America Is a Tune: It Must Be Sung Together
Happy Fourth of July, everyone! Here’s a little patriotic quilty eye candy for you, plus a mural that is on the hallway ceiling in the United States Capitol Building in Washington, DC.
(Back of the quilt that uses a tea towel showing lot’s DC’s Memorials.)
The boys and I hope you have an outstanding Fourth of July!
To truly begin summer off correctly in Southern California, you need a fire, and we have a doozy of one going on right now, only a few miles from my house. The above map, from today, shows 21% containment, and I could see clouds of billowing smoke yesterday when I went to the grocery store. Usually we like to END our summers with a fire, but not this year, the fourth year of the drought.
So my friend and I decided to hit the road this morning, in order to recover from the ardor of Registering for QuiltCon 2016 (no, I didn’t get the Gwen Marston class), and visit the newest shop not too far from our town in the neighboring city of Temecula: Needle in a Fabric Stash.
Our only other dedicated-modern-shop is in Los Angeles, way too far away for a casual stop, so it was nice to find out about this place.
Sue Stone, the owner, has a well-curated selection of fabrics, from Alison Glass to Cotton and Steele to Dear Stella, and isn’t locked into one line too heavily, but instead displays them to encourage mixing between the designers.
Some fun displays and stacks of fabrics.
The displays and patterns are well organized and encourage browsing.
Here Sue is helping a young customer choose fabrics for a quilt.
A nice selection of solids, plus more lines.
Needle in a Fabric Stash is owned and managed by Sue (above).
She’s been in operation about 7 months, and has already set up some great classes.
We grabbed some lunch and kept going. . . over to Primitive Gatherings Quilt Shop, not located in Wisconsin (that would have been QUITE a road trip) but in the next town up, in Murrieta.
This friendly fellow, an import from Wisconsin, helped us get signed up in their store system, and showed us around. Since I used to live in Wisconsin, we traded that old joke about there being two seasons in Wisconsin: Construction and Winter. I knew the one about three seasons: June, July and Winter. He admitted that he would like to be back there during summer, but come winter. . . he was happy to be in California, where the car doors didn’t freeze shut.
As the name of the shop implies, the bulk of their fabrics are Civil War era prints, and they have lots of very cool displays.
The Modern Section.
I was amazed by the teensy tumblers quilt they had on display–along with teensy precuts to go with it.
We both liked their mini tote designs–they had several.
All in all, a good outing on a hot summer’s day!
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!
I’m back to the Sentimental Journey–a round-up of all the bee blocks I’ve made, and the quilts or collections where my blocks ended up. Carla, of Grace and Favour, inspired by Jen Kingwell’s Green Tea and Sweet Beans, asked us all for a sampler block with a texty background.
Here’s mine. Of course, I loved this quilt so much, I copied it for January 2015–now I have one too.
Another year, Carla dreamed up this terrific tutorial for making an arrow, and she combined it with a couple of other blocks, some neutral backgrounds to make this quilt.
Here was mine. This was fun because I was able to use a lot of stash fabrics and it still looks interesting and modern-ish.
A feather block, this time for Susan of PatchworknPlay, from a now-defunct tutorial by Anna Maria Horner. Susan sent us the greige background fabric, and asked us for the two-color combo shown above.
She ended up having some feathers in different sizes (probably because of some printer scaling not set to 100%), but I loved the way she set them all on the diagonal, making this beautiful quilt.
Inspired by a quilt she saw on Pinterest, one round Susan asked us for brightly colored solids with black background; above is my block. It took me forever to get her my signature block (I really miss my mind when it wanders) but she waited for me and added it to the back. Here is the front of her gorgeous quilt:
Linda of Flourishing Palms asked us for strip-pieced diamonds. The tricky part is to get the strips going the right way (trust me on this).
She also asked us for pink and green “bar” blocks, which she has now used to complete her “Strawberry Fizz and Lime Pop” quilt.
A gifted domestic-machine quilter, she has now started to quilt it. These photos are taken from IG, so aren’t that great, but click on the link to her quilt name and see many more!
Mary of Molly Flanders asked us for this set of triangles (above) as well as this set of blocks (below), but is planning on making a larger quilt using both, so doesn’t have a grouping to share.
These two fun pink Cross-X blocks were for Mary, of Mary on Lake Pulaski. She turned our blocks into this quilt:
And this is her collection of the Union Jack blocks she asked us to make for her. I won’t tell you where mine is, because even though I ripped it out three times, I still don’t think it was very good. It looks fine in this grouping, though, proving there is strength in numbers, even if the numbers are quilt blocks.
The final set of blocks and quilts are for Anne Deister, of SpringLeaf Studios. I loved making Anne’s blocks because I always felt as if I were in on a big secret, as she is a pattern designer and we were helping her figure out, and pattern test, her designs. So here’s one set of blocks, above, which turned into the quilt top below:
Which she then refined, and made up in her stash, turning out this beauty, above. She calls it Matrix, and it should be released soon (she gave me permission to post these photos). It was easy to make, and fun to see the finished product.
And then this block turned into this terrific quilt:
Anne calls this Tumble, and again, the pattern should be released soon. We’ll probably do a blog hop/giveaway, so I’ll keep you posted.
She has an artist’s eye for staging her quilts. I love this photo.
So that’s it for the originals. We have had some leave our group, and some newbies join us, which I have written about as I’ve made their blocks. It’s been a rewarding experience working with all these women!
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 