Quilts

My Small World, June 2015 edition

June 17, 2015June 17, 2015 Elizabeth E.22 Comments

I don’t often jump on the Latest and Greatest Thing in QuiltLand, but this one called my name. It’s Jen Kingwell’s My Small World and was printed in the oh-so-elusive QuiltMania Spring issue 2015 (picture above is from the QuiltMania website). I don’t know why you are making it (there is a My Small World QAL on Instagram and other places), but I know why I am making it.

It’s because in the 1960s, when wearing white socks with your loafers was considered cool and women always wore pantyhose with their bare legs, I came here. Our family was on our way home from living for two years in Lima, Peru. It was in the days of Disneyland with tickets, and we seemed to have enough for our family of seven children to go on this ride. Since I had a broken leg, I went on it more than once.

The ride, first fabricated for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, was installed in California’s Disneyworld in 1966, which will make it fifty years old next year. I live about an hour from the original Disneyland, so it’s my patriotic duty to honor this institution, right? Of course we all know THAT song:

“Children of the World” was the working title of the attraction. Its tentative soundtrack, which can be heard on the album, featured the national anthems of each country represented throughout the ride all playing all at once, which resulted in disharmonic cacophony. Walt conducted a walk through of the attraction scale model with his staff songwriters Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman, saying, “I need one song that can be easily translated into many languages and be played as a round.” The Sherman Brothers then wrote “It’s a Small World (after all)” in the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which influenced the song’s message of peace and brotherhood. When they first presented it to Walt, they played it as a slow ballad. Walt requested something more cheerful, so they sped up the tempo and sang in counterpoint. Walt was so delighted with the final result that he renamed the attraction “It’s a Small World” after the Sherman Brothers’ song.” (Wikipedia)

While I have no idea if Jen Kingwell was influenced by the smart geometrics, towers and shapes (Tokyo Disney, above), to me there is a clear connection.

Judging by the photos on Instagram, we all start here: cutting sky pieces. I did neutrals for a while, then started adding in whispy blues, just to make it more interesting, as I’d seen others do it. It’s that idea of collaboration, as expressed in my last blog post.

Section One’s Sky. I was listening to a book on Audible, that I finally had to turn up to 2x speed just to get through it. I’m not recommending it.

Now I’m back to Inspector Gamache, written by Louise Penny. I’m going to hate it when I get through reading this series!

Buildings and some sky. Now to start on the details. I found reading Susan’s entries on her PatchworknPlay blog was helpful, too.

I used some leftover leaves from the Pineapples and Crowns quilt to make this square.

Susan’s idea to start the tiny pinwheels by cutting two inch squares, then making HSTs, then on to the pinwheel was a good idea. I threw in some of my New York City fabric, with the words Radio City Hall to liven up this section.

It took me forever to figure out what text thing to put at the top of the building, but I went for this one, since Betsy is a childhood name. I also had fun fussy cutting a hot air balloon in the Sky Section for Section 2. You can see the bits of blue sky in the neutrals now. Here is the progress I’ve made so far:

And here’s my contribution to the Errata: In section 2, the center square for the churn dash is incorrect. It should measure 1 1/2″ no 2 1/2″. Having said that, I have enormous appreciation to Jen Kingwell for this pattern–it has a LOT of moving parts and to even get some sort of pattern down on paper is amazing.

In my real small world, I’ve taken a couple of trips since the semester finished.

The first one was to Phoenix to see my daughter’s husband graduate from Dental School. I think he had the oldest children of any of his fellow graduates there! They have happily moved to their new city, and he has started work already. But this week, they are on a trip to Disneyland to celebrate their achievement.

And to start the summer off with a bang, I also took a couple of trips through these two machines as a spot on my lungs showed up in my yearly X-ray. It is because of *this* that my oncologist checks everything. Twice. The diagnosis from these humming machines revealed it was nothing to worry about, although for three weeks I did — a lot. I couldn’t really talk about it at the time, so I’m glad it’s behind me.

However going through all that certainly made me feel like a basket case. No, I didn’t know about this when I started this quilt, but it certainly is appropriate! Now I should really get to the closets that need cleaning out, the papers that needs tossing. It’s nice to think about regular life again.

I’ve also been busy sewing up more Circles Blocks as I want to finish that quilt and get it quilted. I have one more to go, then I’ll have sixteen total. Block #13 will be up on the blog in a couple of weeks. Here they are stacked together:

What’s been going on in Your Small World?

Next block is coming on July 1st!

Quilts

Pineapples and Crowns–Blogger’s Quilt Festival

May 15, 2015May 22, 2015 Elizabeth E.21 Comments

Pineapples and Crowns made it into the Viewer’s Choice section of the Festival.
Please remember to vote for your favorite this week!

Pineapples and Crowns, 61″ square

I am entering in Amy’s Blogger’s Quilt Festival, and I apologize for my regular readers who have already seen this quilt. But she requests a blog post written the week of the festival, so as some one who is totally rule-bound (*cough, cough*) I am writing a new post. The original post is *here.*

The inner pineapple blocks were made for me by two sets of bees, but the outer border, of the pineapple crowns is all hand-appliqued. I went back and forth between all the categories, looking for the “mixed technique” category, but finally entered it in the appliqué category, if you want to help this quilt become a winner–that’s where to go (*shameless plug*).

It could have gone in “scrappy” or “large” for just like our children, we can categorize our quilts as one thing or another, depending on if they’ve kept us up all night, sick and crying, or if we see them decked out in their Sunday best, playing the timpani drums at the end-of-school concert, like my eldest granddaughter just did. (Way to go, Keagan!)

But, as always, the best thing to call quilts is done, ready for display or enjoyment or to take to a botanic garden and take pictures of them, which I did recently. I love the mix of scrappy white-background fabrics and the rainbow of brights. I placed warm bright petals in the outermost border, and cool petals in the inner border. It’s not really noticeable overall, but I needed to organize these blossoms somehow, and I chose to do it with color.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes and head back to Amy’s Blogger’s Festival to see all the other terrific quilts that are showing up there, and to vote for your favorite in each category. The voting begins May 22nd, and you can also vote for Viewer’s Choice as well. Enjoy the online quilt festival!

Quilts

Colorwheel Blossom–Blogger’s Quilt Festival

May 15, 2015May 17, 2015 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

Colorwheel Blossom, 48″ square

Welcome to the Blogger’s Quilt Festival! I’m entering ColorWheel Blossom in the ROYGBIV category of Amy’s online contest.

The original finished blog post is *here.*

It took me forever to find the right colors for the center of the blossom, and I haunted several quilt show booths, combing through their Kona Cottons to find just the right shades, then visited Purl Soho–Irvine to get the right inner petal shades. I appliquéd it to the white background, and then it took me several months to get up the courage to quilt this. I settled on a curvilinear emphasis in the middle field and an angular emphasis in the borders.

It now hangs in our hallway right by the front door, a rainbow greeting all our guests, lighting up our home.

Thanks for stopping by to see Colorwheel Blossom. Be sure to head back to Amy’s Blogger’s Festival to see the rest of the quilts, and to vote for your favorites! Voting begins May 22nd for each category, as well as Viewer’s Choice.

Quilts

Pineapples and Crowns

April 22, 2015 Elizabeth E.29 Comments

Pineapples and Crowns
Pieced, Appliquéd and Quilted
61″ square
No. 145 on my 200 Quilts List

The pineapple blocks were pieced by two different bees and I over six months: the Mid-Century Modern Bee and the Always Bee Learning Bee.

I had forgotten to piece all the signature blocks into the backing from Mid-Century Modern Bee, so I just kind of swooped them onto the back. While they may look a bit unusual, I figure the back of my quilt is like looking in my clothes closet–no one will see it but me–and this way I won’t lose these precious tiny blocks. I wish I had a signature block from the other piecers of the blocks, but that bee didn’t do them, and that bee is now scattered.

The background is a series of petite prints on a white or creamy colored ground–no beiges or grays to muddy the clarity of the colors–and is a contrast to the solids of the pineapple steps and the crown petals.

I quilted this quilt over a week, using seven and a half bobbins, in a free-swirling pattern, outlining the leaves and stems in the border. I got the idea for my border from the masters of borders, the Piece O’ Cake ladies, but varied it somewhat to fit what I needed. I was interviewed for an article on quilting last week, and I noted that if we think we are making something original, we are slightly delusional. Actually I wanted to say we are straight-up delusional, for everything comes from somewhere else, but I qualified it so quilters wouldn’t have their feelings hurt. The idea, I think, is to make that snippet of influence new for you.

Mark Ronson, the well-known DJ-record producer, noted in his TED talk that we are all sampling from everyone else, sampling being his word for when recording artists slip in a line or two from someone else’s recorded song to bring a texture or a reference to the work that has gone before (cue at 6:15 for his discussion). So you might say I sampled some early pioneer in the use of her pineapple block and the Piece O’Cake ladies for the border, and both of these were probably sampled from somewhere else, somewhere. I feel richer for being a part of this quilting universe, with good ideas slipping in from places beyond.

Yes, you did a notice another quilt in that first photo. Stay tuned.

These photos were taken in our local university’s botanic garden, in the gazebo near the iris section, overlooking the creek gully. It’s a very old gazebo and I fully expect that one day I’ll arrive with my quilts and it will be gone. Until then, it will be sampled into my photos, my coda on the making of a quilt.