2013 Challenge Quilt — Solids!

Bright color camouflage! Can you find the hidden child?

Once again, part of why my blog went dark in the latter part of last year was that I couldn’t show you what I was primarily working on. This year’s challenge was announced in May and was solid fabrics, at least six different shades/hues. My initial reaction was very negative:  basically, “eww, I’m not doing that!” After all, the fabrics I love are prints and batiks, and I have a houseful of them. Doing a solid fabric challenge would entail buying new fabric at a time when I’m desperately trying to use up my stash, as my stash decidedly lacks solids.

Finley helped me assess my feather coverage partway through the quilting.

However, when I told my mom about the challenge and how much I was NOT inspired by it, two things happened. First, she reminded me that the first quilts I fell in love with, the quilts that inspired me to start quilting, and indeed my first several quilts, were all made of solid fabrics. And second, she gave me a bag of twelve solid half-yards for my birthday. I subsequently added some neutrals, and the game was afoot. Besides, in retrospect, if my reaction to a challenge is “eww!” then that suggests that it really will be a challenge, not just an excuse to make a quilt I would’ve made anyway.

Early on in the process, I decided that the biggest advantage working with solids would give me is how well quilting shows up on solid fabric. Therefore, I wanted to keep the piecing simple. Since I love pinwheels, and have been planning for years to make a quilt that incorporates different sizes of pinwheels, I settled on the idea of making a quilt similar to this one of Kaffe Fassett‘s:

From _Country Garden Quilts_

I started the cutting at my mini-retreat in late July with Rhonda and Diane, and didn’t really work up a strict plan. I decided to just run all the solid fabric through my Accuquilt GO! cutter (after all, I really wasn’t looking to start a solid stash) and make the quilt however big it turned out. I had a lot of fun cranking out all those triangles. I then paired them off into blocks using my standard concept of quilt entropy, trying to get the colors as mixed up as possible. I don’t know whether I will ever be capable of leaving things up to chance sufficiently to make a “brown bag” quilt, but I did have fun free-associating about the various bright color combinations:  green and purple is the Hulk, orange and fuchsia is the beach, red and brown is a robin, yellow and purple is Easter. The colors all coordinate with one another because there are so many of them; as Alex Anderson says, if the colors in your quilt aren’t going together, add more colors and they will.

You know you’re really chain piecing when you can barely see the baby

I sewed all the large 12″ blocks together and had paired up the triangles for the 6″ blocks when I realized I’d goofed. In the original quilt, the smaller blocks are 1/3 the size of the larger blocks, not 1/2. Oops. Time for a new plan. I liked the idea of keeping the center of the quilt set on point, so I just sewed the large blocks together and planned on making the smaller blocks into a border. And that’s when I got seriously sidetracked with other projects (they’re in the next post.) That’s also when I fully internalized just how large a quilt (84″ x 84″!) I was ending up with, which hadn’t really been in the plan.

Just the center

The primary problem with having the challenge meeting in January is that I didn’t get back to the challenge quilt until after Christmas:  even though we actually had more time between the announcement of the challenge and the meeting, I would have had to have the quilt virtually finished before Thanksgiving to have truly been on-time with it, and my brain doesn’t work that way. I very nearly packed it in and turned it into another UFO, but Dan was my cheerleader and encouraged me to finish it. Fortunately, the rest of the quilt top went together smoothly and the children more or less cooperated to get me some sewing time.

Some days, this is what cooperation looks like

I wound up working in Danville, PA for a military dental event the weekend before the guild meeting, so I made certain I had the quilt basted and the quilting started before I left so I could get some dedicated quilting time in my motel room. I made the most of it and had the entire outer border and 1/4 of the center quilted by the time I got home. Once again, working under deadline really helped me make decisions as to what quilting designs went where. Feathers are favorites of mine to stitch without a great deal of marking and they always look fancy, so I put Patsy Thompson-style soft heart feathers in the outer border and Kimmy Brunner “twirly whirly” feathers in the center. I was able to get away with only marking the spines in all cases; the seam lines for the borders and the X through the center gave me all the other guidelines I needed. This was definitely not a project for subtlety, so I used neon green Brytes by Superior Threads for all of it. I managed to get the remainder of the center quilted and the outside edge zigzagged and trimmed in time for the meeting, so even though it wasn’t finished, it was finished-ish.

Before and after hyperquilting

The inner border was reserved for my fanciest quilting, since it would show the best there. I think it also helped me finish this quilt, as I was really looking forward to quilting that border; otherwise, I probably would have lost momentum once the meeting was past and I no longer had a deadline. I rewatched Patsy Thompson’s Free-Motion Fun with Feathers Vol. 4 DVD again for inspiration and quilted a hyperquilted, symmetrical border flowing from corner motifs that started as Quilter’s Rule Dragon Scales template and evolved from there.

Detail, corner quilting design

I used orange Brytes for the original feather and hyperquilted it with Superior Threads Metallic in variegated gold. I also shook up my standard machine binding protocol to add a little more embellishment by trading the stitching in the ditch for a decorative stitch in a variegated King Tut:

Detail, binding stitching

What would I do differently? Well, much as I love wool batting, it definitely increased the difficulty level on this quilt. I think as long as I’m quilting on my home machine, I need to reserve wool for the smaller projects. It doesn’t spray baste as nicely as the cotton blends, and I got more pleats and tucks on the back than usual. I didn’t have any problems with skipped stitches or shredded threads (even with the Metallic! That stuff worked like a charm and I will most certainly be using it more often from here on out) but I had more “nests” on the back than I normally do. I’m not sure why. I didn’t let it stop me (another benefit of being on a strict deadline) but I will be keeping my eye out for future problems along these lines and possible causes/solutions.

For a happy dance, I’m mining the classic movie musicals again. The bright colors in this quilt made me think of the old movies that would advertise being shot “in Glorious TECHNICOLOR!” including “On The Town.” Enjoy!

The Appalachian Quilt Trail

Breathtakingly beautiful!

I recently had the opportunity to travel to eastern Tennessee to participate in one last military dental event while I was still allowed by the obstetrician to do so.  (Aside:  I checked the airline guidelines to make sure I wasn’t going to be denied a seat on account of my gravid status, and found out they only restrict travel within seven days of the due date! And it’s by honor system!  I guess even airline employees follow Dave Barry’s Rules for Living on the subject:  “You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.”)

Anyway, I had never been to eastern Tennessee, or, for that matter, any part of Tennessee that wasn’t the Memphis airport, so I jumped at the opportunity.  I’m so glad I did.  My itinerary wound up providing me a free Friday afternoon and a free Sunday afternoon for sightseeing, so before leaving I did some internet detective work to find out what I might want to see.  Needless to say, my first thought was of quilty things, and a quick search revealed an impressive density of quilt shops in the greater Johnson City-Jonesborough area.  But it also revealed something very intriguing:  the Appalachian Quilt Trail.

The concept was started in Ohio nearly ten years ago, to promote tourism by painting quilt block murals on the sides of barns.  The state of Tennessee picked up the idea with a vengeance, placing 330 of the 8′ x 8′ hand-painted wooden murals on the sides of barns over a 300 mile looping trail in central and eastern TN (there are quilt murals in southwestern VA and western NC as well.)  Rather than just being assigned randomly, several of the quilt blocks replicate family quilts inherited by the owners of the sites.  There was an open house event happening on Saturday, October 16, but as that was the day that I was screening the dental health of Army National Guard troops for 10 1/2 straight hours, I was otherwise occupied.  Apparently, though, several of those family quilts were on display at selected sites that day.  The very helpful map and brochure indicated not only the location of each mural, but also whether it was located at a “drive-by,” private site, or if there was a shop, museum, or farm stand associated with it.  Thus, not only does the Quilt Trail create a lovely rationale for driving around the stunningly beautiful Tennessee countryside, but it also provides opportunities for ecotourism, agritourism, historical tourism, and shopping.

I landed at Tri-Cities Airport around 1 pm on an absolutely picture-perfect fall day, the kind with sunny blue skies and a crisp breeze that just makes you want to rake leaves, carve a pumpkin, and bake an apple pie.  I didn’t have to be on base until 7:30 the next morning, and I had a rental car, so I drove around to several of the sites and quilt shops in the greater Johnson City – Jonesborough area.  I got lost a decent amount; street signs are not apparently much of a priority in that area, but in daylight and without a strict time schedule, I didn’t mind much.  I started out at the Knob Creek Museum site in Johnson City, planning to see the museum as well as the mural, but it turned out to be open by appointment only, and that always makes me feel awkward.  I did get a picture, though:

"Mother's Dream Nine Patch," Knob Creek Museum, Johnson City, TN

From there I headed towards the next location on the map, but made a wrong turn.  However, in my attempt to get turned around, I spotted a quilt shop I hadn’t prescreened at home, In Stitches.  It’s a small shop, primarily a Bernina dealership, but they have an eye-popping collection of modern, graphic fabrics.  These two juvenile prints recommended themselves immediately:

However, this was also where I found out the downside to being a tourist in Tennessee:  nine-and-a-half percent sales tax! Everyone I met there was very friendly and very proud of their state, and I’m sure it’s a nice place to live, what with no state income tax and all.  But as a tourist who doesn’t get that benefit, 9.5% sales tax is a little… chafing.  Oh well.  Delaware has no sales tax at all, but is nowhere near as pretty.

From there I went to another quilt trail site:

"Swallows in the Window," M. Thomas Barn, Johnson City, TN

And from there, to another shop.  Somewhere Sewing is about to move to Ohio, so everything was 30% off.   A new shop is opening in the next town over and has already hired all the staff, so morale was excellent and the selection was vast.  I called my mom from the shop and did a little remote personal shopping for her as well:

The blue Stonehenge on the left is for my mom

I then attempted to find a quilt mural that my iPhone’s GPS was quite confident it knew the location of, but I never found, despite driving by three or four times.  I did, however, get a picture of this:

I apologize for the dark picture, but it was very sunny that day:  it’s the intersection of Crockett Court and Boone Drive, which explains part of my difficulties navigating.  Everything in that area seems to be named after either Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone, which led to plenty of unfortunate singing on my part.

I then proceeded to Jonesborough, otherwise known as Historical Jonesborough, the Oldest Town in Tennessee, Storytelling Capital of the World.  (They seem both very proud of their history and very fond of capitalization.)  I wasn’t initally going to go to The Sewing Bee because I couldn’t find a website for them (I’m such a websnob) but they had an ad in my Quilt Trail booklet, so I gave them a try.  It turned out to be a very nice shop with beautiful class and shop models, a strong notions department, Patsy Thompson DVDs, and a good back room clearance selection!  This was where I really had to remind myself that all purchases had to fit in my suitcase.

Based on their website, I was expecting Tennessee Quilts to be a nice shop.  I wasn’t expecting this:

It's like the Tara of quilt shops!

And yes, the whole two stories was occupied by the shop.  It was huge, and had the most comprehensive Kaffe Fassett selection I have ever seen in person, including multiple shop models of his designs.  I think I spent the first 20 minutes of my visit just wandering aimlessly around, taking it all in.  I didn’t actually buy much, just a couple of bargain fabrics, but I thoroughly enjoyed my visit, and the friendly saleslady tipped me off to a small exhibit of guild quilts across the street (Boone Street, naturally) at the Historical Society.

Saturday was all about work, and I expected to put in almost as full a day on Sunday, but my team was finished early.  My flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until after 6, and a call to Delta resulted in no better options, so I devoted my afternoon to seeing a few more Quilt Trail murals.  I had another glorious day of clear weather, with the leaves just starting to turn and the Smoky Mountains in the distance, so I couldn’t think of a better use of my time.  I’ll let the pictures do the talking:

"Stars Over Tennessee," Allandale Farm, Kingsport, TN

"Dutch Girl," Childress Brothers, Kingsport, TN

"Crown of Thorns," Bailey Farm, Kingsport, TN

"Bow Tie in a Nine Patch," Lady Barn, Kingsport, TN

It was actually a good thing that my flight schedule put an endpoint to my natural tendency to apply a Pokemon-style “Gotta Catch ’em All” philosophy to a project like this, or I could have happily driven around much longer.  And on that note, a parting shot from Dave Barry’s Rules for Living:  “There is a very fine line between ‘hobby’ and ‘mental illness.'”

Patchwork as Fashion

Tom and Lorenzo have a great post up on their fashion blog about the Yves Saint Laurent retrospective going on at the Musee des Beaux Arts in Paris until the end of the month.  Suffice to say, I won’t be attending in person.  However, as I was reviewing the pictures to add a little fabulosity to my morning, I came across this dress from 1969:

Yves Saint Laurent gown from the 1969 collection

Doesn’t it look exactly like something from a current Kaffe Fassett/Rowan book?  Big prints, bright colors, simple piecing.  The idea of wearing a patchwork maxi skirt may be hopelessly dated, but the colors to me look very contemporary.  Those tropical brights are unavoidably “in” right now.

I haven’t seen too many current fashion designers using recognizably traditional patchwork elements in their clothes lately; Jay McCarroll did it beautifully on the first season of Project Runway, and of course now he designs quilt fabric.  Angela Keslar from PR season 3 kept doing those awful yo-yo embellishments (which she insisted on calling “rosettes”) and they eventually got her kicked off, but I think the idea had potential, albeit in a much different form.  Tie-dye and shibori have made a comeback on the runway thanks to Proenza Schouler and Rodarte, among others, but it’s not quite the same thing.

I’d like to make some “wearable art” myself; one of the reasons I love making quilted purses is that they actually go out into the world to be seen, while bed quilts by their nature usually stay home.  However, as someone with a body that certainly doesn’t need any bulk added to it, I have hesitated to make a jacket, having seen too many that make the wearer look like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.  I’ve also seen a few that have embellishments or piecing details that, umm, shall we say, weren’t properly thought out for placement on the female form?  Perhaps the lady I saw wearing the Log Cabin jacket that put two coral-centered blocks right on her breasts really was living her sublimated Gypsy Rose Lee fantasy, but that’s not something you have to worry about with a purse.  Hopefully I’ll find the right project someday, but till then I won’t be piecing any clothing.

But imagine a world in which that patchwork maxi skirt would not only pass without comment but would be the height of fashion?  It would be a world very different from ours.

The girl who dances with the police horses:  is her skirt made of granny squares or yo-yos?  I can’t tell at this resolution.

How impressive that a top European designer like YSL would have produced a high-fashion runway look so closely influenced by American street culture of the time, and that forty years later, that same color palette is the height of fashion.  Everything old is indeed new again.  Peace!