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.

Creating · Tutorial

Portuguese Tile Quilt

Elizabeth E.9 Comments

I started with this picture of some tiles from Portugal.

Then I mocked up a quilt in my Quilt-Pro 5 program.  I mapped it out with 8″ squares, set 6 across in 6 rows, with a 4″ border, yielding a 56″ square quilt.

I’m using the Madrona Road fabric, as I’m always wading into my outdated stash to try a new quilt, and wanted to take this new line for a test drive.  Because of the barn and the truck, I thought back to my days of Amish quilting and went with black for that windmill blade, just like the tile in Portugal, shown above.  Besides every quilt needs some contrast and this line reads to me, for the most part, as in the middle-intensity value range, a favorite of mine and nearly every other quilter.  (I have to work to get the darks and the lights into my stash.)

To cut out the large pieces, I laid out my fabric RIGHT SIDES UP, and cut a rectangle that was 7″ by 4 1/2″, then lay the template on the rectangle (see picture below), and sliced it into two. Here’s the template: PortugueseTileWindmilltemplateSM.

Print it out so you’ll have the pieces to use as a guide for cutting.  (Okay, full disclosure.  I at first didn’t lay the fabric RIGHT SIDE UP, and have quite a few pieces that are backwards, ensuring that I’ll be making this again. So try not to screw up like I did.)

I could have either cut all the black pieces according to a template, or figured out a way to make it easier.  I went with the second.  Cut a rectangle 5 3/8″ by 2 3/4″ and then slice it from corner-to-corner, diagonally.  You will have dog ears you’ll have to cut off, if that’s a consideration for you.

Cut 72 pieces of the blue line, 72 pieces of the pink/orange fabrics and 144 black triangles (that’s 72 rectangles, cut in two).

Lay a triangle across the larger piece.  To get it lined up, put the black on top, with the left point sticking 1/4″ out over the edge.  Don’t worry about that right-hand side longer point.  Stitch.  Press towards the black.

Now lop off those points, by truing this block up to 4 1/2″ square (see below).

I’ve laid them out on my  pin wall.  I don’t have enough of them to do the REAL work of laying them out, because I’m headed downstairs to make some corn-shrimp-coconut soup for dinner, but I’m thinking I do want to mix up the different types of fabric within the pink/orange group and the blue group.

Thanks for you nice atta’ boy comments yesterday.  I took to catch up on the speeches from the Democratic Convention (remember, I’d assigned the watching of these to my students, so feel like I need to keep up), and cut and sewed my cloth.  It’s amazing the difference a day makes.  I liked what Betty said, that this exhaustion must be in the zeitgeist or something.  But after a break of a day, I may even feel like grading, knowing I have this little project to come back to throughout the day.

Quilts

Exhaustion

Elizabeth E.5 Comments

Life is one long process of getting tired. (Samuel Butler, novelist)

If you see a whole thing, it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. (Ursula K. LeGuin)

It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out; it’s the grain of sand in your shoe. (Robert W. Service)

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What does exhaustion feel like?  It changes, I think.  When I was a child it was at the end of a day of playing, of sun or making snowmen.  It was physical exhaustion of going full tilt with my brothers and sisters, and falling right to sleep.  When I was a teenager, I remember the sudden quiet after an evening of being at a dance, the sound expanding, filling the spaces abandoned by guitar, drums and voice.  This delicious quiet followed me home and I felt the weight of the blankets on me as I drifted off to dreams.  Young mother exhaustion is every kind: mental, emotional, and physical.  But instead of falling to sleep, you lay awake at night, worrying about all those things you can’t control, but want to: will they do well in school? will my husband finish his school?  should we take the new job?  should we move?  will the children marry the right person? and sleep eludes you for hours and you wake up more exhausted than when the night began.

This week’s exhaustion is a continuation of the last four, but rooted in a day that began too early, sitting at the laptop composing the second essay assignment, then another assignment, and another as I make my way through a new class and prepare for that day’s evaluation by a colleague.  It continues with a day-long-non-stop schedule that would not faze me if I were 40, but I’m not, and ends at a women’s gathering, getting hair tips from a lovely lass with lovely long hair, but all I can think about is that I’m tired and I need to go home.  Sleep is interrupted, fitful, with the aches that come from that not-40 place, and with the worries about all your children and their young families, and your parents, and a family member or two, the remembered exhaustion piling on in dreams that encumber, all parts of you feeling the weight of some other-worldly place.

So after my husband left this morning, I opened a Flickr file, ignoring the 5″ stack of essays-to-grade in the bag behind me, and clicked through photo after photo, my mind unscripted, my interests wandering.  I found a Flickr set of tiles from Portugal and wondered how our quilt blocks might have taken their cues from these ancient and oh-so-faraway constructions of mortar and glazed tile, pattern scrolling into pattern.  (I have no idea.)  But I liked looking at the grid-ness of it all, glimpsing some of our traditional and some of our modern patterns click into view.

And finally, I roused myself, delaying the grading for tomorrow to give me some space, for I took to heart the thought from Charles Haddon Spurgeon: There is no fatigue so wearisome as that which comes from lack of work.

Which in my world, today, needs to be quilt work.

WIP

More WIPs than I Need

Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Yes, I did the time-honored tradition of quilters everywhere, that when you can’t finish what you’ve got going (Summer Treat, Lollypop Trees) make the leap and add to your stash.  Here’s my latest additions, along with their plans:

Does this give you a hint?  And I in my usual decisiveness, I couldn’t decide between the . . .

. . . pink, or. . .

. . . blue.  It was that farm truck that made me do it.  I owe a couple of Polaroid blocks, and I’m thinking that barn with the quilt would be a perfect candidate for a Polaroid block.  No firm idea for this one, but I am drawn to some of the blocks in my vintage Judy Martin book.

This was purchased to go with the other ocean-themed pieces my friend Rhonda sent me last year.  I have in mind a tote bag, but can’t seem to get to it, so I thought maybe I needed another piece to go with it?  You can see the problem with this way of thinking, can’t you?  

So how could I not get these tone-on-tone Riley Blake Chevrons?  Unlike Rita of Red Pepper, who shows you some stash and then snaps her fingers and the next day the quilt is done, I won’t be showing you anything soon.  I keep having little horrid thoughts cross my mind that interfere with envisioning this in its own quilt, thoughts like the fact that the handout on rhetorical thinking is over there on the computer waiting to be written for class tomorrow.

I fell in love with this Reina and her cherubs, so I ended up getting the whole bundle from Fabricworm:

I added a couple of pieces to this, and so totally want to start slicing through it. New fabrics have a way of dislodging some stuck places, getting you going again on a project.

I was stuck on Summer Treat quilt, because I only cut out enough for a fairly small quilt.  I’m used to lap-sized quilts and there this tiny thing was, plastered to my pin wall for nearly a month, because I had determined it was too tiny and needed to be larger.  Finally I said to my Dave, “Can quilts be small?”  “Yes,” he said in all his wisdom and experience (of living with a quilter for lo, these many years).  That was all I needed to start rummaging through the stash to find the right backing.

All the colors in the quilt are here.  I may even bind it with this for a touch of whimsy on the front against all those solids.

And while this is primarily a quilting blog, and today’s post is primarily about Quilts in Progress, I realized that my tiny universe of quilts is nothing compared to bigger Works in Progress.

Like the elections in America, getting off to their post-Labor Day horserace to the finish line in November.  I assigned my students the task of watching either the keynote or the nominee’s speech for either party, so last week was the Republican’s turn and this week it’s the Democrat’s turn.  I have to say I am enjoying the speech-i-fying, but more importantly, I am enjoying the fact that we have elections at all.

And how about this for a work in progress?

Cue the Karen Carpenter songs.  The reception was done on a shoestring because they are both students (that’s why I was the photographer), and frankly they both look like a couple of teenagers, but their lovely smiles and obvious tenderness for each other reminded me of why weddings make us cry.  Talk about a work in progress.  Theirs has just begun.

So, like a bride tossing her bouquet, bequeathing to another this task of beginning, I wish you all the best in your Works in Progress, whether they be candidate speeches, or packing school lunches, or starting a quilt, or yes, even finishing one.

Happy Post-Labor Day.  Happy Quilting!