Creativity Mirror

I went to A Work of Heart on Sunday with a group of friends to belatedly celebrate my birthday. I LOVE LOVE LOVE that place! I love the space, the creative energy, Andrea (the owner). I want that creative wonderland to be down the street from my house. Really, I want to live there, but I would settle for it being down the street from my house.

I invited some non-crafty people so Andrea the Awesome suggested the Altered Mirror project. I wasn’t that excited about that project, but went with it and am very pleased at how mind came out (top), how successfully everyone was able to work and how well all the mirrors came out.

The place is great and all of the supplies you see in the backgrounds of the above photos are available to use.

Step 1: Paint the Frame

The first step was to paint the frame and the little chipboard squares. I ended up painting all of them (top and sides). Above it shows the squares as I was painting the sides.

The color scheme I chose was to coordinate with the way we are going to paint our bedroom. I didn’t mean to put ‘CREATE’ as the message, but creativity is on my mind lately and it seemed like the right thing. I don’t know if the mirror will end up in our room ultimately, but we will see.

Step ?: Distress Some Squares

Each of the squares has something done to them: cover with paper, paint with crackle paint, ink, etc. Above I was using distressing/embossing powder on some of the squares. BLECH!!! I sincerely disliked how they came out and the effort was not worth the result. Live and Learn, though. I am glad I tried it and now I know.

Step Near the End: Embellishing

Above I have lined up all of the squares and glued them to the frame. I have also started to embellish. Andrea has FABULOUS glue and I only had to stick down some of the papers a little bit. The glue used to stick the squares down is different from that she suggested I use to apply the embellishments.

Kathy's piece

Kathy, from Everyday Bliss, wrote a great post about the day. She expresses some self doubt in the post, but I didn’t see that at all. I saw her start looking at the paper and dive right in. Kathy’s piece, with its orange base, reminds me so totally of her. It has whimsy and a little reality check (see the martini glass? She is the parent of a 2YO, after all) and a fabulous girly, but elegant girly look. Check it, and her project out, at the Everyday Bliss blog.

One of the great things about the afternoon, as I mentioned, was that everyone was successful. Everyone worked on their mirrors and created beautiful pieces. Everyone seemed happy and to have a good time. There was  a nice creative and relaxed feeling that permeated the event.

Julie's

I love Julie’s message. Her message of “Today” makes me think about not looking to the future too much. It is a good reminder to be in the moment – or to balance planning for the future while living in the moment.

Helen's

Helen seemed really uncomfortable when she started. I don’t know what Helen’s creative experience is to date. She did the most amazing work. I love the color scheme and her selections of paper and embellishments. It was so fantastic to watch her work.

Bron's

Bron’s embellishments came across to me as delicate.

Mary's

Mary knew not getting the squares straight would drive her crazy, so she made the squares wonky. That small changed added movement and now the straightness is not an issue. I adore her background color.

Maureen's

Maureen used her hand dyed fabric instead of paper to cover the chipboard squares. It reminds me of a painting I saw at the SFMOMA. I’ll amend this post if I remember which one it was.

Terri's

I love the red that Terri used for the background color. Her piece has a bit of an Asian feel.

Camille's

Camille insisted that she was not crafty. Her piece, for her daughter’s new bedroom, tells me otherwise. I had a pink and purple bedroom when I was a girl, so I am partial to this piece.

Maggie's

Maggie wanted to make a piece to commemorate our sorority. I love it that she used yellow to to prevent the pink from getting to sickly sweet. This piece is very cheerful.

Kim's

Kim has more experience than anyone with the various tools and supplies. If you look closely at her piece, you can see where she used a rubber stamp and then embossed. The embossing actually came out well on hers.

Kim's also

I think the above photo reflects the colors she used a little better.

Sharon's

Sharon’s piece reminds me of sailing and code flags. She says that she chose a color scheme that would coordinate with her duvet cover.

Adrienne's

Adrienne, or AJA, is one of the quiltmakers with whom I do the Bullseye Project. She came all the way from Tucson to be at my party. I was so happy! She and Julie and I went to dinner after the party. I love the way she used the bottle cap and the garter hooks.

Valerie's

Valerie and I see each other once a year. We met in the baby class when we were both pregnant and our kids used to play together when they were small. Now we see each other about once a year, but it is great. She is a great sport at being creative with me.

I am thinking of having my birthday there again next year.

One Old, 3 New, Sorbet Blocks

The above blocks are the blocks I made over the weekend. Except for the one in the lower left hand corner, which I made last week. I put it in to make the photo square and so you wouldn’t see my ugly carpet.

2 Sorbet Blocks, August 2009

Last week I made two blocks for the Sorbet quilt (left). They sat on my design wall all week and as I looked at them a new idea formed in my head: a baby.

When I made these, I just wanted to make some of the quickest blocks to cut and sew. I wanted to get some endorphins going and some quick satisfaction.

What I didn’t realize was that these two could be merged to make yet another block. I didn’t need to make a pattern, which is part of the fun and joy of this quilt.

I can’t shake the idea that these two blocks got together and had a baby!

Baby block

Silly, I know, but it is what it is.

The others I made were from the patterns I already designed in EQ6. I think this quilt will be one that I can longarm myself.

Four Patch Corner

Not really sure why the above block is called Four Patch Corner. I didn’t make up the name, it was in EQ6.

9 Patch

Regular old 9 Patch fits the size and shape requirements. Easy to make and I think it looks great.

Sorbet EQ6 Pattern Key

In a recent post, I posted a partially colored view of the patterns I had created in EQ6 for the Quilt Sorbet Quilt (not sure whether I will call it Sorbet or Quilt Sorbet or something else). Here is a fully colored rendering.

Some of the blocks are pretty obvious, but others kind of blend together.

My other thought was to create an EQ6 rendering where I color the blocks as I sew them.  That might make my life too complicated, but we will see. It might, on the other hand, make it easy for me to keep track of blocks I have made.

FOTY 2008 quilted

I spent time yesterday machine quilting the Fabric of the Year 2008 quilt at Always Quilting. It took me 3.25 hours from the time I started pinning the piece to the machine until I took it off. It was the fastest I have ever done longarming-all three times I have quilted a quilt on the longarm! I can’t really take all the credit credit for the speed, however. I did focus on the longarming, but the helper did everything for me except the actual quilting.

The quilting part is actually the speediest part of the longarm process. The other parts of the process are pretty time consuming. You have to, first, pin the quilt to the leaders on the machine afer you center it. When the bobbin runs out of the thread, you have to wind and change the bobbin and start up again, etc. While these tasks sound really straightforward, they add to the time it takes to move the process along.

Since I am not an expert, all of these tasks take me longer. I need to learn how to complete the whole process alone. In order to get the process straight in my head, I need time. I need time to think and make logical connections between the tasks while I am quilting.

Today was not the day to do this. They wanted me to quilt my quilt and get off the machine. They had a Kid’s Camp going and needed to have one of the girls finish her quilt after I was done and by the end of the day. As a result, anything except for the pinning and the quilting was done by my helper. I didn’t ask her to do this. She just, basically, muscled me out of the way and did it. It was fine. I have had a long week or so and was tired.

Quilting, detail

I am particularly fond of the quilting in the red next to the red circles with white background.

Quilting, detail 2

I stopped in this spot for some reason and snapped a picture so you could see an image of quilting and non-quilted spaces. See how tight the quilt is? You could bounce a quarter off of the top.

Back of FOTY 2008

Back of FOTY 2008, detail of label

I make my labels by printing on fabric something that I type into a word processing program, like Word.

Back pinned onto leaders

This is how the back looks after pinning it to the leader. I was looking down from the top.

Here is how the back looks from the other side when it is pinned to the leader. I am trying to collect pictures of the entire process in an effort to make a visual tutorial for myself, but it is taking me awhile.

Starting a row

After you finish a row, you have to cut the threads and move back the controller to the left side of the machine to start the next row. Before you can start quilting, the quilt needs to be rolled up to an unquilted section.

Adding a border to the quilt

I don’t like borders that much, especially if the quiltmaker has just slapped them on to make the quilt bigger. However, I decided to add these borders so I would have something other than the piecing, which I like, to trim in order to square up the quilt. I wrote about this issue in a post from 2005 when I was binding Feelin’ Blue.  I added a grey that had been hanging around the fabric closet for awhile. The ladies at the quilt shop were a bit horrified that I was going to cut this off. They liked the grey.

It was something I tried and it worked ok. There was still one corner that got a little distorted. We’ll see how it looks after I put the binding on.

I talked about Barsha’s silk crazy in a Sept. 16 post. I kept not posting about this project for some reason. I think I just never got around to it. Here is the finished top. I still need to make the back, but it shouldn’t take too long. This will be a project I will give away, but to whom, I don’t know.

I made it with one of the packs of Moda squares I bought in Maryland. The fabrics were Friends and Flowers by Mary Engelbreit. I found that I didn’t have to cut and resew as many times, which was nice. I thought it was a good thing to do with those fabric packs. I found that I didn’t like the fabrics that much and was glad I hadn’t bought a Jelly Roll.

I started this bag a month ago and was finally able to finish it today. It is really fun.

Detail.

How to Make a Halloween Costume

Supplies and Tools

• Picture of child’s dream costume
• Felt (of appropriate color(s)
• Sewing machine
• Scissors
• Shoelaces
• Timtex
• Liquid Paper (correction fluid)
• Aleen’s Craft Glue

The Halloween costume, except for some decoration, which are drying, is finished. The Darling Child is happy and I didn’t have to buy anything except 2 yards of black felt. I like using felt for Halloween costumes, because the raw edges don’t ravel. You can also just cut it off, glue things to it and cut strange shapes out of it with no problem. The costumes are a bit fragile and don’t usually last long. You can see the cloak that I made by looking at this picture from Wikipedia.

I didn’t have any white paint, so I used Liquid Paper to create the whorls on the red emblem the Darling Child needed.

I only had enough red to make five of the emblems, so we had to place them carefully for maximum effect.

It is kind of fun to make the Halloween costumes – to make a child’s Halloween dream come true. It is also fun to kind of figure out how to make something work with what you have on hand. I always buy enough felt to get through the main part of the project, but inevitably, I don’t think farther than that. One costume I made needed a fat tail that stood up. I used a paint stirrer to keep it stiff enough. That was before I knew about Timtex.

As you can see, messy crafting runs in the family. I went to a scrapbook night with my sister Friday night. This is her work area. She does gorgeous pages! I created about 10 pages and they were all very basic. My theory is get those photos on pages and be done. When my photos are all up to date, I will take more time for each page. I am still set on the goal rather than really enjoying the process. I’ll get there yet. Sis takes her time with each page and really makes them wonderfully.

Time has been even shorter lately than before. Yesterday, we had a long car drive, so I brought my hand piecing and was able to finish another Cross Block (Flowering Snowball). I thought I would able to do more, but I have to face reality. It takes me about 1.5 hours to make each block.

I can’t help but lay all of the blocks out each time I make a new block. Then I play around with them for a bit. I move them around so that no colors are too close to each other. I also try to make sure the backgrounds are duplicated too close to each other.

This time, I realized that having more choices for foregrounds and backgrounds makes me make better choices. I have been trying not to duplicate colors or fabrics in one block.

As you can see from my previous blog posts, I have been sewing and making progress. Still, these seem to be new projects, so I thought I would inventory my UFOs and see what I was facing. One year (1996, I think) I buckled down and worked only on UFOs and finished 9 quilts. That was a record. Most, if not all, were already started and I didn’t quilt them all, but causing them to be quilted counts for something in my book.

This list in no way implies that I will discontinue starting new projects or finish any of these.

Here is my list of UFOs. You can see many of them over at Artquiltmaker.com.

• Bullseye: finally found directions for doing the border the way I want it. Just need to do it
• Garden from Pamela Allen class
• He Tried to Make it Up to Her: needs back and to be quilted. St. JCN has to dig it out.
• Her Eyes were Bigger than Her Stomach: needs a back and to be quilted. Very active quilt; probably not my best design, but a mile marker in the quiltmaking journey.
• Kissy Fish: ongoing hand beading project
• Leaf quilt: needs something that I don’t have; candidate for abandonment; sad, though, because it is a friendship quilt
• Nosegay: top complete
• Pointillist Palette 4: Night
• QA Challenge Quilt: need to fuse the parts and rubber stamp the words.
• See: started in a David Walker class. Needs fusing, stitching on of fused pieces and quilting
• Self Portrait from Pamela Allen class
• Serendipity Puzzle: on the design wall now. Five more blocks to piece.
• Sharon’s quilt: blocks must be sewn together. After Serendipity Puzzle I will finish it. I don’t want a wedding quilt to be hanging around when a baby is due
• Solid Star Friendship Quilt: need more friends so they can make stars for me in solids with black
• Spiderweb: foundation pieced project, still piecing. Need to create the templates for the border blocks
• The Tarts Come to Tea: need inspiration. Improvisational quilts are not the same experience when you do them alone
• Thoughts on Dots: top complete
• Women’s Work 2: needs focus.

Just for fun, here are the quilts on my mind. In some cases I have purchased fabric, but no sewing has been done, so they are not yet UFOs.

• Denyse Schmidt Chocolate Boxes: see the post from August 11, 2006 to see the fabrics I will use.

This a pattern that can be purchased from Quiltworks Northwest.

• San Mateo County Fair Dot quilt
• Paper pieced Nativity scene: I downloaded this pattern when it was free a few years ago and have never gotten up the energy to be as organized as I need to be to make this, but I still want to make it. You can find the pattern at Paper Panache.com
• Interlocking triangles #4: love the techniques and have at least one, if not two, idea[s] for more
• Dot quilt with inset circles a la Ruth McDowell: more uses for dots and a good exercise in piecing
• Feathered Star dot quilt from Summer issue of Quilts & More: more use for dots
• Cross quilt: totally scrappy except for middle and background. I would also like this to be a handwork project that I can carry along with me.
• Some kind of pink quilt with all the pink fabric I have been buying
• Colorblocks 3: I want to use this pattern from Sandy Bonsib, but have silk fabric with a lucious sheen instead of the regular cottons. Background will be cotton sateen.
• I Spy quilt for DS: hexagons and many of the triangles are cut. I just have to start piecing them. St. JCN comes to the rescue as she cut a zillion of the pieces.
• Garden Quilt: I have been collecting photos and patterns of interesting flowers for years and have always wanted to make some kind of garden or flower quilt.
• Jack’s Chain: I saw a quilt of this pattern years and years ago and have always wanted to make one.

Laume, one of my five readers, she of Beach Treasure Blog, wrote in the comment box:

This whole gift bag thing – I’m on the fence with it. On the plus side, the gift bags in the photos are so adorable I want won for ME! On the negative, even though it takes an insane amount of time, I do like so many things about wrapping paper. I like wrapping gifts. I get bored with the same paper year after year though, so wouldn’t fabric bags be even worse! But they would be traditional and I tend to get attached to all things traditional.
For a number of years I’ve had an insane amount of wrapping paper and ribbons and things-you-can-stick-on-packages to use up. Some I bought during my years of being addicted to after holiday shopping binges, some from my mom who gave me all her shopping binge excess when she moved. I’ve made a commitment to use it all up as best I can. I’m really excited because I’m almost completely out of wrapping paper this year and I don’t want to buy any new so I can start fresh with any idea or theme I want next year. I have whittled my box of ribbons and stuff down to half a box, still have lots of that. And don’t even ask me about my entire BOX of boxes of Yule cards – sigh. I might start giving those to my kids.
It does occur to me though that I’m always at a loss for the proper sized boxes for small items. Maybe making up some of this gift bags for smaller items would be a good thing.
What do you do if it’s a fragile item? Put it in a box and then in a bag?

Oh,and P.S. – because I obviously didn’t write enough in my first comment! – I also love the way the wrapping paper entertains my cats. They love “helping” me wrap. They love sitting and leaping from the piles of wrapped packages. They treat them like perches. I suspect that gift BAGS would be treated more like cat beds and would be all fuzzy and cat hair decorated by the time I handed them to their recipients. But most fun of all, I love how the orgy of unwrapping creates an entire room awash in boxes and paper and ribbons and my cats dive and swim and tunney in the great big sea of paper. I believe my cats wait in anticipation ALL YEAR for that one glorious night of wrapping paper bliss.

The extent of Laume’s comments demand that I write another whole blog post about gift bags. So, I will answer each of Laume’s section in order, unless I don’t feel like it:

1. This whole gift bag thing – I’m on the fence with it. On the plus side, the gift bags in the photos are so adorable I want won for ME! On the negative, even though it takes an insane amount of time, I do like so many things about wrapping paper. I like wrapping gifts. I get bored with the same paper year after year though, so wouldn’t fabric bags be even worse! But they would be traditional and I tend to get attached to all things traditional.

We use mostly gift bags, when they aren’t in storage, but we can’t get away from wrapping paper. Our wrapping paper does tend to last for a long time since we only use it for people we don’t think will get the gift bag thing.

We now have about 10 years worth of bags and I can’t remember all the fabric I used until I see it. My SIL commented that she had wrapped something in a bag I made in 1996. She wasn’t even in the picture then! I love that history aspect.

It is also great to use fabric that you don’t want to cut up, because you get to see it in all of is glory over and over. Also, I have no intention of making a Christmas quilt and there are so many wonderful Christmas fabrics that gift bags are a great excuse to buy cool Christmas fabric. Every year I make new bags to spice up the array of bags and use up more fabrics.

Of course, you can also make gift bags for other holidays and events and use up those large conversationals that you love, but will never use for a quilt.

2. For a number of years I’ve had an insane amount of wrapping paper and ribbons and things-you-can-stick-on-packages to use up. Some I bought during my years of being addicted to after holiday shopping binges, some from my mom who gave me all her shopping binge excess when she moved. I’ve made a commitment to use it all up as best I can. I’m really excited because I’m almost completely out of wrapping paper this year and I don’t want to buy any new so I can start fresh with any idea or theme I want next year. I have whittled my box of ribbons and stuff down to half a box, still have lots of that. And don’t even ask me about my entire BOX of boxes of Yule cards – sigh. I might start giving those to my kids.

Well, I can’t really help you with the boxes and boxes of gift wrapping supplies. I definitely think you should use them up…. or give them away. If you enjoy the gift wrapping process (which I absolutely DO NOT), then go for it. Gift wrap is good for little kids, too (though they do get the hang of opening gift bags soon enough). As I mentioned above, we still use gift paper for some gifts. I think gift bags, aside from the fabric acquisition benefits, are great for recycling and reusing. Very little mess in the house and the recycling bin does not overflow.

We still buy cards every year and send them out. They have nothing to do with gift bags except that I can choose to write nice notes to people in my cards rather than spending 3 or 4 days wrapping.

3. It does occur to me though that I’m always at a loss for the proper sized boxes for small items. Maybe making up some of this gift bags for smaller items would be a good thing.
What do you do if it’s a fragile item? Put it in a box and then in a bag?

Yes, boxes are good for small or fragile items and we do put them in the box and then into the gift bag. you can wrap fragile items in bubble wrap (or those pillow things that come from Amazon work, too) before they go in the gift bag. I have also been known to wrap fragile or small items in small gift bags and put them in a larger gift bag especially if they are a group. This is sort of an alternative to the whole gift basket idea.

One of the great things about gift bags is that the present can be any shape. I, once, made a special bag for a weed whacker! Large things take a lot of fabric, but make it easy to wrap as well. Just stuff the thing into the bag. It does take a little extra time to make those special gift bags.

4. Oh,and P.S. – because I obviously didn’t write enough in my first comment! – I also love the way the wrapping paper entertains my cats. They love “helping” me wrap. They love sitting and leaping from the piles of wrapped packages. They treat them like perches. I suspect that gift BAGS would be treated more like cat beds and would be all fuzzy and cat hair decorated by the time I handed them to their recipients. But most fun of all, I love how the orgy of unwrapping creates an entire room awash in boxes and paper and ribbons and my cats dive and swim and tunney in the great big sea of paper. I believe my cats wait in anticipation ALL YEAR for that one glorious night of wrapping paper bliss.

Make your comments long, if you want! I love it!

I am happy for your cats and their joy of the holiday season. We have no cats, so they don’t factor into the equation. We have Sparky the visiting fish and he is fine with the gift bags.

Just incorporate some bags into your traditions. You don’t have to convert all at once. It will get your into your sewing room during the holidays, which will lower your stress level and be a fast and satisfying project. You will also get lots of comments around the Christmas tree. They look so pretty under the tree.

Go forth and make gift bags!