First Finish for 2014

So, I thought that this one was going to squeak by just under the wire – finished in the last few hours of 2013…..Nope, didn’t quite make it… Really, it was almost done, but I could not, in all good conscience say that it was completed in 2013.  I actually finished it at a staff retreat on January 6th (just a little late posting the news, ya think?)…sewing the final edge of the hanging sleeve by hand while I listened to some pretty interesting presentations…(I was on the planning committee for that retreat – full disclosure there – but they really were interesting…)

Wanna see?

Mirror, Mirror – 2014

This was third in a series – Pleiades being the first and Storytime the second.  All made from 6″ crumb blocks.  These sorts of blocks are pieced improvisationally from all of the very smallest scraps of fabric.  I keep a little bin above my sewing machine for these pieces – anything less than 2.5″ on any given side goes in there, 2.5″ squares being the smallest pieces I measure and cut.  If I need something smaller than that, this bin is where I’ll look first.

Mirror, Mirror (Detail – Upper Left)

It’s kind of fitting, now that I think on it, I started sewing these blocks just after last New Year.  As I recall, I was tired of quilting and the holiday slam and just wanted something mindless to do.  These were remarkably relaxing to make – quick, easy, no thought really…just playing with little bits and pieces…like working a jigsaw puzzle (I used to love to do those with my grandmother…).  No rhyme or reason to how they were put together.  Some were totally haphazard, some began with an idea.  I wanted to see what was possible – to experiment – simply to play with color and shape…and see what came out of it.  Before I knew it, I had…well, lots….let’s see… 7+25+36=68…

By the time I had so many, I was tired of fooling with them and there weren’t enough scraps left in that bin to work with.  Then, I sat down and played with the squares…sorting them in different ways – by color group, by theme, by patterns – separating some out and then mixing them back in again.  I sewed a solid concrete-colored grey fabric in an uneven border around each block, cutting them so that the little pieced blocks were not exactly centered and played with them some more.  I ran out of that concrete grey and finished off the last few with a darker grey leaf print.  Eventually, I had two groups with a few left over…one group of 25 that had sort of a child’s theme, with more than a few I-Spy blocks – Piglet and kittens and the like; a second group of 36 that were…well, a bit on the personal side  – memories, if you will, of one sort or another.  The seven that were left over fascinated me – I devised the setting for them and sewed the top together almost on the spot.  It was the first of the three…called Pleiades because of the number and arrangement…and because I happened to be listening to the audiobook of Earth by David Brin just then.  (Such is quite ……. hmmmmm……..inspirational…..reading, indeed!)  I also finished it quickly because I ended up teaching a class for improvisational piecing at TAUNY right around then and wanted it for a sample.  (Hmmm…that would have to have been about March and April..).  The top sat for awhile after I pieced it while I thought about how I wanted to quilt it.  I ended up sort of echo quilting around the squares: using irregularly-spaced mostly-parallel lines, with some overlap from square to square, in addition to the grid formed by the block seams.  This one, I also stopped and started quilting a few times – while I considered what I had done and what else I could do, and puttered about with other stuff in the meantime…That is relatively unusual (and how I managed to remember to take some WIP pictures)…. I almost always quilt straight through from start to finish…Because I’ve got the right thread in the machine; because by the time they get to this stage, I want them done and out of the way of the next projects…(I can see that I’ll have to do a whole post on this subject at some point – i.e. the philosophy of quilting…. I do have some very definite opinions one way and another, so I might as well just get them all out at once – put ’em all in one place where I can hark back to them occasionally…)  Erm….Moving on……

Pleiades WIP
(Almost finished quilting)

The collection of 25 was completed fairly quickly, too – some months later. I called that one Story Time because almost every square had some little feature fabric worthy of a story. (I’ll add a picture of that in here as soon as I take one…)

The last batch – the ones that I most closely identified with – became Mirror, Mirror.  I didn’t have quite enough of the medium grey to sash ALL the blocks, but I made sure that the blocks that used a different fabric would be in this quilt.  I quite liked the effect of the very few darker-sashed blocks — especially after I added the border…  The whole thing reminded me of something that was still sort of “under construction” – as if blocks were forming and clustering in an ever-ongoing process….

The name, btw, also occurred because I happened to be listening to Earth just then….In the book, a young girl sends a message of warning to her father:  “Mirror, mirror, Daddy – don’t take any funny-looking apples.”  This is a contextual code, of course, and a reference to Snow White – doesn’t make any sense if you haven’t read the book, but – it’s a very valid warning all the same.  The quote might not have struck the way it did, except that one of the blocks in particular reminded me of one of those old pier glass mirrors…although there is no apparent reflection in it.  You can see that square in the picture below – the one with the lavender diamond shape…. And, it also occurred that something about each block was a very personal reflection of me – something in an image, the colours, the fabrics…

This quilt is mine…

Mirror, Mirror (Detail – Upper Right)

Oh, and this quilt will be on exhibit in Clifton Park the first weekend of April at the Empire QuiltFest….along with 2 others (I know, I’ve said it before….one at a time….)

P.S. I didn’t show the back, did I?

Mirror, Mirror (Back)

Doesn’t look like much from so far away, but those are morning glories on the left and a giant folk art floral motif on the right…with touches of a bit more here and there….’Cause what’s the point of having a boring back, right?

This quilt was so big that we had to hang it off the deck in order to get a picture without it scraping the snowy frozen ground…it measures approximately 80″ x 80″.  Oh, and I quilted it with variegated thread (pastels) in sort of an irregular grid in the grey and spiraling outward from the center of each small pieced block.

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.

Mother Goose

I had been saving some scraps of a Mother Goose print for years so I could do something with them.  The fabric was a cotton polyester blend, so I didn’t want to use it with regular cottons.  As bits and pieces of other such blend fabrics were found or came into my possession, I stuck them away with the Mother Goose print.  After weeding through three trash bags of gifted fabric scraps and pieces, I discovered that I might have enough blend fabrics to make a quilt.  Not a lot of different pieces of fabric, but some were fairly sizeable.

I cut out each Mother Goose picture and bordered each cut square with the same printed flower print so as to make them a uniform size – 8″ x 12″.  Then, I cut all the remaining fabrics into 4.5″ squares and laid them out.  Sure enough, I had exactly the correct amount of squares.  I arranged them into a pattern reminiscent of The Anarchist, although a bit less random, and sewed them together.

A much larger piece of blended fabric from the same trash bags was large enough for the back.  I sewed the back to the front from the reverse with a layer of batting added, turned right side out and topstitched/quilted each seam and the edge. No binding on this one.

Other blended fabrics in those trash bags that were not suitable for this quilt were used to make baby bibs and burp cloths, as well as a few baby blankets – both pieced and un-pieced.

While I don’t often use blended fabrics, I do use them for this sort of baby item.  The fabrics do not wear as well as all cotton fabrics, but they are more stain resistant and dry much faster.  This makes them quite suitable for things that you know are going to be spit up on, have food smeared into, etc.

Altogether, I have 4 blankets, 2 quilts, 4 burp cloths and 18 bibs finished now in preparation for the County Artisan Fair coming up on April 27th in Canton, NY.  That is in addition to the usual cotton quilts and wallhangings I have finished.   Now, I have 15 pillows that I need to finish for that Fair, as well as finish making some display racks.

Oh, and I got this lovely girl working:

She was quite a find at one of my favorite local used-stuff stores – cost $20.00.  A Kenmore machine ca. 1967 that does both straight and plain zigzig stitching.  The bobbin wouldn’t stay in and the original travel case is damaged.  This machine is extremely heavy.  It is older than my usual machine by about 15 years, and simpler.  After fiddling with the bobbin case and other bobbin apparatus on and off for a day or two, everything suddenly clicked into place and she now sews beautifully!  (Did you actually expect a technical explanation from me regarding how I fixed it, including proper part names?  All I can tell you is my technique – I consider, fiddle with, tweak and tinker when “fixing” anything – whether it’s a quilt, a meal, a machine, or a pattern).

Now, back to those pillows!

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.

Chasin’ the Blues Away

Again, it’s been awhile… With the Easter holiday and Spring Break, my time at the computer has been limited.  This is the latest finish:

Chasin’ the Blues Away – 2013, 47″ x 54″

The working title for this one was the Russian Doll Quilt.  I had gotten bits of the Russian doll print in a bag of other scraps, probably from Etsy.  Not having any other particular plan in mind, they went into a box to be cut into stock squares.  (I routinely cut scraps into whatever sizes of squares they’ll accommodate.  I always have these squares on hand to use when needed.)  Last Spring, I was rummaging through the 4.5″ stock squares box trying to put together a baby girl quilt for a custom order shower gift.  I separated out the pinks and reds for the girl quilt, and started weeding through the blues, thinking I’d set some aside for a boy quilt or two as long as I had the box open anyway.

Chasin’ the Blues Away – Detail

Among the blue squares, I found two focus fabrics that would work for boy quilts, denimy blues, one with yellow and the other with red and black.  (These became the two Denim Baby Animals quilts.)  I also found 5 squares of the doll fabric, but decided that the colors would not mix well with the two previously-chosen focus fabrics.  So, I set the doll print aside.  I quickly sorted through the remaining prints and discovered that most of the prints that did not fit with the two denimy quilts were ones that went remarkably well with the doll print – the purples, purply blues and browns, olive greens and teals, beiges, etc,  In fact, I quite liked the effect of all those colors and prints together, although it was a color combination I probably wouldn’t have considered absent that doll print.

Chasin’ the Blues Away – Detail

I was a bit concerned that 5 squares would be a bit few to consider a focus fabric, but, they seemed to hold their own in the mix as I rifled through them.  So, I decided “why not?  I counted squares and, with the addition of a few others here and there, I had enough for a 10 x 12 rectangle – with a border, it would be a decent-sized throw or crib quilt.

Over the next few months, the squares were sewn together, a border with 4 matching squares for the corners was added.  I found a piece of flannel for the back – a lovely lavender tonal print with birds and butterflies.  (The same print, different colorway as the back of The Anarchist.)  This piece wasn’t quite wide enough, so I used strips of two differnt purple non-flannel cotton prints down either side – one is lavender with a touch of pink (the same fabric as the 4 corner border squares), the other is purple on white.  Standing back, both prints blended well with the flannel, so I went ahead and basted it.

Chasin’ the Blues Away – Detail of Back, Variegated Thread

Once basted, it moved pretty quickly up the queue for quilting.  (I do not have much room to house basted quilts, so, unless I hit a real snag with the quilting plan, this is not a place where WIPs linger for long.)  I debated briefly over thread and finally settled on a King Tut variegated thread of blue, purple and teal (the other choice was a Gutterman variegated in purples).  A binding fabric I had used on another quilt (The Tropics) called to me, so I used it on this one, too.   Made the binding, sewed it on by machine, moved it to the hand-sewing pile for finishing and there it sat.

This was one of my portable hand-sewing projects for approximately 4 months.   That’s not usual –  by this time, I’m usually more than ready to get stuff finished.  But, there were custom orders that took priority and other little hand-sewing projects that got snuck in.  Plus, I started finishing more bindings by machine.  (Finishing all the bindings by hand was creating a logjam and, for some things, a machine-finished binding really is more suitable.)  I finally finished it this weekend on our trip to Albany for the holiday.

Oh, and the title change?  As I was finishing the last of the binding, my sister, my mother, my niece and I were watching Easter Parade.  It had been awhile since I had seen it and I had forgotten about one of Ann Miller’s dance numbers in it, an Irving Berlin tune called Chasin’ the Blues Away.  That song has been running through my head to the point that I’ve been breaking out humming and jiving (Ann Miller style, of course) at odd times while fixing dinner and sewing for the last four days.  When it came time to sign this quilt and write it up, the title change seemed to be a natural fit… 🙂

As for the rest of the past week or two, sewing-wise?  This is what 3 dozen mug rugs look like:

Now, on to the dozen plus bibs and baby blankets I need to finish for the upcoming St. Lawrence County Historical Association Antique and Artisan Fair on April 27th. After that, I need to work on pillows.