FINISHED!!!! The Very Hungry Caterpillar Quilt

"This is MY quilt!"

Yes, I know Ronan is only 16 months old and probably doesn’t need quite so many quilts. But we do storytime every night before bed, and one of his absolute favorites has long been The Very Hungry Caterpillar. So when I saw the full line of the fabulous Andover Fabrics Eric Carle fabrics at Ladyfingers when we did the shop hop last fall, I couldn’t resist. I didn’t think I’d make anything with them any time soon, but when I was reorganizing the fabric in my studio closet I wound up leaving the central panel within toddler reach. Ronan not only grabbed for it, he kept playing peek-a-boo with it and was making his “cute noise” (normally reserved for sightings of furry animals) while looking at it. What could I do but start a quilt?

I had lots of fun with this due to the extremely simple piecing and the bright saturated colors. While there are absolutely gorgeous blenders and tone-on-tone fabrics in the Andover collection, I chose the path of thrift and used all fabrics from my stash for the four-patches. The long vertical mirror-image panels with the caterpillar and the sun were originally joined in the center for making a bolster pillow or door-bottom draft stopper, but I thought they’d look more interesting in the quilt. I originally planned this as a lap quilt, but it finished 53″W x 76″L; I thought about stopping with just the central three panels divided and surrounded by four-patches, but I loved that large stripe and decided it needed to be a part of this top. Besides, that means Ronan will be able to use it on his big-boy bed someday.

The large food stripe had the power to be a deal breaker because it depicts the art from Ronan’s favorite pages in the book, the ones in which the holes in the foods are actually punched out of the book’s pages so that little fingers can follow the path of the caterpillar. I had only bought 3/4 yard of the stripe last fall, as I had no idea what (if anything) I was going to make out of these fabrics and I didn’t want to go overboard. However, it’s also not the sort of design that could be pieced without looking extremely strange. Therefore, once I finished the center of the quilt and all the four-patches, I got on the Ladyfingers website to order two more yards. They were sold out. Trying not to panic, I began searching elsewhere online. I did find a few sites that had it in stock, but they were either a) in England, or b) offering it for the low low price of FIFTEEN DOLLARS A YARD. So Ronan and I made a Saturday morning trip to Zook’s at Kitchen Kettle Village in Intercourse. They had the majority of the line, but not the large food stripe. (I consoled myself by buying a few other fabrics at their fabulous prices.) However, across the street at The Old Country Store, they had it!

Success!

I promptly brought it home, washed it, and cut it the wrong size. The less said about that day, the better.

But I made it work. I had initially planned to have those borders run the entire width of the quilt without being surrounded by four-patches on all sides, so I wouldn’t be limited to multiples of 2″ for the height of the border and could just follow the design. So although having to cut it 12″ finished height meant that there are some little stems and leaves and details peeking up from the seam line, I think ultimately the four-patches gave it a more finished and cohesive appearance. I can’t say I’m glad that the price of gas is tiptoeing towards $4/gallon, but that certainly helped me make the decision to work with what I had rather than jumping back in the car, and I think the final result is the better for it.

In my continuing struggle to select appropriate quilting designs and appropriate threads to quilt them in, I think this project was a solid success. I wanted this quilt to be softer and more pliable than Ronan’s fancy blue and taupe quilt, so thus much less heavily quilted. The batting is Quilter’s Dream Orient, a blend of bamboo, silk, Tencel, and cotton; I thought it would be funny for the caterpillar quilt to have batting made by actual caterpillars. A practical advantage of this batting is that it can be quilted up to 8″ apart, granting me significant latitude in designing the quilting.

I never want to mark or measure more than necessary, so I used the four-patches as landmarks for gridding the unpieced panel areas. I used a simple on-point square grid for the central panels, and a hanging-diamond variation for the horizontal borders. I think grids come the closest to disappearing over heavily graphic areas so as not to distract from the artwork. This also allowed me to use the walking foot for all straight line quilting. I then switched to my free-motion setup, which continues to perform extremely well, with no skipped stitches or shredded thread. Again drawing inspiration from the subject matter, I quilted echoed leaves in all the four-patches. I used a yellow Isacord #40 polyester thread for all quilting. While it did play peekaboo to some extent, I’m happy with the result.

This process was a good reminder that simple quilts can be a satisfying and rewarding experience, that every quilt teaches me something. And Ronan loves it and knows that it’s his, which is reward enough.

I made the label from the only four leftover four-patches.

For a happy dance for a quilt based on the story of a caterpillar’s life cycle from egg to butterfly, what could be more appropriate than “The Circle of Life”? Dan and I were fortunate to see “The Lion King” on Broadway about 10 years ago, and this number left me speechless:

I’m Down with EPP (English Paper Piecing)

(What can I say, I was a college sophomore when that song came out, so it’s permanently imprinted on my psyche.)

Another new project I’ve been dabbling with is entirely Bonnie Hunter’s fault! (Didn’t I start following her to help me finish my UFOs?) She’s been posting on her blog about her English paper pieced hexagon project that she works on for handwork during all her travels. As I’ve been feeling a little uninspired by hand applique lately, and my counted cross-stitch projects are in a woeful state of disorganization at the moment, I’ve been in a bit of an uncharacteristic handwork drought myself. So when I saw a lovely display of English paper piecing projects and die cut papers for sale at Back Door Quilts outside Indianapolis in August, I thought I’d give it a try. If I didn’t like it much, I’d only be out $3.75 for the bag of 250 3/4” hexagons and a little stack of scraps.

I’ve never been much one for traditional hand piecing a la Jinny Beyer, so I never really contemplated making a hexagon quilt. I think they’re lovely, but the necessary step of basting in the papers seemed like it would be tedious. So far, I’m enjoying it far more than I’d ever imagined I would. (I am thinking I need a thimble for my thumb when I baste, but I haven’t seen Roxanne thimbles at a show lately, and I’d want to be fitted in person.) I learned a quick method of chain basting hexagons from a YouTube video by Jackie Willis, so the preparation stage doesn’t take quite so long. And it’s remarkably satisfying to take the papers out once each hexagon becomes completely surrounded, kind of like a quilting version of playing Minesweeper.

I’m using scraps left over from cutting out Taupe Winding Ways (you know, the same scraps I used for Ronan’s quilt? and for my circle applique block? and there are still more of them?) The whipstitches used to put the hexagons together are so far much less susceptible to my perfectionism than my applique stitches usually are. Rather than making typical Grandmother’s Flower Garden shapes, I’m piecing elongated diamonds like in the Martha Washington’s Flower Garden quilt:

"Martha Washington's Flower Garden," by Hannah Wallis, 1800-1849

The beauty of this project is that it’s self-limiting: I’m planning to make diamonds until I get sick of them, and then I’ll join them into whatever size they make. It could be a bed quilt, a hot pad, or anything in between. I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far at the speed at which they’ve been going together when I really have a chance to focus, though; I finished an already-started diamond and basted a respectable baggie-full of hexagons while sitting at my most recent quilt guild meeting. And I’m certainly honing my reflexes for hiding the scissors every time Ronan pulls himself up to my table while I’m working on them!

I’ve certainly seen many hexagon quilts over the years, especially examples from the 1930s at Documentation Day, but I had never really studied just how many possibilities a hexagonal grid leads to. The English tradition means that they show up all the time in Australian Patchwork and Quilting, and the handwork aspect means they’ve become popular among Japanese quilters as well, so I’ve been looking through some of my old magazines with new eyes. My starting this project seems to represent such a perfect example of the odd juxtapositions inherent in being a quilter in 2011:  I was inspired to start doing a style of hand piecing that’s been around for nearly 300 years, by a blogger, and I learned how by watching a video on the internet. Oh, Miss Bennet!

Back to the Studio!

Where have I been? I’ve been asking myself the same question!

It’s been a busy summer, especially as I’m still getting used to how much having a baby in my life changes things. Ronan is an absolute joy:  his sunny personality just blows sugar through my soul every time I look at him. He’s crawling now, babbling nonstop, giggling and dancing and chasing the cats, and I’m cherishing every moment. I can’t lose myself in the studio for hours on end the way I could Before Baby — which is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff — but that’s the way my OCD personality works best for creative endeavors.  I’m starting to acclimate to life in this warm messy new country called Motherhood, and am digging in some hand- and toeholds to find my way toward quilting again, albeit in the brief scrambled bursts I can occasionally scrape together. And hopefully, I’ll also figure out how to find time to blog about it as well!

It hasn’t been a total dry spell, though. I finished something!

Double Pinwheel Table Runner, with inevitable cats

Diane, Rhonda, Kathy, and Rhonda’s cousin Cathy (that was confusing!) came for a mini-retreat at my house in mid-July. Dan acted as the primary with Ronan so we could all get some concentrated sewing in. Diane had given me a charm pack (Lollipop by Sandy Gervais for Moda) with my birthday present, so I decided to use it for some relatively brainless piecing. For whatever reason, in my life, “easy” doesn’t usually turn out that way.

I planned to make some simple double pinwheel blocks using the Angler tool. Easy piecing, no marking. Well, first, the Angler just wasn’t working for me. I know quilters who swear by it, but I was finding myself more prone to swear at it. My seam allowances looked like my history with Weight Watchers:  straight and faithful at the beginning, but veering off the longer I went and, let’s face it, getting wider. Since ripping out and resewing was the absolute antithesis of what I wanted to be doing, the Angler came off the machine bed and I started marking my diagonals on the backs of the squares.

I made 2 identical half-square triangle squares from 2 contrasting charm squares, then sewed each of them along both sides of the diagonal to another charm square to make 4 pinwheel units. So far, so good. But those 4 units, put back together, didn’t make a pinwheel! Oops…

As someone who works in a mirror all day, I’m ashamed I didn’t see that one coming. (It works if you cut the charm squares into quarter- and half-square triangle squares and then sew them all together, but not if you use the “quick” no-triangle method..at least not the way I did it.) If I’d been working from fat quarters, I would have simply cut more squares and continued to make my blocks containing only 4 fabrics each. But since I just had the charm pack, with only one square of each fabric, I had to either abandon the project entirely, or find a way to make it work. And let’s face it, one of the central tenets of Sarah Loves Fabric is that more fabric is better! So I ended up with five sets of identical-but-mirror-image blocks containing EIGHT different fabrics each, for a total of ten blocks with only two charm squares left over from the original pack of 42.

As it turned out, I’m glad my original plan fell through, and I’m glad I felt obligated to work with what I had rather than just cutting (or worse, buying!) more fabric. I think the blocks are more interesting with eight fabrics than they would have been with four, but I don’t believe I would have been brave enough to plan them that way. As I mentioned before, when it comes to fabric I definitely believe more is more; I get bored making a two- or three-fabric quilt, or one where all the blocks contain the exact same fabric combination. But until now, I hadn’t taken the plunge into making blocks that each contained quite this many different fabrics. I have to consider this a very successful experiment, and one that I intend to repeat — just so long as I don’t manage to manipulate it into an excuse to buy more charm packs!

Detail, Double Pinwheel Table Runner

I quilted the table runner using minimal-mark designs from Pam Clarke’s “Quilting Inside the Lines” with Lagoon Brytes by Superior Threads. These blocks turned out fairly lumpy in the centers, even after twirling the seam allowances when pressing, so I wanted to choose a design that allowed me to avoid those areas unobtrusively. Also, as I’ll be taking a class from Pam at Quilting with Machines in October, it seemed like a good mental warmup. I used a piece of Pellon Legacy wool batting (yum) left over from another project, and managed to find backing and binding fabrics from my stash that coordinated with the charm pack, rather than giving in and buying more of the Moda fabrics. I am appropriately proud of myself. I even hand-sewed the binding, and finished it in time for show and tell at Guild last week! It’s like I’ve turned over a new leaf.

For the happy dance for this one, how about two late greats of American comedy, Dom DeLuise and Gilda Radner, in the one bright spot in an otherwise dreadful movie:

Baby Quilts

Big surprise that lately, when I’ve had a chance to quilt, I’ve been working on baby quilts. As I alluded to in my last post, I’m making a quilt for Ronan that’s blue and taupe. I had gotten this wonderful Japanese owl print by Alexander Henry several years ago from a vendor at the Airing of the Quilts, with no thought at the time that I would someday have a baby son; I just liked the fabric. It manages to be juvenile-appropriate without being juvenile. Really, the only clue that the designer intended it to be a baby fabric at all was that it was available in pink and blue. My mom bought some too, in both colorways, and has made three baby quilts with it (two pink and one blue) for two daughters of family friends and one of my nephews. In contrast, for me this was one of those fabrics that gave me (bad pun alert!) Quilter’s Block. It was too cute to cut. That is, until I had a good idea– and then made a bad mistake that had the potential to scare me off cutting any “good” fabric for the rest of my life!

I bought the book, “9-Patch Pizzazz” by Judy Sisneros a few years ago as a way to use up some large prints that I always fall in love with on the bolt but then don’t know what to do with. I loved the author’s ideas for combining the large print with both coordinating and contrasting fabrics, but of course, being me, I had to goose up the difficulty a little bit. So while I came up with a basic layout very similar to the ones she uses in the book:

I decided to use quarter-square triangle squares, or hourglass blocks, instead of the 9-patches. This decision also allowed me to use some relatively small scraps (hi, Bonnie Hunter!) left over from cutting the Taupe Winding Ways blocks. Cutting the triangles posed no problems; the trouble started when I cut the big blocks of the owl fabric. I have an 8.5″ x 12″ Omnigrip ruler that has faked me out in the past with that extra 1/2 inch. Somehow I managed to transpose that in my mind into thinking there was an extra 1/2 inch on the 12″ side, too. So all the owl blocks that were supposed to be cut 12.5″ x 12.5″ were accidentally cut 12″ x 12″. And of course I didn’t have enough fabric to recut anything (although I would have had enough to cut them correctly in the first place, grumble grumble.) While there was initially some wailing and gnashing of teeth, I realized that with so many seams coming together in the pieced areas, odds were (knowing how I tend to piece) that the hourglass block sections would measure shorter than the cut size for the large-print blocks anyway. Therefore, I reserved judgment on the cutting error until I had the piecing done.

Wouldn’t you know it? The ONE time in my piecing life that I channel Sally Collins and have my blocks come out exactly the intended size, is the ONE time I wanted them to turn out small! Oh well. I added some 1″ dark taupe strips– another opportunity to add in more fabric!– and I think it actually improved the design. I’ve heard the saying before, it’s not a mistake, it’s a design opportunity, but I think this is the most significant example in my work so far.

To a lesser extent, this phenomenon recurred with the appliqué blocks. I knew I didn’t have enough of the owl fabric for all of the large blocks on my plan, so I intended to make one 6″ x 6″ block and one 6″ x 12″ rectangle out of the blue and taupe leaf print that I used in the hourglass blocks. Several of the model quilts in the book use more than one featured print to excellent effect. However, once I got them up on the design wall, they just blended right into the background. I salvaged the situation with some fused, machine blanket stitch appliqué, and I think the result is more interesting and attractive than if I’d had enough owl fabric in the first place.

I still need to add the borders, but I needed to put Ronan’s quilt aside to start AND FINISH!! Arianna’s quilt. We stood as godparents to Matt and Alyssa’s baby daughter, and of course I wanted to make her a quilt. (Plus, it gave me an opportunity to use some pink fabric, now that I live full-time in the Land of Blue.) I started with some Log Cabin and Pinwheel blocks I had left over from another project, added some borders and some more machine blanket stitch appliqué, and quilted it with Patsy Thompson-style no-mark feathers and freehand Baptist Fans. Considering how down-to-the-wire this project was (I finished putting the binding on at 1:30 on the morning of the baptism) I think it turned out quite well:

Once again, deadlines seem to be my friend when it comes to selecting quilting designs. If I have all the time in the world, I can dither endlessly as to which designs would be best. If I’m racing to finish, I make a command decision and put the hammer down. This was the first time I’ve even attempted, let alone used, that freehand Baptist Fan, which was inspired by Ruth B. McDowell‘s use of it as a background filler on her fabulous art quilts. I was very pleased with the result and will definitely use that again (possibly even on Ronan’s quilt?) especially on another quilt with a lot of busy piecing. It makes such a nice texture. No wonder it’s a classic. (Plus, more fun quilting puns: Baptist Fans on a baptism quilt?? Huh?? Funny?? I’m such a dork.)

Quilting Detail, Scattered Hearts (Arianna's Quilt)

On Saturday Ronan and I attended the AQS Lancaster show. I won’t give you my reviews now; hopefully there will be some new posts on the subject within the next week.  I will say that I was very excited to see that many of the changes I predicted from last year have come to pass. I definitely noticed a significant uptick in positive media coverage of the show over last year, much of it focused on the predicted $10 million it’s bringing with it to Lancaster! Several non-quilters of my acquaintance specifically asked me if I were going to the show, as they had heard about it from TV, radio, and the newspaper. So AQS seems to have come to understand Lancaster, and Lancaster seems to have grasped what it means to have a show of this caliber come to town.  More on that soon!

Finished! Matt and Alyssa’s Wedding Quilt

The baby’s asleep — I can get a post up here!

You know what they say about good intentions… and what they’re used to pave…

When my friend Alyssa asked me, roughly a month before her November 2009 wedding, if I knew anyone who’d be willing to make a wedding signature quilt for hire, I jumped at the opportunity:  “Let me do this as my wedding present to you.”  I was very sincere in this.  Despite having already planned for 2010 to be my Year of the UFO, I thought this project would make a worthy exception.  I love signature/album quilts; they’re such a wonderful tradition, and speak to me so volubly of Why We Quilt — they are literally a way for the recipients to wrap themselves in the good wishes of people who care about them.  Besides, it was going to be a simple quilt:  big blocks, straight-line piecing, nothing fancy.  This wouldn’t take much time.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Because this became Murphy’s Quilt.

Everything started well:  I prepared a basketful of precut 4 1/2″ squares of the JoAnn Fabrics Kona cotton in a nice cream, prewashed and ironed onto freezer paper, with a 1/2″ seam allowance premarked with blue washout marker.  (I figured, mostly correctly, that a marked 1/2″ seam allowance would probably yield a useably empty 1/4″ seam allowance.)  As their wedding colors were dark blue and chocolate brown, I brought along fine-tip Sharpies in navy and brown, which I had pretested for colorfastness.  Dan made a nice sign for the table at the reception, explaining the project, and the guests did a nice job leaving signatures, notes, wishes, and even some artwork on the squares.

I had planned the quilt to encompass 25 Air Castle blocks, measuring 12″ each, as I wanted it to be big enough for them to share as a couch/cuddle quilt.  I chose the Air Castle block because it’s simple, attractive, and  contains 5 solid squares; thus the quilt could accommodate up to 125 signed squares.  Projected attendance was roughly 100, and I made sure I had plenty of extra squares available to allow for mistakes, but as most couples and families signed just one square to represent them all, and some guests didn’t sign at all, I ended up with only 39 signed squares.  This was fine; it meant that I could put a signed square in the center of each block, with a second one in the lower right hand corner of slightly more than half the blocks.  It also gave me room to make an additional square to place in the center of the quilt with their names, wedding date, and details.

I had warned Alyssa when I offered to take this project on that it wouldn’t be finished anytime soon; there was no way I could start it before the new year, and she was fine with that.  I was able to pull all the necessary brown fabrics from the leftovers from Window on Whimsey, but the not-quite-navy of the bridesmaids’ dresses wasn’t really represented in my stash, so it gave me something to look for on the Shop Hop last year.  I then bundled up the fabrics, the sketch, my copy of Marsha McCloskey’s Block Party book, and set them aside.  And then my life got complicated.  I started this blog; I found out I was pregnant; three weeks later, I found out I was losing my job; and two months after that, I lost said job.  Then I started traveling so I could work for the military dental contractor, and next thing I knew, it was the middle of summer and I hadn’t yet started this quilt.  (Hello, quilt guilt!)  I had taken the supplies to the April guild retreat, but didn’t actually work on it.  In fact, I didn’t start the quilt until the weekend before my mini home retreat with Rhonda and Diane; I had started the cutting at my parents’ house during a quilting day with my mom, thinking I’d be able to knock out the whole top the following weekend.

Again:  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

As regular readers may recall, that was when I mistakenly cut a large portion of my fabric into the wrong size triangles, having forgotten in the criminally long interval between planning and starting that I had changed the block size from the 9″ in the book to 12″.  And I couldn’t just change my mind and make either more blocks or a smaller quilt, because the signed squares were 4 1/2″ and could not be cut down.  All I could do was get over myself and recut the pieces.  Fortunately, I had enough of the brown and blue fabrics, and the cream was a standard solid from JoAnn’s, easy to procure more of, right?  Right???

The first time I looked for more of the solid cream fabric was when my mom and I were in Pittsburgh to hear Bonnie Hunter speak, and we stopped into a local JoAnn’s to kill time before the meeting.  I couldn’t find anything that looked like what I’d been working with, but I didn’t have a swatch with me for comparison so I didn’t worry.  I started to worry, however, when I did take a swatch to my local JoAnn’s and still couldn’t find anything that matched.  I remembered having bought Kona cotton, but I started to second-guess myself and looked at all their solids.  Still nothing.  Could they have discontinued an entire line of solids between November and July?  Could there be a missing off-white that no one was stocking?  I was really puzzled.  I finally bought a yard each of the two closest matches, the Kona cotton and the Egyptian cotton, hoping that one or the other would look significantly different once it was washed.

And surprise, it did!  Turns out, both fabrics apparently have so much sizing and finishing additives on them that they radically changed in appearance once they were washed and dried, and the Kona cotton was indeed the winner as I had remembered.  Washed, it looked lighter in color, much more matte, and with nearly a seersucker texture even after pressing.  If I needed a reminder of the importance of prewashing, this was it.  Another obstacle surmounted.

I finished the top and also pieced the back.  I’d found on last year’s shop hop not only a beautiful blue and brown large-scale Oriental floral perfect for this purpose on the bargain rack, but also a piece of Gail Kessler‘s life-size piano keyboard fabric, which I thought would be very appropriate to incorporate into a pianist’s quilt.  It made the construction of the back somewhat more challenging, but I think it was worth it:

I then basted the quilt and started quilting.  And that’s when the final round of Murphyness raised its ugly head.  As previously discussed here, I had unprecedented problems with skipped stitches and frayed threads, especially every time I crossed a heavy intersection of seam allowances.  In a pieced quilt, there are a lot of these, and it made me nervous about my prospects for quilting both Ruby Wedding and Taupe Winding Ways.  Manipulating tension and needle choice solved most of the problem, but I still had to periodically stop, rip out, and restitch throughout the project, which really ruined my momentum and greatly prolonged the process.  I was happy with my choice of quilting design, though:  a virtually no-mark, Pam Clarke-inspired combination of continuous curve quilting in the blue and brown triangles and in the signature squares, with additional loop and curl embellishments in the solid cream squares and triangles.  The light blue thread created enough contrast for visibility without distracting from the primary focus of the top.  I finished the quilt with a scrappy binding of all the blues, once again using the Sew Precise, Sew Fast machine binding technique.

If this were a fictional story, this whole tale of woe would culminate with my putting the finished quilt in the washing machine to remove the washout blue marker and the water-soluble thread, and having all the Sharpie signatures inexplicably vanish off the fabric, thus ruining the entire project.  Fortunately, this is real life, and I really had tested the markers first, so there was no final tragedy.  I was able to give them their quilt on their first wedding anniversary, and they loved it.  Despite all the roadblocks I encountered, I am happy I made this quilt for them, and it certainly was a learning experience!  Therefore, I’ll leave this happy dance in the capable hands and feet of Mr. Gene Kelly, who danced happier than anyone:

My Brand-New Little Project

Ronan Damien Paddock made his appearance at 12:35 p.m. Saturday, November 20, 2010, weighing 10 lbs., 8 oz. and measuring 20 1/4″ long.  He was born yelling and passed all his neonatal tests with flying colors.  Due to his hugeness, he was delivered by Caesarian; so far, my recovery has been blessedly easy.

He has a full head of dark brown hair, my ears, and his daddy’s barrel chest; beyond that, it’s too soon to tell who he looks like, so for now he just looks like himself.

He is very strong and grabs everything he can with his tiny hands.  I’m already imagining a lifetime of his exploring the world through those hands:  making and breaking things, digging and playing, building and experimenting.  I hope that he enjoys working with his hands as much as I do.

I hope he knows that I will always be here to hold his hand.

Our first family portrait, taken by our anesthesiologist

Suffice to say, there will be a considerable lull in the quilt-related posts here while the new normal asserts itself and I figure out where quilting fits.  Quilting will always be a part of my life, no matter what else is going on, but I have to reprioritize and restrategize around this tiny new human for right now.  There’s a post in the pipeline about Matt and Alyssa’s quilt, and I’ll be able to catch up on my back episodes of The Quilt Show with Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims during baby feedings, so I may post some reflections and points of interest about that.  Dan is working near my Janome dealer, so he’s planning to run my machine up for servicing next week; hopefully the free-motion quilting tension problems I’m experiencing will be alleviated by the time I can actually find a free moment to quilt.

But in the meantime, I’ll be marveling at how on Earth I managed to make this amazing little person.

Little Happy Dances!

Wow, it feels great to get things finished!  Even though none of these projects were on my “official” list of UFOs, they were still taking up both physical and psychological space, and it’s wonderful to have them out from underfoot, so to speak.  Plus, as I wait for labor to start, finishing quilt projects is apparently as close to “nesting” as I get.

Noah’s Ark panel:

I picked up Mary Mashuta‘s “Foolproof Machine Quilting” for $10 on sale at Quilt Beginnings in Columbus, OH on our way out to Indianapolis in August.  I have long been a fan of hers, first upon seeing her gorgeous quilts and wonderfully inspiring books (her book,  “Confetti Quilts” would be on my desert island list) and second upon learning that she manages to amicably share a sewing space with her twin sister, Roberta Horton.  However, for all that this book contained some great ideas, it was mostly centered around making walking foot quilting accessible to new quilters who’d been put off by free motion.  Since that’s not where I am at this stage, I passed the book along to a friend.

But one of the ideas she’d stressed was using heavy threads and decorative stitches to make quilting show up on busy prints (for which she and I share a passion.)  I didn’t want to do very intricate quilting on this piece, first of all because it’s just a panel that I tweaked by piecing in the lattice, but also because I didn’t want to detract from the graphic impact of the panel.  The viewer’s brain already has to make the visual “jumps” across the lattice; I didn’t want to further confuse things by introducing a busy quilting design.  So I marked a simple 2″ grid to echo, rather than compete with, the lattice, then used the walking foot with a serpentine stitch and orange Brytes by Superior Threads, a nice heavy 30/3 polyester with a bit of a sheen to it.  I used the Pellon Legacy wool batting I’d bought at AQS Lancaster, which gave it a nice puffy loft.  (I hesitate to say it, but I think I might actually prefer the Pellon to the Quilter’s Dream wool I used for Convergence Birds and have set aside for Ruby Wedding!)

Serpentine stitch grid

I switched to my fancy new free motion foot, its first real test drive since I bought it at Quilt Odyssey, but left the Brytes in to do a no-mark, freehand Patsy Thompson-style feather in the top and bottom borders.  I’ve been a huge fan of her Freemotion Fun with Feathers DVD series, but hadn’t had much opportunity to use her techniques in actual quilts rather than just on doodle cloths, and I’m very pleased with how it turned out.  I quilted these feathers before I took her class at Quilting with Machines in September, and it acted as an excellent warmup.  I wasn’t sure whether the feathers would show up in that busy print border, but apparently the combination of the puffy wool batting and the thick thread did the trick.  I will have to remember that.

Freemotion feather border

For the binding, I used the same fabric I’d used for the lattice strips, and Suzanne Michelle Hyland’s Sew Fast, Sew Precise Machine Binding technique that was so maligned by the show judges on my quilts this spring and summer — remember, “a hand-sewn binding adds refinement” — but that gets my quilts finished rather than languishing in limbo.  Plus, I don’t think my baby boy will be so discriminating.

Mom’s Halloween Attic Windows:

I had three big decisions to make when quilting this little quilt:

1) How to handle the border, which is decently wide and of a solid batik that would nicely show off the quilting

2) How to quilt the focus fabric squares without distracting from the fabric itself

3)  How to use the glow-in-the-dark thread to best advantage.

It’s always tricky to quilt something for someone else.  Even considering that my “client” in this case is my mother, whose tastes I have far more experience with and insight into than the average person’s, there’s still that worry that what pleases me might not please her.  I know she doesn’t like extremely dense quilting, especially in contrasting threads.  At the same time, I have this wonderful opportunity to use glow-in-the-dark thread on a Halloween quilt, and the NiteLite colors are all very light; I used the Purple, but against the deep plum border even it looks almost white.  I used the Pellon Legacy soy blend batting, which only needs to be quilted every 8″, so dense quilting wouldn’t be necessary.  I started with simple ditch quilting with the walking foot and fine, matching threads to anchor the center.  That way, I could come back to the center once I’d figured out what to do with it.

I knew I wanted to do something spectacular in that border, yet that would still fit the whimsical theme of the piece.  That was when I remembered the antique Easter quilt I’d seen in Fons & Porter, with an appliqued border of stylized bats that just looked like fancy swags at first glance:

"Easter Quilt," by Bertha Amelia Meckstroth, 1933 (from Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting Magazine, July/August 2010)

That idea was way too much fun to leave alone, so I modified a simple bat design from an online coloring page (great resources for simple shapes and line drawings!), sized it to fit, and then used another technique from Mary Mashuta’s book to mark them:  I cut them out of freezer paper and ironed them onto the quilt top, then did my freemotion quilting just outside the edge of the paper.  This also allowed me to fudge the measurements where I needed to, and obviated the need to do a lot of marking on a dark fabric.  I hadn’t originally intended to add the button eyes, but I wanted to make the shapes more clearly recognizable as individual bats, and especially with the “spooky eyes” fabric as the sashing, I think it maintained the mood.

Bat border closeup

I wish I could post a picture of what it looks like glowing in the dark, but I do not have the right camera equipment for that.  In fact, I have a phone, which is not going to cut it.  But let me assure you, it’s pretty impressive.  So I decided to just use the NiteLite for all the visible quilting, even though it’s higher contrast than I would have otherwise dared.  That also solved my dilemma for the Attic Windows sashing, as I didn’t really want to have to change threads between the purple and orange segments.  I chose the design partly as a quilting pun:  it’s a variation on the old Pumpkin Seed design, which I thought was both thematic and pretty.  Add some diagonal lines to tame the focus fabric, and it’s done!  This also got the machine binding treatment:  it’s a wallhanging, for goodness sakes!  I did hand sew the hanging sleeve, though.  Isn’t that batik adorable?

Batik back & sleeve for Mom's Halloween Attic Windows

Matt and Alyssa’s quilt gets its own happy dance post, after all the trials and tribulations of what was supposed to be a simple project.  So here’s my preliminary happy dance for the two smaller projects, and I’ll indulge in a grander one in the next post:

Hooray for Home Retreats!

It’s been so hot here this summer.  At first I thought I’d developed some sort of temperature immunity by spending three weeks in Arkansas, but the uninterrupted misery of it has been getting to me lately.  We’ve barely used our grill this summer, and have no desire to eat on the porch.  Even the cats have just been laying around — oh wait, that’s normal.

Fergus and Tucker spread out in the summer heat

But what better way to spend a hot summer day than having a home retreat?  Fortunately my dining room converts nicely into a three-person sewing space.  Diane came for the weekend in order to attend Quilt Odyssey (more on that later) and we designated Saturday as a quilting day.  Rhonda came down to join in the fun, and our machines were humming and our needles were flying!

Oolong helped Diane

Now, even with having the support of my friends and a well-appointed sewing space, my quilting is still ultimately performed by me alone.  As such, it is subject to human error.  Such as when I cut all the brown and cream, and 1/4-1/3 of the blue, triangles for the wedding album quilt I’m making for my friends Matt and Alyssa, and then realized I’d cut them all the wrong size!!! I had followed the cutting directions in the (wonderful and blameless) book, Marsha McCloskey’s Block Party , without remembering that way back in November when I had designed the quilt, I had planned to make 12″ Air Castle blocks rather than the 9″ blocks the book provides.  Thus, the 4 1/2″ muslin squares that the guests signed at the reception would not fit the 3 1/2″ subunits I had cut for and pieced.  When this realization first dawned, I admit there was a little bit of denial, then a little bit of feeling sorry for myself.  Since we were having a little mini-retreat, there was of course comfort food, and I indulged medicinally.  Then I realized I had to take a bit of my own oft-quoted advice:

This quilter is obviously a woman after my own heart.

We took a break from all the quilt-induced madness to visit The Finishing Stitch, which was having a nice Customer Appreciation sale, and stopped on the way home for delicious soft-serve at a little roadside place whose midafternoon crowds promised truthfully as to how good the seasonal raspberry ice cream was.  Then back to the grind!  I got almost all my new pieces recut, unfortunately reinforcing my tendency to buy more fabric than I need for a project, and managed to piece 13 of the 25 blocks needed before the weekend came to a too-swift close.

Thirteen blocks done!

But if I’d been alone, I don’t think I’d have had the fortitude to bounce right back from realizing I’d wasted all that time and fabric.  I probably would have let myself sink into a funk and stew about it for weeks, unable to start over because any thought of the project would remind me of my stupid mistake and send me back into a black mood.  However, with my friends here for sympathy and guidance, I was able to pick myself up, dust myself off, and cut a whole bunch more triangles in a bigger size.  And therefore, I’m more than halfway done with a quilt top I’ve been guilted over for months.

Hooray.

A Tale of Two Purses

You know how sometimes, when you need to call or write a friend you’ve been out of touch with for a while, you catch yourself  putting it off because there’s so much to say?  Yet the longer you put it off, the more there is to cover, and you dig yourself a little deeper.

That’s where I’ve been with this blog.  I’ve been back from Arkansas for almost a month, my guild show has come and gone, and each time I think about posting to the blog I think, Oh, but I still haven’t posted about the quilt shop in Arkansas, or the lecture and exhibit I went to at the Allentown Art Museum, or winning my first-ever blue ribbon, or going to New York City…

You see where I’m going with this.  I’ve been doing the same thing with the blog lately that I’ve been doing with my UFOs, allowing the accumulated psychological weight of  my perceived to-do list to paralyze me into inactivity.  So perhaps I need to take a more measured approach to the blog, the way I’ve been attempting to do with the UFOs.  Rather than trying to get all caught up, I’ll start with what I’m doing now.  If I can manage to go “back in time” and catch up, great; if not, at least I’m not digging myself in deeper.  Again.

So!  What have I been working on lately?  Purses!  It most likely started here:

As I’ve doubtless mentioned before, I am totally in thrall to the Japanese quilters.  I’m amazed by the idea that a culture with no history of quilting (technically, sashiko isn’t quilting, it’s embroidery to decorate and reinforce a single layer of fabric) and certainly no history of decorative patchwork, a culture which was only exposed to American quilting post-WWII, has managed to produce in just the last 60 years a community of quilters of unparalleled creativity and workmanship.  I subscribe to two Japanese quilting magazines, Quilts Japan and Patchwork Quilt Tsushin, and am always happy for opportunities to see Japanese quilts in person.  I love the design esthetic:  the frequently muted colors (especially taupes!), the artful assymetries, the use of fabric printed with English or French text as purely a textural element much in the same way we use Chinese or Japanese logographic characters for decoration.  Here we see the quintessential American craft, that is ours the same way jazz and rock and roll are, reinterpreted through a foreign lens in a breathtakingly beautiful fashion.

So every time I’m in or near New York City, I stop at Kinokuniya bookstore, located right across the street from Bryant Park, where they put on the Fashion Week shows (Hi, Tim Gunn!) and Sanseido bookstore, located in the Mitsuwa marketplace in Edgewater, NJ.  There I spend some very happy hours browsing through quilt books that I can’t read, but the photographs are stunning and the directions have very helpful diagrams.  Both the books and magazines are for me primarily sources of inspiration, rather than patterns I plan to follow faithfully, but I think I’d do OK once I converted all the measurements from metric to English, if I decided I had to make something exactly the way it appeared.  I didn’t plan to just buy purse books, but these were the items that attracted me the most.

Then, hard on the heels of my NYC trip were several family birthdays.  One of my sisters, when I asked her what she wanted for her birthday, said, “Oh please, don’t buy me anything.”  I decided to honor the letter of the law, rather than the spirit, and made her a purse.  Technically, the only thing I bought were the zippers and interfacing.  She apparently forgives me this transgression, because she loved the purse:

I am inordinately proud of this zipper.

She and her family are big Star Wars fans, even having attended the Star Wars Celebration in Orlando, so I couldn’t think of a worthier recipient for something made from some of my precious vintage Star Wars fabric.  My friend Joan was generous enough to share this with me last month, after I had quite openly coveted it at our guild retreat in December.  She had bought the fabric when it was in the stores after Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, held onto it all these years, then made this quilt for her grown son’s “man cave”:

Joan's Star Wars quilt

I wound up quite unexpectedly being asked to hold an impromptu “Introduction to Star Wars” lecture at the retreat, explaining the story to those retreat-goers not familiar with it, based on the images in the quilt.  (Fortunately, the regulars were all fully cognizant of what a big giant nerd I am, so I wasn’t outing myself.)  It felt pretty much exactly like this:

(I couldn’t find a version of this scene without the added comedy title and subtitles, but you get the idea.)

So the purse is the Huntington Hobo by Pink Sand Beach Designs, and the directions were wonderful.  Even the zippers were easy to do with her photos and instructions.  The only drawback is that I wish I’d had a better quality zipper for the top opening; the big metal one from JoAnn’s hangs up too much.  Hopefully as my sister uses the bag and possibly waxes the zipper, it will work more easily, but overall I have to call this one a great success.  Which is good, since another of my sisters has already informed me that I’m permitted to make one, sans Star Wars, for her birthday in November.

Then this past weekend, we attended a birthday party for my 12-year-old niece.  I got her a DVD she wanted (Up, probably my favorite Pixar movie yet, which is saying a lot) and some fingernail glitter, but I thought it would be fun to make her a purse as well:

This is Geisha Girl by Purse Strings, and the directions were great right up until it came time to put in the zipper.  I’ll definitely make this purse again, and I’ll have to play with the zipper instructions then, but they just weren’t speaking to me this time, so I left the zipper out.  But it turned out SOOOO CUTE!  She was very happy with it.  I wish I could have taken it to show and tell, but I missed my guild meeting last week due to an upset stomach — much as I wanted to share the purse, I didn’t want to risk sharing a nasty GI bug!  Fortunately it was of short duration.

The skull fabric is called Skullfinity, by (you guessed it) Alexander Henry.  I found this at JoAnn Fabrics of all places a couple years ago and bought 6 1/2 yards out of sheer love.  (Yay coupons!)  I have a Halloween UFO that this should be the back to.

I spent much of Sunday making the bias binding for Ruby Wedding.  My parents’ 41st wedding anniversary was yesterday, and while I’m getting no pressure from them, thank goodness, I’m feeling the guilt considering the quilt is now a full year late.  I haven’t basted it yet, but knowing the binding is there waiting for me somehow makes it easier to embark on the huge intimidating project that quilting this quilt represents.  That’s what’s next…

Helloooo, Cleveland!

I’m writing this at the Cleveland airport, waiting for the flight that will take me to Memphis.  I’m going deeply South for the next three weeks for a contract job that I will talk about later.  But first I had to get this out of my system:

OK.  Obligatory Spinal Tap reference made.  Carry on.

I hadn’t intended to let the blog lie fallow for so long.  I’ve had some life stuff going on which I will discuss in a later post (ooh, SUSPENSE!) and the longer I put off talking about that, the harder it seemed to get started.  Not only have I not felt particularly verbally creative lately, but the quilting fell by the wayside somewhat while I regrouped, reassessed, and got adjusted to The New Normal.

But not only have I renewed my commitment to Accentuating the Positive, Eliminating the Negative, Latching On to the Affirmative, and Avoiding Any and All Messing With Mr. In-Between, I have also had a really good quilting weekend.  My birthday was Friday, and I couldn’t have given myself a better gift than three days of quilts and friends.  Since I found out Wednesday that I’ll be spending the next three weeks (!) in Arkansas (!!) without a sewing machine (!!!), I addressed my quilting day with Rhonda on Friday to the sole purpose of getting a hand-applique project ready to take with me.  It doesn’t look like much now, but it’ll get there.  Then Diane arrived Friday night with some drop-dead, knock-out show and tells:

Batik Disappearing Nine-Patch

Batik Ohio Star

The Ohio Star blocks are the beginnings of the quilt she’s been buying all those gorgeous blue, teal, and purple batiks for.  I feel a palpable ache to see the finished quilt.

Rhonda, Diane, and I took a shop hop to Lebanon, Lancaster, and Berks Counties on Saturday, stopping at Martin’s Fabric Barn in Lebanon; Burkholder’s and Sauder’s in Denver; Wooden Bridge Drygoods in Kutztown; and Ladyfingers Sewing Studio in Oley.  I didn’t buy any full price fabric, but I still did more damage than I would have ideally liked, especially since we were going to a quilt show the next day.  However, I was able to pick up Marsha McCloskey‘s new Feathered Star book, which I have been semi-breathlessly awaiting since the first volume came out in 2003, so that could not be helped.  It was a beautiful day for a drive out in the country, and a good day with friends.  When we got home, Dan made burgers and served birthday cake.  Doesn’t get much better than that.

Sunday we drove to Chantilly, VA for the Quilters Unlimited show.  QU has something like 1200 members, and the show is not judged, so they get a huge turnout of quilts.  It’s nice to see such a wide variety of difficulty and skill levels displayed, as the format encourages guild members to submit quilts that probably wouldn’t appear in a smaller, judged show.  In my critical hat, however, I started to feel like a broken record on two topics:

1)  Value Judgments:  If you don’t have much value contrast between your fabrics, your piecing or applique is not going to show up.  While this can occasionally be useful, even desirable, I don’t think many of the worst offenders at this show recognized the problem before the top was finished.  If all your fabrics are medium, there’s nothing to move the viewer’s eye around the top.  And apparently, the quilters of northern Virginia l-o-o-o-v-e them some Kaffee Fassett.  Gorgeous fabrics, but tricky.  I’m a believer in “showing my work” like in math class:  if I made the effort to do it, I darn well want you to see it.  And if your entire quilt is light peach and light green (or dark purple and dark teal, or whatever), that work doesn’t show.  You might as well have just quilted a big piece of one fabric.

2)Caught With Your Pantographs Down:  Just because I haven’t yet sent out a top to a professional longarm quilter does not mean that I have anything against the practice; far from it.  I would much rather see someone who likes to make tops but doesn’t like to quilt them enjoying finished quilts (and supporting a usually-female entrepreneur in the process) than feeling guilt over a closetful of unquilted tops any day of the week.  And I’ll never say never:  I may very well be patronizing a longarmer myself one of these days.  BUT– (and it’s a big but, tee hee) there is a time and a place for pantographs.  A busy pieced quilt with the focus on the bold print fabrics, where custom quilting wouldn’t show up no matter what you did, is the perfect application for a nice pantograph.  But a medallion quilt with big open spaces around the piecing?  An applique quilt?  A quilt where the value difference between the pieced stars and the background isn’t particularly strong?  Bad, BAD pantograph!  An all-over design pushes the foreground into the background and blends everything together.  That’s sometimes an asset, but for some of these quilts it was definitely an deficit.  I know pantos are normally cheaper, but there’s a time to be cheap, and your quilts aren’t it.

/soapbox stowed.

The quilts were lovely, the guild members rightly proud, and the vendors numerous.  We grew sore from walking on the unforgiving concrete floors, but it was well worth it.  However, fantasy had to cede to reality, and my fabulous quilt weekend had to give way to a long day in airports.  Such is life.

I’d better get to my gate; I have high hopes for Elvis-inspired ridiculousness at the Memphis airport.  If I am not disappointed, I promise to share.