finished #8 (I’m trying to catch up). This fall we’re headed to Northern Italy, with a stop in Venice, but in reading these books, I feel like I’m already there.

100 Quilts · Quilts · Tutorial

Village Houses: Joybells Ring in Heaven’s Street

July 23, 2012July 1, 2022 Elizabeth E.3 Comments

When I was at our sewing group, Lisa brought out her “house” quilt, the earliest group quilt that we’d attempted together. You saw hers. Here’s mine:

Quilt #28

We had the common fabrics to use of the fairy print (on navy) and the pink striped (shown in some of the houses).

And here we are: Tracy, Lisa, Susan (who has moved away) and me, all holding up our quilt squares. I love how they are all laid around the sofa everywhere. And I love seeing that houses quilt in the background (#14 on my 100 quilts list, made 10 years earlier in 1988).

Detail. I wanted it to have bits and pieces of a neighborhood so I included those things in each deep border above and below the houses. I guess at the time it had significance, as I notice some World Wide Web fabric there (the earth globe above). The internet was just getting popular then — seems like a millenium ago.

This one’s my house. I guess my fairy was tired and lay down on the front walkway.

I entered into Road to California in 2000; here’s what I wrote on the entry form:

As I was designing all the houses, I tried to include a wide variety of styles, to illustrate the diversity of a street in Heaven, a celestial neighborhood that would be knit together in love and faith. In the upper and lower borders, I placed activities that the people in the houses might do: getting together with friends, outdoor activities, celebrating holidays, and of course, quilting. The name of this quilt comes from an old saying that explains that when a child is given a home, “Joy-bells ring in Heaven’s street.”

You know those things you buy at quilt shows, like the panel above. Whenever are you going to use them, if not for backs?

Okay, here’s a few of the houses. The links underneath each illustration are templates for each house. They are PDF download files, but I’d ask you to remember that since I was a novice at this software at that time, they aren’t perfect. Some have a lot of pieces, others are more streamlined. A mix is best, if you’re making a village.

1930s Prairie House ESE

100 Quilts · Quilt Bee · Quilts

Heart Houses–Far Flung Bee

July 16, 2012August 13, 2012 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

Krista received her Far Flung Bee Blocks, so now I can write about them. Like a pregnancy, I figure it’s not my news to tell, so I like to let them do the Woo-hoo! thing and then I’ll follow up. Since I’ve only done In-Real-Life Swaps, it’s probably all wrong, like when I sent in my Polaroids. . . Whoops, did it all wrong.

She wanted a wonky house. And trees, if you please.

But I thought about how she recently got engaged, and so I drew from a quilt I’d made a couple of years ago (one block is up in my blog header), and made her a block that featured a heart made of two houses. Aw. I’m of the mind you should always celebrate love. Especially “goofy love,” as Krista refers to it. (I remember those days with great fondness.)

This is Number 68 on my 100 Quilts List. A version of this quilt was on the cover of a quilt magazine some time ago, and I had searched my hard drive for the downloaded file, but couldn’t find it. I started drafting it again, then tried the internet. No luck. Finally it was in the last place I looked. (Sorry for the wobbly lower edge — for the photo, I had it on a quilt rack extended yea-high and the wind interfered.)

Here’s my PDF of the block that has all four blocks–click to download: heart_houses

They show it for paper piecing, but no way was I going to do that. The blocks on my quilt are about 12″ on the short side because I wanted JUMBO houses in among my pine trees. I took it to the local copy shop and blew up the PDF and taped the pattern pieces together. I just cut them out and use the pieces as a pattern, sometimes just measuring then cutting.

I made the long blocks for the border sort of randomly, first making the tree tops, then gauging how long those trunks needed to be to fit.

I backed it with some Mary Lou Weidman fabric.

That was the year I was in charge of a camp for young women ages 12-18, which was held up in the pines in the San Bernardino forest near Big Bear Lake. It’s a LOT of work, and I was working with a camp director who I found out later was brilliant in working with recalcitrant teenagers, but not so brilliant in doing the grunt work that has to be done to get a camp organized. Her team was also untested, but were very strong-willed about what should and shouldn’t be done. I had been to a similar camp when I was a girl, had gone back as an adult counselor for several years, so I came at it from a different angle. Needless to say, that was a challenging spring as we tried to quash all our personality quirks in order to get the camp planned.

And on top of all that, it was my only my third semester teaching at a community college, and they’d given me a new level of class to figure out, and I felt like I was nearly underwater all the time just on that issue.

So, what else to quilters do? They make a quilt. I called this Hearts in the Pines. I finished the top and with only a few weeks to go, the semester ending, I called my quilter and she did stitch-in-the-ditch to stabilize the quilt. I stitched the binding on, but didn’t have time to sew it down. I took it to camp and in the few free minutes I had in between kitchen crises (oh, didn’t I tell you that two of the cooks backed out at the last minute and so I was in the kitchen too?), visiting with the girls, my husband (who I’d recruited to join me) and my angel daughter who drove in from Arizona with a friend to help her mom, I finished stitching around the quilt to get that binding on. And much later, I finished the quilting around all the houses and trees.

I always like how quilts have a story behind them. Whether it’s just one of those quick quilts that you throw together for a baby shower, or one that represents a time in your life, the story — I believe — makes the quilt. Just like Krista will hopefully remember the summer she was engaged, when she looks at the quilt she made from a few wonky heart blocks.

100 Quilts · Quilts

Project Gingham!!

July 4, 2012July 23, 2012 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

A long time ago, in a ~~galaxy~~ garage sale faraway, Elizabeth found a whole lotta’ gingham. She shared with Krista, who really likes vintage fabrics. Then we hatched the idea to share with a few others. And today’s the day everyone is sharing with us, but first–my reveal!

I’ve titled this quilt: Gingham Quilt. Really original, but certainly it has to get points for being descriptive, doesn’t it? I auditioned a lot of different block ideas, and then decided that just about anything would work with these prints, especially a lot of white. I know some of the checks get in the way of the bow-tie, but I wanted this to be a fun, summery quilt, without freaking out about anything. So there you go—some things you just live with and love.

I had seen in a Roberta Horton book that she had used a different fabric for the outside blocks in order to create a border, and I wanted to try that too. I picked up the cool lavender almost randomly, wanting it so it wouldn’t intrude on the crisp white in the middle of the quilt. A slight shift, only, in that border, and I tried to use many of the darker ginghams to highlight that shift.

Detail of the quilting, which is a spool of thread and a needle. My quilter Cathy always has a great design for me.

Two glamour shots of the quilt. I wanted to show one of my favorite ginghams–one not likely ever seen again in today’s mass market. It’s that true lavender in the middle of the quilt.

I left this picture bigger so you could click on it for detail. This is made with (deep memory, here, from my CloTex degree) a dobby loom. The word comes from the early days of fabric manufacture, when a little boy would sit on top of the loom and pull up individual warp (or lengthwise) yarns so the weft (crosswise or selvage-to-selvage) shuttle could glide across and make a design. Dobby is short for “draw boy,” or so the rumor goes.

If you look closely on the back, you can see white yarns (threads) that are carried across the back, and create the design on the front. The floating yarns are the tip-off to which side you are looking at. A lappet is another type of machine but it’s my understanding that the lappet can only do one direction of thread, whereas in this design both the warp and the weft are involved. Like I said, we aren’t likely to see this fabric ever again.

Label.

I chose a Jane Sassaman print for the back, and not only because I got a bunch of it for a deal when I went up to Michael Levine’s in Los Angeles, in the garment district, but more because it seemed to be in the mood of the front.

I think of this as the quilt for a picnic, for throwing down on a meadow somewhere and pulling out a wicker basket, kitted out perfectly with gourmet feastiness. Right. Not my life. In reality, I think of the time I went up and took my then 4th-grade daughter out to lunch. . . on the front lawn of the school. We got a lot of crazy looks from the gardeners and the kindergarteners as we enjoyed our sauteed pepper-and-onion sandwiches, just the two of us, with moms picking up kids in the school’s driveway just three feet away. It’s a great memory; it’s that kind of a picnic quilt.

Now hop on over to the other blogs and see their Project Gingham reveals!

Krista, of KristaStitched

Cindy, of Live A Colorful Life

Rachel of The Life of Riley

Suz, of PatchworknPlay

Kris, of Duke Says Sew What

Becky, the Sarcastic Quilter