Pre-Blog Project – Artquiltmaker Blog

September 11…Once Again

I almost didn’t post about that horrific day this year. There are now adults who weren’t even born on that day. There are even more adults who were too young to remember. I still ask myself if anything has changed. The same old men are still in charge. There are still people dying in the Middle East. I am not excusing the radicals; I just don’t know if there is anything that can make everyone tolerate everyone else, stop killing each other for religion and stay in their lane. It is depressing to think about.

I made two quilts to commemorate the lives lost during the destruction of the Twin Towers. The first one was Fireball, which is the imagery I could see as I sat and watched TV the week after that event.

I was doing woven art pieces at the time and this is one of them. It is chaotic, reminds me of smoke and flames. This is a small quilt, maybe 12×12, and I was able to channel the pure emotion into this piece as I made it very quickly. The quilt was shown at the Houston Quilt Festival that year.

The quilt I really wanted to make took longer. I wanted to plead for something different than what ended up coming out of that terrible day. I wished for something different than a 20+ year war. People just want to fight when they are attacked; they don’t want to talk.

This is a hard post for me to write. I force myself to do it every year, to get the message of What Comes Next out there, so, perhaps, people will think and do something different next time, though I hope there isn’t a next time.

Pointillist Palette #4 Returns

Sew Day started off as a bit of debacle for me. Sew Day itself, once I got there, was fine. Getting there was a problem. I planned to cut and baste the pieces for La Passacaglia Month 15, like I have in the past. Unfortunately, the package didn’t arrive, so I was project-less.

I thought “no problem, I have plenty of projects on which to work.” I grabbed a project box that had some projects in it and found that the pattern hadn’t been printed, the templates were somewhere else and the fabric for the different bags wasn’t included. Same with a few other projects. Pointillist Palette #4 was the only project that had all the pieces, so I brought that. I had to lug my sewing machine as well. I prefer just to cut out projects, but I had very little time to prepare so Pointillist Palette #4 it was. I want to finish this project anyway, so it is skipping over Who Am I? for the moment.

Pointillist Palette #4 blocks - Oct 2022 — Pointillist Palette #4 blocks – Oct 2022

Pointillist Palette #4 mostly requires sewing a lot of small squares into larger squares. When I pulled everything out of the project box, I had about 8 blocks already. TO DO: find out how many blocks I need. That information was not in the project box.

The good thing about this project is that it is straight piecing and that is a relief after a lot of applique’ and bag making.

Pointillist Palette #4 organization - Oct 2022 — Pointillist Palette #4 organization – Oct 2022

I had time after I got home and did more piecing. All of these trays were from the days when I would eat Trader Joe’s burritos for lunch. They are useful for organizing colors.

After quite a bit of sewing, I have many more pieces waiting to be sewn into blocks. I have in the back of my mind to finish this quilt in the next few days so I can bring it to Colleen with The Lobster and Orange You Glad.

It might seem like I am not enjoying my sewing and am just plowing through projects to get them done. That is true in a way. I want to get these old projects out of my hair and start some new ones which I will enjoy.

Tarts Then and Now

I am becoming slightly obsessed with this project. I wonder if I need to worry about how often I am using the word obsession or its derivatives lately?

The Tarts Come to Tea - July 2022 — The Tarts Come to Tea – July 2022

The first record I have of the Tarts is from 2003. That is a few years before I started this blog, so the details are lost in the mists of time or hidden in my journal from that time. I had a 6 year old, so who knows what I wrote down?

You can see that some of the elements stayed, but some are gone. If I find those elements, I can bring them to the guild for the orphan blocks donation project.

Painting a Memory

A long time ago I used to paint. When the YM came along it became impossible. I would just put out paints and he would need me. By the time I got back to it the brushes would be ruined and the paint dried out. It wasn’t feasible anymore.

It actually worked out. At the time, I was said, but I got rid of a lot of painting supplies and began to focus on quiltmaking. I am happy that I did. I think having 100 canvases around the house would be much harder to deal with. Also, I wasn’t a very good painter. I enjoyed it, but I would never have been great.

Before that I painted a picture of a view I looked at as a kid. The view is from inside my godmother’s kitchen out into the dining room and is completely stylized. I don’t really know why this view made such an impression on me, but I remember sitting in the kitchen and looking that way a lot.

The walls were not violet. The stove, a space age looking electric behemoth, was on the left inside the kitchen door. Auntie (what we called my godmother) never made cakes like that and the Christmas tree was not in the dining room. The overall arrangement was correct.

Block Blast from the Past

In the course of cleaning out my workroom, I found this block. It was crumpled up and dusty in the bottom of a bag I haven’t used in a long time.

I made this block in my second quiltmaking class. That class was focused on drafting blocks. None of the blocks were straightforward, so drafting and making templates was the only way to get them made. I drafted the pattern for this block before making the templates and piecing it.

In my early days of the quiltmaking, I primarily used solids. I did have a wild streak that you can see in the border. I fussy cut all of those pieces so that it looked like the block had a special border. I didn’t do a spectacular job on the fussy cutting, but considering it was one of the first dozen blocks I ever made, I am pretty proud of it.

September 11…Again

September 11 comes around every year.

If anyone says September 11, I think about my mom calling me and telling me to turn on the TV and how that changed everything even though I didn’t know it. I was home alone that morning as DH was out of town and I was trying to get the YM to pre-school and get to my job. I couldn’t process those planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the passengers taking over the flight that eventually crashed in the field in Pennsylvania and the Pentagon. I think of how quiet the skies were for days after. I remember watching TV for hours with DH and seeing the same images over and over. I think of the years of violence that make up our lives today.

I made two quilts to do something to mark-commemorate-remember (I don’t really know the right word. Send a message?). The first was done very quickly and sent off to Houston to be displayed in a commemorative display at Quilt Festival and Market.

Fireball is a reaction to all the fire that was shown on TV. It is a woven quilt. I have made a few woven quilts, though not in a while. I cut the strips and wove them together, then quilted over the top of the weaving. The strips were raw edge.

The second quilt is also an art quilt. It took me longer and was my wish/prayer for the future. It is called What Comes Next. Clearly my wishes were not acknowledged because the things I wanted to come out of that terrible day were not what came out of it.

This quilt has similarities to my Blood and Oil quiltand the more recent, Down the Drain quilt. Someday I’d like to use those paper doll motifs again.

TBT: She Had to Have Her Latte

Well, best laid plans. Life, I guess, got in the way of me posting old quilts every Thursday for awhile. I really did intend to do it and here I am again.

She Had to Have Her Latte - 1999 — She Had to Have Her Latte – 1999

She Had to Have Her Latte was my favorite quilt for awhile. It looks a little dated now, but I still like it.

She Had to Have Her Latte was one of the first Improv quilts, but done in a different way than people commonly understand Improv quiltmaking today. In this quilt, I cut novelty fabrics into shapes with the primary focus being to showcase the motifs. Other pieces were put in between those focus pieces so the quilt fit together. There was no free cutting or rulerless cutting.

I made this with a friend and we had a whole story around the quilt about a woman who had to have a latte every morning. We discussed why and what it meant. I intended this to be the first in a series of quilts, but they were never made.

9/11 Again

Once again, 9/11 is upon us. It sort of snuck up on me this year. There hasn’t been the hoopla surrounding the event as there was last year. I guess there has been too much other stuff going on.

What Comes Next hangs in my workroom so I look at it every day. In some ways, it can be construed as an altar, because I do look at it every time I pass by and hope that my wish espoused in this quilt is not too far away. It isn’t just part of the background even after so many years.

Like Down the Drain, this quilt was meant to be and came together relatively quickly and with few problems.

I still remember 9/11. I had an almost 5YO. DH was out of town with our BIL on a vacation. I didn’t even know what had happened, because I don’t listen to the news before I head off to work. My mom called me in a panic telling me to turn on the TV. I didn’t want to and couldn’t imagine why it mattered. I couldn’t imagine something like the actions of 9/11 happening.

What’s worse is what came after. The wars, ISIS, Al-Quaida, the European cities under siege, the huge debt that will crush us all one day. The mess that is the Middle East. I am not saying that those things wouldn’t have happened anyway, but I think a different response was required.

September 11 Quilts

This year is the 15th anniversary of the September 11.

If anyone says September 11, I don’t, first off, think of our YM’s friend’s birthday. I think of those planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the passengers taking over the flight that eventually crashed in the field in Pennsylvania and the Pentagon. I think of how quiet the skies were for days after and waking up to a phone call from my mom telling me to turn on the TV. I think of not being able to get hold of DH and taking the YM to pre-school. I think of going to work and having to turn around and go straight home before the train stations closed and the trains stopped running. I remember watching TV for hours with DH and seeing the same images over and over. I think of the years of violence that followed.

As you know, I don’t always write about September 11. This year I am thinking about it particularly because of the violence that I perceive our election cycle is causing.

The second quilt is also an art quilt. It took me longer and was my wish/prayer for the future. It is called What Comes Next. clearly my wishes were not acknowledged because the things I wanted to come out of that terrible day were not what came out of it.

This quilt has similarities to my Blood and Oil quilt in some of the shapes and motifs I used. Someday I’d like to use those paper doll motifs again.

#TBT: Early Tarts

I don’t often have something to show for Throwback Thursday. I received a box back from ScanCafe and I found an early photo of the Tarts Come to Tea. It is amazing to see how it has progressed and to realized that the quilt is still in process. Sigh.

I started this quilt pretty soon after TFQ and I made She Had to Have Her Latte and I was still thinking that novelty fabrics would be a good idea.

Those novelty fabrics were jettisoned at some point, but some of the elements stayed. Even some of the placement basically, stayed.

I also started out using much darker fabrics.

I do still have that vase, which I like and may make into another applique type quilt.

I am not sure how I feel about these improvisational pieces now. Clearly, I am having trouble finishing the Tarts, despite keeping it on the list.

Throwback Thursday: Playmat (#TBT)

A few weeks ago, Sandi, of Quilt Cabana Patterns, posted a playmat she made. It reminded me of Throwback Thursday (#TBT) and how Quiltin’ Jenny always posts something from her pre-blogging days. I wasn’t very productive in pre-blogging days, but I do have quilts that only show up on Artquiltmaker.com about which I have never written.

The Playmat is one of those quilts.I made this quilt in about 1997 or 1998.

The Playmat was one of the first projects I worked on when I was a new mom. I hadn’t been sewing much, was only marginally connected online (remember this was in the dark ages with no Twitter or podcasts or blogs) via the QuiltNet listserv.

I don’t remember why I decided I needed to make a playmat, but I really used it to lay out on the floor so the Y.M. (previously the Tiny Bubba) could lay on it. Later, he sat on it, but as soon as he started crawling, we used it briefly in the stroller, but he would throw it off and out, which became annoying.

I made this quilt very quickly and used a pillowcase technique to avoid binding it, then quilted it myself. I notice now that the edge is all bias. Not sure what I was thinking, but the piecing is much more interesting (if the color combo doesn’t hurt your eyes) on point than a straight set.

The back is a nice cute bears in King Arthur garb print. I know I didn’t want to cut it up and I used it for a quilt for Friend Julie‘s younger son as well. I’ll try and add that photo to this post.

I linked up with Jenny over at Quiltin' Jenny — I linked up with Jenny over at Quiltin’ Jenny

Pointillist Palette #4

I don’t really even remember when I finished the last Pointillist Palette quilt. The late 1990s? It had some reproduction fabrics in it by Jinny Beyer, maybe? there are 3 quilts in the series and I think I had planned 6. I don’t know if #5 or #6 will ever be made as the bloom is somewhat off the rose after all of the these, but I am more interested in finishing #4 now that I have found some blocks.

Fortunately, the fabrics have held up well and are somewhat timeless.

This quilt in the series is called night and the black and white fabrics in it are supposed to represent that. I took apart a back of #2 or #3 so I could use the fabrics in this quilt. TFQ thought I was insane and I probably was since I didn’t actually finish the quilt…yet.

Vintage Tuesday: Blood & Oil

March was an odd month, as I know I keep saying, so I am pressed for content. As a result, I decided to show some older quilts.

I have a couple of quilts that have to do with war. As a mother of a boy, I am concerned about how easily our recent presidents seem to engage in war. I don’t see my son as expendable.

This quilt was made before the Young Man was even a dream in my eye.

This quilt was made as a gut reaction to the First Gulf War. I was sitting home alone watching CNN’s coverage of bombs falling on Baghdad, Iraq. After living in Austria, I know that people everywhere have moms and jobs they go to and children who need to be taken to music lessons and soccer camps. The type of war we have now does not spare civilians and that is of great concern to me. It is a reaction to war itself – the death, the devastation, the violence and makes no comment on the justification for that particular war or any others. It is also not a judgement of those soldiers who choose the military as their career choice. The military does a lot of good for a lot of people and I applaud those who choose that path.

The background uses a technique by Mary Mashuta called ‘pushed neutrals’. The idea is to use several different fabrics in a similar range of hues to make a background instead of using one fabric for the background. This idea has lodged itself firmly in my brain and sometimes comes out these days as mosaic quilting.

This quilt probably has the most organized and intentional use of mosaic quilting of any I have made. It reminds me that I can use it as a design option. It also reminds me of low volume quilts which are such a craze right now. They use the same idea for the whole quilt rather than just the background.

Although the subject matter is difficult, I think this is one of the best quilts I have ever made. It was shown at the San Francisco Quilters Guild show in 1990, with much controversy. It was on display at the law firm of McKenna & Cuneo, LLP from 1997-2000.

I think I will need to take a better, higher resolution photo of this piece at some point.

Vintage Tuesday: Pink Spider

Periodically, I will find something interesting that is old and post it under the Vintage Tuesday tag. In this case, I am showing you an old quilt of mine. It can’t really be called vintage as it is only 24 years old, but you get the idea.

There are a few things that you should immediately see in this piece. They are:

another hexagon quilt – I really have done a few of them
not my colors
gradated to a certain extent – as much as could be with the colors I was using
similar to the EPP stars

Here is the story:

This isn’t my first quilt, but I believe it was the first quilt I actually finished (the Sampler took me awhile, because of the hand quilting). It was finished in 1990.

I did in response to a challenge posed by one of the members of the quilt group of which I was a member at the time. We were all on board and one of the other members went to pick the fabric. It is all machine pieced-NOT paper pieced- and machine quilted as well.

Do you like that binding? I put the binding on by machine and then sewed all those miters down by hand.

It was really a challenge to hang.

Quilts for Sept.11 (2001)

I don’t think I have ever posted about the quilts I made around the events of September 11. I try not to think about the whole situation, because it is just depressing and senseless from so many angles. And the senselessness just seems to continue.

I decided to write about them this year, because my work is good and I still think the message I tried to send is good. I keep one of the quilts on my wall and look at the words and try to remember to walk the walk.

After September 11, Karey Bresenhan called for quilts to be made and sent for the Houston Quilt Market and Festival where they would be displayed 2 months later. Many, many quilts were made and displayed, including my quilt, Fireball.

The exhibit was followed up by a book. Fireball was included in the book. Fireball was successful, in a way (displayed at Houston and included in a book), but it wasn’t the quilt I wanted to make for 9/11. It was an immediate, viseral reaction to the horrifying images shown on TV.

What Comes Next is the quilt I wanted to make. What Comes Next has a message that I wanted everyone to hear and see and heed. I wanted politicians to take up the call and act in a way that would truly show the US as a world leader.

It took me much longer to make What Comes Next than the month or so I had to make Fireball. I worked on the beading in the car heading to L.A. I worked on the rubber stamping at my SIL’s house during craft night. It is one of the quilts I have quilted myself. I worked hard on the quilt to send a message of hope and peace and to encourage people to think about what comes next after September 11. Nobody heard or saw or heeded. It just makes me sad.

Update 9/12/2011: Based on my friend Kathy’s post, I have changed the name of this post to include the year, 2001. I want to move past this date. I want 9/11/2001 to become part of the past, which is not to say that we should forget those affected. From Kathy’s post:

“The Elder said the thing that would keep the tragedy alive was the fact that we keep referring to September 11th in the present tense. Every time we say 911 or September 11 without including the date 2001, it continues to work on our psyche as a current event. He said that unless we can collectively place the event firmly in the past it will continue to haunt our todays and true healing would not be possible.”

I do not want this day to haunt my life forever. I want to remember the people with joy, I want to learn from the mistakes we, collectively have made in the quest for justice, and remember the heroes with awe. I want us all to consider What Comes Next and move forward confidently in a positive direction.

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