Light in the Crook of Shadows

Fall’s come to the bedroom.

I like to change up the quilt at the bottom of my bed every once in a while away from the standard blue one-patch that usually resides there.  And the fall colors really create a different mood in the room.

I began this quilt in a class about plaids, taught at Road to California by Roberta Horton.  One thing she said always stuck with me, and that was not too worry too much if the grain line was perfectly straight.  Part of that is because you could lose your mind trying to get it perfect on these ikat and plaid fabrics.  But, she said, slightly off-grain plaids give an energy to the quilt, and so to worry over them also deprives you of some motion within the design.

I chose a simple block design of a smaller square bordered by two triangles, all sewn to a larger triangle.  You can do a lot of things with this block.

I had fun adding that orange checkerboard as an inner border.

Here’s the crazy-pieced back.

And the labels.  The title and blurb come from my love of two words at the time: crook, meaning in the corner of something, like a “crooked elbow,” and illume, a variant of illuminate.  Click to enlarge if you want to see someone get carried away with fancy words, although I still like the title of the quilt very much.  I’d just change up a few things in that description tag. At that time I was in the final years of my undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, and was awash in fancy words — not only my own, but those of my classmates and visiting writers and seminars and all the books I was reading.  But I’ve decided that our quilts are as much a creation for all times as they are a record of who we were when we made them. Fancy-schmancy words and all.

Lyon Carolings–FSF

The mad summer of sewing quilts has come to an end.  I found the list of quilts I’d made at the beginning of my time away from the classroom, and “French Quilt” was on the top.  I’d remade this–or as I like to say–I made this twice, just trying to find the right way to show off these fabrics from France.  You’ve heard the story before (click on Lyon Carolings in the tag cloud to your right on the main page of this blog), so I won’t bore you with it now.

I just couldn’t decide what to quilt in the center of the yellow squares, but went with a floral motif from the border.  I had to rip out one block when it turned out I hated that particular thread.  I have picked out a lot on this quilt.  I’d originally stitched the green borders with a swirling design from that same outer border.  Wrong.  Back-up.  Re-do.  So I unpicked that, and channel/echo stitched it to mimic the blue X’s in the center of the quilt.

(In your best French accent) Zee Famous Border!  And of course you can’t see the flower I chose.  But here it is all Photoshopped up so I could pick out the main design lines:

And here I’m laying it out on the quilt and marking.  Does anyone else hate marking like I do?  I don’t want pencil, although that is the easiest.  And since I don’t plan to wash this quilt (it’s for my hallway), I don’t want something I have to wash to get out.  I don’t trust the disappearing markers, so that only leaves me with chalk and my ragged eye to get the job done.  It was interesting, but yes, we got the job done.

And the back, with its four colors of toile.  Make that five if you count the hanging sleeve at the very top.

How did I come by all this fabric?  Like Miss Carrie of Schnibbles fame, we had traveled to France.  The first few days were touring around the south of France before we were headed to Toulouse for his scientific meeting.  We’d traveled far that one day, arriving at our B & B late (8:45 p.m.) just outside the town of Aix-en-Provence, after getting lost.  They did serve us our dinner, and the part I remember was having a chilled melon soup in the dark in their courtyard.  It was lovely, and served in a hollowed-out cantelope half that had been frozen.  The French do food right, I must say.

Aix-en-Provence, painted by John Horsewell

The next morning, we ate breakfast with the white mountain in view, an oft-painted mountain, then glancing at the darkening sky, checked out and drove to into Aix-en-Provence.  We were hoping to catch a market day.  As soon as we parked the car (in the carpark on the outskirts of town), the skies opened up and a huge torrential downpour kept up trapped in a deep doorway for ten minutes.  Of course we had only one umbrella between us (!), so we ran from doorway to doorway to the center of the town.  The market was closing up, even though the rain was ending–it was still quite drippy.  We caught a few photos of the newly washed melons, berries, tomatoes, when the downpour started up again.  We dodged into a shop that ringed the market square, peering out at the rain.  We were pretty discouraged.

Then my husband leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Turn around.  I think you’ll be happy.”  I turned and looked.  We had ducked into a fabric shop and although tiny, it was filled, floor-to-ceiling with glorious fabrics printed in the traditional manner of old France.  Those were the days when an extra suitcase was no problem and weight limits had not been heard of yet.  I had brought along a soft-sided suitcase and between my purchases here–and the ones the next week in Toulouse (for they had a lovely fabric shop as well)–I filled that suitcase full.

I have purchased these fabrics in other places, but this shop, found while dodging the pouring rain, was the genesis of my collection.

If you want to start your collection, I can recommend French Connections, here in North Carolina in the US of A.  They have a wide range of choices (that’s where I bought that fabulous yellow border) and I think given the cost of importing, the high price of cotton and the weak dollar against the euro, they have reasonable prices.

Happy Sewing!

Family Tree

I really shouldn’t let this quilt show its face in the quilt world.  Really, it has that many problems.  But sometimes these quilts are fun to look and to remind myself of how far I’ve come as a quilter.

So the idea was, since we were headed to a family reunion, to make a banner for my husband and I, like I’d made for my mother.  Hers was more successful, and it’s all on account of the quilting.  I hadn’t yet taken a fusible class, so I was working with my old stand-by which unfortunately leaves the fabric like a slab of wallboard.

I cut out the tree, and then traced everyone’s hand for the leaves.  I slabbed on them on to a tone-on-tone background fabric (which, thankfully we don’t have around much as the fabric can change colors turning more yellow–I think the newer ones are better).

I then wrote our name using a Pigma pen, copying the style of my sister-in-law’s handwriting.

Then, for some strange reason, I decided to put it under my machine and quilt it.  Maybe I did that because this idea of quilting the quilt yourself was an idea that was percolating around; back in the Olden Days (when we wore skins and cooked over an open fire and used cardboard templates and cut everything out by scissors) there was no machine quilting on your own machine.  Either you hand-quilted it or you tied your quilt.  That was it.  Then the longarms started showing up, and then the idea came that you of course could do your own quilting.  This quilt is a testament as to why sometimes you shouldn’t.  Or you should take a class and get better.  (Which I’ve tried to do.)

Okay, here comes the prelude to the scary part.  Can you believe I switched out the color in the bobbin?  I did it again this year.  I’d better write this one down on the Things Not To Do list, and tack it up by my machine.

ACK!!! ACK!!! ACK!!!
Don’t you just love all the loose bobbin stitches, the globs of thread that burped out on the back, the horrendously balanced thread tension?  I give myself a little break because I WAS sewing through bunches of wallboard-glued-on-fused fabrics and that’s just about impossible.

But I have to say I learned a lot, and still am continuing to learn about the Big Three Elements of Free-Motion Quilting.  They are:

• Speed of the machine (how heavy your foot is in on the pedal)
• Speed of your hands moving the quilt around
• Tension/Thread/Needle Size.

I now sew with a size 14 Topstitching needle most of the time when I’m machine quilting.  Sometimes I bump up to a 16.  I ALWAYS test drive the thread tension — it can change with the thread you use –  on a small quilt sandwich that I keep by the machine.  And I really hope I never use a different color of thread in the bobbin again. (Cue: sound of head banging.)

Here’s a photo of my parents’ grandchildren all lined up by age.  Not all of them are shown here, but overall there are 27 of them.  And now we’re working on the next generation with nearly 20 great-grandchildren (an adoption or two are in process).  We’ve been at our bi-annual Reunion this past week, where I got to see all those new cute little great-grands, and they got to meet their auntie–me!

National Park/Anniversary Quilt

The first time I went camping as an adult was with my intended husband, my Dave.  His brother and sister and their children, and Dave and I and my four children all packed up and went camping to a place where a giant German shepherd terrorized the campground and barked all night, the neighbors drank too much and were too noisy, and we burned our foil dinners.  It was perfect.  I was so happy to be there with Dave, and the kids and out in nature.

Fast forward six years and we’d been to a lot of the National Parks in the West and a few on the East coast as well (although not always camping in them).  He proposed to me in Yosemite.  Our first family camping trip was to Zion National Park.  We had dated near the giant redwoods up in San Francisco, and had taken a summer camping trip (sans the kids) to Sequoia and to Kings Canyon. And we’re headed to Yellowstone this week.

One of our local fabric stores had printed up several different sets of orange crate labels since our area is home to the navel orange industry.  I chose the National Parks set and put the labels in an Attic Window setting, then sashed them to further set them off.  I used naturalistic fabrics, and a sky full of stars fabric for the border.

Our local home subdivision is called Canyon Crest, and probably a long time ago before all our homes were built, orange groves probably dotted the area.  The best smell you’ll ever smell is in April, when all the citrus flowers burst into bloom.  It’s better than candy, just standing on a slight hill above the groves on a spring night, the orange blossoms scent surrounding you in the mild temperatures.

More nature scenes on the back.

I go back and forth on the name of this quilt.  Sometimes it’s the National Parks Quilt.  Other times it’s the Anniversary Quilt.  I can’t believe with all our challenges he and I have made it this far–me a crazy single mom with four children (teenager to kindergartener).  He a studious scholar with no children of his own.  We took a leap off our own mountaintop, a jump into the unknown, and yet we’ll celebrate anniversary #22 in a week.  Happy us!!

Southern Brights–FSF

This is my son Matthew and his wife, Kim.  Sometimes she likes to be called Kimberly.  Other times it’s just Kim.  She’s a bright and sunny personality of a gal, and easily matches my son in energy, determination and love of a good joke.  They’re great.

This is their family, taken at a family camping trip (quickly! and that’s why Emilee has no shoes on), in the mountains above Phoenix Arizona, a place they call their home.  But only for another day or so, because he’s been promoted in his corporate job and they’re off to Cinncinati Ohio.  I love that she would follow him anywhere, so I decided to make her a quilt to honor her love of the Southwest and her bright and sunny personality.

Ta Da!  I give you “Southern Brights.”  It’s a Bento Box block, with lots of wild and crazy fabrics, put together in a bundle by Fabricworm, but of course, I added a few of my own.

My favorite is the little Round Robin fabric with little round robins on it.  I also like the punched-up hugeness of those flowers in the middle.  Change in scale?  This quilt’s got it.  Change in color?  Yep, yep.  Change in value?  Not so much (all medium fabrics) so I threw in some lights and brights to keep the eye moving.

Love the Marimekko fabric on the back, punctuated by a strip of the the Anne Kelle flowers.  Alas, our Crate and Barrel outlet has closed, so now if I want those fabrics, I need to travel an hour and half–instead the previous half-hour.  So I hoard my stash of these, but this quilt just called out for something sunny and bright.

I wish them all success in their new home and new state!

Cowgirls Write Letters

My husband and I lived for a year in Washington, D.C. while he did his sabbatical at the Department of State.  (That’s what they call it.  Most of the rest of us just call it the State Department.)  I investigated any fabric store within reasonable driving distance and one of the ones was Material Girls in La Plata Maryland, about 45 minutes drive from where we lived.  Fast forward a year, and I went back for a visit to see my pal Rhonda, and of course, we had to hit some fabric stores.  Didn’t have a lot of room in the luggage, so I was drawn to the collection of fat quarters they had, and selected as many of this line as I could find.

But what pattern?  Luckily they had a whole rack of Schnibbles patterns, by Miss Rosie’s Quilt Company, and Rhonda and I each chose a couple of them.  I decided on this one, Decoy, then enlarged the blocks, cut them out, and had to piece the border because I was running out of fabric.

But what backing?  Of course it had to be a Western theme.  The cowboys were heavily represented on the front, so I went with the women on the back.

And I had lots of letter fabric, so I envisioned them all out on the plains, posting letters to each other as they herded the cattle wherever cowboys and cowgirls herd cattle.

We all know that the ladies are more frequent letter writers than the men.  So I titled it, Cowgirls Write Letters.  I made it extra tall for my own cowboy to use while he watches his spaghetti westerns on the television.  Thanks, Carrie, for such a great pattern!

Munich’s Garden Gate

Because the experts always say to have a better chance of accomplishing a goal, I have started thinking each week what I want to finish.  I realized that this week, because my red fabric for my Red/White Challenge hadn’t arrived (my planned finishing item), I would have to think of something else.  It was this quilt.

We went to Munich in 2004, and I shot 300 photos, digitally.  And some time in April 2005, I erased them all.  (!)

But I had already planned to use this photo for the center for a project I was working on with my guild: a medallion quilt, so had moved it to my desktop.  It’s the only remaining image. I carried on, blowing it up, figuring out the flowers and what colors I wanted them, as I had carried home a sack of scraps from a small fabric shop in Munich that made dirndls for Oktoberfest.  We had been there shortly after that season, and they sold me the bag for about 25 bucks.  Many of the fabrics in this quilt are from Munich.

Here’s the central medallion, almost finished.  Then the hard work of figuring out the borders–always a dance.  I invested in a couple of used books, and slowly, border by border, I built the quilt.  We were on sabbatical in Washington, DC at the time, and I was able to finish my quilt top before we left to return home; I quilted the top all the way across America, finding more thread in Albuquerque when I ran out.

It sat, quilted, for a while and when I came across it again, I decided to add more quilting.  Back at it with the blue painters’ masking tape until I finally got fed up with it all and started drawing light lines of pencil on the top.  I finished that quilting, then it sat again, until I started the photography project.  I dug into the stash, found the binding, made the label and finished stitching around it in time for this week’s Finishing School Friday.  I HAD to have something finished!

When I went out to photograph it, the wind was moving the quilt back and forth, and it flicked into the sun, creating this translucent effect.

All the hand quilting–think of it as if every state along I-40 has a bit of itself in this quilt!

The labels, all stitched down.

Five years later, we went back to Munich, and this time I didn’t erase all my photos (back it up, people, back them ALL up!).  I didn’t ever find the original gate, but I did see this grillwork alongside a building near the dirndl shop, near the beer garden downtown, with the same central motif.  It felt like I was seeing an old friend.

First Quilt Ever

Sometimes it’s wise to pause in the headlong rush to completion and busyness and take stock of where you are before you jump off the cliff again, and summer is often a good time to do just that.  I’ve mentioned before that I began to photograph all my quilts.  First I had to make a list, and as people talked to me, I would pencil in another and another.  It’s like forgetting one of the children, but I think I’ve about got everyone.

Occasionally I’ll post about them, and as I do, I’ll catalogue them on my page Quilt Gallery–Body of Work.  Here’s the first quilt I can ever remember making: a whole cloth quilt made from some densely woven Holly Hobby print.

I was pretty clueless about this quilting business, but I had slept under handmade quilts on occasion so our family was not bereft of something original.  I picked out this fabric, layered it over a plain yellow backing with some lumpy batting and put it in a hoop and stitched around nearly each figure.

Why lumpy quilt batting?  They were all lumpy in the early 1970s–big polyester wads that you had to unfold and unfold and smooth out and then stitch fairly closely so it wouldn’t shift in the washing of the quilt.  Decorative edges were the norm; this one has 2″ eyelet ruffling with rounded corners.  I’m pretty sure I stitched it onto the top, then folded the backing over to meet it and whipstitched the edges together.  I wrote about this in an earlier post, and defend its homeliness.

The back.  So different than what’s au courant now.

And here’s the place where I couldn’t figure out how to stop or start–a nice little nub of thread under one of Holly’s shoes.  I think it was about another 5 years before I really figured out that beginning/ending of the thread thing.

I realize that looking at my first quilt is like that old saying about my child’s precious and lovely, and yours is coarse and picks its nose, but I hope that by showing this, you’ll be realize that everyone is somewhere on the quilting spectrum–from beginner to master quilter.  This is where I began, and if you post or write about your first quilt, come on back here and leave a comment so we can see how far you’ve come!

Gone Fishin’

Not really, but I just returned from a family reunion in Zion National Park in Southern Utah.  This was just after the rainstorm, and the Watchman Mountain was reflected in a puddle.  It is glorious waking up to, and going to sleep to this sight, as our campground is just below its colorful beauty.

Not only was the place beautiful and with wonderful people, which were made all the better when I discovered that an in-law (the wife of one of the young cousins) loves to quilt!  I dragged out the quilt I had on my sleeping bag to show her.  “Brights,” she said.  She likes the Reproduction fabrics, a more subdued palatte than the one below.  I keep this quilt in the car as it’s smaller.  It was really cold that first night (43 degrees) so I was glad I had brought it along.

This was a mystery quilt done by my guild, and I had a stash of fabrics from Me and My Sister Designs, which all worked together just fine. I have never named this one, but generally refer to it as “the bright mystery quilt.”

True confession: I generally HATE mystery quilts.  I’ve done several and I feel totally constrained by not knowing how the fabrics will work together, or where the darks/lights/colors will end up.  Some of the rows in the above quilt worked okay, and some didn’t.  Maybe that’s why I keep this in my car!

This Quilt Is A Mess

Whooey!  Another tempest in a quilting teapot! (And this quilting disaster–explained at the very end!)

I love all this controversy.  I love that we are talking about quilt issues, digging our hands deep in the loam of the quilting garden and really talking about things that bother us and that delight us.  Rachel of Stitched in Color was quite frank one day about Saying Things She Didn’t Think She Should.  Bammo!  Millions of comments–some, mostly rants–about one aspect of the quilt world or another.  I should have expected as much from all of us women who run blogs.  Then her next post was about Things We Should Say, and the issues of it’s a subjective world (quilting) that some are trying to categorize objectively (skill levels, style labels).

Here’s my .02:

I’ve read all the posts and it seems like the conversation/comments has generated a healthy discussion, re: the labels of modern vs. traditional quilting.  More about that at the end.
But about the other–the “dumbing down” stream.  I’ve read all *those* original posts and realize that it had its genesis in trying to describe levels of skill.  I think this is sort of one place where there is no subjectivity, and that’s kind of what set off the whole alarm bells and craziness.  Either you have the skills to make successful HST (Half Square Triangles) or you don’t.  It’s meeting an objective standard.  For some, HST are intimidating.  For others, they do them in their sleep.  I do think it can be successfully argued that there are certain skills that come with practice and after having achieved them, a quilter can objectively say s/he’s got those down.  I consider myself a master quilter, having done just about every technique in the book (some while I was majoring in CloTex in college, some afterwards as I took quilt classes to become more proficient).  The point is I was still learning, still trying. And as I want to improve myself,  I’m now trying to master more applique techniques.  So even while I may have objectively met some unnamed standards of skill level, there is always more that can be learned, can be perfected upon.

Now: my .02 on the “modern” quilting business.  A while back ( a year ago?) I read a blog post putting forth the idea that *modern* was one leg of a three-legged stool, the other two legs being *traditional* and the *art quilt*.  I was happy with that idea–that we were all finding ways to be creative.  I love the injection of fresh! new! that the modern gals have brought to the industry.  I started quilting in the 1970′s when I was 21, and personally, I thought we were all getting a bit old and musty.  Something had to change.  I wasn’t ready to go the art quilt route because I still love a good cuddle under a hand-made quilt.  So I was happy to see some fresh ideas, another way to contribute to our big wide world of quilting.  It’s not an either/or.  It’s all of us together, doing what we love.

On that note, I present to you. . . This Quilt Is A Mess.

I don’t think that this was its original name, but it is certainly the name it has now.  I’d recently been on a trip to Venice and like so many other quilters, fell in love with the floor of the main cathedral.  I bought the POSTER of the floor (they wouldn’t let us take photos) and started to sketch it out.  This quilt was supposed to be one of those very clever quilts of using one block yet coloring it so many different ways that the quilt would be chameleon-like.  Yeah, right.

It started out that way–I think that section is kind of in the upper right.  Then I got tired.  Then I started piecing things every which way.  Then it sat, like an ugly gnome in a room of beauty queens.  Here’s where the class thing comes in.  I had to have a quilt to take to a workshop with Hollis Chatelain, who was just hitting the circuit after her very successful painted images (then quilted) were winning big prizes.  I knew I would be experimenting with quilting, so grabbed this.  She talked to us about spray basting (so I did that) and brought the “glued-together” sandwich to the second day of the class.  I realized that I had to be plain-jane with the quilting, not swirly.

So the quilting consists of eight billion rows, one-quarter-inch apart, some in black thread and some in red and occasionally switching directions.  I was never so happy to be done with a quilt.  I put the binding on, a sleeve for hanging, but basically it is STILL an ugly gnome in a room of beauty queens.  It rarely sees the light of day.

So, even though I execute flawlessly in objective skill level (well, okay, maybe not ALL the time), subjectively I can say: This Quilt Is A Mess.  To this day, I’m still not a complete fan of tight row stitching, but I have learned from Red Pepper Quilts that there is a fresh, modern way to adapt that technique so it’s not so painful.  So to all you bloggers & quilters out there–keep sharing, keep showing, keep writing.  It’s good for us all.  Even the tempests in the teapots.