Category: Something to Think About

200 Quilts · Quilts · Something to Think About

Autumn Quilt

Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Autumn Quilt is just smoothed up on the wall (crookedly), but I’m happy to be at this place with this quilt.  I started collecting fabrics for it about 8 or 9 years ago, gathering up  reds and golds and earthy greens, browns and blacks with pattern.  I was mimicking a quilt design from a friend of mine who had made a similar quilt and I loved the way it glowed.

I used the basic Square-in-a-Square pattern, adjusting it so that these are nine-inch blocks.  I put the inner striped border on it and hung it in the closet last fall.  And it stayed there while I ruminated on and pondered the border.  My family has the Ruminating Gene in spades.

I showed some of the process in my last post, so I know this is a repeated tale.  Sorry.  But what was different was that I cut down the one-inch striped border to a half-inch sort of piping-effect border. I’m happy with it.

But when I put it all together, it was like there were doorways or gates on each side, letting the border go flabby.  While I may have to deal with flabby everything else, I’m not at all about to settle for flabby borders.  I unpicked and re-stitched to what is shown above.  I like it a lot better, and many thanks to my husband for helping me talk through that little knot of a problem.

I had one backing all picked out–a vintage piece of fabric, bought at a yard sale next to my sister-in-law’s house in Utah.  It just didn’t sing.  But this eight-year-old piece from Alexander Henry did.

I added two other fabrics with a orangey-blue tonality, and we were good to go.  So today, it did–off to the quilter’s.

I did other errands today made me glad to have a holiday that causes me to think about what I’m thankful for.  I ran into Joan in the grocery store — an 80-year-old friend — and she was buying a disposable roaster and colorful napkins.  The whole family, with grandchildren, boyfriends and everyone is at her house again, as they are every year.  Everyone helps but she confided she has a hard time getting the gravy made because “They want me out in the backyard playing croquet with them!”  And then as we were leaving, she gestured with her arm to the immaculate grocery store, perfection this morning at 8 a.m. before the hordes of Thanksgiving shoppers arrived, and said “When I look at this abundance, I feel like I need to give thanks to God all over again.”  I’ll be taking a wee break from blogging while I cook and peel and crimp and serve and oh yeah, clean up (as well as do a bit of grading and maybe even shopping) so I’m posting this holiday wish a bit early.

Like my friend Joan, this Thursday, I’ll be giving thanks to God for friends I’ve found in writing this blog and in participating in the quilting world.  You really do enrich my life with fabric chats, a little fun gossip now and again, and a sense that I belong to a vibrant community full of talent and enough quirkiness to make it interesting.

I’ll be giving thanks to God for his goodness in my life, for the gift of our children and grandchildren and in-laws and out-laws (hey, we all have a few).  I’m grateful to my mother and father for giving me atta’boys when I need it, and correcting my grammar and spelling when called for.  I’m happy to have sisters and brothers, and to have grown up in a family so large that we had to learn to share, yet small enough that when one of us is down, the others all know and want to help.

I have many ways to count the blessings in my life and will be doing just that on Thursday, feeling the Lord’s kindness rain down. And I wish this all for you.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Something to Think About

Digital Images-NYPL

Elizabeth E.3 Comments

While I do think that the internet sucks up my time and not always in a good way, occasionally there are places that are interesting to visit, to gain inspiration.  The above image is from the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.

These two prints are by Maurice Pillard Verneuil from 1869.  More are found *here.*

I went into their Printing and Graphics section from the main page, then randomly clicked on the list as I didn’t want to wade through all the images.  Here’s another:

It’s harder to see this one, but the catalog indicates it has plant forms, peacocks, and a waterscape.

And this one could provide ideas for machine quilting when the quilt is done.

Applique, anyone?

So how does this relate to quilting?  By encouraging me to see new shapes and new relationships between shapes.  I sketched up a block, taken from some of the ideas in the first one, then played with it in my quilt program (flipping and twisting the block), gaining the slightly weird, but somewhat intriguing design below.  While I have to work mainly in solids on the computer, I could see this in rich florals, or another type of print where the edges blur from the colors overlapping from one square to another.

The idea, at least for me, is not necessarily to have a quilt to bang out in one week, but perhaps to tuck these doodlings away in a sketchbook, whether it be the digital or colored-paper-and-pencil kind.  The idea is to make new connections.  The idea is to have an idea.

Where do you get your ideas?  Other blogs? Flickr groups?  (You’ve already seen my take on Portuguese Tiles.) Nature? Quilt shows? Something a friend has done? All of the above?

200 Quilts · Something to Think About

Blind Ambition

Elizabeth E.6 Comments

So I’ve been thinking about old age and dying, especially after the dream I had last night where I was trying to get off of a bridge littered with bodies and it was imperative (like dreams can be) that I not stop and help anyone (maybe they were infected with a ghastly disease, or something) and I kept dodging people and not slowing down and only woke up when I got to the other side, leaving behind, in a rainstorm (! but it was a dream) that site of sadness and death and human suffering.  It took me a long time to come awake, and I watched the sun’s color paint our backyard trees, including the olive that has died slowly from an airborne illness, killing it from the leaves downward, and which needs to be removed.

So from there I  began wondering about how many productive years I have ahead of me.  It’s a fool’s quest, this kind of thing, because I could get wiped out on my way to school tomorrow (two major freeway interchanges, one bout of commute traffic).  Or full-blown arthritis could arrive tomorrow and sewing would be out of the question.  Or maybe those poor souls on the bridge in my dream are only a harbinger of some invasive cancer that I’ll have to navigate somehow. (Does the ending mean that I get to live?)

When you are thirty, these thoughts are considered morbid and completely unnecessary.  When you are post-forty, they are a part of your life, especially as a friend or a grandmother or a close relative dies.

But yesterday, I did something life-affirming.  I added the tag of “200 Quilts” to the post I wrote.  I don’t know if I’ll reach 200 before my quilting thimble gets left in the drawer for the last time.  But I took the ambitious step — a blindly ambitious step considering we can’t ever know the future but pin all our hopes on it — and declared my Portuguese Tile Quilt to be number 101 of 200, a lovely, big, ambitious, and history-laden bi-centennial sort of number.  We’ll just see how it goes.

Quilts · Something to Think About

PTQ/WIP

Elizabeth E.6 Comments

PTQ is how I’ve taken to calling the Portuguese Tile Quilt since writing out the long name is tedious.  But tonight when my husband came upstairs to check on me (his cave is downstairs, mine is upstairs) and I said, we really have to go to Portugal.  Really, really.

Here’s my work in progress, which I’ll be posting on Lee’s blog Freshly Pieced, on her regular Wednesday Feature of WIP Wednesday (found *here.*)

Here I’m working the windmill effect, striving always to keep the pinks in the same place.  I had to cut some more blues, because I’d cut the first ones upside down and backwards.  And I have lots of black points, so I’m wondering if I gave the right amount in the how-to post?  Pretty sure I did.

I noticed that the pattern seemed to be lost in the fabric I chose, so this version is my trying an entire block of blue and an entire block of pink/orange.

Nah.

I laid out what I had and decided I liked the not-square version of 5 rows by 6 rows.  It’s good to change your mind once in a while.

I decided to make up a batch of those “backward” blocks.  I placed one in here–spot the ringer?  I would be tempted to leave it in but it would drive my symmetry-loving husband nuts. I was just trying it.

I pressed the seams towards the black pinwheels on all pieces.  Then you have a lump in the middle, so clip a couple of stitching threads to release it, and pressing down with your thumb, “swirl” to flatten out that center.  This is the backwards block, so your seams will look reversed.

The back of the backwards block.

I was really tempted to sew this row by row, with no regard to the block.  But I need that block to be distinguishable in a subtle way, so decided to start piecing blocks together first, then sew them in rows.  That way the block will be its own entity before losing its identity to the overall tile pattern.

Just like my hair stylist who married a guy with four children.  I went in to get my hair cut today on her first day back at work since her honeymoon.  She said they spent a week on Maui, then got home late Saturday night. Monday morning, he went to work early and didn’t return until late.  She told me she went from “single woman” to “single Mom” in one week.  I admire her and think about her a lot because of my story: my husband Dave married me and my four kids.  He We survived, but even so, it doesn’t stop me from keeping her in my prayers, hopes and thoughts.

So as I work on this quilt, I think about how all of us are individuals with our own lives, quilts, loves, hates and troubles, and sometimes it just doesn’t seem to make sense until we put it all together and see the pattern.  I like that about quilts.  I like that about life, now that I’m old enough to discern some of those patterns now and again — one of the great advantages of hanging in there.