Village Faire

June 28, 2013August 12, 2013 Elizabeth E.10 Comments

Village Faire, quilt #117 on my 200 Quilts List

A part of the Year of Schnibbles, hosted by Sherri and Sinta.

This quilt reminded me of summer days, of green lawns that you can lay down in and drift off, and of course, pinwheels that spin with the flick of a finger, or by holding them overhead while running. I was also reminded of local faires and immediately thought of Babe, the Gallant Pig, and Mr. and Mrs. Hoggett, cotton candy, ferris wheels.

I started it on the small machine, as the big machine was set up downstairs, quilting Kaleidoscope.

Here’s the original. You can see I changed up the border.

Given the bold prints of my fabrics, I felt the border was too busy for what I had going on in the center, and as we are given license to modify and create and have fun with Carrie Nelson’s patterns, I indulged and put a series of bars along the edges, with pinwheels for cornerstones. I have a fabrics from the Comma collection from Moda and from Thomas Knauer’s Asbury collection, which has summer-time things like bumper cars and soft-serve ice cream cones.

And on the back? Yep–a tea towel. This one is from Wensleydale in the Yorkshire Dales region of England. We went on vacation there a few years back and as we are enamoured of Wallace and Grommit, we knew we had to head over to Hawes and sample some Wensleydale cheese. (Even though it was raining. And rained all day, which explains why England is so green.)

A scene or two from Yorkshire. I can now get this Wensleydale cheese in Costco, during the holidays. Will wonders never cease.

This measures a little larger than the other two Schnibbles designs, coming in at 34″ square. I think this design would morph perfectly into a baby quilt, or a quilt for a child, by adding another row of the pinwheels.

After taking the outside photos, I gimped upstairs (yes, I can walk around now, but not much, and have that lovely blue boot on my foot) and threw the quilt on the guest bedroom bed. I really like these bold colors. Given that we are heading into a weekend of 100+ degree heat, I declare that summer has arrived!

This summer may you find a Village Faire to attend, and a pinwheel to spin with a quick puff of breath.

Quilts

Kaleidoscope

June 24, 2013 Elizabeth E.31 Comments

At long last, I have finished Kaleidoscope.

Here she is on the fence, all quilted and bound and ready to be hung up in our home. The first picture was merely the top, unquilted, but I like that image quite fine (it’s my home screen pix on my phone).

Krista got me started on this process and the above is a photo of my first block, blogged about *here* so I don’t need to redo the gory details (just do a search for “EPP” in my search box, if you do want the whole story).

I liked how I could sew bitsy pieces together into a new design and they could become something else.

I finished my first block in February 2012, wrote about it *here,* using the completion as a sort of a milestone capping off a cancer experience. While I do like the quick quilts that sew up in a month, or whizzing through a bee block, there’s something gratifying about a longer quiltmaking experience, as it serves as a thread through many experiences and days and months and weaves in and out of other quilts.

I liked how every block was a puzzle, a mystery, waiting to be figured out, laying out the pieces to see what it should become and how to sew it together. I liked that it was portable, going to many doctor’s offices, on a road trip, and certainly while making my way through three seasons of watching Downton Abbey.

One center laid out on a computer laptop one night.

Photographed on a hotel chair, pieced while on a road trip to San Francisco.

The way I cut and laid out the pieces was like a twist of the wrist on a childhood kaleidoscope viewing toy, the glass pieces tumbling into another design, another shape. So I started to think of the blocks as visions through a kaleidoscope. I didn’t know how many of these blocks to make–it was one of those things I just kept working on and I figured I would know when I was done.

There were three.

Then there were six.

And then seven, and I was trying to figure out what to do. I ordered more fabric (bless the manufacturers who don’t yank their lines so quickly!). The small bits in the lefthand lower corner didn’t work. So I went with bigger triangles, trying to let the seven kaleidoscope shapes rise to the top.

I labeled and sewed those together by hand as well. Then onto the existing top.

It sat on my pin wall and I just didn’t know what to do–wasn’t really sold on it. Then I thought about the border, chose the bright lime, auditioned it for placement: large medallions going down the middle of the border, or small ones? Again, trying to make the quilt center the star, I went with the latter.

Sewing the top to the borders–the only time I used machine piecing on this quilt top. I decided to leave in the papers until it was all sewn, so they could stabilize the edges. One thing about the edges in this quilt–none were placed with regard to straight of grain, so the top was very flexible, and needed careful handling.

Once those borders were sewn on, the whole top began to sing together again. And now the next puzzle–how to quilt it? I let it sit some more, until I worked up the courage to move forward.

Cut and sewed together more of that second batch of fabric, trying to match medallion to medallion. It worked well enough.

I stretched out the back on my living floor, taped it down, then the batting, then the quilt and pinned it all together. Still didn’t know how to quilt this thing, so it sat for another spell. Finally, I realized it was never going to get done if I didn’t get going on it, and I had three days free–all in a row–so found the perfect thread in my bag from the last run to Superior Threads and got going.

I like to sew on my dining room table. I put down a placemat for my sewing machine and notions, and let the quilt slip-slide all over as I work.

To grip the quilt because I’m not a fan of quilting gloves, I use that stuff you can buy at an office supply store on my fingers (one brand is SortQuik–don’t know what mine is).

After two and half days and sixteen bobbins of thread, I wanted to be done. Really, I did, but the border was a little ripply, so it needed some more. Final tally? Seventeen bobbins of thread. The quilt is 53″ wide by 54 1/2″ long, so that’s fairly dense quilting. I used a polyester thread with little bit of sheen for the top, as well as Masterpiece, a cotton thread. I used Bottom Line for the bobbins–it holds more; I did loosen the top tension to get the stitch balance correct.

The back of the quilt, with the two colorways of the medallions. I came to really love this fabric: Michael Miller’s Gypsy Bandanna.

I had decided I didn’t want a narrow border to show on the top, so went with a faced binding. This label was the last thing to be sewn on, last night as I lay in my bed with my foot propped up on two pillows, recuperating from another surgery (this one not life-threatening, a planned event). But still, for those of us who like to keep busy, like to be doing, this forced idleness is really hard to deal with. I plan to try to figure out how to do some quilting this afternoon, my good foot on the sewing machine pedal and my gimpy foot propped up on a pillow on a drawer. I figure I can get 30 minutes in before I say “uncle,” and head back to bed.

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This is the 116th quilt I’ve made in my life, and the quilt is also part of the Finish-A-Long, quarter two.

100 Quilts

Using the Other Side of Fabrics

June 4, 2013 Elizabeth E.5 Comments

First off, after I finally figured out how to use Mr. Random Number Generator, and making sure that comment included a trip, I’m happy to announce that the winner of the Itsy Bitsy Scissors is Mary, of Needled Mom. Congrats!

I figured since I subjected you to a swath of vacation photos, I needed to get real and get some real quilts back up here on the blog. I started yesterday on the newest Schnibbles for June, Dulcinea, beginning with the background fabric in a navy-blue print:

A high-quality iPhone photo, uploaded, then recaptured as a screen shot. Love technology. Kidding, but it does come in handy.

I filled in with mostly Comma prints, but a few others (I hate doing one line of fabric), but it just wasn’t going anywhere for me, until I turned the background fabric over to the “other side,” not the “wrong” side (shown in pink circle). Why do I not say “the wrong side”? It comes from the era of watercolor quilts, when we tried to blend blend blend our tones across multitudes of itty-bitty squares. We learned to consider both sides of a piece of fabric as possibilities.

Here’s my version: Color Study: Night Infolds the Day. My friend Leisa got us started on this adventure–I think it was her first quilt ever. We cut about a zillion little squares, and since that cool gridded fusible web hadn’t been invented yet, we pieced them all.

So the technique was to smooth the colors across the colorful sections, and sometimes no matter how many little squares you browsed through, it just wasn’t possible.

So you flipped the piece over and used the “other side,” like the middle partial square in the upper row, and the full right-hand square in the second row.

I used an allover celestial print for the back–that was pretty daring for that time — all of 14 years ago.

The label. I exhibited this is a local quilt show, and stitched on their label, too. The best part of this story is that our friend Tracy adopted our six pizza boxes full of squares (we sorted them by value, from light to dark), added about a zillion white squares and made herself a wonderful quilt from our leftovers, another value of getting together in a quilt group. This is #29 on my 100 Quilts List.

Another quilt where I used the “other” side sometimes, was on the quilt I made for my mother (mentioned in last week’s post). We’d gone to a quilt show in Carmel, where I’d picked up a fat quarter pack of blues. This is titled The Blues of Carmel, and is #19 on my 100 quilts list. It’s named not only for the ocean at Carmel’s edge, and that pack of blues from the quilt show, but also because my mother has blue eyes.

The back of this is merely a whole cloth, allover design, which I used as a guide to hand-quilt. Pretty much the only people who machine quilted their quilts at that time were J. C. Penny’s or Sears. It was hand-quilt, or yarn-tie. Quite a range of options, right? Since this was made in my earlier days, it doesn’t have a label. I need to remedy that. This quilt was published in Joen Wolfrom’s book Color Play (page 64). Don’t know who Joen Wolfrom is? Google her. Her book, Patchwork Persuasion is ground-breaking. And just typing “#19 of 100 Quilts” makes me realize how far I’ve come, and how far quilting has evolved, in the nearly two decades since I made this. Of course, I’M not any older.

This was on my melon for lunch, which reminds me I need to get back to sewing that Schnibbles quilt, another one in Sherri and Sinta’s Another Year of Schnibbles!

Quilts

Punching the Creative Buttons

June 2, 2013June 2, 2013 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

{NOTE: If you are looking for the teensy scissor giveaway, you can find it *here.*}

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If you’ve never traveled to New York City, the question of whether that city is worth all the hype may cross your mind. I can’t answer that one, but from a quilting perspective, the stimulus provided by this “town,” as the cabbie called it one time, gives me a chance to look at things in a different way. I’ve had the unique opportunity to travel there three times in the past year and half and have come at the city as a tourist, not as a resident, so can’t answer whether it would be lovely to be there 24/7. Is my experience so different from any travel, anywhere? Don’t know that, but here are three things that punched my creative buttons this past week (along with some quotes on creativity).

“Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” –Ken Robinson

Five Pointz, Queens, New York–scheduled to be demolished in September of this year (2013), so hurry if you want to see it

Take the 7 train from Grand Central towards Queens, and as you round the curve, the elevated track passes an old factory, completed decorated with street art. Yep, like you, I don’t really want this on MY house, but here in its urban setting, it was amazing.

On Memorial Day when we were there, the area was deserted and quiet, with only a few tourists like ourselves strolling around, cameras clicking away. I put quite a few of these up on my Instagram feed and within hours, the street artists were identifying each other’s work, noting for me who created these and in some cases, which country they were from. The taggers (but most of these weren’t really tags, but full-fledged art) have to get permission to put their art up here, and I felt like I was interacting with a community as tightly-knit as our quilting community.

Detail of above

I liked also how people interacted with the art. This family was from France.

This young woman was there with three of her friends (can you see her in the middle?), and they did yoga poses in front of several pieces. We talked to one set of spray paint artists (the best paint is apparently purchased from art stores–no Home Depot for them) as they worked, and they said this building could look completely different next week, as it continually being painted over. There is one man who kind of runs the place, and to be able to paint here, new artists have to work their way up from scraping and cleaning the site, in order to adorn a wall with their creation.

As quilters, we have quilt shows, blogs, and places to show our art. And while the street art at 5Pointz may not be your thing, I thought it was interesting how this community had evolved in this particular place and time. I hate the blight of graffiti on my town, the tags scrawled across buildings, defacing them. But I loved coming here. My takeaways: passion for your art, dedication to completion, ability to put it out there and let it go, colors, shapes, novelty.

“You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid — things you liked — on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that: ‘Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.’ Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken.” –Ken Robinson

El Anatsui–exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (click on this link and watch the video of them putting up the pieces–reminds me of hanging a quilt show. Sort of)

El Anatsui is a Ghanian artist working in Nigeria and is a master at using materials at hand to create his art. These squares are all bottle tops, bent and shaped and then put together to create massive “quilts” of color and form and shape. In a video at the exhibition, he used the word “patchwork” to describe his work of creating pieces and put them together. There are a lot of similarities to what we quilters do, only ours are cloth, not liquor bottle tops.

My sister had gone the week before and said it was an amazing exhibit. Be sure to watch the video on the Brooklyn Museum’s website about how they installed these pieces. Although they are huge, they look as light as air. Takeaway: explore all kinds of colors, materials, shapes and forms. Don’t be afraid to reshape or move things around to get a different result.

“Human life is inherently creative. It’s why we all have different résumés. … It’s why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic.” –Ken Robinson

Punk: Chaos to Culture–showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Like the above street art, I am not drawn to punk naturally, but this exhibit at the Met I thought was brilliant, because it talked about the influence of punk fashion on the greater world of fashion–and it brought together some of the things I’d been seeing this week in my touristing. [All photos are from the internet.] To get a fuller perspective on the show, watch the video, narrated by Andrew Bolton, the curator.

This gallery, titled Bricolage, was where the culmination of recycling trash to treasure was noted, and I loved what what used in the skirt and shirt below:

Bottle Tops! Couldn’t believe it. They also had dresses that had graffiti sprayed on them, and how graffiti can be incorporated into T-shirt and dresses. I thought of the current obsession we have with text on cloth, and wondered if we were also feeling a wave of punk influence, in a more refined way.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” –Ken Robinson

I won’t show you any more of that exhibit, as it was punk-ish, after all, better seen in context, as is all art. But I will leave you with one more picture:

This is the grave of Elias Howe in the Green-Wood Cemetary in Brooklyn (hey–it was Memorial Day, after all), in the who we all owe a great debt, as he was the inventor of the modern sewing machine. Apparently the biggest sticking point was where the eye of the needle should go, and this account from a family story, tells how he came to invent this (from Wikipedia):

“He almost beggared himself before he discovered where the eye of the needle of the sewing machine should be located. It is probable that there are very few persons who know how it came about. His original idea was to follow the model of the ordinary needle, and have the eye at the heel. It never occurred to him that it should be placed near the point, and he might have failed altogether if he had not dreamed he was building a sewing machine for a savage king in a strange country. Just as in his actual working experience, he was perplexed about the needle’s eye. He thought the king gave him twenty-four hours in which to complete the machine and make it sew. If not finished in that time death was to be the punishment. Howe worked and worked, and puzzled, and finally gave it up. Then he thought he was taken out to be executed. He noticed that the warriors carried spears that were pierced near the head. Instantly came the solution of the difficulty, and while the inventor was begging for time, he awoke. It was 4 o’clock in the morning. He jumped out of bed, ran to his workshop, and by 9, a needle with an eye at the point had been rudely modeled.”

Wikipedia also notes that “Howe received a patent in 1851 for an “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure.” Perhaps because of the success of his sewing machine, he did not try to seriously market it, missing recognition he might otherwise have received.” In other words, he invented the zipper, too.

Sorry for the long post, but sometimes it’s interesting to note where we get “refilled” when we’ve run out of ideas, or are tired, or have too many UFO’s lurking in the closet and have lost our creative mojo. (Plus, we had a great time in The Big Apple.)

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Quotes are from Ken Robinson, who has given many TED talks on creativity and our educational system.