Commentary about works in progress, design & creativity
One of the projects I prepped at Sew Day was Clue 5 for the En Provence quilt. I used my triangle technique, which made the hardest part of the process, pressing and trimming.
I have to admit that I thought I was done and could get to putting the blocks together.
Sigh.
No such luck. I checked out Clue 6 and found I have to make a bunch of Quarter Square Triangles AND I need to introduce a new color. This will require some thought.
At least I finished something, no matter how small.
I went back and forth on what to bring to Sew Day. I thought for sure I would bring my machine. We are having a heat wave, which means record temperatures. I was hot and not really in the mood to be dragging a ton of stuff around, so in the end, I just brought projects to prep/cut out.
This focus was a good move. I was able to cut out or prepare 5.25 projects, which means it is time to sew again – HA! Not that it is ever time NOT to sew:
I found another stash of HSTs that go with the Dots & Stripes HSTs I mentioned last week. They will make the piece larger, which is always good. I trimmed the last few I didn’t have time to trim at Craft Night and trimmed this new stash. Some progress.
I had cut the squares for the En Provence HSTs on Friday night, so I had sixteen less things (fabrics) to haul to sew day. I pinned the squares together and drew the lines in preparation for sewing using my Triangle Technique at home.
I grabbed the coffee fabric, which had been hanging around for awhile. I always intended it to be napkins, but I get tired of making them after a few. I had never gotten to cutting this fabric. I did on Saturday and yesterday I had an idea of what backing to use and who they will go to as a gift. I need to get to work.
It is hard to know whether to count cutting out gift bags as one project or one per fabric. I counted using a hybrid method. There were three different fabrics and I will end up with probably 7 bags total.
I also found the fabrics for my last two cell phone wallets. Now all of the pieces out of all the fabrics are cut. I need to start sewing, because I really miss not having the matching bags when I wear my tunics and dresses.
Finally, I started three more Sew Together Bags. One will be for me. I will use it for embroidery. The other two will be gifts. I only got one step of pieces cut, but it is a start. After making three at a time last winter, I think it takes almost the same amount of time to make three at once as it does to make one at a time. As you know the cutting of the pieces is the worst part. The weird thing is that the fabrics I want to use for the exterior have disappeared. I can’t move on to sewing until I find those.
Anna and Nicole, who I had never met came and showed off their projects. Anna is making a table runner with a Lone Star block in the center. She is using nice soft colors. Nicole is hand quilting a beautiful log cabin quilt made from a lovely combination of blues and greens. The fabrics looked like batiks, but I didn’t look that closely.
Mary had surgery on her elbow so mostly chatted with me, but did a little bit of handstitching. She also met with the Retreat committee.
Bonnie was making nametags for the Retreat with help from Nancy.
Marti was making round mug rugs. I have been thinking of making a couple of mug rugs for the Puzzle Guys at work, so she inspired me.
Lynette was working on zipper pouches she will donate to a holiday boutique to raise money for the Belmont Senior Center.
Others were there as well. We tried to keep cool and had some fans to help. It was a fun day and I am glad I went. I feel like I accomplished stuff.
Finished 2017 Quilt Projects
Finally! I have at least one finished project! I finished the Peacock and entered it into PIQF.
The art quilt is nearly finished, but I can’t put it in the done pile yet.
Finished 2017 Non-Quilt Projects
While finished quilts are thin on the ground, as you know, I have been sewing and I have finished a lot of small projects. I am working on quilts and t I plan to make more small projects this year.
Shockingly, the above along with donation blocks and tops is about XX yards of fabric this year and I am not in the black in terms of usage.
Doing Good
In Process
The ‘In Process’ is used to denote projects on which I am actively working or pretending to stitch. I try not to put away projects, because that will ensure I never work on them.
Still WIPs
I still have WIPs. Who doesn’t, after all? A project in the ‘UFO’ category means I am stalled. A nicer way of saying UFO is a WIP. The list is a lot shorter and the projects are newer, for the most part.
Ready for Quilting
In Quilting Process
Binding
Down the Drain – the binding was machine sewed on last week and now I need to hand stitch it.
Hunting and Gathering
Other
What’s on your list?
Gerre talked a bit about putting the Merit Hexies together in a project at the last meeting. This discussion was swirling around in my mind when I went looking through my media library (where all the photos I have posted to the blog live). Yes, I posted this photo back in February 2014, but with Gerre’s comments on my mind, it struck me anew today.
While I am not super bothered about sewing the merit hexies into something, I also don’t want them laying around for the rest of my life and then getting thrown out when I die. It would be interesting/fun to make pillows out of them, or cushion covers, and see how many I will make before the project peters out.
I thought a couple of things:
I had a hard time finding a picture this week. I am not sure why.
Still, I love cherry trees, so I went with one this time. This was taken a few years ago, but I still like the detail. I am curious as the palettes.
I don’t dislike the default palette this time. I am interested in that there are so many purples.
I moved the circles around to see about getting a more pink palette.
I decided, shockingly, to try and make a palette with neutrals. HA! Lots of grey. It would make a good guy quilt.
Next I focused on the green to see what I could make.
This was actually a good exercise and I am pleased.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I was dabbling in quiltmaking. I had made a couple of projects with fabrics I bought specifically for those projects. The Internet was just starting to be something that quiltmakers could use and I was on a Usenet Board where quilts were discussed.
I went to Seattle for a conference and visited a quilt store called In the Beginning. At that time, it wasn’t just a fabric line, but there was a huge store. It was one of the largest I had ever visited. I saw the Pointillist Palette fabric there – the whole line. I was amazed and thrilled. This was fabric I really liked. Up until then, I was trying hard to avoid dusty rose and teal.
I like these quilts and think they might be the precursor, in some small way, to the Fabric of the Year quilts.
I wrote a lot about my inspiration in another post, which is good since then I don’t have to rehash it. I did think about one of the quilts in the series back in 2014. years ago, I know, but the thought hasn’t died. There is hope.
Help Those in Need
As many of you know Hurricane Harvey is still raging as I write this. I am sure we will be asked to send fabric, quilting supplies and sewing machines to those quiltmakers who lost everything. That time is not here yet, but other supplies are needed. Hobbs Batting is filling their trucks and driving them to the affected areas. Read about it on their IG feed. Of course, national and local agencies are taking donations and blood banks need blood as well.
Fabric, Tools & Supplies
I picked up a Quilts & More magazine and then forgot about it. 🙁 I saw it in the [giant, endlessly teetering, some of these papers and flattish things done have a home] stack on my desk and leafed through it while my computer took its time booting up. In it I noticed that Windham has a cool new panel of the US. It is kind of mid century modern version of a U.S. map.
I recently saw an Instagram post with some fabulous fabrics. In scrutinizing the photo, I also saw a ruler. It turns about to be the Classic Curves Ruler by colorgirlquilts. I have never seen it before, but I am definitely interested. Have you tried it?
On the Blog
My links got away from me. I recently found a couple that were out of date for some reason. Gabi Campanario – Seattle Sketcher – was one of them. I love his drawings and his drawing style. Check out his site and his blog for inspiration.
I am horrified to say that I never updated the link to Sandy’s site after she moved hosts 12 years ago (exaggeration for the sake of emphasis). You should be able to use my blogroll to get there now.
I also updated the Quilts in Print page. Have you read any of these books?
Finally, will be giving a trunk show in September. In anticipation of that activity, I began looking through my blog’s Gallery to see what I wanted to bring to the show. As a result, I have also started adding more quilts to my gallery, especially older quilts. I don’t have as much information on those older quilts as I do on my current quilts, but I have made a start. Stay tuned.
Sites
We all know Spoonflower, but my friend told me about Shop Vida. It seems like the same sort of idea, but with more wearables – scarves, shirts, and wraps.
My friend had a skein of sari “yarn”. Sari silk is twisted over yarn or string, I think to make something like yarn that you can knit or crochet, etc. I saw a tutorial for making your own with fabric scraps. I am not sure it would work for something like my scarves, but it might work for a rug.
Other Artists
Melody Johnson has a cool improv stars project on her blog. I love the colors. Very cheerful. Very quickly she turned it into Moon and Stars. Fabulous!
Have you seen Sharon Risedorph’s website? She took the photos for Roderick Kiracofe‘s book, Unconventional & Unexpected:
American Quilts Below the Radar 1950-2000. This is a gorgeous, well researched and interesting book. Sharon’s site shows more than just quilts. It is spare and the photographs are highlighted very well.
Media
You can purchase the entire archive of American Patchwork & Quilting (1993-2016) AND Quilts & More (2005-2016) on a USB drive for $149.00 (probably around $165 with tax and shipping – YMMV). Go to their shop. While generally, I have enough projects. I am very tempted by this as it is a complete collection. It will also allow me to go through my project sheets and toss the paper. Also, there are a number of projects in Quilts & More that I have really liked and would like to be able to see what I may have missed. I will have a searchable archive. I think you get updates as well, because the ad says that a 2016 update is now available.
There is an article someone sent me about the health benefits of knitting. It was in the NY Times. It references the study that came out a few years about how quiltmaking helps brain health.
If you want the full, official minutes of the meeting, check the BAMaQG blog. This will just be some impressions of things I liked or inspired me.
Three of us were chatting and admiring each other’s pedicures. I took a picture and posted a photo/joke up on IG about the latest BAM challenge. I wasn’t 100% joking though I don’t know if I have time to make something. We’ll see what people say.
I was invited to do a trunk show next month. Gerre had spoken to me about it several months ago and I had completely forgotten, so I was a little stunned when she announced it. Of course, I am extremely flattered. Since the meeting, I have been thinking about which quilts to bring. I can’t bring them all, because I don’t have them all. Also, there are too many even of the ones I still own. I am going to focus on my older quilts. I haven’t, for the most part, showed them at guild and I think they will be the most interesting. In preparation for this exercise, I am preparing some Throwback Thursday posts. Look for those.
Gerre is starting to talk about projects that can be made out of all of our merit hexies. She has started to collect ideas on a Pinterest board and there are some fun ones there. I am not sure what I will make. I don’t want to sew them all together like a Grandmother’s Flower Garden. I have enough EPP with the Half Hexie Star project.
The Charity Girls have some interesting blocks. I have never really been interested in the Monkey Wrench block. Of course, all blocks have beauty in their own way blah blah blah.
I think I must have missed the call for these blocks. I saw them laying on the table as I was wandering around and found them to be the most exciting Monkey Wrench blocks I have ever seen. I particularly liked the top one. I took pictures of it in detail in case I want to make some like it – for the charity project, of course.
I think all of the MW blocks use fabric cleverly and that makes them much more interesting than just using two colors/fabrics. My favorite is particularly interesting, not just because of the fabric, but also because of the reversal of foreground and background. I am not an eye researcher so I don’t know the particulars of how the eye sends information to the brain, but I think that I was looking at it more. My eye was moving around the block more because of the foreground/background switch. My brain was trying to make sense of the information the eye was sending to it. I am VERY tempted to try making a few of these.
The Charity Girls still have a lot of quilts available to quilt. This makes me nervous because I always bring quilt tops. I barely quilt for myself and quilting for charity might send me over the edge. I was pleased that someone had taken the Stars #2 Quilt right away to quilt. Another thing I don’t have to worry about.
Most of my info seems to be about Charity. There is a lot of interesting work going on with Charity right now. A lot of people stayed until the bitter end, but not a lot of people sewed. There wasn’t a lot I could photograph, as a result.
The last Charity effort I saw reminded me of my Renewed Jelly Roll Race Quilt. The colors in the fabrics are little bit dustier than my quilt, but this is still a very cheerful and attractive quilt.
It was a great meeting, as usual. The Board is doing a great job.
I seem to have a lot of HSTs around. The other day I talked about the Mostly Manor HST quilt. I found the bag of Ta Dots & Stripes HSTs recently and laid them out to see what I could do with them.
First, they didn’t turn out as expected. The stripes are a lot darker than I anticipated and kind of dominate the quilt.
Second, there aren’t as many as I thought, so this will most probably be a lap quilt.
Third there aren’t enough colors of dots to make this really interesting. I don’t remember if Ta Dots come in more colors. If not, they should, but these are all the colors I have.
I laid them out anyway in order see what I could do with them. I laid them out in lines and straight HSTs.
This layout is similar to the one that my SIL did with the Mostly Manor HSTs. It concentrates the colored triangles together and makes them stand out a bit more. The stripes still fairly dominate the whole piece.
The other layout was inspired by a quilt on the Quilts and More Summer 2017 issue. It is straight HSTs in kind of a color order all pointing in the same direction. I thought it would be a possibility for this quilt.
It is ok, but the contrast is still difficult.
You might remember the Amanda Jane Cafe Apron? I made 3 or 4 of them and sent them off to new homes.
Apparently, my sister loves hers and uses it at her art shows. She ripped a few seams so when I went to visit the YM she gave it back to me to fix. I have been working diligently on the art quilt, so it took me a few weeks to get to it. I took a break from the art quilt and did some piecing. One of the other things I did was fix Lil Sissy’s cafe apron.
I reinforced seams, which I am shocked I didn’t do before. I also backstitched some seams that I thought would get stressed. My sister was very good natured about it and I appreciated that.
SIL #2 moved back here from Maryland last year. Since then she has been getting comments about how she must miss the seasons. We do have seasons here. They may not be the four radically dramatic seasons of the East coast, but we have seasons.
Anyway, she has started her Seasons quilt and the first bit of it is AWESOME! Part of the awesomeness is the cutting, but the other is the Pointillist Palette fabric. The picture is not ideal, but you get the idea. The quilt shard is not on a curve surface, but the Pointillist Palette fabric and the placement makes it looked curved.
Pointillist Palette was a great fabric line. It cemented my friendship with TFQ. We bonded over fabric. 😉 It was one of the first fabric lines I bought. It was one of the first fabric lines I remember being marketed as a fabric line. There was a reissue of some of the colors and new colors last year. Both SIL and I have large collections of many of the colors. I still have the idea -and some hope- that I will finish my Pointillist Palette series. Seeing SIL”s piece gets me thinking about my PP series.
The first headline of this spark is “Follow Fireflies. it made me think of my ‘What If’ game. The first line also sent my mind spinning. It reads “Inspiration is everywhere you look” (pg.73). I had just been walking down a street I frequent when I saw the decoration/gargoyle on a house. I thought it looked like a semi-wild cat. I like the detail (new houses have no character) and was amazed that I can still find things to see and be inspired by on a street I have walked down many times. I think having a camera in my pocket gives me incentive to look more carefully at the world around me. Bloomston also says “it can be commonplace or holy. It can catch you unaware and take away your breath. It can leave you speechless” (pg.73). I think I tend towards the commonplace – looking at the world around me, taking inspiration from the line of some bricks or some green growing in the crack of a sidewalk. At certain times of the year – not summer where I live – the sky and clouds can be quite dramatic. When I travel, I often find views and cityscapes that take my breath away. Architecture often amazes me because of the sheer scale of buildings built without computers. Noticing shape and line that inspires us is what Bloomston calls “the fireflies” (pg.73). She says “when we step into a life of chasing the fireflies of inspiration, we are more able to get into a creative space” (pg.73).
I find that I worry less when I am looking at the world around and making an effort to see the details – the beauty of the world around me. Carrie says that by getting into a more creative space “we create a fluency between our so-called normal life and our creative life” (pg.73). I find that there is less of a difference between the lives or parts of our lives. That lessening of space makes it easier to move between the two. The author further says “inspiration is often just a pebble thrown onto the path. It is up to you to stop, stoop down, and investigate it” (pg.73).
Ms. Bloomston has four suggestions: “slowdown, daydream, unplug, have a net” (pg.74). Unplug speaks to me today. I have been listening to many, many audiobooks. Lately, I have to think a lot and I can’t keep track of the story, so I haven’t been listening to as many audiobooks. I realized that, while I was very much enjoying listening to stories on audio, I was escaping and keeping my mind entertained so it wouldn’t dwell on the political situation or other bad things with which I was struggling. Now that I have less time to listen, I am allowing my mind to wander a bit. It does go to the dark places, but not as often. By not engaging it with audio 24/7, I am giving it space to think creatively as well. I am getting back into the groove of daydreaming. I think I am also learning to let my mind wander and touch on various topics, let it make connections between things.
As usual, Carrie Bloomston has some worksheets (pg.75). Go get your copy and fill them out. Think about what you are writing as you fill in the worksheet and let it inspire your creativity.
Nota bene: we are working through Carrie Bloomston’s book, The Little Spark. Buy it. Support the artist. Play along. There is much more to each spark than what I am writing. The original chapters will help you. Go buy Carrie Bloomston’s book, so you get the full benefit of her fabulousness! You can see my book review, which is what started this flight of fancy.
You can find the last spark on the blog a few weeks ago.
I know the Nighthawk Scarf was barely cold in the box of gifts when I went and bought more yarn. There are not many yarn shops near me, so I have to take advantage when I can.
There is one near my hairdresser and since I was getting a cut, I stopped and bought yarn as well.
I bought two skeins of the yarn shown, which is Madeleine Tosh Lichen. The person receiving this scarf-to-be likes dark green. I couldn’t find an all dark green skein, so this is what she is getting. I am not a huge green fan, so the purple and grey will relieve me a little bit.
This is knit on size 6 needles, but I cast on to size 7s and then purl on to the size 6s to keep the curve from developing, like on the Nighthawk scarf. I really wanted to get started, but forgot my size 6 needles, so I haven’t gotten to it yet. Soon.
I was tempted to buy two additional skeins as well, but resisted. I really don’t want to start a yarn stash. I have a fabric stash and that is my limit.
I am pleased to say that I finished the Nighthawk scarf. I started it just about a month ago and finished it over the weekend. I wove in the ends at Craft Night, so done and dusted.
As I almost always say, I am pleased with how this scarf came out. I was also pleased with the size and feel of the yarn. As I said in a previous post, it has a kind of springy feel.
The finished scarf is rather heavy. It is also long, but I wanted it to be long. This scarf, the Monarch scarf and the next few scarves will go to the YM’s friends who helped take care of him this summer.
Back in May, or perhaps the beginning of June, I went to Sutter Creek with DH for a Native Sons event. There was a wonderful parade in the town where people drove their minivans filled with costumed poodles, the local dance troupe danced along the town square and the Shriners drove go carts like crazy people all over the main street.
It was pretty warm, so we spent most of the time inside the Parlor building. As I was wandering around, I noticed an amazing crazy quilt! It is made of various ribbons along with velvets and other fancy fabrics, embroidery and event ribbons. It is framed and behind glass, so I couldn’t see all the details. From what I could see, it is in great shape and well protected.
The ribbons are NSGW ribbons, political ribbons and there is a judge’s ribbon for a California Admission Day Celebration in Stotckton (yellow). Some of the ribbons are dated in the 1880s and there is a definite Stockton theme, though other Parlor ribbons can also be seen.