Quilts

America Is A Tune: October Schnibbles Quilt

October 20, 2013October 19, 2013 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

America Is A Tune (it must be sung together)
finished October 2013
Quilt #122 on my 200 Quilts List

I was making this quilt all during the recent embarrassing shut-down of our country. It was embarrassing because I’d been thinking about the ideals that began our nation, and I felt that no matter what your political persuasion, the sacrifices of those early leaders would pale in comparison to the sacrifices being made by those now congregating in the halls of Congress. And perhaps because they made those sacrifices, maybe those early leaders recognized the fragility of the nation, and worked hard to get it going and keep it going. The title of this quilt is from Gerald Stanley Lee, a clergyman writing at the time of World War I, and I think it kind of expresses what I would hope we, as a county, could embrace again: working together.

Okay, enough on that, but I am really happy the shut-down is over.

Clover Schnibbles

Sherri and Sinta chose Miss Rosie’s new pattern, Clover, for our Schnibbles this month. I couldn’t face making all those teensy blocks, so this was my plan:

So I cut the center “flower” blocks 3” square (finish at 2.5″). Then cut a bunch of 1 3/4″ squares and sewed them into a four-patch, which would finish at 3″ square, too. I randomly picked these measurements, and so also include how I constructed the side setting triangles and the corner triangles.

And although it happened again: this pattern included no cutting instructions for those of us who don’t buy gobs of Moda pre-cuts, this brilliant design is all Carrie Nielson, from Miss Rosie’s Quilt Company, so get the pattern before you start.

What prompted this was a visit from my son, who is a political animal–eats, drinks and sleeps politics. Somewhere in a chest of drawers out in the garage was a little T-shirt I’d bought for a grandchild at the Senate Office Building when we had our sabbatical in Washington DC. And when looking for that to give to him (so his daughter could wear it), I found this tea towel, with some of Washington DC’s landmarks.

My favorite one, the World War II Memorial isn’t on here, nor is the World War I memorial, which is hidden off to the side of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool (on the left, as you face Mr. Lincoln).

The backing fabric is an ancient fabric from Susan Winget. I’d been saving it for a patriotic quilt, and it now has found its home. I quilted it in a cross-hatch design, while listening to The Light Between Oceans, by M.I. Stedman. I have three hours to go and I’d better get going on quilting last month’s Schnibbles, so I can finish the book and talk to my mother about it.

This and That and a New Baby

August 7, 2013April 2, 2024 Elizabeth E.19 Comments

While the rest of us have been having a summer, my son and his wife have been having a baby: they flew to Iowa (sweet corn country) to pick up their newest son, making four in that family, and number eleven grandchild for me.

We had the older boys stay at our house, and here they are doing a little corn shucking of their own with grandpa.

Somewhere in here, I finished the quilt for Charlie, this newest grandson.

I love love the back of this fabric: Backyard Baby, and so instead of a formal label, I scattered the information within the breezy trees. (That little white dog, with its ears blowing backwards, cracks me up every time I look at it.) While I finished it up a couple of days ago, I’ve learned to write the birth month on the quilt.

This is quilt #120 on my 200 Quilts list.

But summer is always slightly ADHD with going here, going there and not staying home to clean out the garage, don’t you think? So here’s a bit more this and that:

Kris, of Duke Says Sew What, is doing another Polaroid Swap, if you want to join in. I’m slow to post this, so hurry over to her blog and leave a comment to let her know you are participating; you have until August 26th to mail in your blocks (domestic — the international mail-in deadline is a bit earlier).

Several nights this summer, my husband and I have streamed down Endeavour, the newest detective series on our iPads (we have an Apple TV), a prequel to Inspector Morse and which I like better. The star, Shaun Evans, is an interesting mix of loose ends and brilliant thinking. It also helps to have one of these to get into the mystery:

And finally, finishing up this peripatetic post, is notice of a

I attended the Long Beach Quilt Show last weekend and picked up a couple of fun things to giveaway to my readers and followers, knowing that the end of summer is coming and we can’t say good-bye to its crazy days without a little fun. Giveaways (I have more than one!) will be posted at the end of this week, and I’ll pick my winners next Monday, the 12th.

Have a nice end to your summer!

200 Quilts · Four-in-Art · Quilts

Congruence, Deconstructed

August 2, 2013October 26, 2017 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

Our reveal for the fourth challenge quilt in our art group, Four-in-Art Quilters, was yesterday and today I’ll tell you how it came together.

I first started by looking a what seemed like billions of photos of owls. I did a lot of this through Flickr, where I found this photo:

I wrote to Matt Smith, the person who posted it, and asked permission to use this photo and he gave it to me. And then I sat on it for a couple of months, not knowing how to approach this. Did I want to paper-piece it? Not really. Embroider it? Pixelate it into little squares? None seemed satisfying. And then it was in the background reading that it came to me that I would fracture it, play with it a little and see where that went.

I digitally chopped the owl picture into fourths and then chopped into fourths again, making sixteen parts. And then I began to play with filters, one of the least used, but really fun parts of Photoshop. I applied at least one, and sometimes multiple filters to each segment, approximating the sizes so I could get this bird back together again in the end. You can see the mock-up on the lower right. That was me, trying to reassure myself.

Then I printed it off on paper, cut it apart, and still tried to reassure myself. I grabbed a previous art quilt off the wall (I knew it was 12″ square) to use as a template. It seemed okay. But how to get it to fabric? I usually iron freezer paper to the back of a piece of fabric, tape that to a piece of paper like I did in English Elizabeth, then run it through my Epson color printer. But I’d read in a blog about someone who simply ironed the fabric and freezer paper together, making sure it was a standard paper size, and then ran it through the printer.

Don’t you love the ink smudges? The next time, I made sure the freezer paper was really well-adhered to the fabric, then set the printings for thick matte paper on high quality and ran it through again, using a long thin tool to assist it through the last phases and so the fabric wouldn’t touch anything. The closest thing I could grab was a nail file — but it worked.

I peeled off the freezer paper carefully and cut apart my sixteen squares of Mr. Owl.

Layering the background — Kona Ash — with the backing and batting. Kona Ash? Light taupey gray? Cindy of Live a Colorful Life is probably laughing her head off now because she knows how much I hate gray. Really, I do. In so many modern quilts it acts as a big hole in the composition, especially if it’s a medium gray. I think if a quilter has to go gray in a quilt (and I’m not talking about those low-volume quilt compositions where it is intentional and where it works) they ought to go charcoal. Or slate. Ash is what I had on hand, as I don’t generally keep gray around (I bought it for a bee block I had to do). But it worked for this as the picture, except for the owl’s eyes, is all in taupes and grays. Yeah, low-volume.

Using the paper mock-up as a guide, I start layering the cloth images onto the backing.

Moving things around, trimming down the pieces so some aren’t square, trying for balance. Trying for that little artist’s lightbulb to go off in my head. I got about a night-light’s worth of illumination, but from my writing in grad school, I knew that showing up wouldn’t get you anywhere–you have to keep trying. To fully put this concept into action, I went to dinner, then let it sit for a week while I went to our quilt retreat.

Then one morning it was simply time to tackle it again. I couldn’t decide between satin-stitching a thicker line (close zig-zagging) or straight-stitching a narrow line of thread around each piece. Narrow won. I trimmed it up to 12 inches and then thought I’d like to try a faced binding (tutorial on how to do a faced binding coming in a couple of days).

I cut strips to match the backing, sewed them on.

When I ironed them to the back on a couple of sides, it became apparent that I needed that “frame” of the binding for this particular quilt. Rip off the binding.

I kind of liked the way the binding corralled those tiled pieces.

I made the label, sewed it on, then went outside to photograph it. I made an interesting discovery.

This lower section of the feathered wing imitated the gnarly bark of my silk oak tree in my backyard. Maybe because I’d dampened the literal image of feathers with Photoshop filters? I don’t know, but I liked the effect.

So, all the incongruent small pieces — the images, the tiling, the layering, the stitching — all merged into a lovely congruence of an owl, just like the metaphoric meanings discussed yesterday. All combine into that creature that captures our imagination while mystifying us as well.

And now I leave you with a poem by Mary Oliver, that I think captures this idea:

“Praise,” by Mary Oliver

Knee-deep
in the ferns
springing up
at the edge of the whistling swamp,

I watch the owl
with its satisfied,
heart-shaped face
as it flies over the water–

back and forth–
as it flutters down
like a hellish moth
wherever the reeds twitch–

whenever, in the muddy cover,
some little life sighs
before it slides into moonlight
and becomes a shadow.

In the distance,
awful and infallible,
the old swamp belches.
Of course

It stabs my heart
whenever something cries out
like a teardrop.
But isn’t it wonderful,

What is happening
in the branches of the pines:
the owl’s young,
dressed in snowflakes,

are starting to fatten–
they beat their muscular wings,
they dream of flying
for another million years

over the water,
over the ferns,
over the world’s roughage
as it bleeds and deepens.

from House of Light, 1990

Quilts

Congruence, a Four-in-Art Challenge Quilt

August 1, 2013August 12, 2013 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

Congruence, #4 in the Four-in-Art Nature series

In one of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Praise,” she watches an owl “as it flies over the water” with its “heart-shaped face,” hunting down “some little life. . . before it slides into moonlight and becomes a shadow.” She wrote multiple poems about nature, and owls were a featured bird in her poetry. She captured their qualities from their nocturnal hunting to their perceived wisdom to their wildness. As I read further about owls, the more I discovered. I felt the owl — or its ideal –was being fractured into many parts.

Some say the owl is wise, other say evil. Some say the owl brings death, other say he represents the ideal of living for a millennium. I couldn’t find any sources that agreed on what an owl represented metaphorically, and so I, too, began to see the owl as fractured, of being composed of multiple parts. And so I present my version of an owl, a congruence of many similar, yet disparate parts.

This is the 4th challenge under the heading of Nature for the art quilt group Four-in-Art. Initially that number four denoted the four of us (see below for their quilts), but we have now stretched our group to eight, so in November (when our next challenge is due) we’ll have other quilts to look at.

I found this theme to be a challenge, yet am happy with what came to me and how it fell into place. Do I feel it was a home-run? Hmmmm. But even a base hit will get you started round the bases, and double or a triple will get you a good way towards home plate. When I began this year-long process, I had no idea how it would work, or even if everyone would stick with me to the end. But for this to work, I needed to see their home runs, their doubles and triples in order to grow. Congruence now hangs in my studio, the last in a line of four quilts that have become a narrative to a new kind of journey in quilting. So, to my fellow Four-in-Art artists, I say a heartfelt and mighty thank you. You are the best.