‘Twas the Week Before Christmas

December 15, 2013 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Well. Almost the last week before Christmas (ten days to go, says the Advent Calendar on our fridge).

Given that I’ve been >>sick<< with ick and asthma and blah for too long, and that I have TONS of stuff to do, I leapt into action and made my bee blocks for December for Mary at Molly Flanders. I mean, that is the prudent thing to do, right?

It was actually quite restorative working with old-fashioned prints and calming neutrals. A whole lot more fun than trying to get the last of the Christmas decorations up (but I did finish them today, thank you very much). I enjoyed the process. One thing that our bee does, which I like, is that we make each other a signature block with our name, our blog name and our location and send it along with the blocks. I have a row of signature blocks on the back of my Santa quilt (which has been idling all these past couple of weeks on my sewing room floor while I have graded and rested) which makes me smile when I see them.

And maybe it’s because I have signatures on my brain. Here are all the blocks for my signature quilt put up on my pin wall. They lack the sashing and the borders, but what fun to see a flower garden of my friends!

Whoops. I had to fix one of them. Mind you, that block has been like that for nearly eight years, and I’m just now noticing it. What’s fun about working with signature blocks is that you think about the person who’s name you are holding. Kendy would have a fit if her block were wrong, as she was always perfectly put together and perfectly modulated in all comportment. (Look it up–I kid you not.)

I had one more signature that I had to get, and I couldn’t just contact her and get it lickety-split (more on Toni in a later post). So I found her Christmas card from a few years back, enlarged her signature and traced it onto a prepared fabric square (a square of fabric that had freezer paper ironed to the back of it).

Toni’s square, all bordered in greens. She would be pleased.

Often at Christmas, all the relatives gather, or we go to their houses. If you want to start a signature quilt, have a stack of squares ready for them to sign. Choose a block with a wide open space for writing, and a simple frame for that signature. Then cut the center square about an inch larger than you’ll need it, back it with freezer paper. I drew the 4″ center square directly onto the freezer paper, so that it would show through and give people an idea of their boundaries.

I used a Micron .05 pen for people to sign their names. Those who I couldn’t get (who lived too far away), I sent the block to them and had them write their name lightly, but legibly with pencil, and then I traced it in the Micron pen when it came back to me (I included a SASE so the blocks would come back). I only had one that never returned to me, but then that woman get could get her dander up quickly, and she carried a grudge longer than anyone I’ve ever seen. She was still wonderful to me, though, and I loved her. I’m sorry she didn’t return the square.

Yes, all this quilt is women. Relatives, friends, mentors, and the latest batch of my granddaughters. At some point, I realized I had to cut off the additions, otherwise it would never be done. So, with the exception of my granddaughters, I stopped adding, even though there are still people who are important to me without their names on my quilt blocks. I love looking at it. I drop it at the quilter tomorrow, and since my granddaughters are coming for Christmas, she has promised to have it done by the 23rd. (I’ve already made the binding!)

Why did I start this? Because of Toni. I’ll tell you more about Toni, and why she was the inspiration for this quilt in another post–probably after Christmas, after all the company’s gone home!

Creating · Giveaway · Quilt Bee · Quilts · Something to Think About

Bee Blocks & Winner of Project Folio

August 25, 2013 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

First, while my husband and I were watching Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in Three Days of the Condor, I leaned over to him and said, “Give me a number between one and sixteen.”

“Five.”

Five it is. Cindy, you are the winner. I’ll mail off the portfolio tomorrow. Thank you to all my very fine readers and followers. You are such lovely people!

I must admit that I did want to give it to my newest follower: my daughter, Barbara (Hi Barb!), but I’ll make her a new something or other for her work-out clothes (what she said she’d use it for) and send this white one to Cindy. Congrats!

Secondly, even though it feels as if I haven’t touched a machine much this month, I did get my Bee Blocks finished. Above is the one for Always Bee Learning. We were sent some some fabrics, a link, and we were off to making arrows. It was a real brain-stretcher, but I finished mine and sent them off to Megan.

And for the Mid-Century Modern Bee, Mary asked for some Cross-X, or X & + blocks as I’ve seen them called, in pinks. So I followed her linked tutorial at Badskirt’s blog and sent them off.

And now, the to pull the biggest rabbit out of the hat: figure out how to start sewing my projects again. With this disjoint summer, a bad beginning to my school year (it will get better), and some time away from the sewing machine, it’s like being on a boat being carried down stream from the dock, slowly, and you can see your picnic lunch there in the middle and you are getting kind of hungry but you can’t figure out how to get to it. Okay, bad analogy, but I think you all know the feeling.

I look at my list of things I want to sew and nothing interests me. I love reading blogs and seeing everyone’s fun projects, and think, I could do that. But if I do everyone else’s project, how will I find time to do mine? It’s a double-edged sword, this living in a world of blogs and Instagram and it’s hard to turn off the input in order to find the creative project that is uniquely mine.

My father, aged 87, goes most mornings down to his painting studio on the second floor of a building in his downtown. There, he thinks, starts his routine, puts on his music, paints, pauses. Of course, I can only imagine this because it is done in solitude, but every October he opens his studio for a painting sale in his studio, proving that he accomplishes, produces, Gets Stuff Done, sending out more paintings into the world.

I find my challenge to still myself — to enjoy the social media-fied quilt world, yet also to let that project that is interesting to me find its way forward. I’ve been tempted by another Polaroid Swap, a recent Signature Swap, this winter’s Scrappy Trip-A-Long, and the Medallion Quilt among other recent popular quilts. But I also know through historical evidence that our quilting grandmothers searched the newspapers for what others were doing, and through imitation, linked themselves together through common projects.

LIke them, I do quilt what is in my universe. I often think of Nancy Crow, a quilt artist I admire from afar who has seemed to produce what is important to her, to follow her own stream of thinking and creating without regard for what is the most popular. Perhaps she, and my father, are at one end of the spectrum while the social media/Instagram/blogging crowd, of which I am a part, is at the other end. No answers here.

Just searching for those oars that will get my boat back to the dock, back to my sewing machine, back to my quilty world.

Creating · Four-in-Art · Quilts

Owls

July 10, 2013July 15, 2013 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Our Four-in-Art theme this round is Owls, under the year-long theme of Nature. When Betty chose it, I went blank. Then she wrote about it, I did a search on Flickr, and ideas starting percolating. Slowly.

This chick has owl rings and owl socks, but is not the same person that owns the collection up above. I found out my daughter liked owls, as does my niece, one of my husband’s colleagues and Suz, of Patchworknplay. I had no idea there were so many owl enthusiasts in my life.

This card was from my granddaughter when I had my surgery. More owls:

But how to move an owl idea into a quilt? What aspect to focus on? I looked up the meanings of owls, the folklore and those were all over the map, fragmented. Sometimes they are good, other times they portent evil or bad things, sometimes they bring luck, in other cultures they spell disaster. Just about anything can be pinned on an owl.

The only “experience” I’ve had with an owl was when we were traveling in Canada around the Sunshine Circle (Vancouver and above). We were standing waiting for the ferry to take us across one night. The sun was fading into pinks and golds and it was pretty quiet up there near Comox that evening. I was focused on the water and thinking about where we had to get to before we could stop traveling, when all of a sudden I heard a whoosh–a rush of air. I spun around and an owl was just moving away, its wings unfurled and climbing toward the sky. It was eerie, out of nowhere. No wonder these birds get pinned with all sorts of intents and purposes.

This was my computer desktop yesterday, with all sort of bits and pieces of my owl scattered over the screen. Whenever I approach these art quilt deadlines, I feel like a child being dragged kicking and screaming toward home. Deadline, I moan to no one in particular. I’d better get crackin’ because I know my Four-in-Art-mates will have theirs ready.

But one thing leads to another and to another and pretty soon I hear my husband arrive home and I’ve been working and veering through a creative journey for hours, absorbed in my task. And then I can’t wait to get back to where I’m headed–which of course, I have no real idea of where it will end. For now, I know only the next step, and that’s where I’ll go.

(from *here*)

We’ve decided to open our group up to four more quilters to participate in our art quilt adventure. You do not need to be an artist (hey–I’m not), but only want to stretch your creative wings. We have four art quilt deadlines a year: February, May, August and November. So far, the quilts are experimental in size: 12″ square. You’ll need to have a blog or a Flickr site, and a sense of adventure. We welcome beginners, but most of us have some years of experience either in handcrafting or sewing. I think we went this direction just because we wanted to try something new.

Leave a comment if you are interested, along with a comment as to why you might think taking a jump into this kind of creating is where you want to tread. Make sure I have a link to either your blog or your Flickr site, so I can get a feel for what type of quilter you are.

Creating · Good Heart Quilters

Block of the Month: Starts and Re-starts

July 1, 2013April 27, 2014 Elizabeth E.6 Comments

I’ve been working on Amish With a Twist–part II, having sewn up some strip sets before I went under the knife for foot surgery, then cut them apart:

While this is how the pattern recommended we proceed, but when sewing them together I found lots of repeated colors. Think carefully about where you sew your lights and mediums, trying not to have the same order of colors from bottom to top, otherwise you’ll find yourself with the problem I have below:

So yes, today I’ll be unpicking and re-stitching in order to break up the two yellows. What you see up on my pinwall is where I got a bit smarter and laid out the strips and the stars and the sets, and could mix and match before sewing them up in a rush.

Actually, when you open that first package, I’d recommend making yourself one of these:

A swatch card. I wrote the name of the color on each clip of selvage, then also coded them as to whether the pattern designer considered it a “medium” or a “light,” as shown by the pink or yellow lines next to the swatch. While it was true that I was cutting these out while hanging out with my three younger grandchildren, and I was trying to follow the plots of their multiple episodes of Witches of Waverly Place streaming down on Netflix as their mother took a nap, I was also pulling out my hair over which color was which. The pattern does include a color chart, but as we all know, print colors can vary from actual colors. So, do your best to sort out which is what color and go forward.

I’m past the initial confusion and aside from the bit of re-stitching I’m going to be doing in a minute, I’m enjoying this process. I’ve never done a Block of the Month (BOM) before, and it’s kind of fun to get a package and a pattern on your doorstep. It is fun to pick and choose colors in the fabric shop, I admit, as well as patterns and ideas, but this summer, given all the sturm und drang (aka “storm and stress”) of the surgery, family trips, and other sundry complications in my world, it will be nice to have part of the creative process simplified. This is my inspiration (the finished quilt top) and I look at it often:

Hopefully, if I stay on track and don’t get too far behind (yes, I’m three blocks behind already!) I’ll have a gorgeous quilt like this one.

˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙

On a side note: for those of you with tons of zucchini in your gardens, I finally got a handle on an interesting zucchini bread recipe, with dried cranberries and walnuts. Recipe *here.*