Be*mused

This and that

It's been a really busy week but I don't feel that I have much to show for it.  A little of this, a little of that.  I started my red & green block, twice, but I'm having background issues.  That's another post.  Today I've been working on a popular work-in-progress, but that's another post as well.  So much to look forward to!  *grin*   

 

A few weeks ago, Wendy gave me a long, narrow piece of insulation board that was left over from her studio design wall.  I finally cut it down to 5', covered it in batting and flannel and made a portable design board.  No more waiting for good light in the sewing room for photos.  Now I can haul it all over the house in search of *true color* as well as use it in the sewing room, as needed, for small projects.  Highly recommend!

  

Good mail day!  I just browsed through this quickly at lunch but I can tell this is a winner.  I've long admired the Piece o' Cake girls for their beautiful applique but it was always a little *tight*, design wise, for me.  Ok everyone...you can stop laughing now!  I loved their floral designs, their embrace of pattern, pattern, pattern and their exuberant use of color, but I've resisted their books until now.  In this one, they've loosened up and the quilts, to me, jump off the pages.  Looks like a lot of good tips here.

  

If you've been visiting here for more than five minutes, you know I've been trying to "loosen up" forever, always fighting my natural inclinations.  Years ago I took a workshop with contemporary quiltmaker, Susan Shie, in which I designed and made this small wall piece.  If you're familiar with her wonderful work, she is the queen of *loose* and got a big kick out of how difficult it was for me to achieve uneven stitches, as if I had some kind of genetic predisposition that regulated my stitches.  At first she suggested that I try stitching with my non-dominant hand.  That didn't work so someone suggested I work on it while riding in a car, to which she replied, "How about while she's drivinga car?"   St. Perpetua Perfecta hangs in my sewing room as reminder, but she hasn't had as big an influence as I had hoped. 

Maybe I should have brought my stitching into the city Saturday night...that may have done the trick!  Nice view, huh?  Although I wasn't involved with the BlogHer Conference that was held in Chicago last week, some friends (old & new) were in town for it and I was happy to be invited to join them at a bloggy soiree.  Cocktails on a rooftop terrace on a perfect summer evening with a bunch of hilarious women bloggers...not my usual weekend activity!  It was a fabulous, memorable night.  And now I have more blogs to read.

*Sidenote to Blackbird and Martha MacGyver:  Volare. 

Catching up

I've had a list of things here at the computer that I've wanted to include in posts so I'm going to roll them all into one today and clear the desk deck.  Since I can't bear to post without a photo and I'm on a red & green kick here lately, I decided to include this one of a quilt I started a few years ago.  When I posted about it (in 2005!), I wrote that the nine completed blocks were waiting for a border.  However, when I came across them last week, one actually wasn't quite completed so I worked on it a bit last evening.  I love this block design, traced from an antique quilt.  I purchased the tissue paper tracing at a small, local quilt show in Ohio, at least 20 years ago.

 

On to other business!  First, I'd like to thank everyone for the help regarding removing the date stamps from the wedding photos.  Several of you even removed the date from the photo I posted!  I got lots of good tips and since I do have Adobe Photoshop Elements on my computer, I have purchased a handbook that has a chapter on the clone tool and will be fooling around with that in the near future.

It has recently come to my attention that several of my favorite blogs' feeds are not being picked up by Bloglines.  Grrr.  Not only are they not being picked up, there is no indication of that ( the red !) next to my listings.  I happened upon this when I realized that a friend hadn't posted in quite a while.  Hoping nothing was wrong, I clicked on her blog to find a month's worth of posts!  I thought this was an anomaly but yesterday while reading someone's blog, I noticed in her sidebar favorite blog updates (is that just a Blogspot feature?) that Jane had just posted.  I clicked over and again, a month's worth of posts that never showed up in my Bloglines.  I'm sure there are more favorites being skipped that I just haven't caught yet. I've contacted them about this and am waiting for a reply.  Any suggestions for a more reliable feed aggregator? 

It's been ages since I did a link list, but here are a few notables.  You probably have seen some of them, but I'd be surprised if anyone's seen them all!

• Primrose Design recently showcased a nice edging treatment with rick rack. 
• There's always something going on at Calamity Kim's.  Check out the instructions she recently shared for two fabric flower embellishments - a fold-and-twist rose as well as a gorgeous chiffon blossom.  You could spend a day at her place...visual overload!
• I've always loved the look of Rowans' Kidsilk Haze but never found a project that tempted me until I came across this pillow at Cherry Blossom Hill Studio.  Luscious!
• The Piece o' Cake girls have posted a few good ideas recently...an easy way to hang a quilt and a different way of folding a quilt.  Do note that the specific links are to older posts on Blogspot.  However, they recently moved and their new blog, always worth checking out, is at Typepad.
• Blackbird Designs started a blog a few months ago and this week, Alma shared instructions for a magnetic needle holder that she designed to keep needles close at hand.  My sister will be hoping I make one of these.  When we were in high school, I lost a needle once and had the whole family on high alert, scouring my recent trails.  Several hours later, Lori announced at a screaming, high pitch, *I FOUND THE NEEDLE!!*.  It had been dropped on the stair carpet and pierced her toe as she was running down at a fast clip.  We still laugh about it.  Or one of us does.
• doe-c-doe is a graphic designer with an interest in vintage needle arts. Here are some really charming gift tags...vintage buttons and vintage trim packages...to download and print out for personal use.  So charming and the perfect accent on a handmade gift.  She also regularly shares vintage embroidery motifs.
• Just Something I Made is another graphic designer whose blog is a treasure trove of designs she freely shares for personal use.  Lots of wonderful ideas here!
• Glorious Color just got the new Kaffe Fassett fabrics in.  Scroll down the home page and click on the fabric swatches to see the newest prints and colorways.
• I had to sneak back in here (a few minutes after first posting) and add this last link.  Design Sponge just posted a tutorial for fabric envelopes.  So clever!!

Red and green

 

Red and green quilts have always been among my very favorites.  Although I can lose myself in the details of finely designed blocks in a traditional Baltimore album quilt, it's the more primitive, *homemade-look* blocks and quilts that really hold my interest.  Over the years I've collected many, many shots of wonderful examples so it was this photo trove that I recently mined for some inspiration for a project I'm planning. 

 

The block I decided to use as a starting point was a diagonal set, which wasn't going to work for my project.  So I cut a large square of drawing paper, divided it into quarters and lightly sketched in the shapes I wanted to work with, elongating some of the stems lengths to better fill the square.  My plan was to fill some of that open area with additional leaves, but I could quickly see that this wasn't going to work.  If you look closely at the light sketch, despite its square format, the design still basically looked like a diagonal block set on point in a square.

 

To my eye, the most successful square applique block designs completely fill the area of the block.  In the above b&w photo of an antique piece, you can see how the quilter has filled almost all available space in her blocks with motifs...very little background space is unadorned.  I love that!  Looking at these blocks, it was immediately apparent that my block needed two big blooms in the upper corners.

 

Sometimes when I'm sketching out such a design, it's hard for me to envision the visual weight of the designs without color.  I wanted big and bold, so I used some of the templates I had made, tracing them onto fabric scraps and cutting out the motifs in real size, no seam allowances added.  This allowed me to play with different size floral elements and move the motifs around on the background until I was happy with the placement.  At that point, I lightly sketched in stems.

 

One of the prominent features of the more primitive block designs is the uniform thickness of the stems, probably due to the common use of bias strip stems, simply bent to the design.  This often results in a lumpy area at curves, something that can be charming on a true antique but I find less so on a modern interpretation. When I play with these designs, I always have a difficult time restraining my natural tendency to narrow the branches as they grow outward.  This time, once I had the line of the stems established, I just added lines on either side until I had the thickness I wanted.

 

I then traced the numbered stems onto tracing paper.  Since I'll only be making one of these blocks, tracing paper will be fine for the templates.  If repeat blocks were planned, I'd make them from template plastic.

 

Again, still unsure that the stems were going to be wide enough to give me the look that I wanted, I cut some from green fabric scraps to test out.  Looks good!  Since the block will be somewhat symmetrical, no further work is needed.  I'll lightly trace outlines or mark setting points on the fabric, flipping the drawn design on a light-box for the left side of the design.  Now I can start appliqueing, although I haven't yet developed the final design for the basket.  Plenty of time for that!

Re-entry

 
Wedding flowers

I severely underestimated the time it would take to get back to some kind of routine after the wedding trip.  Once we got a few nights' sleep and I finally emptied the suitcases, I was a little surprised to realize how much I had let go around here as I planned & packed and filled most available hours with countdown quilting.  The place was a mess! 

 

When I ventured into the sewing room to putter around, that, too, looked somewhat wrecked, so I took a whole afternoon to straighten up, reintegrating the wedding quilt fabric and sorting my fabric shelves.  I love doing that. I get some big idea about a better way to sort and start making piles according to the new plan.  This time, I decided to segregate my Kaffe Fassett fabrics and make separate piles of my favorite categories...stripes, polka dots, reproductions.  Well, you know what happened next.  In what pile do the Kaffe polka dots go?  There is no perfect system.

 

I had accumulated quite a bit of new fabric over the last few months, mostly from several fabulous sales.  These were stacked, unwashed, in a corner so while workmen were at the house last week and I wanted to stay on the first floor, I took the opportunity to wash and iron them all. 

 

I hate ironing, but somehow perversely enjoy tackling a big, colorful pile of fabric and taming it into a neat pile of possibilities.

 

I admit that I have lost big chunks of days phone chatting with family about how much fun we had at the wedding.  And an inordinate amount of time has been spent at the computer, looking at wedding photos and enjoying albums that friends and family have been uploading to share with us.  One group of photos is particularly wonderful, except for the date stamp that is imprinted on each shot.  Not only is it visually distracting, it makes cropping almost impossible.  After some internet research, it seems that these are a permanent digital imprint on the photo file, though I did find this software, which might be a solution.  A free trial download is available, but I'm pretty careful about putting anything on our computer without some recommendation from a current user.  Has anyone ever tried this? 

 

I finally got back into the sewing room yesterday and am working on two projects, something old and something new.  (That wedding theme again!)  The *something new* was inspired by all of the red & green talk over at Kathie's and Janet's.  More on that next time. 

Behind the scenes

We're home!  I'm slowly emerging from a coma-like state, induced by our whirlwind wedding week, which if I had to pick one word to describe, would be *overload*.  Non-stop fun and overload on every front.  Despite having arrived home mid-week, we are still recovering.

4/28

My presence has been a bit scarce here on the blog over the last few months, and I can finally disclose why.  Over the last few months, I've been working on a wedding quilt.  I got a very late start on it for, perhaps, a silly reason.  I had decided early on that I wouldn't make one.  I had no idea if my future daughter-in-law liked quilts and although we'd spent lots of time with her, because of our move situation over the last few years, she hasn't had the chance to visit us yet.  No tour of the sewing room, no chance to gauge interest or taste in styles.  A bed quilt takes so long to make, I hated to commit the time to something that would be a shot in the dark.  And if she didn't like quilts...oh dear, would K choose to marry someone who didn't like quilts?...I didn't want to put her in the position of feigning interest. 

 
5/6

Shortly before I left for my trip to Japan in January, I was talking with my sister on the phone.

Sis:  So how are the quilt plans coming?
Me:  What quilt plans?
Sis:  The wedding quilt!
Me:  I wasn't going to make one. 
Sis:  WHAT??!!!  You've got to be kidding.  You've made quilts for everyone in the family...wedding, anniversary, graduation...and you're not making one for your own son's wedding? 
Me:  Hmmm.  I see your point.  I'll see what Molly thinks.

 
5/15/2009

The next week, I arrived in Japan.

Me:  Aunt Lori was horrified that I wasn't planning on making a quilt for H&K's wedding.  I just don't know if she likes quilts and I don't want to impose one on her.
Molly:  Well, do what you want, but just know that if I get married, I'll be expecting one!  *grin*

 
5/22/2009  Layering and pinning

Through the winter, I mulled it over.  I knew they both loved blue, so that was a start.  But what kind of pattern?  I love making scrappy quilts and I knew because of time constraints it couldn't be overly complicated.  I played with several possibilities.  Remember this?  It was a try-out.  But there were others, including some traditional blue & white designs.  In the end, I came back to this design because I couldn't imagine making a traditional blue & white queen sized quilt on a deadline.  It just wouldn't have held my interest.

 
5/22  All pinned, ready for basting

You'd think I would've really poured it on, work-wise, before Molly arrived for her visit in late April.  However, my work started to lag a bit as I was finding the search for appropriate binding/border fabric to be more challenging than I thought.  Would I put all of this time into the center design and not be able to find something that worked as a border? 

5/23  Basting...and basting...and basting

I wanted a fabric that was a subtle print but that would *read* as a complementary solid.  How difficult could that be?  As it turned out, quite difficult.  When Molly and I attended the International Quilt Festival/Chicago during her visit, our primary goal was to find a fabric among the vendors that would work.  The deadline clock was ticking loudly!!

 
5/27  The grid starts to emerge

We found exactly what I was looking for at Web Fabrics, a vendor who specializes in blender fabrics.  I purchased several shades of their blue fat quarters, all of which were identified by Web Fabric stickers as to manufacturer, fabric name and color number.  After a quick audition at home on the design board, two colors were chosen and ordered.  I must add here that Webs Fabric couldn't have been a better source.  I ordered online on a Friday morning and within an hour, had an email response asking for some clarification.  I responded promptly and they said they'd fill the order that afternoon.  It arrived in Monday morning's mail!!  One more thing about them...they carry every color in these blender lines.  Here is their color selection of my choice, Robert Kaufman's Fusions.  Look at all of those blues!  (I chose Regatte and Midnight.)  I'd highly recommend Web Fabrics for both service and selection if you're in the market for blender prints.

6/2  Almost there!

When Molly returned to Japan in early May, I really had to get going on this project.  It had been a long time since I'd made a queen sized quilt, and although I *knew* it was going to take a while to get the top together, it seemed to drag on for days.  The unwieldiness of its size (88"x 93") seemed to add to the time it took to do a simple thing like borders.

6/15  Re-basting in blue thread

After two back-breaking days of pinning and basting...the worst part of making a large quilt, in my book...it was time to start quilting.  My machine quilting is basic at best (something I intend to work on now, with my new machine) so I never entertained anything but handquilting.  I was a little hesitant about this though, as I haven't really done much in the last few years.  As I wrote about at the time, however, I fell in love with handquilting all over again while working on this quilt.  Good thing, too, as over the three weeks of quilting, I was putting in hours of handquilting a day.   

6/15

I knew when I started quilting (honestly, I knew long before that!) that I was never going to be able to finish it before the wedding.  I did, however, want it to be in a somewhat finished state and was able to get the center minimally quilted in an all-over pattern.  I then pulled out all of the white basting threads, re-basting the borders in a matching dark blue thread and folded the backing over the edges, loosely tacking it down to approximate the look of a finished quilt.  

 
6/15

As I glanced out the sewing room window, it occurred to me that I'd be able to get a good shot of it from that vantage point if I draped it in the garden.  Sending a silent plea to all of the birds who inhabit our big tree to keep their legs crossed for a few minutes, I dashed about setting up the photo shoot.  Complete (for now)...ready to wrap!

 
6/24

When we got down to Myrtle Beach, so many relatives were anxious to see the quilt (having heard my frantic laments over the past few weeks...*Can't talk now, got to quilt!*), we accosted the couple early in the week to open their gift, I think as we were getting ready to head down to the beach one afternoon.  The bride's reaction?  "I love it! I was hoping you'd make us a quilt!"

 
6/27/2009