Light in the Crook of Shadows

October 25, 2011July 23, 2012 Elizabeth E.6 Comments

Fall’s come to the bedroom.

I like to change up the quilt at the bottom of my bed every once in a while away from the standard blue one-patch that usually resides there. And the fall colors really create a different mood in the room.

I began this quilt in a class about plaids, taught at Road to California by Roberta Horton. One thing she said always stuck with me, and that was not too worry too much if the grain line was perfectly straight. Part of that is because you could lose your mind trying to get it perfect on these ikat and plaid fabrics. But, she said, slightly off-grain plaids give an energy to the quilt, and so to worry over them also deprives you of some motion within the design.

I chose a simple block design of a smaller square bordered by two triangles, all sewn to a larger triangle. You can do a lot of things with this block.

I had fun adding that orange checkerboard as an inner border.

Here’s the crazy-pieced back.

And the labels. The title and blurb come from my love of two words at the time: crook, meaning in the corner of something, like a “crooked elbow,” and illume, a variant of illuminate. Click to enlarge if you want to see someone get carried away with fancy words, although I still like the title of the quilt very much. I’d just change up a few things in that description tag. At that time I was in the final years of my undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, and was awash in fancy words — not only my own, but those of my classmates and visiting writers and seminars and all the books I was reading. But I’ve decided that our quilts are as much a creation for all times as they are a record of who we were when we made them. Fancy-schmancy words and all.

Lyon Carolings

August 5, 2011July 11, 2019 Elizabeth E.5 Comments

The mad summer of sewing quilts has come to an end. I found the list of quilts I’d made at the beginning of my time away from the classroom, and “French Quilt” was on the top. I’d remade this–or as I like to say–I made this twice, just trying to find the right way to show off these fabrics from France.

I just couldn’t decide what to quilt in the center of the yellow squares, but went with a floral motif from the border. I had to rip out one block when it turned out I hated that particular thread. I have picked out a lot on this quilt. I’d originally stitched the green borders with a swirling design from that same outer border. Wrong. So I unpicked that, and channel/echo stitched it to mimic the blue X’s in the center of the quilt.

I chose to quilt one of the flowers in the center of the yellow blocks.

Does anyone else hate marking? I don’t want pencil, although that is the easiest. And since I don’t plan to wash this quilt (it’s for display), I don’t want something I have to wash to get out. I don’t trust the disappearing markers, so that only leaves me with chalk and my ragged eye to get the job done.

And the back, with its four colors of toile. Make that five if you count the hanging sleeve at the very top.

How did I come by all this fabric? Like Miss Carrie of Schnibbles fame, we had traveled to France. The first few days were touring around the south of France before we were headed to Toulouse for his scientific meeting. We’d traveled far that one day, arriving at our B & B late (8:45 p.m.) just outside the town of Aix-en-Provence, after getting lost. They did serve us our dinner, and the part I remember was having a chilled melon soup in the dark in their courtyard. It was lovely, and served in a hollowed-out cantelope half that had been frozen. The French do food right, I must say.

Aix-en-Provence, painted by John Horsewell

The next morning, we ate breakfast with the white mountain in view, an oft-painted mountain, then glancing at the darkening sky, checked out and drove to into Aix-en-Provence. We were hoping to catch a market day. As soon as we parked the car (in the carpark on the outskirts of town), the skies opened up and a huge torrential downpour kept up trapped in a deep doorway for ten minutes. Of course we had only one umbrella between us (!), so we ran from doorway to doorway to the center of the town. The market was closing up, even though the rain was ending–it was still quite drippy. We caught a few photos of the newly washed melons, berries, tomatoes, when the downpour started up again. We dodged into a shop that ringed the market square, peering out at the rain. We were pretty discouraged.

Then my husband leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Turn around. I think you’ll be happy.” I turned and looked. We had ducked into a fabric shop and although tiny, it was filled, floor-to-ceiling with glorious fabrics printed in the traditional manner of old France. Those were the days when an extra suitcase was no problem and weight limits had not been heard of yet. I had brought along a soft-sided suitcase and between my purchases here–and the ones the next week in Toulouse (for they had a lovely fabric shop as well)–I filled that suitcase full.

I have purchased these fabrics in other places, but this shop, found while dodging the pouring rain, was the genesis of my collection.

If you want to start your collection, I can recommend French Connections, here in North Carolina in the US of A. They have a wide range of choices (that’s where I bought that fabulous yellow border) and I think given the cost of importing, the high price of cotton and the weak dollar against the euro, they have reasonable prices.

Happy Sewing!

100 Quilts · Creating

Family Tree

August 4, 2011July 23, 2012 Elizabeth E.2 Comments

I really shouldn’t let this quilt show its face in the quilt world. Really, it has that many problems. But sometimes these quilts are fun to look and to remind myself of how far I’ve come as a quilter.

So the idea was, since we were headed to a family reunion, to make a banner for my husband and I, like I’d made for my mother. Hers was more successful, and it’s all on account of the quilting. I hadn’t yet taken a fusible class, so I was working with my old stand-by which unfortunately leaves the fabric like a slab of wallboard.

I cut out the tree, and then traced everyone’s hand for the leaves. I slabbed on them on to a tone-on-tone background fabric (which, thankfully we don’t have around much as the fabric can change colors turning more yellow–I think the newer ones are better).

I then wrote our name using a Pigma pen, copying the style of my sister-in-law’s handwriting.

Then, for some strange reason, I decided to put it under my machine and quilt it. Maybe I did that because this idea of quilting the quilt yourself was an idea that was percolating around; back in the Olden Days (when we wore skins and cooked over an open fire and used cardboard templates and cut everything out by scissors) there was no machine quilting on your own machine. Either you hand-quilted it or you tied your quilt. That was it. Then the longarms started showing up, and then the idea came that you of course could do your own quilting. This quilt is a testament as to why sometimes you shouldn’t. Or you should take a class and get better. (Which I’ve tried to do.)

Okay, here comes the prelude to the scary part. Can you believe I switched out the color in the bobbin? I did it again this year. I’d better write this one down on the Things Not To Do list, and tack it up by my machine.

ACK!!! ACK!!! ACK!!!
Don’t you just love all the loose bobbin stitches, the globs of thread that burped out on the back, the horrendously balanced thread tension? I give myself a little break because I WAS sewing through bunches of wallboard-glued-on-fused fabrics and that’s just about impossible.

But I have to say I learned a lot, and still am continuing to learn about the Big Three Elements of Free-Motion Quilting. They are:

Speed of the machine (how heavy your foot is in on the pedal)
Speed of your hands moving the quilt around
Tension/Thread/Needle Size.

I now sew with a size 14 Topstitching needle most of the time when I’m machine quilting. Sometimes I bump up to a 16. I ALWAYS test drive the thread tension — it can change with the thread you use — on a small quilt sandwich that I keep by the machine. And I really hope I never use a different color of thread in the bobbin again. (Cue: sound of head banging.)

Here’s a photo of my parents’ grandchildren all lined up by age. Not all of them are shown here, but overall there are 27 of them. And now we’re working on the next generation with nearly 20 great-grandchildren (an adoption or two are in process). We’ve been at our bi-annual Reunion this past week, where I got to see all those new cute little great-grands, and they got to meet their auntie–me!

100 Quilts · Family Quilts · Finishing School Friday

Southern Brights–FSF

July 29, 2011April 2, 2024 Elizabeth E.3 Comments

This is my son Matthew and his wife, Kim. Sometimes she likes to be called Kimberly. Other times it’s just Kim. She’s a bright and sunny personality of a gal, and easily matches my son in energy, determination and love of a good joke. They’re great.

This is their family, taken at a family camping trip (quickly! and that’s why Emilee has no shoes on), in the mountains above Phoenix Arizona, a place they call their home. But only for another day or so, because he’s been promoted in his corporate job and they’re off to Cinncinati Ohio. I love that she would follow him anywhere, so I decided to make her a quilt to honor her love of the Southwest and her bright and sunny personality.

Ta Da! I give you “Southern Brights.” It’s a Bento Box block, with lots of wild and crazy fabrics, put together in a bundle by Fabricworm, but of course, I added a few of my own.

My favorite is the little Round Robin fabric with little round robins on it. I also like the punched-up hugeness of those flowers in the middle. Change in scale? This quilt’s got it. Change in color? Yep, yep. Change in value? Not so much (all medium fabrics) so I threw in some lights and brights to keep the eye moving.

Love the Marimekko fabric on the back, punctuated by a strip of the the Anne Kelle flowers. Alas, our Crate and Barrel outlet has closed, so now if I want those fabrics, I need to travel an hour and half–instead the previous half-hour. So I hoard my stash of these, but this quilt just called out for something sunny and bright.