Early-May Accomplishments

May 10, 2017May 10, 2017 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

Gidsters May Bee

I finished my Gridsters Bee block for Rachel. She asked for buzzy bees, as she is a beekeeper in the Midwest. Her tutorial is *here,* as well as links to her pattern, but I didn’t cut apart the pieces. I just straight paper-pieced the thing, then joined the head section to the body section. We blew up the basis 6″ pattern to make 10″ finished bees. I can’t wait to see what she does with them all.

Chuck Nohara May17_1 This is beginning to feel like the never-ending quilt.

I’m making small (2-1/4″ finished) plus sign blocks to go in between all the Chuck Nohara blocks that Susan and I made together last year. Our blocks are 6″ finished, so after I worked out the measurements, I drafted a pattern for the sashing. Here is the PDF: Chuck Nohara SashingFinal

I started the plus blocks by cutting strip sets (2 low-volume and 1 bold), then seaming the two low-volume onto the bold on either side. Cut those across the strip set into 1-1/4″ wide strip pieces. These pieces are both the a) top and bottom of your plus block, and b) the center of the “dot” block, shown in the intersection of the sashing, above

ChuckNohara_plus assembly I then cut matching pieces of fabric into 1 -1/4″ x 2-3/4″ bits. I sewed a matched set of two strip-set-blocks, one on top, and one of the bottom to make a “plus.” Then I sewed 1 -1/4″ x 2-3/4″ pieces of low-volume on either side of a “dot” to create the mini block that is at the intersection.

Then the low-volume center piece, in between the two plus blocks, measures finished at 2-1/4″ by 1-1/2″ (so cut 2-3/4″ by 1-3/4″).

ChuckNohara_plus block The “plus” and “dot” units finish at 2-1/4″ square, so trim them to 2-3/4″ square (size before sewing).

Sew two “plus” units on either side of the low-volume center piece. Arrange them all around, then sew the row with the blocks and plus-units first:

ChuckNohara blocks row

Then I sewed the “dots” and plus-units together:

ChuckNohara blocks row2

And then I finished sewing them all together:

I’m now trying to figure out the borders. After all the piecing I did for the sashing, I can guarantee you it won’t be like the borders Chuck Nohara showed in her book:

I’ve finally progressed to the place in my physiotherapy (I like the way the Australians say it, as we just call it “PT”) where I could try out my Sweet Sixteen quilting machine again. After 3-1/2 months. It took me a while to get the thread tensions balanced, but then was I able to get going on my quilt from the Traveling Threads Bee, made of Alison Glass fabrics (with a few others).

Bliss. This block, from Toni of HoosierToni, is coming along nicely. I’m limiting myself to 30 minutes/session so I don’t break my surgery (my one big fear in life).

Lastly, you are all invited to our Raincross Guild Meeting this coming Tuesday, May 16th (6 p.m.), where I’ll present a trunk show of my quilts–well, only 25 of them. My husband helped me get them from our closets, walls and cupboards, so I can decide the order and what to say. I just clicked over to the Guild’s website, and in true humbling fashion, I’m not even listed. But Latifah Saafir is, on the day I’m supposed to teach a class for the Guild, too. What will I be teaching?

My Home, Sweet, Home mini quilt. I think they have a few openings, but I’m not sure. I’ll be emailing the class members prep instructions, that if they complete them, they will finish their quilts in class. That’s June 3rd, from 9 a.m. -2 p.m., with a 30-min lunch break (bring your lunch).

Last time I taught this class, I was able to snap a photo of three Home Sweet Home quilts. They look awesome! Patterns are for sale in my Craftsy shop, just in case you aren’t able to attend that day.

Happy Quilting!

200 Quilts · Mystery Quilt · Quilts · Quilts-on-the-Bed

Belle Etoile du Jour

May 4, 2017May 4, 2017 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

BelleEtoileduJour_4garden Belle Etoile du Jour
Quilt #181 of 200 quilts, 88″ square
Began December 2016 • Finished May 2017
BelleEtoileduJour_1unquilted

A couple of weeks ago, I had my son and grandson hold up the unquilted top of this creation, and I include it here so you can see the quilt top. I was late starting this quilt, as everyone else in the world began making it in November when Bonnie Hunter announced her En Provence Mystery Quilt for 2016, based on colors she’d seen in her trip to France. BelleEtoileduJour_5 BelleEtoileduJour_1front

I decided that if I made the various units, as described in the mystery, then stowed them away, I might be able to get back to the quilting even when I was convalescing from the planned rotator cuff surgery. I was able to finish all but two steps. When it was time for me to do those, I figured out how to sew one-handed, and my saintly friend Lisa trimmed up 60 blocks for me. BelleEtoileduJour_3back

I did my best to get it up on my garage-door-photo-studio today, but I had a wrinkle in the quilt that I just couldn’t manage to ease out, so I have to resort to other photos to show it off. I like looking from the back of the quilt outward, like it’s stained glass. I had purchased about 5 yards of backing fabric, unable to remember how big the quilt top was. I needed more, so spliced in a yellow coordinating print, then took it all over to my Cathy, my quilter. BelleEtoileduJour_6 BelleEtoileduJour_7

She was a good sport and let me choose a new pantograph for her collection, which I think really works well with the quilt. The original quilt called for purple fabrics in those 18″ blocks, but I went instead with periwinkle, a favorite color of mine. BelleEtoileduJour_8label

The title comes from an old poem, where the poet calls flowers “Day Stars.” I had Google translate “beautiful day stars” into French, then ran it by my French-speaking husband who said it was fine. (I didn’t want to be swearing in French, or something.) I don’t really believe there is a top or bottom to this quilt, so I sewed the label on an angle, just for fun. BelleEtoileduJour_2 And again, if you haven’t started your listing of your quilts, start now!

Four-in-Art

Four-in-Art Quarterly Challenge: Stained Glass Shadows

May 2, 2017April 26, 2017 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

Shadow owes its life to light.
~an old saying

I am to provide the theme for our next quarterly challenge, and I choose Stained Glass Shadows. I love the saturated lights left on floors, walls, and benches in cathedrals by brilliantly lit stained glass windows and I wanted to make that my challenge.

Sometimes the colors play with what’s already there: think of the duality of jewel tones spilling ephemerally onto hard marble surfaces.

I like how sometimes they look like they’ve been through the Holi Festival of Colors, as if the surfaces had been doused in brightly colored chalks and powdery hues. Think of transparency and playing with color blending. Many edges on stained glass shadows are soft, blurring into the other colors.

stainedglassshadow_8 — *All photos were taken by my husband or I, in the National Cathedral, in Washington, D.C.*

While the opposite of light is dark, in shadows, the darkness is doubled down, softened, the shapes revealing as well as obscuring. A whole new conversation can happen with shadows.

Reveal date is August 1, 2017.

200 Quilts · Four-in-Art · Quilts

Halfway There

May 1, 2017October 26, 2017 Elizabeth E.18 Comments

4-in-art_3 Halfway There_1front

Halfway There
Quilt # 180
13-1/2″ wide by 20″ tall

That night, I was alone in bed in the guest room, five pillows behind me and one to each side, propping me up in a sitting position. I couldn’t lay down to sleep as it was too painful, so I semi-sat there, my head leaning back on the pillows, staring up at the ceiling.

My husband Dave had tucked me in that night, as he had done every night since the rotator cuff surgery three weeks earlier, helping me find the right position for the pillows, touching my cheek, making sure I knew he loved me, then turned out the light and walked down the hallway to our bedroom that now seemed oh, so far far away. I felt adrift on a sea of pillows.

Halfway There_4detail I tried to shift slightly, trying to move to a more comfortable position: there wasn’t one. The pain pills they gave me from surgery had been effective, but unfortunately their side effect was ever-present weeping, so I’d ditched them a couple of weeks earlier, relying instead on acetaminophen, which barely tamped down the pain and discomfort. I was pretty much a mess. Halfway There_3 I gazed at the ceiling, waiting for that sleep that wouldn’t come — hadn’t come, since I’d moved from the uncomfortable recliner chair two days post-surgery and had come off the prescribed drugs. The light from the white Christmas lights we’d left in the laurel bush outside the window shone up through the slatted blinds, casting a linear design on the ceiling.

I studied that pattern of line-upon-line, trying to let it dissimulate the discouragement: there was three more weeks of the sling, the sleeplessness, the being away from my husband, the not-sewing, the one-handedness, the inability to be present in my own life, the trying to be cheerful for whole minutes at a time. Three more weeks of pain. Three more weeks of the uncomfortable sling and the loneliness. Three down, three to go.

fourinart_halfwaythere_May2017

The shadows were linear like the slats in the blinds: they started light, the bright lines gradually decreasing until the dark bands became more prominent, obliterating the light. Half shadow, half light. Half of each. The realization that I was halfway there settled into the cracks in my fractured thinking. The timer on the Christmas lights clicked off, all was shadow and I finally fell asleep, exhausted by the pain, the mental struggle — and, as anyone who has been through this knows — the isolation. Halfway There_8 Halfway There_10back Our theme this year is Light, and Camilla chose this quarter’s theme of Light in the Darkness. I certainly had time to think about it. I loved the nuance and the subtlety of it, and was glad to figure out how to interpret it. Halfway There_11label

Halfway There_9

There is no deconstruction post for this art quilt. I had to cut off lots of outside edges when I trimmed up my Piggies! quilt blocks, and used those pieces to make a “whole cloth” of low-volume prints to be my “ceiling” fabric, as we have those old-time popcorn ceilings with texture. Using flat white cloth didn’t seem right for what I had seen night-after-night. I also liked that all those blocks sent from my friends helped pull me along and out of the sadness and loved their significance in this quilt, and appreciated anew all the encouraging comments from those who cheered me on (thank you). The darkness seemed to have a texture of its own as well. I did indeed have time to study it, and thought this seed print from Australia would stand in well for the shadows seen by a quilter, staring at the ceiling, late into the night.

It’s my turn to announce the next theme so look for it in my next post. And my recovery? It’s going well. I’m now past the three-month mark and while occasionally achy, don’t have much pain. I go to physical therapy regularly. When I hit the 12-week mark, my therapist said, “You’re about halfway there.” I guess that finish line moves, depending on the perspective; I do expect at six months I will hear it again.

You’ll notice that the quilt is sometimes light-on-top and sometimes dark-on-top. I think it works either way.

Last thought: when I stood in the aisles at Road to California this past year, not buying anything, I hoped that by next year’s quilt conference I would be able to say it was all done and all behind me.

I still have that hope.