Structure: Four-in-Art Art Quilt, February 2014

February 1, 2014February 1, 2014 Elizabeth E.20 Comments

On Line
No. 2 in the Urban Series: Structure

Leanne asked us to consider the theme of Structure for this challenge. While other ideas teased, the vision of these immense structures of steel and wire kept haunting me.

My husband and I got off the freeway to follow a few, photographing their massive, yet airy, construction reaching high into the sky, grabbing a line and passing it to their fellow tower.

It made me think about structure in terms of how electricity — and their cousin, the telephone line — have created their own structure in our lives. We used to depend on mail, human contact, driving somewhere, but now we email, Instagram, Facebook, Skype, and need scads and scads of voltage to do it all. The structure of our lives has changed.

I had hoped to make a quilt of tiny envelopes, distress them somehow, then superimpose the grand power scaffolding on top of that, representing the change in communication. It was not meant to be.

I printed out the upwards view of the tower, intrigued by its criss-crossing lines, then proceeded to sew together a billion little angular pieces. I kept thinking how proud of me Leanne would be, as she is the queen of improv quilting.

As I completed a section, I’d lay it out.

Done, but it was a bit small, so I added a border.

I’m showing it from the back, as I’m mighty proud of those billions of seams.

I chose a variegated thread and quilted where I wanted to. Maybe those scribbled lines in the border are conversations? Or interrupted code from a blog post? Or the news from a family member, broken into bits and pieces as it is transmitted? The fabric is scraps from my most recent quilt, Amish With a Twist Two, perhaps because I wanted to work with line and not pattern (and certainly with all the weeny subdivisions, there is plenty of pattern) but also because the sack of scraps had not been put away yet.

I like this photo because the leaves and berries of the bush behind this tree call out the color in the quilt.

Posing with its soul mates: the telephone box and the power meter.

I had planned to piece all the little envelopes together and put them on the back, but I decided that with all the seaming, the quilt would be one gigantic lumpy square. Plain backing then, from the Collage line of fabric, and then added the label. That morning nothing would go right, so it’s on and done; not perfect, but sometimes that’s just how it has to be.

I owe my associations in this Four-in-Art group to these very structures, long looping lines bringing me quilting and friendship.

Take a look at how our group interpreted this theme:

Amanda at www.whatthebobbin.com

Anne at www.springleafstudios.com

Betty at a Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/toot2/12251011196/

Carla at lollyquiltz.blogspot.com

Leanne at shecanquilt.blogspot.com

Nancy at http://www.patchworkbreeze.blogspot.com

Rachel at rachel-thelifeofriley.blogspot.com

CODA

Since I wrote about how I made it, I won’t be doing a “deconstructed” post for this quilt. And when I hear what the new theme is for May, I’ll let you know. As usual, there was some amount of frustration over this quilt–deadline crept up on me, a “why am I doing this to myself?” moan (or two), and then the getting down to it.

Teresa Amabile said “Creativity depends on a number of things: experience, including knowledge and technical skills; talent; an ability to think in new ways; and the capacity to push through uncreative dry spells.” At the end, I’m always glad I pushed through any dry spell to arrive at the finished Four-in-Art art quilt.

Quilt Shows · Quilts

Amish Quilt, in progress

January 12, 2014April 27, 2014 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

Finished the inner top. Put on two borders and still have one border to go this gigantic quilt (finishing at 105″ square). What was I thinking?

I was thinking I loved the colors, the sparkle of the brights, and the use of solids.

This picture is titled Border Fail. They sent me 2 5/8 yards of Blue Coal (it’s a nighttime photo, so all the colors are wacky), and after dinner I was tired but wanted to push on to finish the quilt. So I came upstairs and whack, whack, whack started cutting crosswise strips to piece together for the outside border. After I’d cut about half the strips, I realized they sent me enough to do a lengthwise cut for that outside border, which would really stabilize the quilt. I slumped into my chair, and yes, got all teary about how dumb I was. I was tired. My husband said some “there, there, theres” and I ordered a new swath of Blue Coal from an online shop, which should be here by the end of next week.

Lessons learned: husband is a gem, mistakes can be made, especially if I’m tired, and beware of cutting after dinnertime. I’d already put on the first inner border, and the little squares border. Now that’s an exercise in frustration. Those squares NEVER fit, so you go back in and stitch another 1/16″ of a seam on a few squares, inching it down to fit. If you want to see what I’m working toward, here’s a photo of Amish With A Twist–II:

Here’s Amish with A Twist–Version I, and it’s really big, too.

Found this on the web when I went searching for ideas on how to quilt my quilt. Which won’t be done until NEXT week now.

So the center of my version, Amish With A Twist-2, is this lighter set of fabrics, so that would call out for beige or cream or light gray or something. But then the outer is darker, so that indicates black or dark gray. And I’m having this done by my long-armer, and to keep it affordable, I’ll probably do an edge to edge design.

This quilter had hers done in colorful variegated thread, which she showed on another page. That’s certainly an option, as it does melt into the light-colored fabrics. But I’m not too crazy about how it looks on the dark black. My version doesn’t have that dark black thing, so maybe it will be okay. What would you choose? Road to California is coming up in a couple of weeks and I can pick up some Superior Thread there. Any ideas?

And if you are going to Road to California, want to try for a meet up–say Friday, late afternoon? That will give the out-of-towners time enough to get there, and by then, I’ll be ready to call it done for the day. If you are going, leave a comment, and we’ll figure out a place. Possibly near the ice cream cones. Or cookies.

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Reminder: my blogging software will occasionally place an ad on this page. It’s the way I can keep blogging for free, so it you see one, it’s for them–not for me.

Quilts

In Bed With a Bad Cold

December 7, 2013December 7, 2013 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

In Bed with a Bad Cold
by Pam Rupert

Posted without permission. (Pam, if you wish, I’ll remove it, but thanks for your great rendition!)

And this was the Christmas Tree down at Urgent Care this morning (my second trip–I’m going to lick this yet!)

But I need to digress backwards and show off the three totes made in my Tote Bag class by three wonderful students. They worked hard and all finished up.

I had taken some time this week to work on the quilting on my Santa quilt, and as always, How to Quilt This can really take over my mindset and stop me in my tracks.

I have had troubles free-motion quilting (FMQ) in the past, and have worked to figure it out. I now have three different FMQ feet (the last one was the one that worked best), and am still experimenting with threads. This one, So Fine by Superior Threads, is a dream, as is using their topstitch size 12 needles. I purchased, and read, both of Diane Gaudynski’s books on quilting, which nudged a bit further along on this path. Both were helpful, but I don’t really see myself heading in her direction of teensy-weensy quilting decorated by gorgeous swooping feathers and lots of echo quilting.

This week, Judi Madsen’s book arrived, and this is more what I hope to quilt like. I’m already behind because she has a huge quilting machine, so our techniques of moving the cloth and figuring out the quilting stitches will be different, of necessity. But I found it really helpful in so many ways. She also has a video up on YouTube which is also instructive. So I quilted until the Bad Cold determined that I would not be quilting.

So the quilt is loosely folded up on my sewing room floor, waiting until I get better, get the Christmas tree decorated, the Christmas caramels made, the stack of research papers graded, the final given, the final graded. . . But you know, Santa doesn’t come until the 24th of December, does he? I doubt mine will arrive much before that either. And somewhere in there we need to do a little bit of shopping. Yessiree, it’s a bad time of year to be in bed with a bad cold.

100 Quilts · Quilts

Harvest Weekend

November 9, 2013January 10, 2026 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

With pumpkins and tawny hues and brown grasses prevalent in the colors at this time of year and in the Northern Hemisphere, falling temperatures, it triggers the idea of harvest: cutting the wheat, gathering the last of the fall vegetables, All Is Safely Gathered In, and that sort of thing. Well, what constitutes a harvest?

It all starts with seeds, a planting of an idea, a sowing of labor with the yield some time off in the future. An idea, like beginning to learn how to make Amish quilts from a book, as I sat in the scorching heat of a Dallas Texas summer many years ago, sweat running down my back reading Roberta Horton’s Amish Adventure.

I had escaped to the back porch for three minutes peace from the marauding hordes of hot tired children in watching some movie on the VCR, steeping my mind in the stillness of these stunning quilts.

Strong graphic design and the muted, yet brilliant, colors enticed me, and I began small, with doll quilts, experimenting in the shapes, the colors. At that time the best we could hope in terms of solid fabrics was a mix of cottons and polyester-cottons. Purists would gasp now, but we had just barely graduated from using cardboard templates with taped edges to cutting out the lids of margarine tubs to use instead.

Roberta Horton’s book, first published in 1983, rocked my tiny isolated world of quilting.

I moved from doll quilt-sized quilts to a larger wall quilt, still unfinished. And then to a larger quilt, laid out in rows in the corner of my bedroom for weeks, while I refined the gradations of color.

I had drawn out Sunshine and Shadow on graph paper, trying to figure out the coloration, mimicking what I saw in fabric. This was early in my quilting career: all of my quilts on this post are numbers 10 and 11 quilts on my 100 Quilts list. I also made a faceless doll to match what I’d heard were common in the Amish country. And then, Amish Quilting was the first quilt class I ever taught, in a small shop in Arlington, Texas, now defunct, and yes, we made a doll quilt, and yes, we used Roberta Horton’s book.

Back to the Sunshine and Shadow, I figured out the borders, sandwiched with flannel (as she noted that Amish quilts were flatter than our fluffy renditions) and I began quilting it by hand, criss-cross, and then cut paper patterns for a twined-vine border design.

The seed planted by Horton and her quilts and her book is now in a second harvest, if that’s possible. Last summer, C & T Publishers put out a call for Amish quilts of all types to be considered for a new rendition of An Amish Adventure. I submitted my photographs and had one quilt accepted. The book has now been released and is titled Amish Quilts–The Adventure Continues, and it as much a celebration of that first book in C & T’s publishing history as it is the style and cultural contribution of the Amish quilt–certainly a forerunner to today’s modern quilts.

Here’s my doll quilt, made so many years ago. I now consider it as an entry in the first round of strong bold graphic designs and solid fabrics. In the book, mine is right next to Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr, of the Modern Quilt Studio and Craft Nectar blog. I certainly did do a happy dance in the kitchen as I opened up the package.

You can get the book from the C & T Publishing website and from Amazon.com. My mother already has her copy, so I know it is shipping. If you haven’t had a chance to make yourself an Amish quilt, perhaps now is the time, before too many more harvests stride past.

I like to think about harvests, as to me it always indicates a leap of faith somewhere. At some point I made a quilt, and now can “raise the song of harvest home.”