Playing Catch-Up

Well, in the days leading up to the Antique and Artisan Fair, I managed to finish quite a few WIPs, as well have a few unexpected start-to-finishes. (I clearly need a handy nickname for those – STFs, perhaps?  They so often crop up and are rarely weedy… 😉 I’ve been busy uploading and labeling pix for the last week or so, as well as a few other things that deserve their own posts.

So, first WIP is this wall hanging – “Random Thoughts,” so named because I think it is a fairly accurate representation of the mix of stuff going on in the back of my mind at any given time.

Random Thoughts 36″ x 56″ Wall Hanging/Throw, 2013

Patterns forming and juxtaposing in the shapes, colors and contrasts.

Random Thoughts – Detail, Lower Center

Motorcycles, birds, flowers, flashes of bright; dark patches, quiet, grayed colors and soothing repetitive (hypnotic?) curves.

A tessellated pattern of sorts, all 4″ HSTs (half square triangles), perfectly traditional except, perhaps, for the seeming lack of disciplined organization to the setting.  This is one of a series of recent experiments with HSTs, started last Fall as I began making the quilt I gave to my mate for Christmas.

One of my boxes of stock squares contains 5″ squares and the HSTs I often make.  A bunch of 5″-ish squares trimmed from whatever scraps I’m reducing/managing currently, pair, cut in half from corner to corner, sew on diagonal, press and trim to 4.5″ squares.   The possibilities are endless and I had quite a few of those HSTs made.

The quilt I intended to make wanted Autumn colors, so (as I usually begin!), I started separating all the HST’s by color family. first into warm and cool, and, as I moved through, the ‘discard pile’ evolved into more piles such as pastels, jewel tones, brights. etc.  This happens often when I sort stock shapes, and the little collections of color spark all kinds of ideas.

When I was done, I had two piles of blues, purples and greens – it’s hard to define exactly how they were different, except that one pile was a bit more vivid, a tad more saturated, a little lighter.  The other similar pile were all the ones that were less so, that didn’t quite fit in that other pile.  There were quite a few ‘other’ piles, too – a lot of pink-and-grey, pastel/Spring-y, some ‘real brights,’ black/white/grey/reds, blue-and-white, etc.

I looked at all the little collections of HSTs, thinking of all those possibilities, and I decided to start with sewing 16-Patch squares of HSTs in no random order or pattern.  I started with the “more” pile of blues, and starting with the number of blocks I could make from that pile, divided that pile into smaller piles, one for each, trying to make sure that there were no or few fabric repeats among the HSTs in each block pile.

Once divided, I laid out one block in no particular order or pattern, tweaked the arrangement a bit, then sewed it together.  I liked the way it looked, so I made more blocks.   I went back and forth with the “other” blue pile several times, switching out squares, until I had 9.  I liked it so much that I started sewing that “other” pile into squares the same way.  That yielded 15, and they looked ok mixed all in together, but I didn’t have enough for one more block, and I wanted to do something with them now,… In the end, I settled on a throw/wall hanging with the 6 and a bigger throw/wall hanging with the 9.  That larger one is still a WIP called Wildflowers Don’t Care Where They Grow awaiting quilting, but the smaller one became Random Thoughts.  The more I looked at it, the more fascinated I became noting how the pattern of shapes and color flowed (or didn’t), picking up the common themes of some prints and how they sometimes appeared in clusters or just as individual islands among others.

While I was waiting for my tags to come, so I could finish a bunch of little stuff for the fair, I looked for something I could finish that wouldn’t require more than the 3 tags I had left.  Random Thoughts was in the quilting queue and I grabbed it.  Quilting HSTs is usually pretty fun and I got it done and labeled in time to take it with me.

Several of those other piles of HSTs became pillows, both last Fall and more recently.  Altogether, I think I made over a dozen, although I used the more traditional Flock of Birds arrangement for them.

The Raid

I actually finished the work on this piece last November/December, although I didn’t sign it, or make the hanging rod, until last month.  And, I didn’t get a decent picture of it until a day or two ago.

Sunsight – Wallhanging 25.25″ x 26″ – 2012

This came about after a raid on my favorite quilt shop, Quilting Adventures, in Richmond, Virginia.  I say raid because I left there with the bulk of their scrap bin contents and more that they hadn’t put out yet.  (They have a bin of shop scraps that they sell by the bag – fill your own.)  My sister took me there whilst I was visiting my mother last summer.  She knitted in a corner of the store while I rummaged through that bin.  I was trying to hurry so she wouldn’t have to wait any longer than I could help.  When I had about 5 bags worth, I went looking for a larger bag and found one of their sales people pulling more scraps from under the counter to refill the bin since I had decimated its contents.  She kindly let me paw through all of those scraps, too.  I left with approximately two shopping bags full of scraps.  🙂  NOTE:  Few shops that I have had access to sell their shop scraps that way, assuming they sell them at all.  If they do, the bags are usually pre-packaged.

Anyway, I snagged all sorts of stuff – batik bits, novelty fabrics, solids, wools, flannels, bright colors, pastels, tonal prints and some really cool square pieces that had bird shapes cut out of them (presumably to be appliqued on something?).  I’m still contemplating what to do with those, but, since I can’t remember where I put them at the moment, that idea can simmer for a while longer.

A few weeks later, after I returned home to NY, I sorted through my haul in my usual fashion (i.e. collections of like-sized scraps, bits big enough for a 2.5″ cut square, pieces large enough for bigger squares, strips narrower than 2.5″, solids, bits that needed to go immediately to current projects, etc.).  I was pleased to find a nice collection of narrow batik strips and some solid black pieces and strips.  I laid those out after I put the rest away and arranged them in various ways while I thought about what I could do with them.  I liked the sort of spectrum look and the black really set the colors off.  Some of the black pieces were in strips so I thought about attaching black to the ends of the batik strips to make them all the same length.  I laid that out and looked at it for a while and then stuffed the whole lot into a ziplock bag to keep them together while things simmered.

By this time, it was early Fall and I was savoring the last few sunrises as best I could before it got too cold to enjoy them.  While standing out on the back deck early one morning, I admired the sunrise and the way the trees and the horizon of ridges and mountains and trees looked sillouetted against the intense color of the rising sun and I thought again of that bag of batik and black strips.  It occurred to me that I could replicate some of what I was seeing by using the batik strips as background and the black to create shape and pattern.  All thoughts of those scraps previously had been the other way around – using the bright colors to create a pattern and design against the black.  It was one of those Eureka! moments.

Some of the strips were cut at an angle and some were cut bluntly and I left them that way.  I paired colored strips with black, piecing some of the colors together to get long enough strips. I laid them out and pulled them this way and that until I was happy with them.  I added a wider very dark grey tonal print to the bottom with narrow black bits on either end to represent the tree trunks and bordered the whole with more black.

After sewing the top together, I went looking in my stash for backing and binding.  I first went to my hoard of larger batik pieces because I thought I remembered something that might do.  Sure enough, I found it and it worked wonderfully – blues from light to navy with a design of pine trees, looking very like the view from my deck across a series of ridges to the Adirondacks.

Sunsight – Back

While looking for the batiks, I found a smallish piece of fabric that had tiny stars in white and blue on a black background – perfect for the binding.  On one of my quarterly or so trips to town, I hit JoAnn’s for some lovely Sulky variegated rayon thread in yellows, peaches and orangy-reds.  I quilted it first in black 3-4 times along the vertical seam lines following the line of the trees, not the line of the seam, rounding corners slightly and being careful to cross and parallel the lines instead of sewing over and over on the same line,  as I went to soften and feather the edges a bit.  I had ironed the seams toward the black to bring it more into the foreground and some of those lines of black quilting were actually on the colored batik to recess it more along the edges.

After that was done, I quilted lines radiating outward using the variegated thread, and then did one line of quilting just outside the border seams using a King Tut variegated cotton thread in shades of blue, green and purple.

All while I was actually constructing this project, I knew I wanted it to represent a sunrise and I played with names for it along those lines but nothing I came up with seemed quite right.  Language, its use for communication, etymology, etc., has always fascinated me and I enjoy finding just the right words to communicate precisely and concisely what I want to convey.  Then, I chanced to read an article about Buckminster Fuller while looking into his theory of “ephemeralization” (doing more with less) and other sustainability theories, and there it was, the perfect word:  Sunsight.  Fuller reputedly thought the words “sunrise” and “sunset” were old-fashioned, geocentric and inaccurate because the sun does not move, rather it is the Earth that moves.  He preferred to use the words “sunsight” and “sunclipse” to describe the sun’s appearance and disappearance.  Ooohh, right on!  Just my kind of thinking… So, Sunsight it had to be.  🙂

From start to finish, I worked on this piece for about 4 months, in between other stuff, and then let it sit until now for pictures, signing and hanging rod.  Most of my projects are like that, and I really don’t worry about having too many WIPs around at any given time.  They are all in different stages of progress, ready to be picked up and worked as each idea develops and I know exactly what I want to do with it next.  Maybe that’s why I don’t really get tired of working on most projects before they are finished?  Once in a while, I zoom through one project with no real delays, but those are rare.  If anything, this project went together quicker than most once the idea gelled fully.

In other news, I”m busily trying to come up with ideas to display quilts at the upcoming Antique and Artisan Show.  I haven’t had any luck finding wooden ladders, but did turn up the remains of an old wooden crib.  I’ve started cleaning up an old wooden rocking chair and I need to hunt up the remains of a broken wooden drying rack that I saved hoping to find a use for it at some point.  We’ll see if it has any life in it yet.  It is possible to think about such things now that I can navigate the path to the basement without wading through snow or mud.  At least, such activity gives me a reason to be outside in the sunshine even if I can’t begin the garden just yet.

The Anarchist

Oops – been almost two weeks since I posted.  I must make myself post more often than that or I shall never keep current.  In fairness, I haven’t done as much sewing as I might have – due in part to uploading months’ worth of photos to my computer, to flickr and here, and everything that goes with that, as well as a bit of spring cleaning.

So, about that wallhanging I mentioned. Background first.  I got a a bag of scraps in the mail (from Etsy, I think) that had a few scraps of a lovely print of birds, trees and birdcages in greeny yellows, brown, purple and turquoise.  It fascinated me – the somewhat odd colors, the birdcages hanging in the trees, the birds themselves in cages and out.  I kept looking at it and finally started putting other scraps with it as I ran across them – mostly ones that seemed to fit the colors – blue greens, greens, purples and browns.  Every once in a while, I’d take that baggie out, empty it on the bed and paw through everything, adding or subtracting more bits and pieces of fabric, and wondering what to do with them. I wanted something simple, but not just squares. For one thing, those lovely scraps were fairly small pieces, mostly rectangular, and I hated to cut them to one particular size and lose any of the overall design. I also wanted to set that fabric apart from the rest somehow.

After several months of playing with them, I decided to use solid fabrics to frame variously-sized pieces into blocks of a regular size that I could then use in a yet-to-be decided way.  I found some solids that worked in my stash, blue greens, browns, and a purple/red or two.  I decided to go with rectangular blocks since most of the scraps were rectangles and there was no reason they had to be actual squares. I often use 4.5″ cut squares so I decided to make rectangles that finished 8″ x 12″, just in case.  As it happened, I didn’t have enough of some of the solid fabrics to frame as many blocks as I wanted (12 seemed a nice round number – all for one project or enough for 2 smaller ones if I couldn’t decide on just one…), so I ended up piecing some of the strips.

Since most of the solid scraps I was using were triangles, many of those seams were at an angle.  When I was done, I thought that those seams suggested tree branches and, well, that was just fine with me.  The blocks sat around for a bit while I gathered some more scraps from various places (I have scraps sorted and stashed in all sorts of bags and boxes, by type or project, etc.), including borrowing from other projects. Eventually, I bit the bullet and decided to go with setting the blocks randomly against a background of 4″ finished squares.  I worked out a layout and figured out how many I would need.  I pulled some squares from my stash of already cut scraps and then cut more – lots more.  Some scraps were only big enough for one or two squares, some for several. I kept coming back to one other scrap piece that I had squirreled away as a focus for another project.  The colors worked and it had birds and branches in it, too, but, well, it was supposed to be for something else and I didn’t want to use too much of it.

Finally, I cut two squares from it for this project, including one little bird.  I laid it out and sewed it together, all the while thinking about what to call it.  (I like to have names for projects.)  I had been referring to it as the birdcage quilt and all sorts of variations on that had occurred to me, but none seemed to fit.  I had decided that the quilt would probably be a wallhanging, mostly because I decided early on to have a right side up (I don’t always) and that meant (to me anyway) that it really should have a proper name.  I decided on a backing for it, a green tonal print flannel of birds and butterflies and foliage.

A serendipitous purchase of a fabric printed with green and brown leaves during a recent trip to Albany turned out to be the perfect border fabric and I also used it to piece the back.  I basted it and it waited its turn for quilting while I thought about how I wanted to quilt it.  Well, my birthday came along and I treated myself to some new music (I mostly listen to music while I sew), including Rush’s new album “Clockwork Angels.”  (Awesome album, btw.) One particular song caught my attention. Not because of the subject matter, per se, but the title.  After double-checking the definition, I decided it was a close-to-perfect reflection of my whole thought process on making this quilt, including all the little random decisions along the way.

I decided to go with my usual triple lines of quilting for all of the squares, but still wasn’t sure how I wanted to quilt the blocks themselves. I had outlined the printed fabric centers of that birdcage print, but some quilting needed to be done in the solid frames, both for aesthetic reasons and because I don’t like to have too many largish areas with no quilting.  But, I didn’t want the frames to recede into the background the way they would if I added too much quilting.  I was going to fall back on extending the triple lines from the squares along each outer seam on the frames, but, in the end,  decided to add a line along the outer seam  of only the two widest strips of each frame. (Did I mention that the centers were offset in each block? No, oops.)  That worked beautifully and I finished the quilting and bound it in a purple, green and white striped fabric with touches of orange, just for kicks.  (I do love striped bindings!)  So, Ladies and Gentlemen, here is THE ANARCHIST:

The Anarchist – 2013 – 63″ x 71.5″

(Sorry this photo doesn’t show quite the whole thing – windy day and complaining teenager are my excuses.)

The Anarchist – 2013 – 63″ x 71.5″ (quilting detail)

And, who actually is THE ANARCHIST?

The Anarchist – 2013 – 63″ x 71.5″ (himself)

Why, it’s this little dude! Quietly rebelling, not in a cage, not in a frame, blending into the very diverse background for safety but not hiding, out in the world with perils lurking and happy to be so (there are some squares with purple cats on them that I could not resist adding into the mix), exhibiting his individualism and, dare I say, left-wing tendencies? (There was absolutely no reason to avoid that pun!)  On the whole, I can see much of Wikipedia’s definition of anarchism in this little bird, and in myself on occasion.

In any case, I am very pleased  with this wallhanging.  However, I have lots more stuff to work on, including that other wallhanging I mentioned last time and a previously-forgotten cache of scraps I discovered under my bed. So, tata for now.