Quilts · Something to Think About

Gingham Dresses

Elizabeth E.3 Comments

A few years ago, my granddaughter wore this Dorothy blue-gingham dress for trick-or-treating, a gift from her grandmother on the other side of the family (and a hand-me-down from her older sister).  A classic.

A couple of years later, her younger sister wore it on her trick-or-treating forays, and the youngest granddaughter from that family will probably wear it also in a couple of years.

What is it about this blue gingham dress?  What is it about gingham?  Since I’ve been on an gingham jag, several have left comments that indicate there’s a certain nostalgia for this fabric.  It seems to be associated with childhood, easier times, a dress that had lots of gathers, a dress with a big bow in the back.  Gingham always looks crisp, clean and fresh.  Gingham just has that certain something that reminds of us when we were children, of when staying out until after dark was a delicious treat as we played Hide and Seek, or Red Rover-Red Rover.

Gingham was for dress-up occasions, like Easter Sunday.  There’s an old home movie of three of us sisters all decked out in gingham dresses, with white rickrack along the neckline and armholes.  Mine was pink, Susan’s was blue, Cynthia had a large gingham on in a blue color and Christine, my eldest sister, was apparently too old for gingham as she wore a simple shift.  The quality of the movie was spotty, as home movie cameras were a new thing, the focus flitting as from person to person.  (My parents were just trying to learn this new technology, only they didn’t call it that–it was a great new invention!)  But gingham is ageless, and like Simone, in the earlier posts, when we throw on some gingham it carries with it not only its history (back to England) but also our particular group of memories and associations.

For me, it will always be that pink gingham dress, flounced and tied with a big fat bow at the back, worn on hot summer days.  Or the backing for my second son’s baby quilt–the large blue check a counterpoint to the colorful sashed nine-patches.  Or the flip side of my daughter’s baby quilt, those pink gingham checks making her soft skin glow in those few baby pictures I have of her.

Or perhaps, after this, it will be this summer, with its events and hot days, as I cut and sew new memories with new friends.  Come and sew some gingham with us!

WIP

WIP-Gone All Ginghamy

Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Many thanks to Lee, of Freshly Pieced, for hosting us on WIP Wednesdays.  At least I HOPE she’s hosting us today, as I know she had plans to head to market.  Be sure to head back over there to enjoy our weekly quilts-in-progress.

It’s not a big surprise I’ve had gingham on my mind.  But today I actually wanted to dive into the fabrics and sew with them, so above is my work in progress (need the binding and the hanger) for today.  The quilting idea comes from Canoe Ridge Creations.

I didn’t find much difference in sewing with the all-cotton ginghams I’d ordered from Fabric.com versus the lighter-weight vintage ginghams (which are surely a blend of polyester and cotton).  The vintage (and what you’ll get at JoAnn’s) fabric content leads them to be less tightly woven so you’ll not want to do a binding with them, for instance, but I found them fine for general piecing.

The other night I went to a baby shower.  One of the guests — our friend Simone — wore gingham.  My friend Leisa nudged me and said, “Look!  Gingham!”  Simone says she has a blue gingham shirt, too.

One of the challenges is thinking about the kinds of quilts that would work well with this fabric.  I don’t want anything with too many seams, as the constant subdividing of the checks might drive me batty.  However, having said that, I don’t really fuss about it if they are slightly off-grain, as it gives the piece a bit more energy.  (Did you notice the slightly-off grain “geese” up top in my mini-quilt?  Didn’t think so.)

I’ve been collecting a few ideas on Pinterest, finding it a handy place to stash quilts I run across. I also know I want to make a quilt with lots of white in it, to give it a light, fresh summery feeling.

from Rubyru Quilts and Makes 

from Fussy Cut 

But I have to admit I have my heart set on a bowtie quilt (imagine this one in white background with cheerful ginghams everywhere).  Krista, my partner in crime over at KristaStitched already has her idea all picked out!  We’re both hoping we can entice Cindy of Live a Colorful Life to come and play with us too.  Stay tuned.

Watch for our giveaway of three packets of gingham fat quarters (plus half-yard of Kona white in each) coming soon.

Quilts

Gingham!

Elizabeth E.3 Comments

It all started when. . .

I went to a gigantor garage sale and found boxes of fabric, and tons of gingham.  Gingham?  I hadn’t used or sewn with gingham for years.  I sent some to Krista, of KristaStitched and she suggested we do something fun this summer with our gingham.  One thing led to another and last week a box showed up at my house with some more gingham, woven this year:

Gingham is an interesting fabric because it’s not printed, it’s woven.

Here’s some printed fabrics–we call them checks because there’s only two colors.  In gingham, there’s three.

Check on the bottom, gingham (blue and chocolate brown) on the top.

I call them yarn-dyed, because the color is not applied, like it is in printed cottons, but the yarns are dyed the color present in the gingham, in this case some aqua and some chocolate brown yarns were woven to give us that “checked” appearance so typical of this fabric. The blue yarns overlapping the blues give the solid blue color and ditto for the browns.  But when the blues and the browns intersect, you get that half-toned looking square with both colors in it.  This also means that there is no right or wrong side to ginghams, which when I started to make my paper pieced block (in the Gingham Giveaway logo) I didn’t have to worry about that at all.  And that was one complicated little paper-pieced block.  You can find it here.

The new cottons are 100% cotton, made for traditional and modern sewers.  Okay, so when that box arrived, I thought . . . what was I thinking?  Way too much to use all myself, so Krista and I thought we’d have a Gingham Giveaway.

But it’s not just any giveaway–we want you to play along, and make something gingham-y for yourself and for all of us to see.

So I put together some packets of 3 fat quarters of gingham and a full half-yard of Kona White cotton.  If you are selected in the giveaway, you agree to make a quilt–or a quilt block–or four quilt blocks–or a mini-quilt–or something along those lines with your ginghams.  We’d ask that you then post it up on your blog linking back to both Krista and my blogs.  That’s all!

Dates: The Gingham Giveaway will be held early in June.  We’ll let you know when to leave a comment on our blogs, but we’d like you to be thinking about it.  We’ll announce those who want to play along with us, and because gingham is so picnic-Americana-looking, we ask that you blog about your block(s) or your quilt top on Wednesday July 4th.

Because this is a summer fun project, we don’t need your quilt to be quilted, or your blocks to be finished.  We just want you to have some fun with some ginghams and play, play, play!

Check back. . . or should I say. . . gingham back!

Creating · eQuilt Universe

iPad Quilt Drawings

Elizabeth E.2 Comments

I’ve been quite curious to see if I could use any of the iPad’s apps to draw quilts, or even attempt to draw anything.  I had fallen in love with the press for Pages, and spent quite a bit of time looking at reviews of that.  I also typed in Penultimate vs. Noteshelf (mainly because I kept seeing that app mentioned) and to find a review that talked about the latest upgrade, I had to keep clicking away.

I have the following productivity apps, as they are called sometimes, because you’re supposed to be productive when you use them (links are to websites that reviewed them or to the developer’s site):

Pages–used mainly for word processing documents; can be sent to your email as a PDF or Word document
Cloud-on–have not even opened it up yet, but it’s supposed to function like Pages, yet you can save documents to a Dropbox folder (one drawback of Pages is that you cannot save to Dropbox)
Notability–I have no clue how to use this yet, but an up-and-coming young man at church recommended it; he uses it all the time in his business
Penultimate–I purchased this because they talked about its ability to draw and to use it like one of the Moleskin notebooks.  I envisioned sitting under a tree with a great landscape in the distance, sketching away.  Right.
Noteshelf--has more pens, more papers, and the possibility of buying more papers.  I liked that they had different thicknesses of pens (one is a marker-tip and one is a fine-tip), and more colors.  The use was fairly intuitive for me, but I’m pretty used to Macs, Apple machines and their programs, having had a Mac around the house since the mid-1980s (yes, I’m that much of an Apple geek).

But even though I’m supposed to be “productive” I was more interested in the play aspect, specifically for quilting.  Here’s my first attempt:

Hmmm. New frontier, indeed.  In the above image, I drew shapes with a fine-tip pen, colored them in with a marker, took a photo of my iPad cover and popped it down into the image (resizing it to the size of one of my “blocks”) and then handwrote some notes as I was sitting in the airplane on the way to see my parents; it was turbulent all the way.  Yes, I used a stylus–went to Wal-Mart and picked one up–and I like the way it writes.

This visual is from Beautiful Designs/Gadget Tech website, which has a fairly in-depth comparison of the three programs, but here you can see that the same person produces three different types of script, depending on the program.

But on the way home, the plane ride was more smooth and I had about 90 minutes to really play around.  I needed it to be WAAAAY more capable than the silly sketch above, because although messiness has its virtues, I needed precision.

So I loaded up a grid paper (be sure to take the time to do the tutorial–it’s seventeen pages, but you’ll need all that info to even get started) and tried to draw a representation of the windows of the Ogden City Hall–an interesting proportion.  Then I “drew” a rectangle around it, copied it and became an object I could paste anywhere on the page.  Using the little buttons on the side of the object, I could rotate it and set it into place.

When you have no idea where you’re going, anywhere will do.  I practiced this technique, varying where I put the quilt block/object until I’d built myself a “quilt.”  Since my quilt block was uneven, I left some spaces in places for interest.  I haven’t figured out much since I arrived home as I plowed into grading pretty heavily, but I have to admit I was fairly encouraged by this initial foray into trying to draw a quilt.

Obviously the lines are a bit wobbly as the pen can’t “snap” to the grid like it can in my quilt program, and there’s no preset templates for triangles, etc.  But I feel I could make a reasonable stab at this.  And if I were a programmer, I’d try to develop a quilting app that actually drew quilts, not just told me about how much yardage I need to buy.

Have any of you experimented with this?  What have you come up with?