Frivols Tin 6 (and a few words about Value)

June 1, 2018May 31, 2018 Elizabeth E.18 Comments

FrivolsButton — It’s the first of June, so you know what that means.

Frivols6_3

Cuteness, so cute, darling, adorbs, charming, majorly adorable.

Yep, that’s why I bought these things. So by now you have figured out it’s time to sew up another Frivols, and now we are on Frivols Tin 6, which you can find on the Moda blog. Here is the errata for this box:

Note: After learning that a handful of customers had received rolls of pre-cut squares that were a bit scant, we decided to re-work the cutting to make the pieces a bit smaller and allow a little leeway. The artwork and text for the tin had already been sent for manufacturing so it could not be changed. However, the pattern has the correct sizes and instructions, and we apologize for the discrepancy. It just needed to be done.

Frivols6_4b

After opening, I’m thinking: Still pretty cute, yes yes yes.

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I unrolled and pressed the squares. Um.

(silence) Oh, please. (rolls eyes)

Not another one of these pastel boxes! she moans to no one in particular. Even my husband said “Another one?”

Frivols 1-5 Here’s my Happy Barometer in working with my Frivols Tins so far:
Frivols #1 <happy> for it was a gift for a friend’s baby.
Frivols #2 <happy>
Frivols #3 <happy>
Frivols #4 <meh> It was a test of will, but I’m keeping it around for gifiting to future babies.
Frivols #5 <not bad> once I got going
Frivols #6. <——-extreme dismay——> I know all the Bonnie and Camille fans out there are like, “Send it to me!!” but really, a deal with myself is a deal. But that doesn’t mean I can’t change it up some.

The finished quilt measures 45″ x 54″ supposedly, but I don’t know if that is the before measurement, or the one they took after their changes. I also took a look at the outside of the tin requirements, which is code for BUY MORE FABRIC, but since that fabric — Strawberry Fields Revisited — is long gone, given the current habit of our manufacturers of deluging us with fabric lines until we are overwhelmed, then taking them off the shelves forever. (A personal pet peeve of mine.)

Frivols6_4c

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And given the fact that one of my 7″ by 7″ squares was cut off at the knees, and another one skewed and shredded by the cutter, it’s time to hit my own stash and pull out some colors/shapes/fabrics that will coordinate. Frivols6_5

That piece in the upper left by 3 Sisters ought to be just fine with this group of toned florals and geometrics. And given that I’m already flummoxed by the cutting instructions, we are definitely changing up this puppy. And because I needed a project to do after Annularity’s completion, I charged on ahead (still moaning about these mushy-valued pastels).

Each Frivol has 7″ squares. Even though they warned me not to trim off any bumps, after doing one as a trial, I found I could trim off the sides without any great disaster, then proceed to cut them as they asked.

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And by that night, I had One Grecian Urn. Kidding. I had one churn dash (you have to have seen the movie The Music Man to know the inside joke about Grecian Urns).

A Word About Value in Quilts.

Value Scale.jpg

We need some.

Value is how light something is or how dark something is. Quilts without value shifts tend to be mushy-looking, and sort of blah. It’s the mushy ones we walk right by at quilt shows. I see a lot of these, and have even made some myself (see Frivols #1 and #4). But it is value that moves your eye around a quilt, makes it interesting to look at, gives it depth. When I worked in the photo lab at University of California, the photography professor preached the same gospel: you need black as midnight and white as snow in the black and white photographs. OF COURSE there are exceptions, but we are not always making exception-quilts.

Note the two flowers above. Which one is more interesting? Which one grabs your eye, pulls it around, as you notice things? Of course you said the one of the right, a calla lilly by Robert Maplethorpe (the other one I greyed out to have only medium tones).

Same with our quilts. So what can I do with a box full of medium to medium-light fabrics? Smash them up against each other:

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Now that medium brown in the upper right corner can function effectively as a “dark.” It’s still not wonderful, but I do think it’s better than the one they wanted me to do:

Potato group.jpg

Kidding. Here’s theirs:

Frivols 6 from Moda.jpg

I could tell from their description I was in trouble: Sun-washed. It is a lovely little quilt, perfect for babies, and other people who don’t like contrast in their quilts, I guess. But this is my blog and you are subjected to my bias, and I trend towards quilts with good light-to-dark values.

I also believe if you are going to sell me a tin of fabrics, I should be able to make a quilt with what’s in the tin. (Right.)

Frivols6_10

It needs some kind of borders, so I was going for the look of Frivol #2, but this is a Major Fail. It has that baked potato problem. So I ripped off the borders and pulled out nearly every fabric I had in my stash to find one that I though perked up this baby.

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A lovely tomatoey color of red with white dots will do nicely. I’m happy with it. Now I’ll get it quilted and bound and will show you the end product, at some later date.

What I learned from this tin of Frivols:

Don’t let your quilts be mushy.
Move beyond one manufacturer’s grouping of fabrics to avoid having your quilt be only a medium value quilt.
And some advice as well from my photography professor, given to us on the last day of class: keep your camera dry.

Annularity

May 29, 2018January 11, 2026 Elizabeth E.27 Comments

Annularity
Quilt #203
Began October 2017 • Completed May 2018

I use Magnifico thread as it has a nice sheen without being shiny, and it lays down a lovely line of stitching. In the bobbin is So Fine thread (both by Superior Threads).

I made a duplicate of Annularity II — which was a quilt I designed and made for Paintbrush Studios (which hung at QuiltCon, and most recently, Quilt Market) — because I thought the first version had been lost in the mail en route to the quilter. It hadn’t, and now I had my own top.

Then I decided to quilt my own, trying out different ideas as explained in an earlier post. But thanks to my quilt holder Dave, I can now reveal the fully quilted version to the world, as well as deliver some great news about this quilt.

Recently I’d been talking with Rick and Dot Kimmelman of Pineapple Fabrics about this quilt, hoping they’d want to use it for their booth, as they carry the full line of Painter’s Palette Fabrics. In between Point A and Point B of our discussions, they purchased Keepsake Quilting, which made many of us in the QuiltWorld very happy. And so, beginning this summer, Keepsake Quilting and Pineapple Fabrics will be the exclusive sellers of my Annularity pattern. Both Keepsake and Pineapple will also have kits available that include all the fabrics for the top and binding. (You can check Pineapple Fabrics.com to purchase within the next month, and see Keepsake Quilting’s Fall catalogue, due out the second week of August. You can bet I’ll put something up on here when I first lay eyes on my quilt in their catalogue!)

The wild and crazy back. It’s “prairie house” from the De Leon Design Group, for Alexander Henry Fabrics. I thought it might disguise any oopsies, but I was happy to note that I actually had very few. I guess maybe after ten years I’m getting better at the quilting? Much credit belongs to the Sweet Sixteen machine I use, and the threads, which always seem to balance so well.

After one quilting session, when I turned it over to check the back, I noticed I had quilted in this wedge-shaped scrap onto the back. I started to try and cut it out, then decided I kind of liked this nod to the process, so left it in. Really, you can’t see it, when looking at the overall back. (Well, NOW you do, but you didn’t at first, right?)

So, thanks for being my cheering squad, motivating me to finish up my quilt. And I hope you enjoy making yours!

Frivols Quilts · Quilts

Child’s Play • Frivols 5

May 13, 2018January 11, 2026 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

I am continuing with my determined goal to make all my Frivols tins this year.

Because this one was quite small, finishing up at 29″ by 32″ (different than what was measured on the tin), I finished it early, so I get to put an X on the circle of Frivols.

ChildsPlay_Frivols5_7 — *Child’s Play* • Quilt #202 • Frivols Quilt #5

As mentioned in the last post, the fabric is by French General, and while it looked really dark in the tin, with the black and white four-patches added, it is fairly lively. It reminded me of an extended game of checkers, and since the quilt is small, like a doll’s quilt, I titled it Child’s Play.

I quilted it with a stylized flower.

Every doll’s quilt needs some dolls, and I just happened to have my mother’s play tea set from when she was a little girl. She’s celebrating her ninth decade this month, and because she’s turning ninety, she’s always saying things to me like “You’re not old.”

She’s right. I’m not yet up to her age, but I am one lucky girl to still have a mom here to talk to when I need a cheering up.

Because I’ve been thinking about my mother today, the chair above is an antique from “the farmhouse,” a place where my grandmother (my mother’s mother) moved when she married grandpa, a widower with a passel of children, and adopted — and adapted herself to — a life as a farm wife. And then she had three more children, my mother being one of them.

Mom on young birthday SM — Mom, at age 12, holding her birthday cake

A photo of my mother when she was in college. My daughter, who is named for my mother, is with her on the left. And below is a photo of my mother’s Magnum Opus, a quilt with cross-stitched designs, all hand done while we lived in Peru for two years.

Since it is also Mother’s Day here in the United States, I hope you treasured some memories of your mother, and if she is still here — I hope you called her or visited her.

It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized that my mother (and father) gave me the greatest gift of all: a young life where I could pretend, and get dirty and dress up and have imaginary tea parties and fight with my younger brothers, and go to church, and roam the neighborhood, time to read books, and to hope to be like my older sisters. While soon enough I would discover that there were real sticks and stones out there, she gave me a life sheltered from the world’s harsh realities.

She gave me Child’s Play, every day.

Happy Birthday, Mom, and Happy Mother’s Day!

Giveaway · Quilts

Go with the Flow

April 14, 2018September 6, 2018 Elizabeth E.13 Comments

I’ve been thinking about what it takes to keep me interested in what I’m doing, and better yet, to find that creative task, that, when I check the time, I realize I’ve been absorbed in this task for hours, not minutes. When I used to manage the black-and-white photo lab at my local university, students could stay in there for hours, developing their prints, discussing them, claiming they were in the “zone” and didn’t want to leave it.

I’ve been on a pretty intense creative output flow, and I can feel myself wanting to wind down, and take a breath. So I thought I’d look into this idea–of being in the “zone” or “flow” and see how it would apply to us quilters.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience has much to say about the idea of “flow” or “being in the zone.” He stipulates certain conditions present during flow:

(1) engagement in an activity that is both challenging and attainable

If you ask me to make simple HST quilts forever, I’ll be incredibly bored, as my skill levels have gone beyond that. It was fun for a day, though, in Jenny Doan’s class at Road to California this past January.

On the other hand, if you ask me to talk at QuiltCon 2018 in front of a crowd of eighty quilters with a big screen behind me, I’ll be incredibly anxious. I made it through, thanks to kind quilters.

The left to upper left shows what happens if your skill level is low, but the challenges are too high. The bottom to lower right is when the abilities are high, and the challenges are too easy. Of course, we should all try to shoot on a diagonal path from low to high, to get to the flow, but often we are stuck with patterns that don’t work, or run out of fabric, or can’t figure something out, or feel frozen in our progress.

(2) the ability to keep concentration focused on the activity, and
(3) sense of control over your own actions

I lumped these two together, although they really are separate ideas. For me, these can sometimes be hard to attain, especially if you have young children, or fighting health issues, or don’t have the right physical set-up that allows easy access to your tools/fabric/machine. I also love seeing blank calendar days, without the distraction of appointments or errands. I can stay in the zone for hours on those days.

(4) clearly defined goals that are within the individual’s control

Writing down a goal that says something like winning “Best of Show at Paducah” is not something within our control, because we can’t award that ribbon. Perhaps that why we see a proliferation of techniques Finish-A-Longs, or goal-setting posts, to help us identify our goals. I’ve found this helpful, but more often than not, it leads to a list of tasks — which we call UFOs — rather than list of goals.

(5) immediate feedback

According to the book, our psychic energy tends to atrophy without some verification we’re on the right track. I think that’s also why Guilds and Quilt Groups are so valuable, but often we resort to snapping a photo and texting it to a friend. However, I might argue that too much immediate feedback, such as our faces glued to our tiny screens checking our Instagram likes, being fixated on the number of likes can pull us out of the flow.

(6) deep, effortless involvement in the activity which removes from our awareness the worries/frustrations of everyday life.

I love it when I can forget what’s going on out in the world, listen to a book, and just sew and sew. Or it’s like when we have to glue fabric on 500 one-inch hexies for our quilting booth at an upcoming Heritage Day Festival, and I took this task to my quilt group and we had a great time eating fresh strawberries, chocolate treats, and solving all the world’s problems. (We did get a little goofy, I must say.)

(7) non-self-conscious individualism, or you lose yourself in what you are doing and eliminate all self-criticism. His book states that “loss of self-consciousness does not involve a loss of the self, and certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness OF the self.”

Maybe it’s not best to continually evaluate ourselves as we work, given the rhythm of this chart:

Finally, (8) some alteration of time (either “hours feel like minutes” or vice versa)

Being IN the flow, is definitely not the same ask GOING WITH the flow. But to be truthful, I mostly feel like Sarah Cannell, when she said: “I’m either hurtling down the track not noticing the passing countryside, or standing on the platform having missed the train… The two extremes seem to smoothly flow into each other.”

Thank you for all your comments on the Giveaway for the Northern Star curated stack of fabrics.

I used two different Random Number Generators (actually, three, if you count when I asked my husband to pick two numbers randomly, and interestingly, one of his was nearly the same as one of these) to pick our two winners:

Jamie was #7: “I have not seen the Northern Lights. However if I win, I could make your quilt (you’re writing a pattern for us to buy right?) and then have my husband hold it above me so I can see it in the night sky. Pretty clever eh? hahahaha”

(I laughed out loud)

and Joan was #71: “Oh, yes, I have seen them and should do so more often, but I’m usually asleep in the middle of the winter nights when they are most visible, and I just can’t drag myself out of my nice warm bed to stand in the frigid nighttime air to watch! Summertime viewing would be perfect, but it’s just too light outside to see the aurora even at 2:00am!”

(I’m going to visit you, Joan, and really soon. Joan? That okay?)

I did love these reminiscences:

The first one is from Barb: “I grew up in Winnipeg Manitoba Canada and my parents home backed onto a field so there was no obstruction of view. We could watch the Northern Lights dance across the sky many nights from our kitchen window. I didn’t realize what a special experience that was until we moved to a large city where the only thing I can see in the sky is the Moon and a few bright stars and planets!”

Another one from Edith: “I used to be able to see the Northern Lights in my hometown of Medicine Hat, Alberta when I was a young girl. I used to sit on the park swing and be able to see them over the hill in front of me, but since the city grew and more lights were added, I must say I have’t seen them in a long time.”

And last one, from Holley: “I have seen the Northern Lights many times starting as a child growing up in Iowa. We didn’t see them often but we did see them from time to time. I lived in northern Minnesota after college. This was at the time of missel silos and ICBMs so when the northern lights looked like rockets shooting across the sky it was unnerving. When I lived in Wisconsin near Chippewa reservations I was told the lights were the old people dancing and that was the way they looked. I’ve seen lights in Alaska was I was babysitting grandchildren and in the Scottish Highlands when we lived near Glasgow. I have a quilt started that I call Northern lights that I hope to finish one day soon. The colors and patterns vary depending on location and weather but they are all wonderful. Thanks for sharing yours.”

Ladies, you are living our dream. Thank you all, again. Guess what? Another giveaway is coming on Wednesday, when I show you some secret sewing I’ve been doing for Simone. See you then!