Commentary about works in progress, design & creativity
I received an e-mail today to subscribe to QH. Since I hadn’t gotten around to sending in the card, I clicked on the link and in 2 minutes, I was done. I am behind an issue now, so I still have to go and find that one, but am glad that I won’t have to hunt around for hilarious quilt reading material after this.
And while you are at it, read the Washington Post article. If the Post asks you to register, get a slightly used login from BugMeNot.
Linda Cline, a very prolific and talented quiltmaker has started her own blog, Linda’s Art Journal. Although she only has a few posts up, I was immediately struck by her comments on sketchbooks/visual journaling in her first post.
Linda plans to use her blog as her visual journal, which is an interesting idea. Obviously, I do that, but I don’t think it is the same as a visual journal in which I use colored pencils, markers, crayons, etc to convey and idea or get an idea out of my head. I feel, for myself, that the screen and the keyboard are a kind of barrier. Not a complete barrier, because, obviously, here I am writing away. Still, I do find them to be a partial barrier. In order to post something, I have to use the keyboard to write it, modify (crop, shrink) photos in a piece of software and then upload everything so you can see it.
I enjoy putting pen/pencil/crayon etc to paper. I enjoy the feel of the implement gliding or sliding or rubbing over the paper. I enjoy the feeling of the paper on my hand.
I think there is a place for both in my fiber and visual work. I look forward to exploring more on this topic with you. I think there is value in exploring creativity via different media.
Welcome to the Blogosphere adventures, Linda!
I didn’t get to spend the entire day on Friday on the Pineapples as I would have liked, but I got to spend some time on them and make some progress.
First, I needed to figure out the corner problem.
For Pineapple corners, you need to cut a square in half. The book assumes you have pieced perfectly and tells you to cut squares which are 1.75″ wide and use them to make the block and the squares that go on the corner. Because I was actually using fabric, which stretches and has fabric qualities, 1.75″ didn’t work for me. Below are the sizes I tried.
2″ works on some, but not all. I don’t want to rip the ones out that are too small and I can’t tell until I have sewed them, so 2″ squares (cut in half to form a triangle) are out.
3″: a little too big. I don’t need that much extra overlap.
2.5″ : still too big. I still don’t need that much extra for trimming.
2.25″ : looks too big, but once you sew it on it isn’t.
Here is the triangle cut from the 2″ square laid on top of the triangle cut from the 2.25″ square. It gave me a visual clue of the difference in size.
With the 2.25″ squares (cut into triangles), they work. They have enough play so I can trim them and make the blocks look beautiful. I was pretty excited about REALLY finishing the blocks and putting the quilt together until…
I put four blocks together. Sigh.
As you can see above, the border blocks fit pretty well together, but the center blocks (well, at least the one I finished with corners) are much too small, which means that they don’t work with the border blocks.
What does this mean?
How did this happen?
I used the same strips, the same sewing machine.
The only difference was the iron.
I am exceptionally down about this and truly ready to put this quilt away and start something new. That is exactly what I didn’t want to do. For once, I wanted to work on a quilt from start to finish.
I will add a few more corners to other center blocks and see if they are all too small, then I will decide what to do.
I bought this fabric sometime in the past, but can’t figure out when or where. I thought it was at PIQF 2006, but it appears in Thoughts on Dots before that, so it had to be some earlier. I looked all through the first half of 2006 and PIQF 2005 to no avail. I gave up. It didn’t matter anyway.
There is a point, in case you thought I wasn’t getting to it, and the point is that when I bought this, I was with TFQ and we only bought a quarter yard, then we split it, which left me with an eighth of a yard. I never know what fabrics will spark my interest, but something about this one did as I used it for Thoughts on Dots and now on the Pineapple. When I was close to cutting the last strip off for the Pineapple, I began to think I needed more of it. I looked everywhere – online, in shops, at shows. No luck. The more I didn’t find it the more desperate I became. This one fabric took on a holy grail sort of mindset for me.
I did anyway.
TFQ sent me her eighth yard earlier this week, thus the gorgeous picture at the top of the screen and it put the bug for this fabric back in my ear. Wednesday night, in between preparing the feast, I went online and mindlessly put “timeless treasures” basix blue dots into a search engine and was rewarded with an eBay store, Elisabeth’s Barn Shoppe, that had 13 half yards of the fabric (why she counts half yards as one, I don’t know). I couldn’t believe my luck! I bought a yard. I wondered if I should buy more or buy it all, but I bought just a yard.
One quest complete. Unless I decide to buy more.
There seems to be a lot of confusion around come of my recent posts where I have used Clipmarks. Clipmarks is a social networking tool for posting and providing attributes to non-AQ websites and blog posts I use in my blog. Each Clipmark post has an address bar at the top giving you the original URL or link to a blog post, so you can go back and read the whole thing. It is good to use the links to go back and read the original post as I often don’t convey the original meaning of the author’s post, but put my own personal spin on it.
I use Clipmarks when I see a fantastic image that provides inspiration or someone has posted something particularly interesting that I don’t feel like rewriting or reviewing. I was turned on to it by a subscription newsletter called Neat Net Tricks. Check it out!
Which brings me to the title of my post. The picture of the lady in the post from yesterday is NOT me. She is from Apple Blossom Quilts. See the cartoon to your right? That is me. 😉
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I hope all of you who are celebrating Thanksgiving have a wonderful day and those of you who aren’t have a wonderful day as well!
I read a book about charm bracelets recently after hearing an NPR story on it. Today I saw this blog post about a really nice charm bracelet.
Here are the last four blocks for the Pineapple. It took some time to get these done. I started out normally, but when I got to the last few rounds, I paid special attention to the fabrics I was choosing, so they would be perfect. Perfect is, of course, relative, because of the fabrics they will be placed near, but I just wanted to put some of the dots that I really liked in the last blocks.
I counted several times to make sure that these were the last four blocks and that I had counted correctly initially to make sure I had calculated the number I needed properly, but I fully expect that will have to make more.
As I said, Finished is Relative. Now I am on to adding corners to the blocks. I need to do that so there aren’t big holes in the quilt. I suppose that would be a look, though.
I started out with 2″ squares and cut them in half. They work on some corners, but are too small for others. I want enough extra so I can trim the corners, if I need to do so. I will try 2.5″ or 3″ squares next. I cut a bunch and don’t think I will be able to use these.
Had a cruddy day at work today, but came home to some Pineapple blocks on the wall and that made me smile. They weren’t new ones, but I really had a good look at them and was reminded how much I like dots!
In between working like a complete dog on the weekend clearing out my aunt’s craft room, I sewed a tiny bit on some Flowering Snowball (Cross Blocks). I did most of the sewing on the plane, but some in the morning over my coffee. I decided just to do corners, except for one block, because I was running out of the colored pieces and had mostly greens and pinks left. It is a scrap quilt, but I don’t want to have too many greens and pinks. It’ll be a balanced scrap quilt. 😉
When I got home I pressed all of the pieces and, on a whim, counted the finished blocks. I have a total of 22 finished Cross Blocks thus far. WOW! How did I get so many? Just plugging along, I guess.
My next task for this project is to cut blue, purple, orange and yellow corner pieces to round out my choices a bit.
I also talked to AJA this weekend. She lives near where I was working, but we couldn’t fit it in to get together. I didn’t e-mail her in time at the beginning of the week to remind her and she forgot to write it on her calendar. Not sure when I will be back, but we had a good chat. We discussed doing the next color Bullseye quilts. Purple, I think. She put me in charge. I will have to talk to JulieZS and see what we can work out.
I was browsing Deirdre’s Sloppy Studio when I came across the Sassy Art Goddess blog. I think of this as the best pumpkin I saw.
Other notes and tidbits:
Yarnstorm has some new and interesting links to other blogs. Pea Soup is quite good and I love the creativity of the names of people’s blogs. How about Lobster Squad? Kind of makes me wonder if Artquiltmaker is a misleading name since nothing that I am working on currently could remotely be called ‘arty.’ Her drawings remind me of what I would like my visual journal to look like. Oh, yes, visual journal. Got to get back to that….
I was asked when is the best time for me to write my blog and my other writing and I really can’t figure it out….yet. I often write in my journal in the morning and my blog at night – bookending the day with writing. But I also write more blog posts on the weekends and more journal entries during the week. Today I am writing in my blog in the morning and I definitely feel much more energetic about it. Of course, since I am not at home, I don’t have all of my tools, so the posts are more texty that full of pictures,perhaps skewing the impression? Let me know if you see a difference in the posts I write in the morning vs. the ones I write at night. I know you are rolling your eyes at my unreasonable demands, but just let me know if you notice! Otherwise just read on!
Artquiltmaker blog has not shown up in Technorati yet, per my Entering the Internet Age post. I will have to investigate. The blog is showing up on Google results, however, which, I guess, is good. I haven’t seen any additional traffic, but also don’t have a counter. More investigation required, I believe.
Have a great day!
Yarnstorm has a gorgeous quilt on her blog, which renews my belief in simplicity and that I did the right thing with Thoughts on Dots. Her post talks about her pool quilt. Stop reading now! Right click (so you don’t leave my blog completely, thanks) and go read the post on her new quilt top.
Now that you are back and ooohing and aahing, I hope you enjoyed the quilt. First of all, the photograph that she has shared with us is wonderful. It has made me realize that, perhaps, you would be happy with ripples of color instead of the whole quilt perfectly centered with no extraneous info peeking in? Also, the way she talks about the colors and the quilt is like a poem. It reminds me of some writer who I have read recently, or whom I have read in the past and made an impression on me.
The quilt looks like it is made from all of those tightly, yet very soft cottons. I know that is not 100% the case as I have some of the fabrics. I don’t think any of them are loosely woven, though.
I also like the way she has used large scale prints. It seems like some of the flowers are fussy cut (notice the centers?).
I have been thinking about another quilt of squares only and I am inspired once again. We’ll see how it progresses.
I am out of town again. Back soon with photos.
I am glad she posted the link to the directions. Easier to make….
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I spent a lot of Sunday uploading quilt photos to Flickr. I also spent Monday night, Tuesday night and a little while this evening on the project. I believe that I now have all of my digital quilt photos up on Flickr. In any case, there are about 3500 pictures of quilts.
Some observations:
1. I used to take a lot fewer photos than I do now.
2. Adding the digital photos to Flickr is wonderful, because you can organize them in sets. Each photo can be in multiple sets. This means that the Pineapple photo on the right (as usual, if this is your quilt, I will be THRILLED to put your name here!) is in the PIQF 2003 set as well as the Pineapple set (kind of like iTunes allows you to have one song in multiple playlists). I love this! It allows me to think about quilts in a number of different ways.
3. 2003 and three was a good year for quilts. The quilts are more vibrant (less brown, I guess) than now. The designs are good and the techniques are top notch.
4. I scrolled through many, many of the photos as I tried to organize them and it is quite wonderful just to look at a bunch of different quilts.
5. My photography has gotten better.
6. I was also able to discover interesting quilts about which I had forgotten, including a few more Pineapples hidden in the dark corners of my hard drive. .
7. I wish I could blog sets of photos, but it doesn’t seem like I can. Perhaps I can add a link to an entire set of quilts, so you can see them as I blog about them? Here is a link to a set of tree quilts. You can tell me if it works.
I am considering sending my prints off to someplace like Shoebox reprints and getting rid of the boxes and boxes of quilt photos that I have under my desk and in my bottom drawer. I really don’t know what I will do in the long run with all of these quilts on Flickr, but for the moment it is interesting to me. We’ll see what develops.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day.
