Art, Quilts, and Other Adventures

Attachment to quilts

I was reading Jane Ann's blog, and her post about whether or not you love your "stuff" -- and by "stuff" she meant the quilts that you make.  You should go read what she said (here).  I started to comment, and got a little long-winded. I'm still trying to figure out this blog etiquette stuff, and decided that maybe my answer would be more appropriate as a post here on my own blog.

I guess it wasn't so much about whether you love your stuff, but whether or not you are attached to what you've made, and whether or not you are able to part with those creations (whether by gifting them or by selling them).

I'm somewhere in the middle, I think.  Over time, quilting has become about the process for me, but I am still invested in the product.

If something is started with the intent that it will be given away, I generally don't have a problem doing just that. I have, on occasion, decided I like something too much to end up giving it away, so I come up with something else.  Case in point:  my first attempt at an entry in the Have a Heart contest.  I like it so much that I can't bear the thought of it not coming home to me after the exhibit is over (the entries will be auctioned off to benefit the American Heart Association). 

If I'm making it because it is something I want to make just for the sheer joy of making it -- then yes, I would have a hard time giving it away or selling it.  I can think of several that will never leave my possession no matter how much I'm offered.

And now that I contemplate, there are some quilts in my stack that even though they don't have a designated home (other than my own), I could give them up with little to no qualms.  They've served their purpose (giving me something to do), and I probably wouldn't miss them.  Probably.

I have been wondering about this in connection with the $100,000 quilt contest  -- the first winner is going to receive her check tomorrow morning on the Today Show.  It's a purchase award -- the quilt will be auctioned off for charity.  I wonder if it was hard for her to decide to do that, or if the $$$ was enough incentive to get over any attachment she might have to the quilt.

WIP Wednesday

Even though I've been busy with Christmas, I have managed to do a few quilty things this past week.  I "let" myself start my new project (Peppermint Swirls) yesterday.  It probably won't get much further than this for awhile, but it was fun to do something with new fabric and easy piecing!

This is a quilt that has been pieced for several years.  The color is a little off in this picture.  THe green isn't quite so light on the actual quilt.  I started quilting it, and didn't really like what I was doing at the time (using Rail grey thread on the back -- even with the grey thread it was nearly impossible to see what I was doing).  I did more of the quilting than I should have -- note to self:  if you don't like it after 5 minutes of quilting, you probably aren't going to like it after an hour.

Another note to self:  don't leave projects half quilted for more than a month or two.  Your style changes and you'll think of a better idea.

Yet another note to self:  just because it is your own quilt, doesn't mean it deserves custom quilting, especially if the quilting won't show up....
Off and on over the past few days (watching TV...) I've been frogging the existing quilting.  It'll probably take me until next Christmas to do that (the back is black, and the stitches are hard to see on that side, too....

And last, but not least -- I quilted this wallhanging that I pieced in Fall of 2005.  It might be finished by Christmas 2007.  That is, if I can find the 3rd strip of red binding fabric that wasn't with the quilt top and the other 2 strips of binding.  Maybe Christmas 2008.

Well, I need to shut down so we can head out the door.

Have a great Wednesday!

Happy Birthday, Debra!

Today is my baby sister's 30th birthday.  By now, she is actually 30 (she reminded us earlier that she didn't technically turn 30 until 5:40PM).  I think she's a little traumatized by the event, but I think the ones that have more right to be traumatized are our parents....

My Mom and I sent her a special surprise for her birthday.  Unfortunately, we didn't manage to send it until today, but considering our package mailing track record, that's actually pretty decent.  Hopefully she'll have it by Wednesday or Thursday, and then I can share what we sent.  It's pretty cool.

I did get the 2nd teacher gift quilted today.  I meant to add that yes, I have set a precedent with the teachers that I'm sure they'll expect me to continue.  Honestly, I'm OK with that.  Consdiering the massive job they have, I think that a small quilt from me is the least I can do to thank them for what they do with the resources they have.  Elementary school teachers (OK, all teachers...) are true-blue heroes in my book.  I should also add that in our small school, there are only 2 teachers per grade.  By virtue of being twins, the boys are pretty much guaranteed that throughout their elementary career,  one or the other will get all of the elementary teachers, so I'm not worried about any of the fighting over who gets my kids.....VBG.....

I didn't get the quilting finished until about 15 minutes ago (and it's 10PM now...), so I'll post pictures tomorrow.  Now to get the bindings finished.  I have until Thursday at about 1PM (the time I'm supposed to be at school for the Christmas party...) so I ought to have plenty of time, right?

I completely forgot to mention something else I did over the weekend.  I have a new project that's just screaming for me to start it, no, I'm not really hearing voices....so don't call the men in the white coats (yet).  But before I let myself start it, I figure I need to finish a few  other things, first.  So, I worked some more on an in-process project. 

The pattern is from Miss Rosie's Quilt Company.  I bought the fabric as a kit awhile back.  I actually had another pattern from Miss Rosie, and I was debating between the two.  I asked my children to decide, and they picked this one.  I think that "Super Mario" refers to Mario Lemieux, the hockey player.  I'm pretty sure they thought it referred to Super Mario, the Nintendo character.... 

Yesterday, I finally managed to get all of the 5 inch units finished.  You don't actually make the large "blocks" -- the quilt gets pieced as diagonal rows of 5 inch units.  Well, I thought I had finished them all.  As I started laying them out on my design wall, I discovered that I had not yet made some of the hourglass units, nor have I made the setting triangles.  Oh well.  It's closer, anyway.   LOL.....

Fabric Crisis!

I have had an extremely productive weekend.  So productive, in fact, that I decided to focus on what I was doing and skip blogging about it until after it was over.

I'll get to the fabric crisis mentioned in the title in a minute....

On Friday, I managed to finish up the monster quilt that I was complaining about in the previous post.  The quilt has since been delivered and the customer was very happy.  I did not take any pictures, as I prefer not to have photographic evidence of those sorts of quilts.

Saturday was full of cleaning fun.  Or something like that.  My studio and office have reached the point where the chaos is seriously impacting my ability to accomplish anything, so I dug in.  Literally.  My studio doesn't look a whole lot better, but I'm trying to be systematic about it, and really sort it out, rather than just move the piles around.   We also got our Christmas shopping done Saturday night.  Well, almost done.  Just one or 2 more things here or there....but the bulk is done.  Now comes the wrapping....

I did also manage to make 2 things on Saturday.  One is a gift that I can't share a picture of yet.  The other is kind of silly and only took about 5 minutes, but...it's red and I made it.  I have been using my car key with no key chain for about forever, so yesterday I pulled out some beads and a charm and made myself a quick key chain thingie....

Today (Sunday) was going to be another day of cleaning fun, but it occurred to me that if I want to give the boys' teachers quilts for Christmas, I had better get them quilted, um, NOW....

So, off I went to the cupboard to retrieve the tops that I had set aside several months ago for this express purpose.  I set them out on the floor and the boys happened to wander by.  Joe said "I hate them."

Excuse me??  Keep in mind that I had not asked for opinions, nor had I actually said anything about them at all.

I told them what I had in mind for the quilts.

Joe said "Oh.  Well, Mrs. D. would probably like that one."

Will allowed that Mrs. K. would probably like the other one.

Alrighty, then.

The one for Mrs. D. already had a back pieced and the binding made, so I decided to start with it.  The quilting went pretty fast, and it looks pretty good, I think.   Actually, the quilting went remarkably well -- the borders had been applied well, it was nice and flat and square and I was sure patting myself on the back.

I pulled it off the frame and started to attach the binding.  I had to restart the binding because I assumed it was cut 2.5 inches, but quickly realized that it was only 2 inches cut and needed a 1/4 inch seam instead of the 3/8 in. seam I was trying to use.  Usually I make the wider binding, but since I had made this so long ago, I could remember why I had only used 2 inches.  My suspicion was that perhaps I was running low on fabric and this was all I could do.

I rounded the 3rd corner and thought, "Gee, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of binding left."  So, I stopped and did a little test run of the rest of the binding.

Yup.  You guessed it.  I was short.  By about 10 or so inches.  Fabric crisis indeed.

Did I mention that it has probably been several years since I pieced this particular top?  I have moved since I pieced this top.  It has been years since I've seen even a scrap of the binding fabric that I was using for this quilt.

Ugh.

I did decide to go searching through my scraps to see if there was any possible way I could find a small bit of this fabric.

This is one of the bins that I keep scraps in.  By scraps, I mean little bits of leftovers from various projects.  Small bits.  There are some orphaned blocks in here, and the occasional large hunk, but mostly it's little bits.  The scary thing is that this bin is not the only bin.

The scariest thing is that when I opened it and dumped it out, this is what I was faced with.  I'm sure that you won't be surprised to find out that I did not find any of the fabric I was looking for.  I also discovered that I was unable to squeeze all of this fabric back into the same bin it had come out of.  It grew!  Like a monster!  It was actually kind of interesting to dump it out and paw through it for a short while.  I can barely even remember some of the stuff that these scraps go to.  I wish I have been better at documenting the quilts I make.  I need to work on that going forward.  Hopefully this blog will help.

In a completely different pile, I found about a 1/3 of a yard of one of the other fabrics that I had used to make the quilt, so I punted.  I took the binding I had already sewn on back off.  I cut the original binding and the new binding into 2 by 10 inch strips.  I sewed them together with diagonal seams and wound up with:

It's OK, and might have even been better if I had used shorter strips.  Actually,  I guess it's kind of hard to see what it looks like in this picture.  I need to take better pictures of it tomorrow in the morning light. 

It's a cute quilt -- it's a Thimbleberries pattern from one of the original books -- Peppermint Swirl.

In addition to all of that mess, I also spent time today working on Mrs. K's quilt.  At this point, it is on the frame waiting to be quilted:

When this top went into the closet it was just the inner body of the quilt.  It was only 48 inches square and while it might have been OK to leave it that way, I decided that it really needed to be bigger to be a usable lap quilt.  And now that it is done, visually I think it works better.  For me, at any rate.

I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to quilt this one, or what thread color I'm going to use, but hopefully I'll have a finished quilt tomorrow night to report on.

And if that isn't enough, I actually did something else this afternoon related to a gift that I can't talk about (yet), but as soon as I can, I'll post some pictures.  It's pretty fun.

Just thinking about everything I did today is making me sleepy, so I guess I'd better toddle off to bed!

Yes, I know it is almost Christmas

But, I have absolutely nothing art or quilt related to show for myself for the last day and a half, so you get to see a picture of my children in this year's Halloween costumes.   

I'm not really sure what I've managed to do.  Not a whole lot.  I've been in and out of the house with various school and town activities (we have a Holiday Happenings event in town, with various sales and food and music and stuff going on).  Plus, we went to see  Flushed Away last night (which was pretty cute).

This afternoon, my mom and I are taking a short overnight trip to Minnesota to deliver a quilt to my Great Aunt Barb.  It is a Dresden Plate that was hand appliquéd by Caroline Cramer, 1920s or early 1930s.  Caroline was my mom's maternal great grandmother, which makes her my great great grandmother.  I did the quilting, my mother put on the binding.  I have pictures of it on my website in one of my photo galleries.  

Just for fun, I'll post a picture of it here, too, that way there is actual quilt content and not just this creepy picture of my boys in their costumes.  Joe borrowed the skeleton from his cousin Ben.  Will is a Jawa, which is a creature from Star Wars.  I made the brown robe, and we found the black mask at Target.  I sewed on some yellow buttons for the eyes.  Both of them were extremely creepy in the dark.

Take Heart!

It's finished!  Well, almost -- it still needs a hanging sleeve, but...it's done enough for me to want to show it off.

Click on the picture to view it larger.

The impetus for this piece came from two sources.  First off, the Fast Friday Challenge group's challenge last Friday was to create an odd-shaped small quilt.  The only "rule" was the shape -- everything else was maker's choice.  The second idea behind the quilt was to maybe make something that would fit the guidelines for the Have a Heart contest sponsored by Unlimited Possibilities.  Keep in mind, that I already had an idea for that contest, and the start of that quilt is still on my design wall where I abandoned it last week to work on this idea. 

OK, a third idea that came into play was wanting to continue playing with red.  Can you imagine?

As part of the challenge, the moderator gave us a website to visit for pictures of quilts that are most definitely rectangles or squares or anything close.  The artist is Sonji, and she creates some very wonderful, unique pieces. 

Several weeks ago, I had written down all of the sayings with the word "heart" in them that I could think of.  I picked one of them (take heart) and started doodling.  I didn't want to imitate Sonji's pieces, so I tried to think of other ways I could use the words and create something that was oddly shaped.  One of my original sketches was to have the quilt itself be a rectangle, with the some of the letters hanging off the edges.

I picked a font, printed the letters out and went into my studio to get busy.

I threw the background fabric up on my design wall and cut out the letters.  I stuck them up and just started playing.  Eventually I decided to contain the letters on the background, but took my chalk and started drawing outlines that sort of vaguely followed the overall line of the words.  Vaguely.  I cut it out (freehand with the rotary cutter...).  Layered with batting and did the applique.  Then I got the wild idea to make the tabs for the outer edges to mimic the letters.  And of course, my heart had to have the same tabs.

Figured out how to make the tabs, enveloped the quilt and turned it right side out and stitched in the ditch around the letters on my DSM with clear thread.  I thought it would be faster than trying to figure out how to load it up on the longarm.  I was reminded of exactly why I'm a longarmer.....

This is the point at which the quilt started talking to me.  I tried beads, but those were too subtle.  I'm not even entirely sure what possessed me with the buttons, but I started laying out long lines of them and eventually drew in some chalk lines I liked and started sewing them on. 

The hardest part was deciding what to do on the heart itself.  I have some letter charms that I tried to use, but they weren't cutting it.    I wanted to add in the words "care of your" to add extra meaning to the phrase.  I'm feeling especially clever about the many meanings that the words on this quilt have.   I wanted the TAKE HEART to mostly stand out, and the rest to be there, but not be as important or as obvious.  I wish it were a little more subtle, but I'm OK with what I did end up with. 

Well.  If you have actually gotten this far, I applaud you!  Most of that was probably really boring, but it's been interesting for me to sit here and think about how I got from point A to point B.  There are a few leaps in there that I'm not sure I can exactly explain even to myself.  One thing I did was to not let myself think too hard about the decisions.  No agonizing allowed.

So now that it is all done, I've actually gotten quite attached to it, and I'm not sure I'm going to use it for the Unlimited Possibilities contest.  Part of that is because the only machine quilting is that poor edge stitching around the letters.  It's a machine quilting magazine!  I'd like to show off a little more than this does, I think.

I'm thinking about going back to my previous idea and seeing if I can make it work.  I also have another idea to do this piece again but different.  More quilting (on the longarm), less buttons.

By the way.  The total button count is 203. 

All but 2 were by hand.  I started doing them on my Bernina and decided that was using too much thread (they don't actually have to be functional, so they don't need to be *that* secure!) and it was taking longer to fuss with getting the button placed, the quilt under the needle, etc, etc, etc, than if I were to do them by hand.  I'm not sure if I'm right or not, but the satisfaction of being able to say they are all by hand is pretty high!

Like a hole in my head

As in ... "I need a new project..."

But, but, but....it's got RED fabric. 

I'm trying to challenge myself to work on original projects, and to use up what I've got before I go back for more....

But!  I just love the way the two blocks work together.  Not to mention all that nice open space for pretty quilting....

Maybe I'll have it done in time for NEXT Christmas.

In case you can't read it, the pattern is called Peppermint Swirls.  It's designed by Fig Tree Quilts.  I got it at the quilt show in Traer last weekend.

(All of the images on my blog are clickable -- you can look at a larger view if you click on the picture!)

Water Lilies

This small piece was a challenge issued by some members of www.longarmchat.com.  A photograph was chosen, and then we were allowed to do whatever we wanted.

I decided to use the colors (the green and blue and the pink) and the placement of the flowers.  I didn't want to try to accurately portray the photograph.

The tiniest squares in the background finish at 1/2 inch.  Before quilting, I layered black tulle over the quilt top.  After quilting, I added the crystals (of which there are several shades of green) and then attached the flowers.  The flower petals were created by layering the 2 shades of pink fabric with 2 sheets of aluminum foil in between.  I stitched around them several times and then cut them out.  They were attached to the quilt top with just the line of stitching down the center of each petal.  Lastly, I added the beads in the flower centers.

It is actually much prettier in person.  The pictures don't seem to capture the sparkle of the crystals very well.  I think I need to take some photography lessons.....

Alice's Head

This quilt is based on the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.  I made it as a challenge from the group Fast Friday Fabric Challenge (see link at left).  The idea is to create a quilt based on the challenge in one week.  I'm about an hour from the deadline as I write this post, so I'm feeling pretty good about that! This month's challenge was to create an abstract piece that evoked an emotion and used the design element of texture.  When I first read the challenge and the poem, I didn't quite know what to think, but someone in the group provided a link to a Wikipedia entry about the poem.  It had a list of some of the nonsense words from the poem and their definitions, as well as a quote that described Alice's response to the poem: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are!" I was also taken by the words themselves and intended to go in a more whimsical direction.  My piece was going to be colorful and was going to focus on the words as words, and not as part of a spooky poem about monsters and other weird creatures. Everything took a different turn, though, when the black fabric I started with underwent some discharge dyeing with a Clorox Bleach pen.  I did this part right before Halloween -- who knew the black would turn ORANGE????  Not me! So -- I went with the weirdness and spookiness of the whole thing.

The second picture is with the flash off.  It's a little bit out of focus, but you can actually see the texture of the quilting a little better. All of the nonsense words are quilted in the black between the orange spirals.  After quilting those, I went back and added the spiky filler.  I had several false starts on the bead work.  I didn't actually have very many black beads, and what I had and started with just wasn't enough -- either in quantity or in variation.  I visited a craft store and got a package (or 2) of every small black glass beads they had, and then went to town making all of the bead stacks.  I was trying to add texture and continue to depict the notion of the weird ideas swirling around in Alice's head.  My children asked if they were supposed to be snakes -- some of them surely could be!  Some are corkscrews (one of the creatures in the poem, the Tove is a combination of a badger, lizard, and a corkscrew).

The final textural detail is the binding, which is actually flannel.  Unfortunately, I don't think the quilt photographs very well -- it's pretty subtle.   Technically, there are some things that I would like to have done differently (i.e. I hurried on the binding and it doesn't look very nice.  Also, I can't quilt words upside down very well, and it wasn't until part way through that I figured out how I could have made those neater...). I don't know if it "works" or not -- but I enjoyed doing it, and look forward to a new challenge.