This is My Heart

Egg Quilt: Color

2012-01-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

It’s been about three dozen months since I moved to California and joined the Flying Geese Quilters Guild, where I met Bridget Paley, who gives me dozens of eggs, whose colors I matched to the circles here by carrying crushed eggshells captured in clear packing tape through local fabric stores.

So this awesome friend of mine from the Flying Geese Quilters Guild has chickens. When her chickens lay more eggs than she can use, she gives them away. In March she gave me and two other members of the guild each a dozen eggs. We three recipients conspired to make quilts based on our eggs. Our goal was to finish them by the next guild meeting. So how do I get from a dozen eggs to a quilt?
The most unique thing about the eggs were their colors. I lined up my eggs by hue and value.

The top left egg falls squarely in the orange hue. It has a high value and a low chroma. Working with GIMP, I found this egg to have a hue of 41 which is really pretty much dead center in the orange spectrum, a saturation (vaguely translatable to chroma) of 62 on a scale where 0 is neutral gray and 100 is as full of color as color can be, and a value of 64 on a scale where 0 is black and 100 is as light as orange can be and still be orange of this hue and saturation.

The second egg from the left is ever so slightly more yellow than the first egg. Again, it has a high value and a low chroma. In HSV language that's 43, 66, 67 - so more yellow, higher saturation (less gray), and higher value (lighter).

The third egg from the left in the top row is more yellow than the second, with a chroma between the first and the second, and a value lower than either of the first two. In HSV: 49, 64, 59. This egg is an excellent example of how yellow at a low value is often misleadingly named "army green."

The egg in the second row of the third column is actually pretty spot on in terms of its placement in the correct hue column. According to GIMP, the hues of this egg and the egg above it are exactly the same. How awesome am I? OK, it's a weird talent to be awesome at, but still. This is even more impressive given the drastically lower chroma and significantly higher value. In HSV: 49, 42, 71

The egg in the third row of the third column is also pretty amazingly accurately located. It's ever so slightly more yellow than the two eggs above it. Again, it has much lower saturation than the eggs above and a higher value. In HSV: 50, 32, 77.

The egg in the fourth row of the third column is exactly the same hue as the egg above it (so ever so slightly more yellow than the top two eggs in this column). It is crazy low chroma and high value. In HSV: 50, 19, 87.

The fourth egg from the left is a bit more yellow than third column of eggs. We're definitely at the yellow end of the orange spectrum. It is very close in saturation and value to the third egg from the left in the top row. In HSV: 53, 64, 60.

The fifth egg from the left is slightly more yellow than the egg to its left. It has a slightly lower value than the egg to its left. The big difference is saturation - this egg is more gray than its neighbor to the left. In HSV: 55, 56, 59.

The egg in the second row of the fifth column is exactly the same hue as the egg above it. Dude, I rock hues! Like the trend in the column of eggs to the left, this egg is lower in saturation and higher in value than the egg above it, though that difference isn't as drastic as it was in the second row of the other column. In HSV: 55, 51, 62.

The egg in the third row of the fifth column is exactly the same hue as the other eggs in this column. It continues the lower saturation, higher value trend. It's pretty close to the saturation and value of the second egg in the other column. In HSV: 55, 42, 67.

The egg in the top row of the sixth column (also known as the top egg on the right) is, apparently, my downfall. It should be in the fifth column. It's the same hue as all the eggs in the fifth column. More specifically, it should be between the top egg in the fifth column and the second egg in the fifth column. In HSV: 55, 53, 60.

The egg in the second row of the sixth column is the yellowest of all the eggs here. It's not smack dab in the middle of the yellow spectrum, but it's a good deal closer to the center of the yellow spectrum than it is to the center of the orange spectrum. It's saturation and value are closest to the egg in the second row of the fifth column (i.e., the egg to the left of it - so that's a good arrangement). It's value In HSV: 58, 47, 61.

Now, knowing my proclivity for The New Munsell(R) Student Color Set, it comes as no surprise that I tried to match the eggs to swatches from the color charts. What did come as a surprise is the total impossibility of doing so. The 5YR chart is WAY too red to approximate even the farthest left egg.

By way of comparison (and an interesting demonstration of how GIMP's HSV is NOT equivalent to Munsell's HVC not controlling for photographic distortion), the closest HSV hue number to the most orange egg is 28 (which was only the hue number for the two farthest right chips in the second column from the top - if HSV = Munsell, all the hue numbers should be the same). This is twelve steps more red than the HSV hue number of the least yellow, most orange egg (41).

I had better luck with the Hue 5Y chart. The chip third from the left in the second row had the highest HSV hue number. It had an HSV of 52, 61, 73, which is closest to the fourth egg from the left (53, 64, 60). All of the eggs to the right of that egg were too green for any of the chips on the Hue 5Y chart.

The eggs in the third column had the same HSV hue number as the second chip from the right in the top row, but they don't look very similar because the saturation and value of the chip are 74 and 82. The range of HSV saturation numbers of that column of eggs was 64 to 19 from top to bottom row. The range of the HSV value numbers was 59 to 87 from top to bottom.

The lowest HSV hue number I could find on the chips was 44 on the farthest right chip on the third row from the bottom. The second egg from the left had an HSV hue number of 43. However, like the comparison in the previous paragraph, the egg color doesn't resemble the chip because the saturation and value of the chip are 73 and 44 whereas the saturation and value of the egg are 66 and 67. In this case the saturation of the chip and the egg are closer. The top egg on the left is too orange for the 5Y chart and not nearly orange enough for the 5YR chart.

Not capable of leaving well enough alone, I had to test the two rightmost columns of eggs against the Hue 5GY chart. The lowest HSV hue number I could wangle was the chip in second column of the top row: 72, way more green than the eggs in the fifth and six columns, which all had HSV hue numbers of 55.

"Why go through all this?" I hear you cry.

We perceive colors differently based on context. If we really want to identify the colors of things, we have to do some work. While running a picture of these eggs through Big Huge Labs' Palette Generator will generate uniform swatches, it's not the end of the color identification process. A bunch of HTML color codes and color swatches with names like "sycamore" don't really get you anywhere. But analyzing the hue, value, and chroma can tell you a lot more.

For example, these eggs, which I thought were orange and green, are actually yellow. This is HUGE! Imagine if I selected a color scheme for a quilt based on my inaccurate assessment the the eggs were orange and green. I'd have to go with a triad of orange, green, and violet, or a tetrad of orange, green, red, and blue. The actual color of the eggs isn't even in there. I'd go shopping or dyeing and lay out my fabric next to my egg pictures and be radically disappointed. Or even worse, I make the whole quilt in that color scheme and then when I set it next to my egg pictures I realize it's just totally wrong. Those two scenarios sound a lot less artistically satisfying to me than spending some time up front to get to know the colors before I buy or dye a thing.

I thought they were all very high values, but actually they run from 59 to 87. Value is the workhorse of quilt design. Knowing the value range of my inspiration eggs can help me incorporate a broader range of values in my quilt than I might based on my inaccurate perception that the eggs were all high values.

I thought they were all very low chroma, but actually their HSV saturation numbers run from 19 to 66. Again, doing a little color work offers me a much wider range of saturation possibilities than my inaccurate initial assessment.

I could take this numerical analysis even further - using the distribution of hue, value, or saturation numbers to help me decide the amount of each fabric to include in my quilt. For example, only one egg has a saturation anywhere near as low as 19, 32. Then there's a cluster of three in the forties, another cluster of three in the fifties, and a cluster of four in the low sixties.

If the most interesting thing about these eggs is their color, then it's worth taking some time and exerting some effort to get to know their colors. Maybe knowing the top left egg's HSV numbers are 41, 62, 64 isn't intrinsically useful. But spending time really getting inside those colors can help me make the best use of them.

Take a Stitch Tuesday: Week 2 - Buttonhole

2012-01-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

Week 2 - Buttonhole
Four graduated buttonhole stitches . . . ooo . . . I'm taking it further. See what people who are really taking it further are doing.

Week 1 - Fly

Take a Stitch Tuesday: Week 1 - Fly

2012-01-15T15:00:00.000-08:00

Week 1 - Fly

Life has been crazy. I'm taking Sharon B literally: taking ONE stitch. Everything beyond that one stitch is gravy.

Quilt Guild Block of the Month: Quatrefoil

2011-10-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is October's Flying Geese Quilters Guild Block of the Month done in the fabrics I'm using for my brother and sister-in-laws quilt. The fabric featured in the center square (should we call it the Whoopi Goldberg square?) is from Lizzy House's 1001 Peeps collection. I've caught up on June and October. Now I just have to catch up on July, August, and September's blocks.

The quatrefoil block was also featured in Modern Blocks: 99 Quilt Blocks from Your Favorite Designerscompiled by Susanne Woods, which just arrived on my doorstep yesterday. So exciting!

Quilt Guild Block of the Month: Dutchman's Puzzle

2011-10-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is the Flying Geese Quilters Guild Block of the Month for June done in the fabrics for my brother and sister-in-law's quilt. I used speed piecing method B from Quilter's Cache. It worked a lot better for me this time compared to back in May.

Blogger's Block of the Month: A Quilting Life

2011-10-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

I am pathological. When I have too much on my plate, what do I do? Ask for seconds. So in addition to catching up on the last few blocks of the month from the Flying Geese Quilters Guild, I've decided to do the Blogger's Block of the Month. The first block is from Sherri at A Quilting Life.

The Blogger's Blocks of the Month are all supposed to be 8 inches when finished. But the blocks for the Flying Geese Quilters Guild are 12 inches finished. So my plan is to increase all of the Blogger's Blocks of the Month to 12 inches finished. That way I can put the blocks from both sets together into one big, beautiful, long overdue, sampler quilt for my brother and sister-in-law.

This month's block is pretty easy to scale up to 12 inches. You'll need:

8 - 3 1/2'' squares background fabric (where Sherri used the Kaffe grey, I used bright green Flea Market Fancy or Katie Jump Rope by Denyse Schmidt for FreeSpirit.),
4 - 3 1/2'' squares of medium/dark prints (where Sherri used four different Kaffe prints, I used one black and dark blue-green print from Lizzy House's 1001 Peeps collection),
2 - 4'' squares background fabric (again where Sherri used the Kaffe grey I used bright green Flea Market Fancy or Katie Jump Rope by Denyse Schmidt for FreeSpirit.), and
2 - 4'' squares of another medium/dark print (where Sherri used two of the same Kaffe prints I used the red and white print from Flea Market Fancy or Katie Jump Rope by Denyse Schmidt for FreeSpirit.).

This block sews together super fast. For the four half-square triangles I used the old make two at the same time trick: drawing a line from one corner to the other, sewing a quarter inch on either side of the line, and cutting on the line. I use a slightly larger square to start with so I had a little wiggle room to square up my pieced patch. Also, since I used the same print for my dark squares, I strip pieced the four-patches. I'm so excited to add this block to my brother and sister-in-law's sampler!

Quilt Guild Block of the Month: Dutchman's Puzzle

2011-10-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

June's Flying Geese Quilters Guild Block of the Month was Dutchman's Puzzle. Click here for a PDF with the instructions. I went to Quilter's Cache and downloaded their paper pieced geese PDF from the comprehensive tutorial on piecing flying geese.
I actually had this done in June, I just forgot to post about it. "Prove it," I hear you cry.

Yup, I won the block drawing. I have 32 gorgeous Dutchman's Puzzle blocks. My plan is to set them on point and make a king-sized quilt.

I didn't get a chance to make this out of the fabric for my brother's and sister-in-law's quilt, so it's on my list of BOMs to make up.

Quilt Guild Block of the Month

2011-09-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

October's Flying Geese Quilters Guild Block of the Month is a quatrefoil block. Click here for a PDF with the instructions. Yes, the last one I finished was for June. I'll be catching up on June, July, August, and September's blocks using the fabrics I'm using for my brother and sister-in-laws quilt.

Woo Hoo!

2011-08-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

At the Flying Geese Quilters Guild I have a bit of a reputation for my jubilance upon winning anything, even the smallest door prize. So you can imagine the racket when I learned that I had won third place in Generation Q Magazine's Quilts Made Modern Block Challenge.

Mind you, I had a 3 in 10 chance of placing. But I had a better chance winning a drawing at my guild last night and didn't win that, so hey. Probability aside, those other seven blocks are AWESOME, so my competition was steep. And the first and second place blocks are SUPER AWESOME, so I'm totally grateful the judges (including Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr of Fun Quilts!) thought my block was worthy of third place.

I came across this challenge by following the blog tour for the Weeks and Bill's newest book Quilts Made Modern: 10 Projects, Keys for Success with Color & Design, From the FunQuilts Studio. I learned about the book and the blog tour because I follow Weeks's fantastic blog Craft Nectar.

A few thoughts on my design process here. I printed out the start of a block, cut it out, and then started folding it along the lines to choose what kind of symmetry I would follow. I settled on making the design symmetrical around the line that divides the circle in my final drawing. Then I doodled with my ruler and compass (clearly modern quilters dig curves as the top three blocks all included circles or parts thereof). Once I got the line drawing I liked, I scanned it into a JPEG and used Paint to fill in the colors. I thought about Weeks and Bill's approach to color in The Modern Quilt Workshop: Patterns, Techniques, and Designs from the FunQuilts Studio. I picked an analogous color scheme centering on a peachy orange and two hues on either side of it, then a light and medium value of each. It's reminiscent of the color scheme in the XOXO quilt in The Modern Quilt Workshop.

Placing in this challenge is awesome, but I think I'm almost more excited about discovering this new quilting resource: Generation Q Magazine. If you're into quilting in general or modern quilting in specific, you will love it.

Thank you Generation Q Magazine!

Fab Printing

2011-08-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

I know I'm coming to this late in the game, but holy cow I think my new color printer, some PFD fabric, and 8 1/2 by 11 inch freezer paper is going to change my life.

LQS Love: Bear's Quilt Shop in Garden Grove

2011-05-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

I first entered Bear's Quilt Shop for a dyeing workshop put on by the Flying Geese Quilters Guild. The Guild doesn't usually hold workshops at Bear's so I was a little surprised. But then I saw the classroom. I can't imagine a classroom better designed for a dyeing class.

I dyed with Daren Pitts Redman in an almost brand new quilt shop with pristine white tables and floors, one sink, no washer, and no dryer. We all had dyed fabric at the end of the day, but the floor and tables had a little dye too. And we were all super anxious about getting dye anywhere. We also didn't properly rinse and dry our fabrics, so we didn't really get to see the final product until we were home . . . to be brutally honest, I air dried those pieces of fabric without rinsing them, folded them up, popped them into a ziploc bag, and they're still in that bag as I type . . . three years later. In fact, the reason I stopped by Bear's last week was to pick up some synthrapol to finally rinse those fabrics so I could use them to finish the project I started in the workshop I took at Bear's.

I also took a dyeing workshop at IQF Chicago, so that was in a hotel conference room . . . using the sinks in the ladies' room at the other end of the hall. Similarly, no one really got to see the fully rinse, fully dried results. And we were all having strokes out of fear that we'd ruin the carpet and get quilters banned from Chicago for life.
Now, if you cannot work in a space that isn't pretty, Bear's is not for you. Bear's whole space is practical. First, like a lot of LQSs in this area, they're in a office park/warehouse with low overhead. They've got the usual amenities like individual tables for each student and super comfy rolly chairs.

Second, unlike a lot of LQSs in office parks, they didn't cover the concrete floors. Not conventionally pretty, but totally functional. Whether mopping up dye drips or sweeping up thread clippings, this polished cement floor is easier to clean than any flooring I've ever seen in a quilt shop. That seems like it would only benefit the people who have to clean it, but I've taken some workshops in some otherwise posh shops, whose floors were totally gross. When I picked up my sewing machine's bag off the floor, a layer of dust bunnies had stuck to it. That's not going to happen at Bear's. Also, while I was in my dyeing class at Bear's I could focus on my project and not worry about whether I was dripping dye on the floor. Amazing what a little anxiety reduction can do for your creative process.

Third, Bear's invested in a stack of cutting mats so each student can use one at their station. This is handy because students don't have to bring mats, which tend to warp in hot cars, from home, nor do they have to wait in line for one shared cutting table. Bear's also has a counter-height cutting table for those so inclined.

Fourth, Bear's installed a serious pressing station. Instead of two irons on an ironing board for a whole class to share, Bear's has a counter covered with heat proof pressing mats with multiple irons. There are at least four outlets and each outlet is on its own fuse. This is important because I recall IQF Chicago blowing the fuses at every ironing station in the conference center.

Fifth, they have a full-sized washing machine and dryer in addition to two deep work sinks. None of this "go rinse and dry this at home . . . I'm sure it will turn out great!"
This is the place to go for dyeing and long-arm quilting. They've also got a lot of 108" fabric for quilt backs at INSANELY good prices. But this isn't a shop with hours and hours of browsing potential. Still, they fill their niche perfectly.

LQS Love: Sewing Party in Laguna Hills

2011-05-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

Sewing Party, my favorite LQS for hip modern fabrics, recently moved into a larger space including this gorgeous new classroom. [Click on the picture to see it a bit larger]

Edited 5/16/2011 to add:
Their new address is 23561 Ridge Route Rd., Suite F, Laguna Hills, CA 92653.

The classroom has individual tables for each student, ergonomic chairs, plenty of design wall space, and the neat little feature pictured above. It's a rail for a room divider, so if more than one group wants to work in this GIGANTIC space at a time, they each have a bit of privacy. I can't wait to see this classroom in action when I attend Malka Dubrawsky's Color Your Cloth workshop there on Sunday, May 21st.

The owner has an excellent eye for color and fresh designs. As before the move, the shop is filled with gorgeous fabrics including quilting cottons, home dec, voile, woven wool felt, and even some laminated cottons.

She also keeps it stocked with notions to make bags and accessories in addition to quilts.

They've also added a sweet little kiddo play area, appropriately colorful in the Kaffe Fasset section.

Quilt Guild Blocks of the Month

2011-05-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

May's Flying Geese Quilters Guild Block of the Month is a sawtooth star. Click here for a PDF with the instructions. As the instructions suggested I went to Quilter's Cache for the comprehensive tutorial on piecing flying geese.

I followed Quilter's Cache instructions for Speed Piecing Method B. Not my best work. Pretty challenging to get the geese blocks the correct size and to not cut off any points. As you can see, some of these outside points are going to be a challenge to not cut off.
And the crazy stuff I did to get this to come out even . . . well, I'm glad this one wasn't for the block exchange at guild because I would be embarrassed by the jacked up seam allowances on the back of this one. But in the end the inside points are good and the overall block size is correct. Also, the nice thing about following Quilter's Cache instructions for Speed Piecing Method B is that my directional background fabric (i.e., the mushroom print) stayed heads up without much effort on my part.
Last month I mistakenly attributed the gnome print to Heather Bailey for FreeSpirit. Actually the gnome print and this mushroom print are both by Heather Ross for FreeSpirit. The rest of the fabrics in this block and last month's block for my brother and sister-in-law is from Flea Market Fancy and Katie Jump Rope by Denyse Schmidt for FreeSpirit.

Dynamic Dualism

2011-04-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

This week the LACMA acquired a Peruvian textile (more specifically a Mantle or Hanging from Peru, Inka (1450–1532) or early colonial period (16th century)). The piece represents the cosmological principle of dynamic dualism in which "the universe was organized of contrasting but complementary opposites, and balance was attained by the interchange between the two."

At first glance it looks like your basic red and white one-patch quilt. Or a simple woven checkerboard. But it was created using a weaving method called discontinuous warp and weft which Kaye Spilker, Curator, Costume and Textiles, describes well.

Woven in a meticulous technique in which neither warps nor wefts extend across the entire cloth, the textile was created with “scaffold” threads (which were later removed) that formed a temporary grid upon which to weave each miniscule square, less than an inch in size, separately. The fabric was assembled by the process of interlocking the warps and wefts of each adjacent square—forming a single cloth from the sum of many parts. In the history of world textiles, the multifaceted technique of discontinuous warp and weft was practiced only in the Andes.

The post also includes a diagram of the weaving method.

The post relates the Inka textile to Agnes Martin's work. Its orthogonal design reminded me of Gerhard Richter's "1024 Farben" (1974) that I glanced in the New York Times this morning. But its color scheme reminded me of the red and white quilts exhibit everyone raved about.

Quilt Guild Blocks of the Month

2011-04-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

I've resolved to participate in the Flying Geese Quilters Guild Block of the Month this round. The theme is "Sew many Geese to Piece!" They have pictures and instructions on the website.

This is my block to bring to guild. We're supposed to use beige as our background fabric. I hope this is sufficiently beige.

My plan is to make a second set of blocks for a sampler quilt I promised my brother and sister-in-law ages ago. Well, by the date of the release of that Heather Bailey for FreeSpirit gnome print I'd say it was about six years ago.

Art as a Function of Availablity of Raw Materials

2011-02-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

Quilting more emblematically so than any other artistic medium is influenced by the availablity of raw materials. See, e.g., the Gee's Bend quilters' use of scraps of corduroy leftover from making pillows for Sears - those "gold", "avocado leaf", "tangerine," and "cherry red" colors in quilts by different quilters starting in 1973 are the same because they all had one source for scraps. (For more information see Lauren Whitley's piece "'Avocado Leaf' Corduroy, Remnants of the Seventies" in Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt by William Arnett, et al). So what is going to change about quilts today because of the increase in the price of raw cotton? One can read the news that quilting cotton fabric is going to go above $10 a yard and cry, "The sky is falling." But the real question is does it change what you make?

Inherent Vice

2011-01-06T00:08:00.000-08:00

One of the art blogs I frequent is Unframed, "a blog of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art intended to create a conversation about the art and artists of LACMA, Los Angeles, and Southern California." Usually there's not much quilt-y on Unframed, but yesterday they had a neat post about saving a red and green applique quilt, 'Oak Leaf and Reel' made between 1845 and 50 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Along with the quilty goodness, I learned a new term, "inherent vice." No, that's not a description of my undying love of cupcakes. Here's how they used it:

The iron component of the black dye, used to create fine lines in a few of the red appliqués, has weakened the cotton fabric. The red sections have literally perforated and split—or, even worse, fallen out. This damage is no one’s fault. Conservators have a fancy word for it: inherent vice.

From Webster's we get the following definition:

A weakness in the chemical or physical composition of a document or other object that causes it to deteriorate from within over time, for example, acid in the lignin contained in papers made from untreated wood pulp, or the chemical instability of cellulose nitrate film. If conservation measures fail, preservation of the item may require reformatting.

It's also the title of a 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, which is sitting on our bookshelf, unread.
Exciting new terminology aside, in the close ups of the quilt you can make out the amazingly perfect way the deterioration of the fabric makes a sort of cutwork. Contemplate creating a quilt that decays in such a way that it becomes more beautiful and intricate over time.

Ballet Costumes as Quilt Inspiration

2010-11-21T16:07:00.000-08:00

Check out these Costumes for brigands in Fokine's ballet Daphnis and Chloé designed by Léon Bakst in 1912 for a Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev's Ballets Russes performance in Paris. They're part of an exhibit on Diaghilev at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They are calling me to transform them into quilt patterns.

Fibonacci Baby Quilt

2010-11-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

If you saw the bunny rabbits among the fabrics for the mathematical baby quilt, you may have recalled that the 13th century Italian mathematician Leonardo da Pisa, a.k.a. Fibonacci (son of Bonacci), described the hypothetical birth pattern of rabbits resulting in the series of numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and so on. This has come to be known as the Fibonacci sequence. The pattern I'm adapting from Mathematical Quilts by Diana Venters and Elaine Krajenke Ellison is based on the Fibonacci sequence.

For the original pattern, you'll have to check out the book. I've modified the original pattern by extending the Fibonacci sequence from 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 to 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. The original quilt without borders finishes 22 inches square. By adding another number in the sequence, the center without borders finishes 38 inches square. This makes the quilt a reasonable size for a baby quilt. Additionally, if your fabric didn't shrink too much from the standard 44 inches wide, you will be able to cut the pieces for the center with very little wasted fabric. Venters and Ellison suggest purchasing one yard of each fabric for the center. However, even extending the sequence of the quilt, with my cutting plan you can make this center with 22.5 inches (5/8 yard) of each fabric (that's leaving an extra inch for clean up cuts).

The second, and I think more significant, modification is in the construction method. Venters and Ellison suggest something approximating a template approach, cutting out each individual piece and sewing them back together again. I developed a strip piecing construction method that makes short work of constructing this quilt. In my example, the dark fabric is blue and the light fabric is green with rabbits.

Layer the dark and light fabric together so you can cut strips from both fabrics with one cut.

Make a clean up cut to make an even edge. Cut a 1 1/2 inch strip from both the dark and light fabrics from selvage to selvage.

Cut a 2 1/2 inch wide strip from both the dark and light fabrics from selvage to selvage.

Cut a 3 1/2 inch wide strip from both the dark and light fabrics from selvage to selvage.

Cut a 5 1/2 inch wide strip from both the dark and light fabrics from selvage to selvage.

Cut a 8 1/2 inch wide strip from both the dark and light fabrics from selvage to selvage.

Sew the dark 8 1/2 inch strip to the light 5 1/2 inch strip.

Sew the light 8 1/2 inch strip to the dark 5 1/2 inch strip.

Sew the dark 3 1/2 inch strip to the light 2 1/2 inch strip.

Sew the light 3 1/2 inch strip to the dark 2 1/2 inch strip.

Sew the dark 1 1/2 inch strip to the light 1 1/2 inch strip.

Press all seam allowances toward the dark fabric.

Stack strip sets of the same size so you can cut two units with each cut. The seam allowances are pressed in opposite directions, so they should nest perfectly. From each strip set cut 2 8 1/2 inch units, 2 5 1/2 inch units, 2 3 1/2 inch units, 2 2 1/2 inch units, and 2 1 1/2 inch units.

Arrange alternating colors appropriately.

Assemble units into 4-patch blocks.
Assemble 4-patch blocks into 16-patch blocks.
Then complete the center.

You may notice that between cutting the units from the strip sets and assembling the quilt, I did a little machine embroidery on the blue pieces. I embroidered numbers and dots that will be connected by quilting stitches to render various mathematical ideas related to the Fibonacci sequence. For example, Pascal's triangle, polygonal numbers, branching patterns, pathways, and the Golden Rectangle.

IQF Long Beach 2010

2010-07-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

The International Quilt Festival in Long Beach is here again. While I haven't found much time for quilting lately, I did make time to walk through the quilts and vendors at IQF. It was much more impressive than last year.

One of the neat things at quilt shows like IQF is that sometimes the quilt makers will stand next to their work and answer questions, sign autographs, or pose for pictures. Here is Rita Verroca from Westlake Village, California, with her quilt Roses of Shenandoah, which won first place for traditional applique in the International Quilt Association's Quilts: A World of Beauty competition in 2009. Rita hand embroidered, hand quilted, hand appliqued, and hand pieced her original interpretation of a Mariner's Compass pattern. She deserves to stand proudly next to her beautiful quilt.

Crazy About Ballet by Linda Steele of Park Orchards, Victoria, Australia, won first place for embellished quilts in the International Quilt Association's Quilts: A World of Beauty competition in 2009. The hand embroidered blocks depict scenes from different ballets. While I'm not that serious a fan of ballet, I have a quilt in the design phase that would involve a number of appliqued and embroidered blocks which might benefit from a similar setting.

Illuminated Alphabet by Zena Thorpe of Chatsworth, California, won third place for innovative applique in the International Quilt Association's Quilts: A World of Beauty competition in 2009.
Apparently, Zena Thorpe is something of quilting phenomenon here in California, and given the amazing detail in this hand appliqued, hand embroidered, and hand quilted piece, I am not surprised.

Rose Hughes, a fellow member of the Flying Geese Quilt Guild, made Journey-Mythos: Follow the Yellow Brick Road which was part of a juried exhibit of quilts by members of Quilts on the Wall, an art quilting group based in Long Beach. She did a presentation at our guild on color last year. Her trunk show afterward was filled with abstract landscapes encrusted with beads.
About a quarter of the quilts at this show were antique quilts. The following are from the exhibit America Collects Quilts: International Quilt Festival Antique Quilts. This one is a four block rose and coxcomb made entirely by hand by an unknown quilter around 1880. I like how a quilt this large, 65 3/4 by 85 inches, is made up essentially of four blocks and two borders. If you put it that way, making a quilt so large doesn't seem so daunting.

Unlike most antique quilts, the maker of this hand pieced and quilted Lone Star quilt from 1845 is known: Mary Mern. She even gave it a title: Silk Stars. Heck, if I'd hand pieced that many diamonds together, I would have titled and signed my work, too. My personal interest in this quilt is the setting. I've got some Lone Star aspirations, but the trick is always how to make this inherently square pattern into a rectangle to fit a bed. This quilt measures 87 1/2 by 101 1/2 inches.

Star of Stars, circa 1845, another amazing quilt whose maker is unknown, collects some great details of early quiltmaking that I particularly enjoy. First, Jinny Beyer and her precision drafting be damned! When this quilter's gorgeous diamond sashing didn't end perfectly at the intersections, she just hacked it off. But that doesn't mean she didn't care about details. Look at this amazing scalloped binding which follows the curves of the border print . . . Jinny Beyer would love a border print like this . . . well, except for the mismatched print in the corner.
Jinny would also love the fussy cut center of the Lone Star.
This quilt was made by an unknown maker around 1800 using a huge variety of fabrics colored with natural dyes.

Senior Thread

2010-01-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

Recently I received a fabulous package from Mom containing some fiber finds from her most recent tag sale adventures. In addition to some lovely fabric, she sent me a whole bunch of thread. Much of it was 100% cotton. Based on color alone I would definitely consider quilting with the cotton threads. But I'm concerned about the age of the thread. How can I tell if I should use it?

I'm not just being ageist. Somewhere in my quilting education a wise woman said that thread can dry out and lose its strength over time, so beware of using great-grandma's thread collection on your quilt. Much depends on the quality of the storage. Given that this was a Floridian tag sale find, I suspect there was plenty of moisture in the air where this thread was stored. As you can see, much of it is wound on beautiful wooden spools, so even if the thread itself is no good, I'll certainly use the spools for winding handmade trims and whatnot.

I'm not going to shell out $42 for ASTM's Standard Test Methods for Sewing Threads, but the description shows that they measure colorfastness, shrinkage, strength and elongation, loop strength, and knot strength among other properties. The peanut gallery at Askville seems to favor the pull until it breaks test. Elphaba over at PatternReview.com favors the bobbin winding test. If I were super cool, I would break out a microscope and check out the quality of the thread under 60x magnification like Debbie Colgrove over at sewing.about.com.

First, I did a snap test like the peanut gallery at Askville suggested. I wound the ends around my index fingers like I was preparing to floss my teeth. I put my index fingers together. Then I moved my index fingers apart as fast as I could. I did this with a few different strands of the tag sale thread and a few strands of brand spanking new thread. Same results. So far, go old thread!

Second, I wound a bobbin at full speed from one of the spools of old thread. No problemo.

Finally, I used the thread to finish the edges of some flannel to make reusable wipes. I sewed at CRAZY high speeds. I don't usually sew that fast, so I'm not sure if it was the thread's fault or mine, but I did experience a few thread breaks over the course of maybe 10 bobbin's worth of sewing. I washed the resulting wipes on the sanitary cycle of my washing machine and dried it on high. No color ran and there was no discernible shrinkage.

Final verdict: yay, old thread!

For more information on thread, check out YLI's A Thread of Truth (PDF) which I discovered via Pin Tangle.

Amish Quilt Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown

2009-11-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

I've been spending way too much of my time staring at the pictures of Amish quilts from this website which I found via Moving Hands. It's an odd website because it's a gallery of images without a clear attribution. Based on the text (specifically a reference to a show at the de Young) I did a little search and found that the images are of the quilt collection of Faith and Stephen Brown. Currently I'm working on a couple of variations on Amish Bars quilts. I would share pictures, but both are prezzies that have yet to be gifted. Stay tuned.

Luminosity

2009-11-24T12:51:00.000-08:00

I've been contemplating the idea of expressing luminosity through fabric for awhile now. Not sure if its mention in The Modern Quilt Workshop by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr sparked the idea or merely propelled that existing idea forward. Regardless, Barb over at Fun with Barb and Mary got to take a class with Bill Kerr all about luminosity in quilts. She posted some great pictures. If I can't persuade my guild to get Bill Kerr as a speaker/instructor, I might just try to execute a similar exercise to the one Barb documented from the class on my own. I found this via Weeks Ringle's excellent blog Craft Nectar.

Can you tell from the early stages of my Jan Krentz Variable Hunter Star that I'm working through some luminosity issues with this project? Of course, I'm kinda cheating by using Michael Miller's Fairy Frost, which is actually printed with metallic stuff and thus reflects light. But I'm also using matte white and an assortment of grays and blacks to build on the idea.

Tea Dyeing

2009-11-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

I am doing a number of home decor projects for a room with something of a zebra theme. The fabric at the top of the following picture is the upholstery fabric I found. The fabric at the bottom of the picture is inexpensive 100% cotton black and white zebra print for other stuff in the same room. To make the color of the bottom fabric a little closer to the upholstery fabric I tea dyed it.

Tea dyeing is the incredibly simple process of brewing a vat of tea and soaking your fabric in it until it is stained the requisite shade of off-white. Tea dyeing is often done by quilters who are trying to give their quilts a more antique look. It is also used as an overdye to unify a very scrappy pallet.

I prewashed the fabric to remove any residue from the manufacturing process that might impede the tea from staining the fabric. I was trying to go from a stark white to a pretty dark brown, so I brewed a very strong tea. I used about half a gallon of tap hot water and about twenty tea bags (technically decaf black tea . . . I mean, who drinks decaf black tea?). I let them steep until the water was cool.

Then I took out the tea bags. Leaving them in might result in uneven staining, which would be cool if that's what you're going for, but I'm looking for a more even all over stain. I put in the fabric.

It immediately soaked up some color, so if you want a small change, you could do it quickly with a dark tea. I left the fabric to soak for an hour and a half. Then I cut a swatch and ironed it dry to see how dark it was.

I think it reached the right value, so I squeezed out the excess tea and threw the fabric in the dryer. Due to the flash, both fabrics look a bit lighter in this image, but as you can see the tea dyed cotton on the left looks pretty darned close to the color of the upholstery on the right. Certainly close enough for my purposes. And so easy!

Jan Krentz Quilting Star

2009-11-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

For my birthday this year I decided to treat myself to a Variable Hunter Star class with Jan Krentz. This was actually my second Jan Krentz class, as I was lucky enough to take her Love that Lone Star class at the Indiana Heritage Quilt Show (you can see a picture of that WIP here . . . in a posting from a year ago . . . in the same state of progress that it is in currently).

The workshop was put on by the Flying Geese Quilters Guild. Jan's name on their schedule of presenters for 2009 was one of the reasons I renewed my membership in this particular guild. As always the guild members were great to spend the day with (though I think I have gained a reputation as a class clown among some of them . . . I can't imagine how). Unlike the previous guild classes I've described (Joe Cunningham, Katie Pasquini Masopust, and Gwen Marston), the workshop did not take place in the lovely large classroom at Material Possessions Quilt Shop. Why? Because Material Possessions Quilt Shop is no more! They closed this past summer (SewCalGal has a lovely in memoriam). Think global, sew local: support your local quilt shop!

Jan is one of the best quilting instructors I have ever had the pleasure to observe. Like Katie Pasquini Masopust's workshop, every moment was accounted for. She used PowerPoint to describe a process, then demonstrated the process with everyone gathered around, and then went from student to student to observe their progress and offer suggestions. She paced the class well so that students could make it through one step before she repeated the PowerPoint/demo/individual attention routine for the next step. She also provided handouts that effectively supplemented her Hunter Star Quilts & Beyond book. You really get your money's worth in a Jan Krentz class. This was equally true of the multi-day Love that Lone Star class I took back in Indiana as it was of the five-hour Variable Hunter Star class I just took.

The big difference between the Love that Lone Star class and the Variable Hunter Star class is the focus. For both patterns, Jan has developed the most elegant piecing and cutting methods possible. To complete a Lone Star your focus is on precision. So Jan's Lone Star class was focused on all the different points in the quilt making process in which precision is key and how to improve that precision. For example, in the Lone Star class we spent quite a bit of time ensuring that we had a scant quarter inch seam allowance. In the Variable Hunter Star class, as Jan walked around and noticed some folks weren't sewing a quarter inch seam allowance, she brought out the special rulers to check and brought around thick strips of tape to use as guides. But it wasn't a focus of the class. It was just a Jan Krentz bonus.

The Variable Hunter Star strip piecing method Jan developed is INCREDIBLY forgiving. So the focus of this class is on how to use your tools most efficiently. For example, Jan had prepared a set of her 6.5" Fussy Cutter diamond-shaped rulers with markings and taped bumpers for the size blocks we made. Then she gave us a handout so we could doctor our own rulers the same way, or modify the doctoring for whatever size block we wanted to make. Using the doctored rulers made the key part of the Variable Hunter Star construction, the rotary cutting, so easy. It was even more elegant with the doctored ruler than with the instructions in the book.

Speaking of the book, Jan had a great suggestion. On the supply list for the class she recommended taking the book to an office supply store or copy store to have them cut off the spine and 3-hole-punch the book pages. Then put the book into a three-ring binder. At first, this seemed totally nuts. I mean, yes, the book would lay open flat while you're following instructions, but is that sufficient rationale for defacing a book (yes, some of us were more traumatized by the librarians in our lives than others)? In class she explained that you could rearrange the pages so the method you choose to use and the pattern you choose to follow are adjacent. Also, her handouts are designed to supplement the text, so they fit in different places among the book's pages. Finally, she said when she finds pictures of Hunter Star quilts or related topics, she puts them into the same three-ring binder. So she has a binder on Hunter Stars, a binder on Lone Stars, etc. Genius!

Jan is clearly a technophile, as her use of PowerPoint illustrates. She even had the insight to suggest that people who brought cameras take pictures of their hands while they were doing particularly tricky steps in the process. For example this is my self-portrait while making the first 45 degree cut of a strip set.

The following is my self-portrait while using the taped bumper on the 6.5" Fussy Cutter diamond-shaped ruler to cut an inch and a half wide strip at a 45 degree angle.
The woman I sat next to actually looked at the pictures she took on her digital camera to double check she was doing the right thing before cutting each new strip set. So not only will those pictures help her when she gets home, but they already helped her right there in class. I took this class for suggestions like this. I might never make another Variable Hunter Star quilt. But from now on I will always bring my digital camera to quilt classes to take pictures of tricky steps in the process. This is why Jan Krentz classes are worth taking even if your guild or quilt show organizer didn't pick a class subject that particularly interests you. You will come away with more techniques that apply throughout your quilting experience than from any other instructor.

In addition to the workshop, Jan presented a lecture and quilt show to the guild. The lecture was on Design Inspiration from Everyday Life. This was the same lecture I saw her present to the Bloomington Quilters Guild. This time her emphasis on political quilts stood out to me. She gave examples of historical artifacts depicting political acts, like the swearing in of a Scandinavian political office holder carved in wood. She also showed examples of quilts which made a political statement, like a signature quilt done in red and white stripes with white stars on blue, loosely arranged like an American flag.

Tangentially, she showed some slides of recipients of Quilts of Valor. She described a scene where recovering wounded service members would see the new quilts arriving and pull out the quits they received as if competing for who received the best quilt. Not only was this a subtle admonishment to people who do "charity" quilts to do their best work, but it was incredibly inspiring to hear how much these quilts are appreciated by their recipients. How many quilters do you know who have put their hearts into a quilt for a loved one and not received the appreciation they deserved? And here these young men and women, who have probably never met the quilter in person, show off their quilts with such pride.

Jan made a number of practical suggestions for transforming your inspiration into a quilt.

Determine the objective for your quilt. What do YOU want to get out of making this quilt?
Collect inspiration images. Then be sure to organize them. She sorts her images into folders with subjects such as texture, ocean, flowers, wildlife, and geometric shapes.
Once you have settled on a theme, research it. Don't just look at other quilts that have depicted the same theme. How has that subject matter been depicted in other media? In other cultures? Look beyond art, for example at scientific research.
Don't forget your theme at the quilting stage. Incorporate your theme into your quilting motifs. For example, a quilt with broderie perse appliqued dragon flies was quilted with a squiggly looping pattern that resembled dragonfly wings and dragonfly flight patterns.

Jan also made a number of practical suggestions about the quilt making process.

When determining the design details, don't neglect the background. While the rendering of the subject is important, the background can make or break a quilt.
Wool batting doesn't retain fold lines like cotton batting.
Change the thread color when you're quilting. It looks extremely impressive from the back.
Do not quilt the borders of a quilt more densely than the center or it will bulge. You can change the quilting pattern but not the density of quilting.

The trunk show included the quilts that recently returned from her solo show at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum as well as the sample quilts from her forthcoming book, which is a follow up to Quick Star Quilts & Beyond. The quilts from the new book were gorgeous. For the most part they used striped fabric cut into 1/2 and 1/4 diamonds and sewn back together. The results are chevron patterned diamonds reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass designs. The quilts definitely made me want to buy the new book.

Mathematical Baby Quilt

2009-11-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

I'm starting a quilt for the impending offspring of two math professors. I will be modifying a pattern from Mathematical Quilts by Diana Venters and Elaine Krajenke Ellison, a book originally recommended to me by my friend R.J. Trubitt. Given the fabrics in the above picture, can you guess on which mathematical concept the quilt pattern is based?

Huge thanks go to my friend Bridget for her very impressive fabric finding skills. She pulled the two key fabrics in this set from the depths of the flat fold stacks at M&L Fabrics in Anaheim. I should have taken a picture of these stacks so you can get an idea of how very impressive her fabric finding feat was.

Flying Geese Quilt Show

2009-11-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

My quilt guild, The Flying Geese Quilters Guild, had their biannual Quilt Show this past weekend. It was out of sight! This guild is made up of some serious talent. There were no duds in this show, nosireebob.

While all the quilts that earned ribbons were awesome, I am particularly proud of the third place ribbon winner in the pieced bed sized quilt category: Bridget Paley.

This quilt was designed by Judy Niemeyer, with whom Bridget took a paper piecing class earlier this year. What impresses me the most is that she started and finished this king-sized quilt in under a year! That's perseverance for you. Bridget wasn't originally thinking of entering this quilt in the show, but we saw a quilt made from the same pattern at the Glendale Quilt Show, which had earned a ribbon for piecing. So she figured, what the heck? And what the heck lead to a ribbon!

I am also particularly proud of Vicki Hamilton Eldredge, who won a blue ribbon in the mixed technique small wall quilt category. A little birdie told us that during judging her quilt was a close competitor for best of show! Vicki made this to honor the marriage of her two friends. Originally, she planned to make it by machine, but life got in the way in the form of various ailments that kept her away from her machine and on the couch. Instead of giving up, she made the quilt entirely by hand. Again, that shows some serious perseverance. Like Bridget, Vicki originally had no intention of entering this quilt in the show. However, the recipient of the quilt insisted that she enter it. And that insistence lead to a blue ribbon!

The moral of the story: persevere and enter your quilts in shows!

Thrice Thanked

2009-09-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

I received my first thank you note via blog the other day. My friend Jonathan posted a picture and some lovely thoughts about the quilt I made for his daughter. This thanks was on top of an email and a post card. Thrice thanked! Makes me want to send his family a You're Welcome quilt. Instead I shall put that energy into completing more quilts to send out into the world.

Gamelan Quilt Completed

2009-08-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Remember that pink and green quilt that I used to demonstrate self-binding back in April? The one based on the Gamelan pattern from Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr's book The Modern Quilt Workshop: Patterns, Techniques, and Designs from the Funquilts Studio? Well I finally mailed it to its intended owner, so I can finally post more pictures of it. Clearly I was battling the shadows on my porch when I took these, but you get the idea. And I think the low angle of the sun really shows off all the quilting, which was a key part of this experience.

Pretty much every technique I used on this quilt is a first for me - piecing circles, free-motion machine quilting, quilting from the back, self-binding. I learned a lot making it. I used the Bernina Stitch Regulator to free-motion machine quilt.

First, I quilted from the back following the outlines of the large scale print (the pink fabric you can see in the self-binding pictures). I didn't quilt-from the back in the area where the pieced circles were on the front.

I quilted from the front for the circles, following the designs created by piecing symmetrical patterns together. All of the fabric is from Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr's fabric line except for the yellow print which is from Luana Rubin's Joie De Vivre line. Ironically, Rubin's symmetrical print lined up more easily than the two Ringle & Kerr prints, which were designed specifically for use in this pattern. I'm a huge fan of Ringle & Kerr's 813-411, the green small scale print that I used as the background on the top. You can piece the heck out of it and not see a single seam line.

Underground Railroad Doll Quilt Completed

2009-08-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

I finally bound the Underground Railroad Doll Quilt. I used a Bernina Binder Attachment Accessory #84 and Foot #94. Well, technically, I borrowed my friend Bridget's and hers are a bit older and don't look exactly like the ones Bernina currently sells, but it's the same idea. Basically the accessory and attachment fold a strip of fabric as you sew it around the edge of the quilt, ostensibly sewing through the front and back of the binding at the same time. Bridget isn't a fan of using this on a quilt with corners; she finds it much easier on quilts with rounded corners. But taking the information I gleaned from a demonstration of Martelli's Kwik Bind Sytem at the Glendale Quilt Show, I thought I did a pretty good job on my corners for a first try.
This is the part where the end of the binding overlapped the beginning. I didn't try to do anything to fancy, just folded over the tail, lapped it, and sewed right over it. I hand stitched closed the folded over end along with the miters in all the corners.
I wouldn't say this results in contest entry worthy binding. But it certainly did a sufficient job for charity quilts or, with a little practice, gift quilts for non-quilt snobs. It was certainly faster and less time consuming than a traditional binding. Probably took about the same amount of time as self-binding, and might result in a more durable binding since you can use bias strips.
I don't know if I'll be shelling out the big bucks for a binding attachment set up any time soon, but I will certainly borrow Bridget's again.

IQF Long Beach

2009-07-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

I didn't experience my first IQF Long Beach nearly as intensively as I took on IQF Chicago a couple of years ago. I didn't take any classes or attend any events. Mostly I did the good ol' walk around the quilts and vendors. Following are a few close ups of the three quilts that I found particularly inspirational.

Spring in Japan by Akiko Kawata of Osaka, Japan. Machine and hand appliqued, machine pieced, and machine quilted.

The Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C., inspired me to translate the overwhelming beauty of cherry blossoms into a quilt. That quilt is still in the development phase, but Akiko Kawata executed a beautiful, abstracted rendition of the subject matter that is certainly along the lines I am considering. In particular, I am fascinated by the idea of representing the cherry blossoms with either single circles or circles for each petal. Here the maker used single perfect circles in a variety of fabrics to represent cherry blossoms.

Homecoming by Marlene Shea. Hand appliqued, photo transfer, hand quilted.

I find photo transfer problematic in quilting. When it is good, it is very, very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid. Here Marlene Shea used transfers of antique portrait photographs to fill the windows in traditional house blocks, which she then alternated with traditional primitive appliqued willow tree blocks, all made with reproduction fabrics. To top off the "traditionalness," she hand pieced, hand appliqued, and hand quilted the piece. So the photo transfer technique is the only contemporary aspect of the quilt. Shifting this technique out of its usual context and into the milieu of reproduction quilting made this quilt stand out from the rest.

People's Park, Nanning China by Martha David of Spencerport, NY from the Hoffman Challenge.

I'm a sucker for fish, particularly koi. This block from Martha David's entry into the Hoffman Challenge is no bigger than 8 x 10 inches. She captured the movement of a school of fish as well as the shapes of individual fish in amazing detail on such a small scale.

Self-Binding

2009-04-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make. I hate binding. Not like I hate doing my taxes (i.e., so much that I pay someone else to do it), but it is my least favorite part of quilting. I have heard people who extol the virtues of binding, equating it with the final stretch of a marathon or tying ribbon on a package. I don't run unless chased and I use gift bags for a reason. My relationship to binding is best summed up by this quote from Yoda,

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

To face my fear of binding I took a class at IQF Chicago 2008 with Kathy Kansier called Quilts with Great Edges. We covered at least fourteen different binding techniques or edge treatments, including the humble wrapped or self-bound hemmed edge.While the wrapped or self-bound hemmed edge may seem humble it is nothing if not logical. When non-quilters come into my studio and see a quilt that has been quilted and is waiting to be bound, many have spontaneously said, "So you're going to wrap the fabric from the back to the front, roll it over a couple of times and sew it down?" Knowing nothing about quilting or sewing, they can see the logic of self-binding.

But the fact that it is logical does not mean it is simple. I discovered this when trying to self-bind my Gamelan quilt, based on the pattern from Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr's book The Modern Quilt Workshop: Patterns, Techniques, and Designs from the Funquilts Studio.
The trick with self-binding is that your quilting determines the edge. If you were doing a standard binding, you'd just hack off any quilting done beyond the squared up edge. But with a self-binding, if you didn't stop quilting at the same place all along the edge, then you'll have some unsewing to do. This issue is compounded when you quilt from the back. Quilting from the back is quilting with the backside of your quilt facing up usually in order to follow a pattern on the backing fabric. That's what I did on the Gamelan quilt. I used a large scale print on the back (the pink fabric - which is from Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr's fabric line, as were almost all the fabrics in this quilt), so I could outline quilt from the back.

My backing (the pink fabric) was about four inches larger on each side than my quilt top (the green fabric). And, despite my efforts, was not particularly evenly aligned with the front during the basting process. So on some edges I'd quilted beyond the edge of the top and on other edges I barely made it to the edge of the top. I ended up making a chalk line on the top where one would normally cut if one were squaring up a top for a traditional binding. Then I ripped out the quilting stitches outside the chalk line.
At that point I could trim the backing and the batting to the edge of the quilting by laying a ruler along the edge of the quilting and folding the top back over the ruler and out of the way. [Can you tell I took this picture after I had already trimmed what needed trimming? Can you tell I need a manicure? That reminds me of a hand piecing class I took with Jinny Beyer in which she used this neat enlarging projector so she could put her hands underneath it and the projector would enlarge the image onto a screen. She said this was great for showing a classroom full of people how to hand piece, but it was not so great the day after she'd been working in the garden. So the next time you're envious of Jinny Beyer's quilting talent and fabric empire, just take solace in the fact that she too is in need of a manicure.]I trimmed the top to an inch wider on all sides from the back and batting.I did a test run on a scrap of paper to determine how much I could cut off the corner to reduce bulk without leaving raw edges exposed. Then I trimmed the corners of the top, so when they're folded over to the back they form miters. I folded the edge of the top in half and ironed it. Then I folded the corners toward the center and ironed them.
Not having the greatest of confidence in my ironing, I basted down the corners so they would be more easy to form into miters when I got to them. This worked well and the basting stitches came out easily after the binding was sewn on.
I folded the edge of the top to the back of the quilt as I sewed the edge down. Finally I hand sewed a few stitches in each corner to secure the miters, which is a heckuva lot less hand sewing than the standard binding method.

Diane Ricks at 2009 Glendale Quilt Show

2009-03-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at the Glendale Quilt Show I examined the quilt that won First Place for Innovative Quilt and found it was done by Diane Ricks. I took Microwave Dyeing for Cotton and my cousins took Needle Felting with Diane Ricks at IQF Chicago in 2008. In fact, all the non-sparkly hand dyed fabric in my Gwen Marston Liberated Stars is from that dyeing workshop. We even did shibori in the microwave!

Ms. Ricks just happened to be passing by, so I took her picture with her quilt. She was so proud! The quilt is named Ghost Dance. Ms. Ricks described it like so:

The book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee inspired me to make this series of small quilts joined into a triptych as honor to their memory. It is dye painted, free hand drawn, and screen printed on rusted cotton with free motion quilting featuring images of the fallen warriors in the quilting.

I wonder if she intended the complementary color scheme of the orange from her quilt set off by the blue of the background drapery. Genius!

Gwen Marston Unleashed

2009-03-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

A few Fridays ago I took a fun class on Liberated Stars with Gwen Marston, a quilt historian and renowned quilter in her own right. She has to be one of the most prolific authors on the subject of quilts with both popular and scholarly publications.

The workshop was put on by the Flying Geese Quilters Guild. Gwen's name on their schedule of presenters (along with Katie Pasquini Masopust's) was one of the reasons I joined this particular guild. As always the guild members were friendly and interesting and just so darned fun to spend a day with. Also as always, the workshop took place in the lovely large classroom at Material Possessions Quilt Shop. Think global, sew local: support your local quilt shop!

Unlike Katie Pasquini Masopust's workshop, in which every moment was accounted for and there were exercises and group critique sessions, Gwen Marston's class was almost entirely unstructured. Recounting the instructions given would make the class seem much less interesting than it was. Really it was about spending the day picking Gwen Marston's brain.If you want to make a Liberated Star quilt, get thee to the library and pick up Gwen Marston's out of print masterpiece Liberated Quiltmaking. It is also part of The Parts Department section of Collaborative Quilting. She mentioned that a forthcoming book, possibly Freddy & Gwen Collaborate Again: Freewheeling Twists on Traditional Quilt Designs, would have updated instructions for many of her previously published design/methods including Liberated Stars. My friend R.J. recently wrote that she found the previous book's precursor Collaborative Quilting inspiring.I must admit, I checked Liberated String Quilts out of the well-stocked Monroe County Public Library in Bloomington, Indiana, last year and found myself vaguely dissatisfied. I didn't understand Gwen Marston's approach. I wasn't open to the idea of looking at a series of historic quilts and developing axioms about their creation. I guess I struggle with the idea of reducing these historic quilts to "patterns" for the modern quilter. This is not a reflection on Gwen, but a reflection on the quilting-industrial complex's obsession with kit-able units. Her current book Ideas and Inspirations: Abstract Quilts in Solids, which she published outside the traditional quilt book publishing establishment, seems to be the truest to her sensibility - no "patterns," no "lessons," no "projects." Just images of beautiful quilts intended to inspire. The product description on Amazon (which I believe is in Gwen's own words) sums it up nicely:

This is a book for grownup quilters. It's a book for the many accomplished quilters who are not looking for yet another project book with pages of detailed elementary instructions on how to make someone else's quilt.

Seeing Gwen Marston in action and hearing her stories addressed my concerns and converted me to her fan club.While piecing our liberated stars we talked about Gwen's favorite quilters. Of course she discussed Mary Schafer, about whom Gwen has authored two books Mary Schafer, American Quilt Maker and the currently out of print Mary Schafer and Her Quilts. Additionally she mentioned Susan McCord and Emily Adams (I might have written down the latter incorrectly - but The Quilt Index does have a number of quilts under the name Emily Adams Hubbell). She talked a lot about Susan McCord's work, noting that it is housed in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. She was especially taken by McCord's use of four unique applique borders on one quilt as well as her use of three, two, or even one border. She specifically mentioned a turkey tracks quilt by McCord with one applique border with sensational, exquisite, detailed applique that probably could not be sustained for four borders. She liked the idea of exerting the same amount of effort your might put into all four borders, but concentrating it all on one amazing border.Her favorite style of American quilts are folk art quilts. She started making pieced traditional quilts. She said, "As most young quilters do, I thought I knew a lot about making quilts." [As a young quilter I don't take offense, particularly as I don't think I know much at all about making quilts -- not to mention my whole Buddhist beginner's mind approach, but this isn't about my issues.] Through extensive research into actual early quilts she discovered that quilts didn't conform to the 1970s ideal of the traditional quilt. Real early quilts (as opposed to idealized traditional quilts) had borders chopped off, borders that were not the same, points that didn't match, fewer than four borders, and all sorts of characteristics that "traditional quilters" would categorize as flaws.In studying folk art traditions including but also beyond early American quilts, Marston noticed some universal folk art characteristics including lack of set patterns, frequent color substitution, and the free placement of elements. She specifically focused on the transmission of design elements among craftspeople, the appearance of design elements across cultures and media, and the transmission of wisdom through folk art. For example, the traditional design elements in kilims from Anatolia were passed down from weaver to weaver the same way traditional quilt block designs like churn dash were passed down from quilter to quilter. People then interpreted these design elements as they saw fit. Some design elements appear across cultures and media. For example, she found flying geese designs in a kilim as well as an Uzbek ceremonial horse blanket. Folk art tends to convey wisdom from one generation to the next. For example she has an example of Ghanaian applique which conveys parenting advice, "Don't tell a child not to eat hot peppers. He will find that out soon enough." Another Ghanaian applique depicts a man on the ground lying on top of a gun with a leopard on his chest. The moral of that story, "If you shoot the leopard and do not kill the leopard, it would have been better not to shoot the leopard."

She admonished the collected quilters that Picasso wasn't worried about coloring within the lines. In other words, precision does not equal artistic success. A good lesson for quilters, young and old.

Darjeeling Limited: Border Numero Uno - Part Numero Uno

2009-03-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is partly the story of the first border of my medallion quilt inspired by the Wes Anderson film The Darjeeling Limited. It is also partly a song of praise for Jinny Beyer's book Quiltmaking by Hand: Simple Stitches, Exquisite Quilts. Don't let the title fool you, this book is about so much more than making quilts by hand. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is the most comprehensive resource on how to draft pieced quilts from blocks to borders. The book applies the tips and tricks of drafting to quilting. This can be intimidating to the math averse. But she explains her math thoroughly so it's not too difficult to follow along at home.

Jinny Beyer (who is totally one of those people whose first and last names you have to say together) is known for, among other things, her medallion quilts. In fact her quilt "Ray of Light," one of the One Hundred Quilts of the 20th Century, brought medallion quilts to the attention of the quilting revival of the 1970s. So it's no surprise that her book goes into great detail describing how to draft the kind of pieced borders that appear so frequently in medallion quilts.

Now, as quilt historians like Gwen Marston will show you, pre-20th century quilters didn't get overly fussy about planning their pieced borders to make sure that the same portion of the design falls in exactly the same place at each of the corners of the quilt. Often borders just ended where they ended. But as a challenge to myself I wanted to see if I could piece a border where the design did fall exactly the same place at each of the corners of the quilt. I also thought it would be easier to test drive a pieced border on a small quilt rather than a large quilt. So, while the effort will be ENTIRELY lost on the infant recipient and their parents, I am doing it anyway . . . for me . . . for the experience.

Preliminaries

If you'd like to follow along, turn to pages 150-156 in Quiltmaking by Hand: Simple Stitches, Exquisite Quilts. First, the unfinished size of my center (as measured through the centers of the center, not along the edges) is 24 inches long by 12 1/4 inches wide. That makes the finished size of my center 23 1/2 by 11 3/4 inches.Second, the border unit looks like this. It is a non-directional symmetrical, square unit (though it will be pieced out of quarter square triangles, because what is life without a challenge). Because it is a non-directional symmetrical unit the edge of a full unit or the edge of a half unit could fall in the center.

Corner Unit
Designing a pieced corner unit seems really difficult until you draw the two possible endings (full units or half units) at right angles to one another. Then you just play around with how those units would continue. For example, if the pieced borders end with a full unit, the corner might look like this.If the pieced borders end with a half unit, the corner might look like this.

Determining Border Unit Size

Beware: this way there be mathematics!

Getting a pieced border to fit the center of a quilt is THE challenge of pieced borders (unless you take the traditional pre-20th century "wherever it lands, there shall the border end approach"). How many border units will fit along the sides of the quilt? About how big would you like each border unit to be? In my case, I'd like each border unit to be about 2 inches (my border unit is square so the width and height will be the same). Let's start with the shorter finished dimension of my center: 11 3/4 inches. If I divide 11 3/4 inches by 2 inches, I find that 5 7/8 units fit along the short side of my center. 7/8 unit is not going to cut it. So I can either go down to 5 units along the short side or up to 6 units along the short side. Either way, the size of each unit will have to deviate from my ideal size of 2 inches in order for the pieced strip to end with a whole or half unit.

Let's imagine I want 5 units along the short side of my center. If I divide 11 3/4 inches by 5 units, I find each unit will have a finished size of 2 7/20 inches.

Let's imagine I want 6 units along the short side of my center. If I divide 11 3/4 inches by 6 units, I find each unit will have a finished size of 1 23/24 inches.

Now, neither of those measurements are going to show up on your standard ruler. And neither of them are my ideal 2 inch unit size. So how do you pick between the two? In a rectangular quilt like mine, it's easy: see which unit size fits best along the longer side of the quilt.

Let's imagine I want 5 units along the short side of my center. We determined that the finished unit size would be 2 7/20 inches. If I divide the finished length of the center's longer side, 23 1/2 inches, by the finished unit size, 2 7/20 inches, I find that exactly 10 units fit along the longer side of the center.

Let's imagine I want 6 units along the short side of my center. We determined that the finished unit size would be 1 23/24 inches. If I divide the finished length of the center's longer side, 23 1/2 inches, by the finished unit size, 1 23/24 inches, I find that exactly 12 units fit along the longer side of the center.

Well, huh, both ways it works out to be a whole number of units. All things being equal 1 23/24 inches is closer to 2 inches than 2 7/20 inches, so I'm going with a unit size of 1 23/24 inches, which results in 6 units along the short sides and 12 units along the long sides.

Now, this is not the end of my problem. I have the finished length of the hypotenuse of a quarter-square triangle. So how do you draft a template for a quarter-square triangle whose finished hypotenuse is 1 23/24? Now, part of me wants to skip it and just draft one with a 2 inch hypotenuse. But over the twelve units of the long side, that would be off by half an inch. If you were a drafting rockstar like Jinny Beyer, you'd probably plug the decimal version of 1 23/24 into your little CAD program and churn out a template.But I just used ye olde pencile, papere, and rulere to draft a 1 23/24 inch square. Then I drew a line 1/4 inch outside one edge. Then I drew lines through the corners of the square through the external line. Measuring the distance between the intersection of the diagonals with the external line gave me the length of the square I would have to cut to make quarter-square triangles with 1 23/24 inch hypotenuses: 2 1/2 inches.

Frankenbatting

2009-03-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

So I was ready to make a quilt sandwich for the Underground Railroad doll quilt when I discovered all the batting I have is either way too big to waste cutting up or just a wee bit too small. Rather than buying a crib sized quilt bat, I attached strips of batting that I'd trimmed from previous quilts to the four sides of a slightly too small piece of batting. More specifically I used a flat joining seam to sew together a Frankenbatting. MWAH HAH HAH HAAAaaaa!

How to Make a Frankenbatting

Bernina owners, turn to pages 38-39 of Mastering Your Bernina Sewing Machine (here's a link to a PDF version of the whole honkin' thing if you've lost your copy). On a Bernina 440, use stretch overlock stitch (No. 23) and presser foot No. 1.

Stretch Overlock Stitch No.
bernette 55: 10
bernette 65: 13
bernette 80e: S5
bernette 90e: S5

Bernina 1008: 11
Bernina 220: 15
Bernina 230PE: 17
Bernina 240: 19
Bernina 440QE: 23
Bernina 630: 13
Bernina 640: 13
Bernina 730: 13

If you are not blessed with a Bernina, you could use a stretch overlock stitch (if the needle were square dancing, it would take two steps forward, two steps to the right, two steps to the left, and repeat-- Do Si Do your pardner!--sorry, spring was square dancing time in my elementary school gym class). If you have a bare bones machine, a wide zig-zag will probably work just fine.
I pinned the layers of batting together just so they wouldn't get away from me. I overlapped them about 5/8 inch, but I just eyeballed it.
Be sure to keep the edge of the overlapped batting right along the inside edge of the presser foot so the stitch will sew just over the edge of the top layer on the right swing of the needle.
I didn't pin for the second row of stitching as the first row and its fuzziness kept it where it needed to be. Also, I used the mirror stitch function so I could keep the narrow side of the batting running under the arm, but if you don't have the mirror stitch function, just roll up the extra batting to move it through the arm.
The finished flat joining seam!
If you're concerned that the stitches will show through a light top or backing, you certainly could use a lighter thread color. I just happened to have gray thread in the machine. But I ran out of bobbin thread and switched to bright yellow. You can see in the picture above how a different color thread blends in much better with the batting.

No Igors were harmed in the making of this Frankenbatting.

Underground Railroad Quilt Top

2009-03-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

About a year ago I took a workshop with Kathleen Tracy through the Bloomington Quilters Guild of Bloomington, Indiana. The class was basically making the Underground Railroad doll quilt from Ms. Tracy's book American Doll Quilts: 16 Little Projects That Honor A Tradition. The quilts in the book are divided into the same eras as the American Girl Dolls and are sized to fit said dolls.

The class was kitted so I exerted pretty much zero creativity in the design of this quilt, which may explain why it's taken me so long to finish. Luckily my mother has a friend whose daughter is into American Girl dolls, so this quilt has an owner all lined up . . . which may explain why it didn't take even longer for me to finish.

Darjeeling Limited: Background Audtions

2009-03-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't a casting call for movie extras. I'm trying to decide which of three fabrics I should use as the background to the diamond in the center medallion of my quilt inspired by Wes Anderson's film The Darjeeling Limited.

The topmost fabric is a shot cotton, which means the warp is a different color than the weft resulting (by means of optical mixing) in the viewer perceiving the fabric as a third color. It is almost impossible to capture the awesomeness of shot fabric in pictures.
The above background fabric is a print that was on INSANE sale at Material Possessions. I bought this in case the other two options I bought were too blue and insufficiently green. That is CLEARLY not the problem. And the mottling is too busy to serve as a calming backdrop for that eye-searing center diamond.
Though this picture doesn't quite do it justice, this background fabric is a VERY subtle ombre. In this picture the ombre travels from top to bottom because I just laid out the pieces I have on top of the uncut yardage. Unlike the diamond fabric, this ombre only has three changes and it only changes among three saturations of the same hue. Also each change occurs over about six inches, instead of the one inch increments in the diamond fabric. The changes only occur along either selvage edge.
I laid out one corner with the ombre parallel to the edge of the diamond, which you can barely make out in this picture. For the small area it would have to cover, the ombre is too large to see all three color changes. Also the color change is so subtle it is almost imperceptible in this small space. I think I'm going to save this ombre for a larger area where I can really make the most of it.

The winner is: shot cotton (the top photo). Thank you for letting me work through this with you.

C&T Publishing Love

2009-03-15T16:31:00.000-07:00

I just have to share with you my completely disproportionate glee that Megan Wisniewski over at C&T Publishing's blog linked to my post about Katie Pasquini Masopust's workshop.

Imagine me holding a bouquet of fat quarters in the bend of my elbow as I regally wave (elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist) and cry like the prom queen I never was . . . because that's what I'm doing right now. Thank you!

Darjeeling Limited: Center Medallion

2009-03-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is the story of how I translated my inspiration - the Wes Anderson film The Darjeeling Limited - into a quilt. At least, it's a chapter in that story. I started by watching the film with my trusty notebook in hand. When I saw images that I was particularly inspired by, I hit the pause button on the DVD player and sketched. As you can see on the example above, I noted color placement and color scheme. Occasionally I noted the subject matter. In this case I believe it was one of many designs painted on the side of a white bus that comes to pick up the main characters at Dhelana.
Once I had settled on the idea that this diamond would be the center of a medallion quilt, I sketched it again filling in possible colors with colored pencil. More important that the color, this sketch helped me determine the proportions of the diamond.
Theoretically, one could strip piece the center diamond out of a set of solid colors ranging from red-orange to yellow. But when I originally saw the diamond in the film it reminded me of some of the amazing ombre fabrics available. I had been looking for an opportunity to work with ombre for awhile. I knew I'd need at least four repeats to get the four long edges of the diamond. I bought a half yard, figuring the sides of my diamond wouldn't be any larger than 18 inches (using the Pythagorean Theorem I figured if the longer center line of the diamond were 32 inches, and the shorter center line were 16 inches, that would make the sides about 17.89 inches - but don't let the math worry you).
From the reddest stripe to the yellowest stripe was 5 inches. Since I want the entire yellowest stripe to show along the outside of the diamond and I want the entire reddest stripe to show at the center of the diamond, I could have figured out the size of the right triangle I'd need for the template using a lot of geometry I've mostly forgotten.
Instead I made a right triangle out of scrap paper that was larger than what I would need, but the correct proportions (the short leg half as long as the long leg). I lined up the right angle to where I wanted the finished inside corner to land: so the whole reddest line would show. Then I lined up the hypotenuse parallel to the lines of the ombre. I lay my trusty clear ruler down along the edge of the yellowest line and marked the paper. I cut the paper template along that line. The resulting paper template was the exact finished size of the right triangles I need to assemble to make my diamond. Look Mom, No Math!
Next I broke out my handy translucent template plastic. I put it on top of the paper template. Using my trusty transparent ruler which is marked off in quarter inch increments, I drew lines exactly a quarter inch outside the paper template. I cut the template plastic out along those lines. Then, using a 0.1 Pigma marker I used my ruler to mark lines on the template a quarter inch from each edge and extended to the end along the hypotenuse. This allows me to line up the template along the ombre and know I'm going to get the whole reddest line and the whole yellowest line in my finished piece.
Usually when you use templates you flip them over and trace them onto the back of the fabric. But the ombre print on this fabric wasn't visible from the back, so I marked on the top of the fabric. This is no big deal so long as you don't let your pen lift up your template and jog across your finished sewing area. I used a green Ultra Fine Point Sharpie to make a visible line on this eye-glazing fabric. For the diamond, it's important to remember to trace two triangles in one direction, flip the template, and trace two triangles in the other direction.
I used my super-sharp Gingher scissors of doom to cut along the marked lines. Here you can see what I mean about two triangles in one direction and two triangles in the other direction.
Here are the pieces of the central diamond laid out and ready to go!

Pachyderm Parade

2009-03-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

I am working on a much longer update about my Darjeeling Limited inspired quilt. Meanwhile I thought I'd share a parade of pachyderms which I fussy cut from a scattered print of elephants (discussed here) and sewed together into four borders.

Baby Quilts

2009-03-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

Thusfar in my quilting career the vast majority of the quilts I've made have been in celebration of the birth of a baby. The following are a few thoughts on baby quilts, especially how their function determines my design and construction decisions including size, shape, backing fabric, fabric color, fabric preparation, washing and drying finished quilts, machine or hand sewing, and the subject matter of prints.

I think of baby quilts as utilitarian art. So the primary questions I ask myself when I design my baby quilts is what will this really be used for. One possible use, especially if your quilt will arrive between birth and about three months: swaddling. I've heard the optimal size for a swaddling blanket for up to a pudgy three month old is at least 42 inches square. I've also heard that square is the optimal shape for swaddling. For more on swaddling, check out Dr. Harvey Karp's The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer. With this in mind, most of the baby quilts I've made have been square rather than rectangular. Looking back, it seems the trend is for the quilts I finish closer to birth to be square and quilts I kinda knew from the start I wouldn't finish until after the swaddling stage were more likely to be rectangular.

Another possible use to which a baby quilt might be put: play mat. Either parents are getting weird about letting their progeny play on the floor or the infant industrial complex has perpetuated some parental paranoia about the evils of flooring such that they can market nonsense like pack-n-plays. Regardless, the end result is Junior needs something between him and the floor. Your quilt will likely be it. So I like to make the back out of a durable fabric with a print that will hide dirt.

Short of a wall hanging (and even then, not near the changing table), the use to which a baby quilt might be put will invariably lead to stains and dirtiness. This leads me to my almost compulsive paranoia about using fabric with large areas of white in quilts for kids, which I've previously discussed in the comments to my post about selecting fabric for a particular baby quilt. I feel like any white will show every stain or speck of dirt that will inevitably be part of a baby quilt's life. I'd hate to give a parent something that they would feel guilty using for its intended purpose. I've even contemplated overdying fabric that is really awesome, but too white, in my opinion, for a baby quilt. In fact, one of the reasons I laid off a pretty intense '30's reproduction fabric collecting habit was because of the prevalence of white backgrounds, particularly in kid-themed prints.

Along with getting dirty, I assume all the baby quilts I make will be machine washed, probably with hot water and detergent, and then thrown in the dryer. So I prewash all of my fabric for baby quilts with hot water and detergent on high agitation. Then when I'm done with the quilt, I wash it again in hot water with detergent and I even throw it in the dryer to dry it. I can wax poetic about the importance of prewashing any fabric for WAY too long. But I prewash baby quilt fabrics on hot to shrink them and with high agitation test their durability. If they're not going to survive less than an hour in a washing machine, they're not going to survive the first day with a baby. I wash the quilt again when I'm done partially to get out all the schmutz with which the quiltmaking process endows its subject. But in the case of a baby quilt it's also to test my stitches, particularly to binding, to make sure there aren't any weak points that need to be reinforced.

Which leads me to another point, while I have hand appliqued and hand quilted portions of baby quilts in the past, now I only machine piece, applique, and quilt baby quilts. Hand stitches are too easy for little fingers to pop. And, more annoyingly, in my experience, when a parent realizes you made the quilt literally by hand, they wrap it in archival paper, place it carefully in an archival box, and gently tuck it into the topmost corner of the topmost shelf of the least used closet in the house. Then they forget about it and wonder why you were so rude as to not give their baby a present. OK, that only happened once and I'm not going to name names, but I really should NOT have been surprised. But now when I give away a baby quilt I emphasize not all the work I put into it, but how durable it is. I tell them I already machine washed it on hot with detergent and ran in through the dryer so they shouldn't be afraid to treat it the same way. Somehow arming them with this knowledge frees them to actually let their kid touch the quilt.

Recounting that nightmare story about the handmade quilt, which I'm pretty sure the kid never even laid eyes on, reminds me of another story of neurotic parents who have changed my approach to baby quilts. Again, I don't want to be too detailed because someone someday might figure out who I'm talking about and I really do love these folks even if, or perhaps because, they're nuts. As I was at the design wall stage of making a baby quilt for boy, I got the word that the parents were adamant that everything for said baby be extremely masculine, including the colors of everything this kid might ever see. Well, the quilt I was working on was a scrappy, '30's Repro, one-patch which I had painstakingly arranged on my design wall in diagonal rows in sort of, well, a rainbow pattern. First, I had to pull all the pinks and lavenders. Next, I had to pull all the prints with flowers and girls. Then, I had my husband, who is not the macho-est man but can pass in a pinch, to look through the remaining patches for anything that might be construed as "feminine." Mind you, I was working from a few charm packs, so it's not like I had unlimited options. Well, by the time we'd done our butch best, the one-patch center had shrunk significantly and the borders grew a few inches wider all around. And the one-patch arrangement become randomly arranged rather than by color. Now I'm waiting for a very girly girlfriend to have a girl so I can use up all my '30's repro pink, lavender, and femme themed prints. So with that in mind, I now ask parents what the color scheme of the baby's room is going to be. This is a pretty subtle way to see which way they're leaning on the whole "gender stereotypes in infant interior design" spectrum. And if I don't know or can't get a straight (pardon the pun) answer, I go with green and yellow abstract prints.

Now that I've shared my "rules" for baby quilts, I'm sure all of the baby quilts I blog about will break every one. Isn't that what rules are for?

Amish & Mennonite Quilts Across America

2009-02-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

I Netflixed the DVD of Amish & Mennonite Quilts Across America. See, Netflix has this neato feature where it suggests films like the films you add to your queue. So I added The Art of Qulting, American Quilts, and A Century of Quilts due to their inclusion in the listing of quilt-related special events accompanying the Bowers Museum's exhibit American Quilts: Two Hundred Years of Tradition, which I've discussed previously.

Amish & Mennonite Quilts Across America is NOT being shown at the Bowers. But it did pop up as a suggestion on Netflix. Smart Bowers. Bad Netflix. I know my mom always said, "If you have nothing nice to say, keep your trap shut." But she usually said that right before launching into a tirade enumerating all of the not so nice things she had to say.

First of all, from a purely aesthetic perspective, this video looked like it was made by your uncle with his home video camera. The lighting is tragic. The focus is myopic. I defy your uncle to edit something as badly as this is edited. For example, a person will be talking about a specific quilt and instead of just showing the darned quilt, it cycles through a number of quilts NONE of which could possibly the the one the person is talking about. So sad. I was SHOCKED to discover this was made in 1995. The quality of home video in 1995 was better than this.

Second, the "experts" are all quilt sellers hawking their wares. So it kind of seems like a series of those poor quality local advertisements you see on local stations in non-prime time. This is as much my problem with commercialism in art as it is the producer's selection of characters . . . no, in 1995 there were non-commercial quilt experts out there, weren't there? Regardless, rather than focusing solely on the traditional Amish quilts that really gave Amish quilt makers their reputation, most of the interviews focused on quilt store owners who exploited Amish and Mennonite women's labor to produce handmade quilts from fabric and patterns supplied by the owners. You can see the puffy polyester batting and the shiny, unnatural fiber fabric. This is not the stuff of the 1971 Whitney Museum Exhibition.

All my crankiness aside, there were a couple of quilt hawkers who specialized in antique quilts that really were quite impressive, though I'm not sure any one of them would make watching the whole sixty minute nightmare worthwhile. And the, possibly spurious, explanation of the different colors used in traditional Amish quilts varying by the sect of Amish due to the colors of clothing women were permitted to wear was interesting. If you've got Netflix and use it so much that it feels like the movies are free, and you don't mind wading through some tragically bad footage, you might see a few quilts that spark your interest enough to pause and sketch. Otherwise, there are a lot better quilt films out there.

Inspiration Photographs and The Law

2009-02-11T15:54:00.000-08:00

On my Other Blog I posted about intellectual property issues related to using photographs for inspiration. It's the continuation of a train of thought that was most recently sparked by the composition class with Katie Pasquini Masopust.

Act Swiftly Awesome Pachyderm

2009-02-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

I have about a zillion baby quilts in the queue right now including one based on the Wes Anderson film The Darjeeling Limited. Now, if you've seen that movie you know I need elephant fabric. In it's current iteration I'm making a medallion quilt and one of the borders will be of some elephant print. Yes, if I were SERIOUS I would applique those bad boys, but (A) I'm not serious, (B) it's a baby quilt, not Quilt National, (C) there's enough going on with other applique and piecing on this bad boy, (D) I'm aiming for a completion time this side of the recipient's graduation from college . . . I could go on.

Currently I'm torn between the smooth lines of the topmost print available at SuperBuzzy for $17.95 per yard and the sheer economics of the following print available at eQuilter for $6.71 per yard.

I could wait until Marimekko unleashes it's spring collection which includes the following large-scale elephants as noted at the Always Mod blog via True Up. It's WAY too big to use as a border, but maybe replace the current medallion center with it? Or use it as a back? Or not blow $44/yd fabric on some kid I hardly see once a year whose parents would probably be just as happy with a commercially made quilt from Pottery Barn Kids (shudder)?

My frugality aside, the elephants in the fabric from eQuilter do have more detail and personality in common with the elephants painted along the interior of the train than either the SuperBuzzy or the Marimekko elephants. And their scale is right on for a border at 1 3/4 inches. Now I just have to do the math to figure out how much fabric I need to order. Thanks for helping me work that out!

Bowers Museum Quilt Exhibit & Events

2009-02-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

Last fall I went to the Bowers Museum's exhibit American Quilts: Two Hundred Years of Tradition which runs through March 15, 2009. Maybe I'm just jaded from all the no-money-fun in Washington, D.C., but I felt that the $12 admission price was a bit steep for what it was. Now, granted, I only went for this exhibit and didn't wander into any other galleries. Maybe $12 was a paltry investment for the opportunity to see two quilts Joe Cunningham called, "once in a lifetime quilts" - the indigo whole cloth quilt on the right when you walk in and the broderie perse lone star quilt that's on a wall diagonally facing the entrance. They were both amazing and were definitely things to see in person as photographs, if available, wouldn't do them justice.

I am not trying to talk you out of going to see the exhibit. Rather I would like to suggest one way to make the price of admission a little more worthwhile: go on a day that the Bowers is putting on a companion program. There are nine upcoming quilt-related events at the Bowers including a night of music with that very same Joe Cunningham. All of the programs are free with paid museum admission and to members. I've compiled the museum's descriptions of all of the programs below and added my two cents where I can't help myself (which is pretty much everywhere).

And if you're not in the area, the list contains some information about a few quilt films that you can rent or watch online.

It's All About Quilts!
Sun, Feb 8, 1:30PM

Enter into the delightful, curious, and unique world of quilting at this all-day event. Quilt makers, quilt vendors, quilting guilds, quilting shops, and quilting demonstrations will all be here to share their expertise, impress you with their creativity, increase your knowledge, swap stories, and have some good old fashioned fun.
Admission: Free with paid museum admission and to members
My Two Cents: I'm in a quilt guild in Orange County and I haven't heard a peep about this. Makes me wonder who organized this event. I'm not sure what the general public is going to get out of quilt vendors and shops hawking their wares. But if I can doff my cranky pants and don my optimist overalls, I bet quilting demos would be entertaining for the whole family and I bet you could eavesdrop on some quilters walking around the exhibit and get a LOT more information than the signage provides.

Sunday, February 15
12:45 pm-1:15 pm
STORYTELLING: STITCHING HOUR
Join us for some rollicking good tales with quilts at the heart of the matter in the Anderson-Hsu-Tu Gallery. David Whiting and Diana Spirithawk of the South Coast Storytellers make historical folktales come to life when David's animated, humorous style mixes with Diana's intimate characterizations and warmth.
Admission: Free to members and with paid museum admission
My Two Cents: Cranky Pants: I am not entirely convinced that this isn't entirely unrelated to quilts, but because they're telling stories in a room full of quilts they're trying to market it as somehow quilt-related. Optimist Overalls: if you're into storytelling, you can make a day of storytelling, quilts, and all the other stuff the museum has going on.

Film: Quilts in Women's Lives
Tue, Feb 17, 1:30PM

This award-winning film by Pat Ferrero presents a first-person narrative of seven renowned quilt makers who reveal the passion and values behind the continuing tradition of quilting. 28 minutes.
Admission: Free with paid museum admission and to members
My Two Cents: There's a lot of information about this film at FolkStreams.net. Cranky Pants: There's also a fourteen and a half minute "clip" of this 28 minute film at FolkStreams.net. Optimist Overalls: You can't rent this film on Netflix.

Sunday, February 22
1:30 pm
LECTURE: KEEPIN' 'EM IN STITCHES: AMERICA'S FUNNIEST QUILTS
Quilt curator Julie Silber, from Northern California, shares slides and real-life examples of some funny quilts from the 19th and early 20th centuries. In some quilts, it's just the images that are humorous; in others, it's the words. Sometimes it's just the idea that is so amusing. American women have always expressed themselves in quilts — their accomplishments, tragedies, loves, losses, adventures, passages, and even their humor. Following the lecture, Silber will do independent quilt appraisals. To reserve space for an appraisal, please call 714.567.3679.
Admission: Free to members and with paid museum admission; lecture only $8
My Two Cents: Julie Silber is, to paraphrase Christian Siriano, kinda a big deal in the quilt world. She's a co-owner of The Quilt Complex, though she's probably better known as the curator of the world renowned Esprit Quilt Collection in San Francisco. If you're serious about quilts, this is the day to go to the Bowers.

Film: The Art of Qulting
Tue, Feb 24, 1:30PM

This film explores the myriad of techniques and artistry reflected in contemporary American quilts, celebrating quilt artists as they transcend classic quilts by taking traditions of the past to create new traditions. 60 minutes.
Admission: Free with paid museum admission and to members
My Two Cents: This was a program on PBS in 2007. If you're not into quilts per se but you are into contemporary art, this is the film for you. Very cutting edge stuff, even if it is two years old. Cranky Pants: You can rent this film from Netflix. Optimists Overalls: If you don't have Netflix, it is a whole hour movie, so that's pretty cool?

Film: American Quilts
Tue, Mar 3, 1:30PM

Examining quilts from three perspectives—as historical records, symbols of family and community, and works of art—this film celebrates the artists, quilts, and powerful stories woven into them. 80 minutes. Admission: Free with paid museum admission and to members
My Two Cents: I think this is actually America Quilts, which was a program on PBS. If you're more into history and anthropology than art or quilts, this might be the film for you. Cranky Pants: This film is available on Netflix. Optimists Overalls: If you don't have Netflix, it is a whole hour movie, so that's pretty cool?

Film: Hearts and Minds
Thu, Mar 5, 1:30PM

Pat Ferrero’s documentary film explores the intrinsic relationship between 19thcentury quilt makers and the social history they produced in their work. The film conveys the social atmosphere experienced by both the celebrated and average American woman within the context of 19th century events, including industrialization, abolition, the Civil War, westward expansion, and the temperance and suffrage movements. 60 minutes. Admission: Free with paid museum admission and to members
My Two Cents: NOT to be confused with the 1974 documentary about the Vietnam War. I can't find a darned thing about this film ANYWHERE which I blame on its title. This also means you're not going to find this on Netflix or, quite possibly anywhere else. And it's a whole whopping 60 minutes. So this might be a worthwhile use of your admission fee.

Lecture: A Musical Quilt Show
Sat, Mar 7, 1:30PM

Through songs and quilts, Joe Cunningham tells the intriguing story of quilter Joseph Henley who lived in 18th century England. This unique, full-of-quilts-and-song show, vows to be unlike anything ever seen. Admission: Free with paid museum admission and to members; Lecture only $8
My Two Cents: I can vouch for Joe Cunningham in terms of his storytelling ability, his indefatigable charm (you should have seen him handle the hecklers at our quilt guild lecture - man, those menopausal women can be FEISTY (I can't WAIT to have that as an excuse), and his musical chops. I have never seen his performance of Joe The Quilter, but everyone I have talked to who has said it is too fun to miss. If you like acoustic guitar, folk song, storytelling, you'll love it whether you like quilts or not.

Film: A Century of Quilts
Tue, Mar 10, 1:30PM

This rich and beautifully crafted documentary celebrates the art of quilting by featuring selections from the best 100 quilts of the 20th century and the stories behind their creations.
77 minutes. Admission: Free with paid museum admission and to members
My Two Cents: This was a PBS documentary. You can rent it from Netflix. And, I don't mean to be a party pooper, but it was playing continuously when I went to the quilt exhibit last year, so this might not be a "special event" so much as something they run all the time. OR, if I wanted to be REALLY cynical, I could tell you that one of the five films the Bowers it touting as special events is probably playing continuously in the gallery RIGHT NOW. I suppose if you REALLY want to see one of these films in particularly (the elusive Hearts and Minds springs to mind), then plan to go the day and time they're officially playing it.

The moral of the story: go to one of the live events like Julie Silber's talk or Joe the Quilter's performance or the big quilt show-esque monstrosity that started this list and you might just get one of the films to boot. I've put Julie and Joe on my calendar.

My Other Blog

2009-02-03T09:00:00.000-08:00

Recent Fiber Related Posts from Gnomicon (a.k.a. my other blog)

Fabric Fabulousness - Gushing about the Barnslig fabric designed by Eva Lundgreen for IKEA
Oh Deer - a comparison of Jay McCarrol's animal prints to Michael Miller's animal print
Crafty Round Up - why I didn't just post it over here to begin with?

Here's a link to all of the Gnomicon posts about fiber arts.

Zig Zag Mendocino

2009-02-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

Via Whip Up I found a quilt is nice posted a tutorial for a zig zag quilt for which she sells a kit in her etsy store. The tutorial does a great job illustrating how to quickly piece two half square triangles. More importantly, it has made me fall in love with the Mendocino line of fabrics by Heather Ross for FreeSpirit. How did that line slip past me last spring?

Fiber Arts Calls for Entry

2009-02-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

Fiber Arts Calls for Entry is a great source for hard data on getting your work out into the world. It is focused on its mission and very thorough about each call. I am hard pressed to think of another resource for this sort of information. Granted, their broad definition of "fiber arts" might require you to slog through some posts that don't apply to your medium, but I'd rather a resource like this be overinclusive than underinclusive.

Moving Hands Photos of Tokyo Int'l Quilt Fest 2009

2009-01-31T09:00:00.000-08:00

Moving Hands photos from the Tokyo International Great Quilt Festival 2009. Jennifer takes great pictures in general but her quilt photography is exceptional, which is probably a function of her great quilt talent - she knows what a quilter wants to see in a quilt and takes pictures that capture that. And the quilts from the show are AMAZING!

Obama Quilt Shows

2009-01-30T17:00:00.000-08:00

The Cafrtiz Art Center in my old stomping grounds of Silver Spring, Maryland, will be showing "President Obama: A Celebration in Art Quilts" from February 9 to March 5, 2009 with an opening reception on Friday, February 13th. Whip Up has more information and some beautiful pictures.

Closing January 31: The Historical Society of Washington, in my ever-so-slightly-more-far-flung old stomping grounds of D.C., will be showing "Quilts for Obama: An Exhibit Celebrating the Inauguration of Our 44th President." The show was curated by Roland L. Freeman in conjunction with The Historical Society and The Women of Color Quilters Network, the latter having some great pictures of works from the show on their website. Also via Whip Up.

Dear Ada for Daily Inspiration

2009-01-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

Dear Ada is a wonderful blog by Birdie Loo who posts images of art and a little information about each artist. It inspires me every day. My Google Reader Starred Items is FILLED with Dear Ada posts that plant the seeds of quilt designs in the garden of my brain.

Occasionally she features fiber artists. For example, recently she posted some work by Leah Evans.

Katie Pasquini Masopust on Design

2009-01-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

A couple of Mondays ago I took an amazing workshop with Katie Pasquini Masopust, a world renowned quilt artist who wins top awards from every quilt show that hands out ribbons. And if that wasn't enough, one of her quilts was named one of the 100 quilts of the 20th Century - there was this whole PBS documentary. And despite all that, she's laid back and cool. Her class totally changed my entire approach to design.

The workshop was put on by the Flying Geese Quilters Guild. Katie's name on their schedule of presenters (along with Joe the Quilter's) was one of the reasons I joined this particular guild. And not only were the guild members I hadn't met super nice at the class, people I had met previously actually remembered me . . . and seemingly not in a bad way. How nice is that?

In my review of Joe's class, I said,

The workshop took place at Material Possessions Quilt Shop, which is HUGE. I suspect it has as good if not better selection of quilting fabric as G Street Fabrics in Rockville, Maryland.

Apparently, I totally jinxed them, or they were hit by economic bad times like everyone else, because they have now reduced the size of their store by at least a third. Think global, sew local: support your local quilt shop! Nonetheless the classrooms remained spacious, well-lit, well-equipped, and well-organized.

On to the workshop itself.

In some ways, this workshop was like a super condensed version of the six-week class I took with Jeanne Benson at the Smithsonian. For example, rather than laboring over color for weeks on end, Katie passed out a one page handout with half the page dedicated to nine common color schemes and a color wheel. Additionally, she had prepared sets of solid color fabrics for fusing and separated the fabric into plastic sleeves by color scheme. So at the step in each exercise when we moved from line drawing to color, each student grabbed a set of fabric and tried to use all the fabrics in that set. No decision making, just grab a set and go. For each exercise we had to use a different set.

But it should be no surprise that our color work was elided. The name of the workshop was "Composition" - color was just a means to an end. Similarly, we didn't ponder the details of line, shape, value, movement, size, and pattern, like I did with Jeanne, but all of those subjects were touched upon along the way. So it makes sense that the other half of the handout was dedicated to nine common compositions. Katie defined "composition" as the way you arrange the shapes that make up your quilt and the way your eye travels around the surface of the completed quilt. Her primary goal was to give us tools to work through our quilt designs before we start the quilts so we don't finish our quilts and say, "Oh, now I see, I should have done . . ." Additionally, she wanted us to see the potential for abstraction from naturalistic inspiration. This will all make more sense if I walk you through the exercises.

Exercise 1
In the first exercise, we selected a photograph from a pile which Katie had ripped out of magazines and developed a design attempting to take a small step from "reality" towards abstraction.

First, we determined which of the nine most common compositions matched the composition of our photograph. I determined my photo's composition was symmetrical. Specifically, I think it's glide symmetry, but this isn't a Ruth B. McDowell workshop. Then we made a line drawing of the image emphasizing the composition. I drew every piece of the sculpture including the spheres. At that point we paused to share our drawings with the group. Katie took one look at mine and said, "Simplify!" After our constructive criticism session, we went back to our tables and redrew our composition, then copied it. One copy was for the base to which we would fuse fabric. The other copy was to make patterns to cut out the fabric. I'm not a big pattern fan, so I didn't make two copies. Then we picked our fabric set. I picked a set of violet and yellow fabrics in a complementary color scheme. There were seven values of each hue in the packet. I used every one.

In our critique session at the end of the day Katie noted that with "weird" color schemes, like complementary and split complementary, your can make the contrast less jarring by using the full range of values in each hue. I think that's certainly true in this example. If I only used the bright yellow that makes up the rectangles of the door with the dark violet of the second or third to bottom lozenge, it would be harder to look at. Along the bottom where there are just big chunks of each color you can see how contrasty it is.

Katie noted that the high value of the yellow rectangles in the door made her want to move inside and see what was there. It gave the image a sense of depth.

I had the opportunity to do this exercise twice. I picked the following photo and determined its composition was horizontal.

I picked a monochromatic color scheme in seven values of green. I used all of the fabrics.

During the critique session at the end of the day I wondered whether the green was too naturalistic of a choice. For example, Olle Baertling, a Swedish modern artist didn't like to use blue and green in his paintings because no matter what your intent the viewer would always see earth and sky or earth and water. Katie felt my pueblo design did not seem too naturalistic in part because she lives in New Mexico, the indigenous habitat of pueblos, and they sure ain't green. But also, looking at the design apart from the photo, Katie said it looks like an abstract collection of squares. Katie noted that monochromatic color schemes are cohesive and peaceful, and if you use the full spectrum of values you get an elegant result.

When I showed my designs to my husband when I got home he immediately asked if he could take this design and put it up on his office wall at school. He has NEVER had that kind of reaction to anything I've made quite possibly ever. So I might have to make this into a quilt for him.

Exercise 2
The second exercise required us to select another photograph and develop a design a few steps further toward abstraction.

In step 1 we made four small line drawings, one only using rectangles, one using only circles, one using only triangles, and one using rectangles, circles, and triangles.

In step 2 we picked our favorite from the four drawings in step 1 and determined to which of the nine most common compositions it conformed. I chose the combination of rectangles, circles, and triangles and determined that it most conformed to a diagonal composition. Then I drew my selected design again and tried to emphasize the diagonal composition.

In step 3 we redrew the drawing from step 2 with an eye towards improving it. I simplified my rectangles to three squares and drew them with a ruler. I laid my paper over the previous drawing to align my triangles along the curve without a continuous line.

In step 4 we redrew the drawing from step 3 with an eye towards simplifying it. I reduced the number of triangles, removed the skinny vertical rectangles, and reduced the number of circles.

At this point we were to pick our favorite design from steps 2, 3, and 4 and execute it in color. I picked the design from step 4 but redrew it to reduce the circles to one large circle (I traced the color wheel) and to divide the background into three triangles. I selected a split complementary color scheme with seven values of red, one value of blue-green, and one value of yellow-green. I used all of the fabrics.

Reworking the image basically nine times really changed my perception of it. I definitely felt like I worked out a lot of design issues by processing it so relentlessly.

During the end of the day critique I wondered whether it was derivative of Jane Sassaman. Katie reassured me that she knows Jane Sassaman and my design is no Jane Sassaman. But she didn't mean that in a Dan Quayle/JFK way. She really loved my design and suggested I should concentrate on it by working in a series. She thought I handled the weird split complementary colors very well. Yay me! This design in my favorite of those I generated at the workshop, right down to the crazy colors.

Exercise 3
For our final exercise, we selected one of the designs we made for exercises 1 and 2 and cropped to focus on one part of it, which would then be the subject of a new design. I picked the first design I executed for exercise 1 and cropped it like the photo below.

I made a line drawing at a larger scale of the cropped portion of my design. I selected an analogous color scheme of five values of yellow, one value of yellow-orange, and one value of orange. It's a little hard to see in the picture, but I divided the background with the orange in the middle and the yellow-orange on either side.

I didn't have much time to complete this exercise (lots of folks didn't get to this exercise at all), but the time pressure forced me to work faster which, I felt, generated simplicity and elegance. I do think I had this Josef Albers work in my head when I threw mine together.
Sorry for getting my head in the way. I took these late an night. But you get the idea.

In discussing the analogous color scheme Katie suggested using up to four adjacent hues. Analogous colors closely relate to one another and are really just a bare step from monochromatic, so try to use the full value range, particularly of the outside hues.

Katie had some general words of wisdom. She suggested using an unnatural or unexpected color scheme. In competitions it makes the judges take notice because it is different from all the rest, it's unpredictable, it makes people ask questions.

She warned that if you make something like this based on someone else's photo, you may run into copyright issues. So make your own photos the basis of your work. If you are inspired by the subject matter, like ferns, go take your own pictures of the subject matter.

If you're having trouble moving from realistic to abstraction try turning your inspiration photo upside down. Or when you've finished a drawing, turn it - you have four possible tops. Find a focal point, redo it in a different way, and inset it into the quilt.

A concept she referred to without directly instructing was transparency, which appears frequently in her work. The few pointers she shared were that one aspect of successful transparency is continuous line. The continuity of the line is more important than accuracy in color mixing.

Later that day Katie presented her Quilts and Quilt Trips lecture to the guild. She was the first guild lecturer I've seen who showed other quilter's work. It was like she is a quilt fan and wanted to share all of her favorites. It just felt incredibly generous. Here's a list of some of the quilters she mentioned:

Quilts at the American Folk Art Museum

2009-01-29T09:00:00.002-08:00

The American Folk Art Museum in New York City will have three shows dedicated to quilts this year.

The current exhibition “Recycling and Resourcefulness: Quilts of the 1930s” showcases twelve Depression-era quilts from the International Quilt Study Center & Museum, University of Nebraska - Lincoln. According to the AFAM's website, the quilts are shown alongside "works from the American Folk Art Museum's collection that further explore the theme of recycling, such as the Wonderbread Rug, woven from plastic Wonderbread bags; Baby Blanket, made up entirely of condoms in aluminum wrappers; tramp art made from cigar boxes; bottle-cap figures; and quilts made from men's clothing fabrics and patriotic silk ribbons." From The New Yorker Goings On About Town Art listing for January 19, 2009,

Flour and feed sacks, worn work clothes, and dressmaking leftovers construct geometric Grandmother’s Flower Garden, Chinese Fan, and Postage Stamp patterns. Even more eye-catching are the crazy quilts, including a denim-heavy “britchy” quilt sewn by Catherine Somerville of Aliceville, Alabama, and a severe coverlet of black woollen suiting fabrics stitched with running lines of feathery white, signed and dated “Ella 1922.”

The exhibition will be on view through March 15th at the museum's branch location at 2 Lincoln Square (Columbus Avenue at 66th Street). For more information, please call 212. 595. 9533.

"Textural Rhythms: Constructing the Jazz Tradition--Contemporary African American Quilts" opens March 24, 2009 and runs through August 23, also at the Lincoln Square branch. This exhibit displays over sixty quilts by members of the Women of Color Quilters Network. It's currently at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York, through March 1, 2009, alongside My Brothers' Thread: Fiber Works by and for Men of the African Diaspora.

Finally, "Kaleidoscope Quilts: The Art of Paula Nadelstern" opens at the AFAM April 21, 2009, and runs through September 13, 2009. Nadelstern is a world-renowned quilter. Her quilt "Kaleidoscopic XVI: More is More" was named one of the 100 Best Quilts of the 20th Century.

Trèfle Farmland by Kokka

2009-01-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

I've been SO well-behaved lately about my quilting budget. I haven't bought any fabric in months. Truly. And I'm all about using what I have this year. Really. But then I saw Feed Dog's Best Fabrics of 2008 over at True Up and now I'm truly, madly, deeply in love with Kokka's Trèfle Farmland. I want it in every colorway. Above it's in bright, after the jump you can see it in pink, dark, and blue, along with a list of online stores that carry one or more of these gorgeous fabrics!

Reprodepot carries all four: blue, bright, dark, and pink.
Purl has it in blue.
JCaroline Creative has it in pink and blue.

Amish Quilts at the Textile Museum

2009-01-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

If you've been waiting for an excuse to go to The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., wait no more! Starting April 4 and running through September 6, 2009, The Textile Museum will be displaying thirty Amish Quilts as part of their exhibit Constructed Color: Amish Quilts.

In addition to the exhibit there will be a number of quilt-related special programs including:

SPECIAL EXCURSION: “BALTIMORE QUILTS IN THEIR HOMETOWN”
Thursday, March 5 • 9 am – 5 pm
Travel to Baltimore for an exclusive tour of the exhibition Baltimore Album Quilts Revisited: A Matter of Taste with Anita Jones, curator for textiles at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Following the exhibition tour, Jones will offer a behind-the-scenes look in the textile storage and conservation areas and engage in a curatorial discussion of Baltimore Album quilts. Participants will have free time to look at other pieces on rotation before a delicious lunch at Gertrude's, the museum's restaurant. After lunch, the group will travel to a second fiber arts venue. Fee for the tour and lunch: $105/Textile Museum members; $130/non-members. Advance registration is required; space is limited to 20 participants. The point of departure will be announced closer to the program date. To register, call (202) 667-0441, ext. 64.

PUBLIC GALLERY TALK & TOUR OF CONSTRUCTED COLOR: AMISH QUILTS
Saturday, April 4 • 11 am
Take a tour of Constructed Color: Amish Quilts with Rebecca A.T. Stevens, The Textile Museum’s consulting curator for contemporary textiles. FREE; no reservations required. Limited to 35 participants.

EVENINGS AT THE TM: “THAT’S A QUILT?! TRACING THE LINEAGE OF CONTEMPORARY QUILT ART”
Thursday, April 16 • 6:30 pm
Join us for an evening lecture by Kate Lenkowsky, author of Contemporary Quilt Art: An Introduction and Guide, who will examine how tradition influences contemporary artists. Lenkowsky will be available for book signings prior to the lecture. Following the talk, mingle with fellow attendees at a wine and cheese reception. Fee: $15/Textile Museum members; $20/non-members. Advance registration is required; seating is limited. A light boxed supper is available for pre-purchase by attendees; please visit textilemuseum.org/evenings.htm for details and specify your request when ordering. The dinners are available at 6 pm. To register, call (202) 667-0441, ext. 64.

EVENINGS AT THE TM: “REINVENTING QUILTS IN A DIGITAL AGE”
Thursday, May 7 • 6:30 pm
Join us for an evening lecture by Michael James, chair of the Textiles, Clothing & Design Department at the University of Nebraska and a textile artist, who will discuss how he uses state-of-the-art technology in the creation of his beautiful art quilts. Fee: $15/Textile Museum members; $20/non-members. A light boxed supper is available for pre-purchase by attendees; please visit textilemuseum.org/evenings.htm for details and specify your request when ordering. The dinners are available at 6 pm. Following the lecture, mingle with fellow attendees at a wine and cheese reception. Advance registration is required; seating is limited. To register, call (202) 667-0441, ext. 64.

Comfy Chair is Go

2009-01-05T00:25:00.000-08:00

After much procrastination, I finally unpacked the last of the moving boxes in my nascent quilting studio such that I could comply with Dr. Maisel's very specific requirement for a creative space #2: a thinking spot separate from the computer space, preferably with a comfy chair beside a table for a lamp, mug, notepad, pen, and current reads. Not captured here is the corner of my cutting table which is about a foot in front of this chair and perfectly suitable for resting a mug, notepad, pen, and/or current reads.

Flags by Colour

2008-12-11T16:14:00.000-08:00

Via Dear Ada I found Flags by Colours by Shahee Ilyas. The page describes the work:

Using a list of countries generated by The World Factbook database, flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia (as of 26th May 2007) are analysed by a custom made python script to calculate the proportions of colours on each of them. That is then translated on to a piechart using another python script. The proportions of colours on all unique flags are used to finally generate a piechart of proportions of colours for all the flags combined.

Value: Markers

2008-11-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

Since I'm not much of a painter, I've continued my value studies with the Munsell Student Color Set using my Prismacolor markers.
Prismacolor makes three different gradient grey color marker sets: french grey, cool grey, and warm grey. I have the french grey set. The cool greys clearly have a blue tint. Looking at the samples on my monitor I don't see as much of a specific color tint in the warm greys - maybe red, but if so it's very subtle. The french grey set clearly has a yellow tint - so at this low chroma it appears most like taupe. Though without any other color in context, the yellow is barely noticeable.

Like the value scale Deb Menz uses in her book, the Prismacolor grey scale is based on the percentage of black that is mixed with white. So the lightest marker is 10% and the darkest non-black marker is 90% and there are nine markers in the grey scale, plus black. As you might be able to tell, my 50% marker has seen better days. I should really buy a replacement.

One difference between opaque paint and the ink in Prismacolor markers is that you can build up layers of ink in such a way that the value and chroma change. These last two images are samples I made layering the 10% French grey and 20% French grey respectively. I found that by the fourth layer of the 10% French grey, the value matches the 20% French grey. So you can layer the 10% French grey to create two values between 10% and 20%.
I found that by the third layer of the 20% French grey, the value matches the 30% French grey. So you can layer the 20% French grey to create one value between 20% and 30%. Alternatively, if you want to make sure an area of grey is all one value, if you layer it at least four times it will be uniformly one value. This corrects the striped appearance I often get filling in blocks of color. I suppose I should do this test on every marker to see how dark it gets and how many layers I need to do to even out the color.
I also need to line up my other value indicies to see what Munsell values apply to which Prismacolor values and what Menz values apply to which Prismacolor values.

Seeing Red

2008-11-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

This value scale is from Art History by Marilyn Stokstad, which I'm reading with a couple of friends to make up for our failure to take art history in college. This value scale and some other basic tools to describe art are included in the Starter Kit section of the introductory material. For no particular reason that I can discern, values are divided into seven gradations including white and black at either end.

Stokstad's value variation in red uses the highest chroma colors from almost every value row on the 5R chart. For some reason it skips value 7/. From right to left: 5R 8/4, 5R 6/12, 5R 5/14, 5R 4/14, 5R 3/4.

How to Manage Daily Inspiration

2008-11-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

I'm charmed by the design boards Lobster & Swan makes to record the things that inspire her each day, which I found via Design*Sponge. Really, I'm a sucker for anything date-stamped. These collages remind me of On Kawara's Today Series, which you can go see as part of The Panza Collection exhibit at The Hirshhorn Museum.

I clip pages from magazines that inspire me, but I don't keep them in any sort of order. They float around like leaves in my studio, fluttering in the wind from the ceiling fan. I wonder if I should follow Lobster & Swan's lead. Or file them by subject matter. Though it's rarely the subject matter that I find inspiring. Maybe file by whatever it is I find most inspiring about the image. But how many things have I filed away and never looked at again? I've seen people fill their walls with inspirational images. I did that to cover the ghastly wood paneling in my workspace in Indiana. Now my walls are white and seem to have been filled by bookcases and shelves.

Quilt News

2008-11-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

I will post this over at the other, more frequently read, nominally "group" blog as well, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention these great quilt events here.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is showing Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt through December 14, 2008. In conjunction with that exhibit the same museum is showing Quilt Stories: The Ella King Torrey Collection of African American Quilts and Other Recent Quilt Acquisitions. The PMA is a great museum. I saw this particular Gee's Bend show at The Walters Museum in Baltimore. It's a definite must-see.

Also in quilt related news, Dear Ada shared some pieces from Sherri Lynn Wood's collection of Passage Quilts. These quilts commemorate and honor personal relationships, milestones, and rites of passage. You can read more about these quilts in the November/December 2008 issue of FiberArts. Ms. Wood conducts workshops for people "in transition." Quilting has been used as a means of working one's way through a tough time quite possibly since its inception. One incredibly moving example is Coralee's Mourning Quilt, a simple three-strip quilt with words and designs made with simple embroidery.

Textile Museum & TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity

2008-11-21T09:00:00.001-08:00

On the Washington, D.C., segment of my East Coast Tour I went to the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian to see the TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity exhibit, which is on through December 28, 2008, and the Textile Museum. Despite having lived in D.C. for a couple of years I had never been to either of these museums.

While the Textile Museum is relatively small and out of the way, it is entirely worth the trip for its permanent exhibit The Textile Learning Center alone, and even more so if you fancy the current exhibition.

In hindsight I encountered these exhibits in exactly the wrong order. I should have started in The Textile Learning Center on the second floor of the Textile Museum. The exhibit The Finishing Touch: Accessories from the Bolivian Highlands, on through February 1, 2009, uses the vocabulary defined in The Textile Learning Center in its signage and in the organization of the pieces. The two exhibits are close enough to one another that it would be easy to go back to the TLC to refresh your memory. Having learned and applied your textile vocabulary on the second floor, you'd be ready for the main current exhibit Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas, on through March 8, 2009.

Finally, while my first stop was the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian to see the TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity exhibit, I think you could get a lot more out of it if you had the knowledge base from the Textile Museum under your belt.

The brochure accompanying TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity exhibit was one of the most thorough I've found. It included all of the text from the signage in the exhibit down to the descriptions of every artifact. I love taking notes and drawing sketches in exhibits and this brochure had plenty of room for both and enough information that I could concentrate on sketching and noting my own impressions rather than copying down information from signage. Oh, how I would love every museum exhibit to have a brochure like this! Mind you, its dimensions were that of a vinyl record, so not exactly the easiest to carry around all day, but worth the effort.

From the children's guide to the exhibit:

TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity examines African garments, textiles, and adornments as communicators of coded messages. Messages of the age, gender, status, individual character, and group identity are transmitted in the colors, symbols, beads, costly materials, and patterns that decorate these textiles.

This theme ties in nicely with my interest in quilts with secret information behind them.

My favorite pieces in the TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity exhibit included the Man's tunic (jibbeh) from the Mahdiyya State in Sudan created in the late 19th century out of cotton, silk, wool, cotton batting, and dye. The tunic was pieced with floral and paisley commercially printed cotton, giving it the appearance of a traditional western quilt. The signage noted that armor for a man and his horse in the Mahdi Army was most often quilted in cotton. Silk might have been included in this piece because it is thought to deflect bad fortune. It is more customarily used in textiles related to wedding and birth ceremonies.

In addition to materials with special meanings, like undyed white wool having protective properties, the exhibit described a number of patterns with their own meanings. For example, the Woman's wrapper (haik) made by the Kabyle peoples of Algeria in the late 19th century out of wool, cotton, and dye depicted triangles and diamonds, both of which are protective motifs. Lozenge shapes ward off the evil eye. More specifically, the oyokoman pattern of yellow an green warp dtripes in a red field is identified with the Asante rulling clan and Ghanaian nationalism. Can you imagine a textile being associated with a U.S. political party?

I was also inspired by the textile techniques on display. A Woman's wrapper made by the Yoruba peoples of Nigeria in the mid-20th century out of cotton and indigo dye used adire (ah-deer-ray), a Yoruba resist dye technique. The blue background was covered with an orthogonal array of circles called "tops." Tops are a popular pattern made by twisting a comb into a cloth laden with starch resist to make textured circles. They look like very finely drawn spirals.

The idea of textiles as communication devices is also developed in The Textile Museum's special exhibit Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas. From The Bulletin of The Textile Museum:

As social currency, textiles reveal a great deal about an individual's wealth, social status, occupation, and religious and ethnic associations, as well as a culture's values, codes, and social order.

The main theme of the exhibit is comparing textiles made by nomadic peoples to those made by settled peoples.

One story from the signage in the exhibition particularly resonated with me. In the Kuba and Shivran provinces of eastern Azerbaijan, many towns an d villages became known for producing rugs with specific designs or styles. The region came under Russian rule in the 19th century. As part of a program to "improve" local handicrafts (kustar), Russian authorities set about recording and "tidying up" traditional carpet designs. The state-sanitized designs were then redistributed throughout the villages of the region, making it difficult to know if the current design names bear any relation to where a particular rug was made. This faux-folk art is identifiable by its use of repeated colors.

This seems like a very similar process of homogenization as took place in the early 20th century in American quilt making that I've discussed elsewhere. To paraphrase myself, antique American quilts do not conform to the forms and techniques commonly accepted as "traditional" quilting today. The rules enforced by present day "quilt police" seem to have coalesced in the patterns and kits made available in the 20th century, much like the state-sanitized carpet designs distributed by the Russians in late 19th Century. What is commonly accepted as "traditional" quilting is really a set of patterns and techniques created by the quilting-industrial complex. These "traditional" patterns and techniques can be traced back to their owners, purveyors of 20th century quilt patterns and kits, like the patterns in Azeri rugs can be traced back to the state-sanitized patterns distributed in the late 19th century. But both of these sets of patterns are disconnected from their geographically and culturally specific origins. Additionally, this idea of making quilts or rugs based on centrally distributed patterns destroys the creative process in which women improvisationally created without patterns or techniques beyond those they shared with one another on an interpersonal level.

On a less historical note, I found the descriptions of the artifacts in The Textile Museum's special exhibit Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas fascinating in their own right. For example, "An excess of details repeated from a prototype result in overcrowding." And, "A narrow field and multiple borders suggests a window looking into deep space lending a contemplative quality." Something about these descriptions strikes me as more subjective than I've seen in other museum signage. This is an exhibit of artifacts "drawn from the collections of past and present members of America's oldest rug and textile collecting society, the Hajji Baba Club." So I wonder if the owner's personal assessments made it into the signage or if the curators took more of an appraiser's eye towards the objects. While I don't find this type of signage particularly helpful in learning about the object, I do find it helpful in learning what appraisers think of when they look at these sorts of objects. As someone contemplating entering quilts into competition, these peeks at what might be going on in the minds of the judges is always fascinating.

Discussions of Value: A Comparison of Resources

2008-11-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

To further my remedial review of value after my first failed exercise from The Munsell Student Color Set, I reviewed the sections on value in all of the other books I have that address color: Interaction of Color by Josef Albers; Your First Quilt Book by Carol Doak; Color for the Terrified Quilter: Plain Talk, Simple Lessons, 11 Projects by Ionne McCauley and Sharon Pederson; and Deb Menz's Color Works: The Crafter's Guide to Color.
The above picture shows one value exercise in Interaction of Color by Josef Albers. Interaction of Color is like The Munsell Student Color Set in that it is intended as a companion to class exercises. Interaction of Color is probably an advanced seminar on color where The Munsell Student Color Set is an introductory course. If I could ever get through The Munsell Student Color Set, I would love to work my way through Interaction of Color.
The above picture shows the entire value discussion in Your First Quilt Book by Carol Doak. Considering the broad scope of this book, that's actually a pretty hefty word count for a discussion of value. The book dedicates all of eight pages to color-related issues. So for one of those pages to be solely dedicated to value is pretty good. The patterns in the book are also fairly easy to break down into at least light, medium, and dark values, which for beginning quilters is fairly sufficient. Most of the diagrams in the book are black and white, which probably doesn't appeal to buyers like full color graphics might, but the benefit of grayscale diagrams is that they give you a lot more sense of value placement than potentially confusing pictures using actual fabric. If you're looking for an introductory quilt book, I highly recommend Your First Quilt Book by Carol Doak. If you're looking for an in depth discussion of value, this is probably not the one. But it certainly introduces value in terms of fabric choices clearly. It also describes the universal quilters' value tool: The Ruby Beholder. Essentially an easily marketable substitute for a piece of red cellophane, a Ruby Beholder is a transparent piece of red plastic quilters look through to filter out the colors of fabric in order to determine color. Of course, if you love red fabric, the Ruby Beholder is of limited, ahem, value. They have green versions out there as well, just for red fabric lovers.
The above picture shows almost the entire value discussion in Color for the Terrified Quilter: Plain Talk, Simple Lessons, 11 Projects by Ionne McCauley and Sharon Pederson. Considering the relatively narrow scope of this book, I am disappointed in the lack of attention paid to value. Essentially it includes two paragraphs and two exercises, one organizing fabrics into a value scale and another addressing relative value. All of the pictures are full color, which I think might confuse folks. Also, the exercises only use one hue. Arranging a value scale within one hue isn't really the problem. Trying to compare values among varied hues is the real challenge most quilters face. This book doesn't even broach the subject.
This is one of my favorite depictions of value from Deb Menz's Color Works: The Crafter's Guide to Color. Not only does Menz dedicate part of her chapter on describing color to the subject of value, she dedicates a whole chapter to understanding value. Most importantly, she uses color and grayscale images to illustrate value differences among different colors. She even has a diagram depicting the twelves hues on her color wheel with their values. Genius!

Color Theory: Value

2008-10-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

After my abysmal showing at Exercise 1.3, I thought I should back up and take a closer look at value.

If you click on any of these images you should be able to see a larger version of the image in which the values for each Munsell chip are labeled in hot pink. The first value scale accompanied by Munsell chips is from Color Works: The Crafter's Guide to Color by Deb Menz, which was recommended in a quilt guild lecture on color theory by Robin Edmundson.

The first thing I notice when I look at this picture is that the grays of the Munsell chips seem to have a yellow cast to them compared to the color of the Menz grays. The Munsell chips are actual chips of opaque paint which has a different color gamut than the printers ink used to make the Menz book.

This scale is from the same book as the first example, Color Works: The Crafter's Guide to Color by Deb Menz. The back of the book has a number of handy pull out color tools including a gray scale. It's printed on glossy card stock, which might explain the differences between the arrangement of the Munsell chips on this scale and the first scale.

Note the unequal distribution of Munsell chips along the Menz value scale. Particularly at the high end of the value scale there seem to be a lot more grays in the Menz scale than the Munsell chips. Menz creates her value scale according to the percentage of black that has been mixed with white, from 0% (white) to 100% (black). In the value scale at left you can see the numbers along the left side of the value scale which indicate the percentage of black that has been mixed with white to form that particular gray. This gives us 11 different values.

On the Munsell Hue/Value/Chroma chart we have 9 rectangles and only 8 repositionable chips as representative samples for N 1/ (black) cannot be achieved in matte finish. Munsell created his gray scale based on ten visually equal steps between black and white. Because human perception of lightness is not uniform, a gray reflecting 50 percent of the light falling on it does not appear halfway between black and white. On the Munsell value scale, the middle gray, N 5/, reflects only 19.77% of the light. This is because people are much more sensitive to value differences between dark colors than they are to value differences between light colors.

For this reason, the steps in the Munsell value scale have a geometric relationship to one another. Munsell would argue that Menz's gray scale does not appear uniform because the percentage of black that has been mixed with white increases in equal increments.

This value scale is from Art History by Marilyn Stokstad, which I'm reading with a couple of friends to make up for our failure to take art history in college. This value scale and some other basic tools to describe art are included in the Starter Kit section of the introductory material. For no particular reason that I can discern, values are divided into seven gradations including white and black at either end. Their correspondence, or lack there of, to Munsell value chips are apparent from the super out of focus picture.

Munsell Exercise 1.3: Determining Values of Colors - Checking My Work

2008-10-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

It's times like these where doing these exercises in a class would be both harrowing and helpful. I'm relieved I'm not being graded on my ability to determine the values of colors. But I would really like some feedback both on my technique and how to double check myself. Following, please find my thoughts on how to check the assessment of value of a color using an image editing program.

In my image editor of choice, GIMP, if I select Curves from the Color menu and look at the Value graph it appears that I have one big spike in value right around the middle and a tiny curved bump in the top quarter, which I'll blame on the non-green or gray portions of the image. This seems to confirm my guess as to the Munsell value of this green.

I have a few different options for turning color images into greyscale images. One option is to desaturate the image. There are three ways to desaturate an image: lightness, luminosity, and average. Desaturating by lightness has the exact same effect as selecting the Hue-Saturation option on the Color Menu and sliding the Saturation toggle to the bottom.

Desaturation by luminosity appears to confirm that the chip and the background are the same value.

Desaturation by the average (I'm guessing the average of lightness and luminosity), as one might expect, results in an image about halfway between the relatively high contrast of the image desaturated by lightness and the very low contrast of the image desaturated by luminosity. Not sure it actually tells me much.

I started with the second example first because this first example is so clearly wrong. When I pull up the Value graph, I get at least two distinct bumps, implying I've got at least two distinct values in this image. If I were correct, there should only be one bump because the value of the blue background and the value of the gray chip should be the same. At least that's my layperson's understanding of the Curves/Value graph in GIMP.
I didn't even bother to run the average desaturation considering even the luminosity desaturation didn't make these two look like the same value.

The original sample for this image included a lot of other colors than the one with which I was trying to work, so I trimmed out the other colors to check it. Just like the previous example, when I pull up the Value graph, I get two distinct spikes, implying I've got at least two distinct values in this image. If I were correct, there should only be one spike because the value of the orange background and the value of the gray chip should be the same.

But, unlike the blue example, this desaturation by luminosity actually looks pretty good. How can my Curve have two spikes, but my desaturation by luminosity looks almost as good as the first example?

Granted, the average looks a lot like the desaturation by lightness, implying that it's more different than it is the same, but it still seems like a closer match that the blue example.

Still Life

2008-10-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

There's a beautiful still life photograph, with some thoughts on still lives, over at my friend's blog.

I have a hard time wrapping my brain around still life as subject. This is the closest I've come to crafting one myself. Unless you count that big painting of oranges in a bowl on a table, but it wasn't really about oranges on a bowl on a table. So I guess this is the closest thing I've come to consciously crafting a still life.

I made this collage in a design class with my first and favorite quilt instructor, Jeanne Benson. I think is was an exercise about shape and balance inspired by the way Baltimore Album quilt makers developed the designs for some of their blocks.

Munsell Exercise 1.3: Determining Values of Colors

2008-10-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

In my ongoing exploration of color theory centered on The New Munsell(tm) Student Color Set, I've completed another exercise. This time the goal was to determine the Munsell value for a number of colors. Judging values of colors is always a challenge for me. First of all, I thought this was a grayed color. When compared to a chip of actual gray, it doesn't look grayed at all. The chip is Munsell(tm) value 3/, which was my best guess for the value of this color.

I did this exercise in one lighting situation and then when I went to photograph it in another lighting situation I realized my answers were WAY off for a few of them.

The green in this image - which is a tiny segment of a magazine reproduction of what I suspect is an acrylic painting - I suspect might be Munsell value 5/.

The yellowy-orange color from another tiny segment of the same painting in a magazine might be Munsell value 6/.

Under the six chips, this is a portion of Giorgio Morandi's "Natura Morta" (1954) as reproduced in the September 22, 2008, issue of The New Yorker magazine. If you click on the picture, you can see that I've labeled each chip with its value to indicate what I think the adjacent colors' values are.

Works in Progress

2008-10-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

A number of my favorite fiber arts bloggers post their works in progress regularly. For example, SharonB over at In a Minute Ago posts pictures of each crazy quilt block as she completes it. Vickie over at Field Trips in Fiber posts as a weekly fiber arts things to do list and shows the progress of her embroidery in her Handwork Wednesday posts. Joe the Quilter said during his workshop, the best way for him to get through a creative block is to have a deadline. I wonder if posting pictures of my works in progress will motivate me to complete them, like a deadline might.

This is a project started in a Sue Spargo class presented by the Bloomington Quilters Guild in the fall of 2007. Lots of applique to reckon with. I could just machine it - maybe using Sue Nickel's buttonhole stitch. I don't have a recipient in mind for this piece, so it gets bumped farther down the to-do list with every baby my friends have.
This is a lone star quilt started in a Jan Krentz class presented by the Indiana Heritage Quilt Show. I'm making it for a friend's baby boy, who is now almost eight months old. I have the fabric for the setting squares and the border and probably even the backing. The next step is to block all the diamonds. But I feel like I need to block the diamonds, cut the setting squares, and finish piecing the top all in one day or all the hard work of blocking those diamonds will be for nothing since they'll just get all wonky again sitting around my studio.
This is a set of New York Beauty blocks finished in a Jacquelyn Chiddister class at Shiisa Quilts. She worked well with students with VERY different levels of experience. I had never foundation pieced before. In addition to covering the class material, she willingly demonstrated all of the neat techniques she uses to create and embellish her beautiful quilts. I even got to pick out my fabrics with her! She has an amazing sense of color and pattern.
This is a precision patchwork block finished in a Julie Higgins class at Shiisa Quilts. I included the AA battery so you can get a sense of just how tiny this block is. Like Jacquelyn Chiddister, Julie Higgins worked well with students with VERY different levels of experience. But where Jacquelyn was happy to sew some beads on seams that didn't quite match, Julie was ready with her seam ripper to unsew and resew until it was just right. But she gave us so many excellent tips and tricks for working with small pieces and getting the points and intersections to line up, I don't remember unsewing even once. While I don't think I'd make a whole quilt of three inch blocks, I do think I'll apply the lessons I learned from Julie to every seam I sew. And the great thing about doing a three inch block: you can actually finish it in a three hour class!
This is an invisible machine applique block started in a Donna Stevens class at Shiisa Quilts. She is an excellent teacher. I’ve never taken a machine applique class before. She gave clear instructions and responded to questions with a wealth of knowledge. We made very helpful samples that will help me refresh my memory of the technique even after the project is complete. In addition to the class material, she demonstrated applique techniques that went beyond the project we worked on. The sample of the project hanging in the shop was done with homespuns, but Donna was very helpful with design decisions in a completely different pallet. This is only about 1/5 sewn down. I imagine the sewing won't take too terribly long. But I just have to sit down and do it.

I envision putting the New York Beauty blocks, the precision pieced block, and the invisible machine applique block together in one quilt top. I got the idea from Design Your Own Quilts by Judy Hopkins (That Patchwork Place, 1998), which my friend R.J. recommended. And now that I see the colors all together I'm tempted to back it with the top from the Joe the Quilter class, though it might be just too darned big. Eh, that's what ginormous borders are for.

Joe the Quilter on Creativity

2008-10-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

Sunday I took an amazing workshop with Joe Cunningham, a.k.a. Joe the Quilter. For a full review of the workshop qua workshop, please click here. Following please find pictures of the sixteen other 9 1/2" blocks I finished during class and some musings which might be called, "What I Learned about Creativity from Joe."

A guild member asked Joe whether his music influences his quilting, i.e. does his quilt musically. Joe answered that he quilts quiltingly. During the workshop I asked his a version of the same question, basically, does he employ this improvisational style due to his musical background. And the answer is no.

First, pre-20th century quilts by quilters with no documented history of musicality were improvisational. So you don't have to look outside the medium of quilting to ground your process in improvisation.

Second, Joe's relationship to music is in some sense based on virtuosity and external expectations - when he jams with a musician he really respects it is an anxiety ridden experience. But as a male in the female world of quilting, he is an outsider - no one knows what to expect from him. So he feels less anxiety. He finds quilting more freeing than music because of his outsider status. His improvisatory approach to quilting helps him turn off the judgmental part of his brain, which is hyperactive when he plays music.

His design process consists of placing fabric on his floor and taking away things until it pleases him. Joe doesn't have a design wall. But being well over six feet tall, he's probably far enough from the floor to get a fairly similar effect. He also uses a digital camera to view his designs.

Another benefit to - or side effect of - using a design floor instead of a design wall is that if you intend your quilt to be used, then it will most likely be viewed on a flat horizontal surface, not a flat vertical surface like a wall. I've heard from other quilt instructors who are also quilt judges that when judges look at quilts they're usually laid flat on a set of tables, like Joe's design floor. This tends to shift the judges' focus from the center of the quilt to the edges, which they can more easily see up close and get their hands on. And if you think of the quilts you use in every day life, you're probably very familiar with the top edge, but rarely contemplate the rest in much detail.

Another production aspect of Joe's process that impacts his creativity is his quilting. When he hand quilts he uses a standing floor frame and quilts from the outside in rather than from the center out, as one would with a hoop. Only a part of the quilt is visible at any one time.

This combined with the fact that he doesn't mark his quilts makes the overall quilting design less static and predetermined. It also makes finishing quilting more exciting because taking it off the frame reveals the whole quilt for the first time since he started quilting it. Also his frame set up basically limits him to quilting a 6" by 6' strip at a time, so many of his hand quilting motifs fill that space and repeat in rows.

When Joe rents time on a long arm machine, he takes a Jackson Pollack approach to quilting, moving the machine at random over the surface of the quilt. The result is dense all-over squiggles. It's hard to determine whether this approach to quilting is due to a lack of interest in this stage of the process or developing improvisational techniques with a new tool.

During the workshop he mentioned that he'd like one of the long arm dealers to put his quilt top in one of their floor models so it could be quilted by all the different people test driving the machine. This leans toward lack of interest in the quilting phase. But it might be a step toward communal artistic production without mass production.

Joe calls some of his quilt designs conceptual. For example, for one of a series of quilts appliqueing bias tape to a whole cloth, he limited himself to using only the bias tape he could find at yard sales in one month. He only found four or five rolls of bias tape within those parameters. So it was a pretty spare quilt design. In another example of a conceptual quilt, he picked up a different Eucalyptus leaf off the ground each day and used it as a template for a fabric leaf which he then appliqued onto a whole cloth. This use of chance as a design parameter recurs in his work.

The workshop was essentially an exercise in conceptual design: apply a set of rules that will result in blocks. So what's the approach? It's a lot like Mona Brooks' Abstract Design Warm-Up from page 68 of Drawing with Children. Basically, you start with a piece of fabric approximately the size and shape of the quilt block you desire. We used a square, but I see no reason you couldn't start with a diamond or a triangle or a hexagon - any shape that can be tessellated. Then Joe presented two simple modifications to the block which totally reminded me of the Abstract Design Warm-Up's instructions,

Turn your paper in any direction you want.
Make three straight lines anywhere you want on the paper, but start the line on the edge of the paper and run it off another edge of the paper when you are done.

But where Abstract Design Warm-Up would just have you draw lines, in an exercise like Joe's each line would be cut with a rotary cutter and strips of fabric would be added before the next cut. Each cut is a creative act. Each fabric choice for a strip is a creative act.

The only thing that repeats with each block you make is the set of "rules" Joe set out for us (or that you've set out for yourself). How you execute that set of rules can vary with each block - so each block requires a set of creative decisions. Once you've squared up (or diamonded up or triangled up or tesselated shaped up - which, given the sort of odd shape you get from the improvisatory piecing stage, turns squaring up into another creative decision), the process of laying out the blocks was a heckuva lot more interesting than your usual quilt design as each block was unique. And Joe spent time with each student working through their layout. How rarely do quilt students get to that stage in the process so they can really get some practice?

We didn't know what the end result would be. He didn't show us a sample. Each student interpreted the set of rules differently, and Joe never steered anyone to a particular interpretation. Some people made every block identical. Some people used one fabric as the background fabric for every block, but executed the design prompts differently on each block.

I used the same three fabrics in each block and alternated which was the background to the block. I systematically differed each block based on the size of the corner triangle, the direction of the strip, and the width of the strip.
I was trying to make my blocks as different from one another as I could. This required some thought at the cutting, sewing, and squaring up steps. It wasn't truly just leaving it up to chance . . . which is so very like me.

I even fussy cut some of the strips to feature the design of the fabric.

Updated 10/18/08 to add: Joe blogged about the class and included a picture from the guild meeting of six completed tops from the workshop. It's a great picture that shows how different each quilt turns out even though they all started with the same design prompts.

The Color of Heartache

2008-10-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

Susanna Clarke describes colors amazingly in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. For example on page 610 she writes,

The box was small and oblong and apparently made of silver and porcelain. It was a beautiful shade of blue, but then not exactly blue, it was more like lilac. But then, not exactly lilac either, since it had a tinge of grey in it. To be more precise, it was the color of heartache.

This has, of course, caused me to spend excessive amounts of time pondering my New Munsell Student Color Set for the color of heartache.

I've narrowed it down to somewhere between 5P 6/2 and 5PB 6/2. What do you think?

Reflection

2008-10-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

A Quilt with Secret Information Behind It

2008-10-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

The Sunday New York Times Magazine last week had a short piece on Josiah McElheny, a sculptor inspired by the Big Bang Theory to create a series of installations. Some quotes from McElheny resonated with me. He described a piece as

sculpture with secret information behind it.

Later the article states

According to McElheny, physicists continue to struggle with the question "is the world this way because it must be, or is it just random?”

Previously, I'd worked on some paintings of raindrops that were asking similar questions about randomness. I've been contemplating creating some quilts exploring the same subject. Also combining the secret information and the unrandomness, I've been contemplating some quilts based on QR codes.

The Creativity Book: Exercise 4 - Make Minimum Space

2008-09-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

The last exercise for Week 2 in Eric Maisel's The Creativity Book is to revise and rearrange my creative space. I am very lucky to have a quite large room to dedicate to my studio. Following please find pictures of the progress I've made towards rearranging my creative space.

Dr. Maisel sets out very specific requirements for a creative space that would probably annoy me if it weren't for the fact that they're already in line with what I have and want. First, he requires a computer desk, computer, and internet access.

Check, check, check.

Second, he requires a thinking spot separate from the computer space, preferably with a comfy chair beside a table for a lamp, mug, notepad, pen, and current reads.

I am go for comfy chair, but, as you can see, I need to do a little rearranging.

Third, he requires a special bookcase. I liked the way he described how to organize your books: inspiration, subject matter reference, shrine, and professional reference.
So far I've got the subject matter reference and some inspiration. I suspect that as I unpack I'll find some things that should go in the shrine. Not sure what sort of professional reference materials a nascent quilter should have.

Fourth, he requires whatever other space your endeavor requires. Quilting, my primary artistic medium of the moment requires a cutting table, a sewing table, fabric storage, notions storage, and a design wall. I have most of these things already and just needed to unpack them and arrange them properly. I'll keep you posted as that happens.

Munsell Color Charts

2008-09-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

In my hour spent creatively I finally finished Exercise 1.4 in The New Munsell(R) Student Color Set. The exercise basically asks you to complete the book by filling in the blanks on the color charts with colored chips. I've blogged about Munsell's color theory before elsewhere. I've also blogged about my specific experience assembling the color charts, back when I'd finished only the first three out of ten. Here I thought I'd share my pictures of the completed charts with a few observations.

5R with 30 chips. The chip that matches the 5R chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5R 5/14. I started with the 5R chart because a previous chart illustrating the concepts of hue, value, and chroma used one row from the 5R chart to illustrate chroma. Also 5R contains the most chips, 30, so I could check all the rest of the charts against that chart if there wasn't the same value and chroma on the adjacent hue charts.

5YR with 24 chips. The chip that matches the 5YR chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5YR 7/12. Then by chance I worked clockwise around the hue circle. This turned out to be a good plan because in that order the charts with the most chips come at the end. Charts with fewer chips are easier to arrange.

5Y with 21 chips. The chip that matches the 5Y chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5Y 8/12. Do my charts look right to you? Any chips seem out of place? This is the moment when I wish I could work on this with a class so I could have a group of well-trained eyes to double check my charts.

5GY with 20 chips. The chip that matches the 5GY chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5GY 8/10.

5G with 22 chips. The chip that matches the 5G chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5G 6/10.

5BG with 20 chips. The chip that matches the 5BG chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5BG 5/8.

5B with 20 chips. The chip that matches the 5B chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5B 5/8. It certainly got easier the more charts I completed. By the last few I had no trouble pulling out that first column /2 with the lowest chroma.

5PB with 27 chips. The chip that matches the 5PB chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5PB 5/10. Once I figured out that if I set up the chart as I thought it should be on medium gray paper then switched the position of chips I wasn't sure about those switches really pointed out mistakes better than comparing to other charts.

5P with 26 chips. The chip that matches the 5P chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5P 5/10. The only bummer is I'm almost 100% sure I got two of the same chip for my 5P chart. So I have two 5P 8/4 chips and no 5P 7/4 chip. I'm going to write to the publisher, Fairchild Publications, and see if they'll send me a single 5P 7/4 chip.

Finally 5RP with 28 chips. The chip that matches the 5RP chip on the hue circle of the Hue Value/Chroma Chart is 5RP 5/12.

The Creativity Book: Exercise 3 - Make an Hour

2008-09-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

The first exercise for Week 2 in Eric Maisel's The Creativity Book is to sit with a timer doing nothing for 20 minutes, then 40 minutes. Then set the timer for an hour and do something related to your creative project. Following please find my thoughts on the exercise of creating an hour.

First, again, an anti-consumerism complaint. The book asks the reader to purchase a wind-up kitchen timer that can run for up to an hour and clicks loudly as it winds down. Again, while I understand that investing money in your dream is one step in making that dream a reality, I feel confident in my ability to throw lots of money at this dream/reality transition without adding a timer that will drive me insane to my neglected kitchen gadgets collection. This time, unlike the mug and tea for Exercise 2, I think lacking the annoying ticking to reinforce the sense of time is a detriment to my execution of the exercise. But money is tight and I just can't do it.

Second, sitting quietly waiting for a timer to ding is very much like my meditation practice. So it is particularly challenging not to meditate instead of doing nothing.

Doing nothing for twenty minutes was pretty standard. Not too much of a strain. In fact I'm pretty sure I do this at least two or three times a day. Actually, after this exercise I became much more aware of the times I do nothing, which may not have been the point of the exercise but certainly makes me aware of the time I could spend being a little more creative, even if it's not enough time or I'm not in a convenient place to put the creative pedal to the metal.

Between the twenty minutes and the forty minutes I discussed this blog with my brother and he had the following suggestion:

I think maybe a little less self-reflection for you. . . . Here's my daily confirmation for you: every day, read or look at something, anything, and repeat "this is not about me. This is not about me. This is not about me." Concentrate on the thing, and then repeat it again, three times. Think about how it isn't about you.

So when it was time to do nothing for forty minutes, my mantra was "This is not about me." I know, a mantra smacks of meditation which is technically doing something. But work with me. Doing nothing for forty minutes was difficult. First, it was difficult to find forty minutes to do nothing, preferably when my husband wasn't around to say, "Seriously, this is insane." So I put it off for a few days. Then I felt like I couldn't work on anything creative until I got this forty minutes out of the way, and I got so excited to do something creative that I decided I just had to do the forty minutes. But with that frame of mind it was hard not to plan my creative action while I was supposed to be doing nothing. Repeating "This is not about me," helped.

Working on my creative project for an hour was awesome! Well, of course, I went for way longer than an hour. But setting out with the idea that I'd only be working on it for an hour made me work more efficiently than I normally do on this sort of thing.

The author writes, "People who do not want to create, even if they have luxurious amounts of time on their hands, have 'no time' for their composing, writing, or painting. We can carve time out of thin air, or we can fill up even infinite stretches of time with nothingness." I do have luxurious amounts of time on my hands. And I do feel like I have "no time" for my art. I have been filling up extremely large stretches of time with nothingness. But I do want to create. I think I have to consciously choose to stop filling time with nothingness (well, other than when I'm meditating). This ties in nicely with last week's new week's resolution to get on a schedule.

Steps in a Creative Direction

2008-09-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took five steps in a creative direction. Most importantly, I attended my first quilt guild meeting in California.

First, I wrote up a schedule for Monday on Sunday night before going to bed. OK, I know, at first glance this doesn't seem very creative, but in the context of my weird time management issues, it's a big step.

Second, I actually stuck to said schedule despite sleeping in well past my scheduled start time. This sounds like not such a big deal, but I have on more than one occasion chucked the whole day's plans because I didn't wake up "on time." This is the luxury and the downfall of self-employment.

Third, I rededicated myself to the tea ceremony from Exercise 2, taking part in it Sunday night, Monday morning, and Monday night.

Fourth, I did the first 20 minute chunk of Exercise 3.

Fifth, I attended my first meeting of the Flying Geese Quilters Guild. They are even more impressive in person than they are online. Organized like clockwork. Tables with signs telling you what they're for. People were very friendly, especially when they saw I had a new member name tag. And they gave me an awesome bag just for joining.

But not only do they impress operationally, they are a talented guild. The top eight quilts from their most recent guild challenge won the AQS, Quilt Expo: Ultimate Guild Challenge Quilts competition. And another member placed in the AQS Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial competition. To see pictures of all the winners click here.

The program was a trunk show by Shirley Fletcher, a local applique specialist whose very first quilt, an intense Baltimore Album, won at Paduch and Houston and more. It was neat to see all of her work and she described her creative process very well compared to some other trunk shows I've seen. Apparently she teaches a number of the quilts she showed us at a few different shops around the area, so I'm going to keep my eye out for her.

I'm really glad I didn't blow tonight's meeting off or I wouldn't have made it into next month's workshop with Joe the Quilter (all about "unlocking the creative process") or January's workshop with Katie Pasquini Masopust. They had already filled up a Sunday workshop with KPM and I got the fourth to last spot on the sign up sheet for the Monday workshop. Wow!

The Creativity Book: Exercise 2 - Craft One Ceremony Follow Up

2008-09-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

Not only have I not come up with a ceremony of my own, I haven't continued practicing the ceremony from the book as I planned.

The tea ceremony, as described in the previous post, kind of depends on having a set schedule and plugging this ceremony into that schedule. I work from home in a very unstructured job arrangement, though I used to work in a very scheduled environment where you were expected to arrive on time and leave on time and attend various appointments throughout the day while completing you work in between. Especially since we moved to California I'm having a very difficult time getting into a schedule. I think this is contributing to my lack of creative production.

Robert Genn in one of his great Twice Weekly Letters about the practice of art describes the difference between being creative according to the clock, a workmanlike habit, and tapping into the natural ebbs and flows of creativity.

I feel like due to my lack of a worker's time clock I am failing to take part in even the smallest of these creative exercises. I have all the time in the world, so I have no time for anything.

New week's resolution: get on a schedule and include the creativity ceremony in that schedule.

The Creativity Book: Exercise 2 - Craft One Ceremony

2008-09-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

The last exercise for Week 1 in Eric Maisel's The Creativity Book is to engage in a ceremony that honors your dream and keeps it alive twice a day for three days running, then craft your own small ceremony. Following please find my thoughts on the ritual set forth in the book and crafting my own ceremony.

The ceremony in the book consists of making and drinking tea once in the morning and once at night. While making and drinking am I to say to myself, "I have always dreamed of ..." and fill in the blank. Then I'm supposed to feel the dream brewing in me.

First, an anti-consumerism complaint. The book asks the reader to purchase tea and a special mug dedicated to this ceremony. While I understand that investing money in your dream is one step in making that dream a reality, I feel confident in my ability to throw lots of money at this dream/reality transition without adding to our excessive mug and tea collection. Also, like my dream, to become an artist, the mug doesn't have to be brand new to be important.

Second, I had a hard time feeling the dream brew in me. The book suggests the reader, "just be with their dream, love it, and accept it." The first time around I mostly tried to define my dream, what does my dream of being an artist entail. The second time around I focused on what I've been doing already that could be counted towards my artistness already. The third time around I imagined I was being interviewed twenty years from now for a profile of me as an artist. The fourth time around I imagined I was speaking at my high school twenty years from now about how art connects to everything in my life, like math and history, not just stereotypically artistic things. The fifth time around I had reread the assignment and tried to meditate on the idea that I have always dreamed of being an artist. The sixth time around I examined the sentence, "I have always dreamed of being an artist." I listed adjectives describing dreams and tested them to see how they fit with my specific dream of being an artist.

I'm having a hard time thinking of a different ceremony. I like the tea ceremony. I plan to keep doing it until I come up with something else.

The Creativity Book: Exercise 1b - Name Five Obstacles

2008-09-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

The second exercise in Eric Maisel's The Creativity Book is to name five obstacles that prevent you from realizing your creative potential. Mine are pragmatism, focus, goal management, pain, and fear. For more detailed descriptions, please see click below.

1. Pragmatism. Cooking, cleaning, working to pay the bills, paying the bills, errands, and exercising all seem to be more important than realizing my creative potential. I try to do some of these activities creatively, for example cooking, and I do find some satisfaction in that. But when it comes to following through on projects that don’t rise to this to-do list of life, I have a hard time justifying the time, effort, and money outlay.

2. Focus. I have difficulty focusing on creative tasks. This is particularly challenging when what has to be done is something will take dedicated blocks of time, like machine quilting or binding. I put off this step in the creative process, so then I get a backlog of things that are all waiting for this step. Then I decide I can’t start anything else or work on anything else because then it will just wind up on the Waiting to be Quilted pile. So I freeze up and don’t do anything. I have a humongous pile at the design stage, a big pile at the quilting stage, and a pesky pile and the binding stage and I’m just sitting in the middle of my piles feeling scattered and unsatisfied.

3. Goal management. I started quilting because I like making art that I can give to my friends as gifts and I found friends don’t like 8 foot square paintings as gifts. But they don’t seem to mind 8 foot square bed quilts as gifts. Lots of other reasons too, but that’s the one that relates to goal management. Then I heard about Quilt National . . . and I wanted in. I have to watch this competitive aspect in me because I can quickly slip into Golem from Lord of the Rings mode (Quilt National, my precious) and no good comes of that (i.e., even if I get around to entering something, my chances of being accepted are very small, so then there’s that whole failure thing, and even if I get accepted, my chances of winning are even smaller, so then there’s that whole failure thing). Then all of my friends started breeding like bunnies and now I’m backed up six baby quilts and haven’t thought a thing about Quilt National for too long. But Quilt National is very art quilt focused, while my whole purpose in going into quilting was to make useful art. Can I make art and bedcovers at the same time? Can I make baby quilts in a timely manner and still have time for more ambitious projects?

4. Pain. I have Rheumatoid Arthritis. I was diagnosed about a year after I started quilting. Does a stereotypically old lady art form cause stereotypically old lady diseases? Just kidding. Sort of. Anyway, my point is I can’t machine quilt for 15 hours straight like Mary Buvia. Some days I can’t do the requisite life to-do list, see above re: obstacle number one, without needing to rest, so expending energy on non-necessities seems impossible, though all the RA literature tells me to do just that. I am not entirely sure I can hand quilt or embroider at all anymore, even on good days. Cutting can be difficult. Hand sewing on bindings is really challenging what with maintaining the tension on the binding and the blind hem stitching. I tire easily and some days I’m in too much pain and on too much medication to operate heavy machinery, including my Bernina Aurora 440 QE. I don’t want to sound like I’m dying or anything. But this is a list of obstacles, not the list of how I’m working to overcome these obstacles. I bought Bernina to help me transition to machine quilting from hand quilting as a way to adapt to the RA, and that’s a huge help.

5. Fear. Lots of different kinds of fear. Most immediate is the fear that once I have kids I’ll have no time for creativity and my quilt studio will be converted to a bedroom, I’ll pawn my sewing machine, and the artist within will shrivel up and die. I speculate, wildly, that this happened to my paternal grandmother. She was an artist and she returned to it once she abandoned her family. But while she was actively mommying, all hell broke loose. Probably a lot of factors were at play there, not just her frustrated artistness. Unrelatedly, I also fear that people won’t like my work, either in a gift recipient way or a contest judge way. I’m not so fearful that people will critique my execution, because I can always learn from that and try different means of execution. But I’m fearful people just won’t like my concept, the more subjective aspect, which I’m not sure how to learn from. Tangentially, I'm also afraid that I have no idea what I'm doing with this whole quilting thing and no one has just come out and told me so. It's the Emperor's New Clothes fear. Like I'm going to bring a quilt in for show and tell and the whole guild is going to gasp and then laugh, in an at not a with way. Or even worse, they'll politely clap and let me keep walking through this life deluding myself that I can make quilts. I'll keep getting form rejection letters from quilt shows never knowing it's because I'm tragically bad, not just the best that didn't make the cut. Of course, I've never brought anything to show and tell and I've never entered anything for a show, and I've seen shows and I've seen my quilts and they are at least of the same genus, if not species, so this is really quite irrational. But it's there.

The Creativity Book: Exercise 1a - Write Your Autobiography

2008-09-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

The first exercise in Eric Maisel's The Creativity Book is to write a 2,500 word autobiography. An abridged and hyperlinked version of my autobiography follows.

When I was little and I couldn’t sleep I would tell myself the history of the world starting with the Big Bang. We watched a lot of Nova. I would continue through the primordial soup and the dinosaurs with some ice ages thrown in for good measure. Then do my best with human history starting with Cro-Magnons and working my way through Mesopotamia and Egypt and Greece and Rome. Occasionally I’d try to bring in the rest of the world, weaving in what bits of Africa and Asia I learned in history class, but I have to admit I had a hard time reconciling the timelines of world history. The Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam Conflict, I was born, Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale. But that Reagan bit is skipping ahead.

My parents lived in housing for medical residents across from the hospital where my father was doing his family practice residency. My mother, a nurse, walked across the street when she decided her contractions were close enough. It was a Saturday; the doctor was pleased that the delivery was complete in time for him to go watch his son play high school football.

Next we lived on top of a hill by a lake in Windsor, New York. The low-pile carpet in the dining room was orange and yellow and red. The carpet downstairs in the living room was deep shag in blue-green. Playdoh was harder to get out of the carpet downstairs than it was to get out of the carpet upstairs. My room was pale pink and the floor was cold tile. The light through the windows was blue. The porch off the dining room was wood and might give you slivers. The stairs were covered in bright green Astroturf and were open, so little girls had to be careful or they’d fall between the steps onto the hard concrete patio below. The grass between the patio and the lake was prickly and dry. The road was dirt and rocks and hurt feet even through flip flops. Then there was more grass and then a long dock which was even more splintery than the deck. You did not want to do a sitting dive off that dock. The water was cold and clear and I never touched the bottom.

Then we lived in a big white house on a city block, but not a real city. A village block. If life were a fairy tale this is where I would have lived. When people asked me where I was from I could tell them “Owego, New York.” But it’s not true. I’m not from Owego, New York. I lived there awhile. But I’m not from there. People from Owego, New York, probably don’t know me. I look nostalgically back on it, but that just shows how much more horrible it has been everywhere else. Owego is like my first grade teacher, Miss Scanlon, whose fiancé shared my birthday, whose wedding I sang at, who got frustrated because I could count to 100 but could not tell time, who scolded me for persuading a classmate that the ghost of my recently deceased Great Aunt Lil haunted the gym, who made such a huge impression on me, who didn’t even know who I was when my mother and I bumped into her a few years later. She witnessed my best and my worst and my insanity like no one else, and yet I made no impression on her.

My family moved to Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in August 1987. It was never home. My brother was already away at boarding school and I would follow in two short years. My mother hated the place before we arrived. My father wanted to walk to work and the house was too far away. No one looks nostalgically back on Fitchburg, Massachusetts. That could be the town motto. But if I wrote all the stories of Fitchburg and all the stories of Owego, quantified them as happy/good or sad/bad, I think we’d find that Fitchburg got a bum rap. Sure, it’s where my parents divorced. Sure, it’s where I went through all of those teen movie-of-the-week dramas. Sure, it’s where we gave up the Herculean effort to look like a normal nuclear family. But it is also where we became friends with one another instead of mere actors in the family play. It wasn’t easy, that transition. But if we hadn’t made it through that transition, where would we be now?

I feel sorry for people who can’t speak to their parents as anything but a child. Or siblings who make small talk because that’s all they have in common: the script of polite interaction with total strangers. With all of us in different places it was easy to see that maintaining relationships with one another was a choice. We’d have to find something more to sustain our interactions than mere titles and role-play. This was not conscious on my part. Looking back I can see the steps, rationalize the actions, compile a timeline, and craft the scenes, like it was a progress narrative playing out, the end of my family.

Beside my family’s dissolution there was also my own life. The life that was primary at the time. School and social development, neither of which I executed to my full potential. The timeline of home addresses goes a bit wonky. How do you reconcile boarding school starting at 14? I love it when people realize I went to boarding school and ask me what I did to deserve that. What kind of Dickensian world do they think we live in that boarding school is still a punishment? Granted, it was punishing, but I chose to go there. Staying in Fitchburg and going to public school would have been a far worse punishment, which is something that I wasn’t entirely clear on at the time, how bad it would have been, had I stayed, to witness my parents divorce first hand rather than hear about it like tuning into a soap opera you only watch during the summer, to try to assimilate into public school culture where my intellect and socio-economic class would have been just as inhibiting as they were at boarding school, just the other way around. This is post hoc rationalization for the incredible horror that was boarding school. Like Lord of the Flies, but co-ed.

And then college and more college and grad school and David and law school and the Bureau of Prisons and Indiana and now California. I can keep writing a time line or drawing a map or compiling witticisms about how awful or wonderful it was – a sketch of a photocopy of a photograph taken in the dark. I could focus on the big moments; the traumas that made my psyche what it is today. But I don’t want to. I’ve done it before in other settings and with a therapist. Identifying the moments is a connect-the-dots without the lines. There is no image. Just dots.

So here are some lines. I have had stuff to draw with and sculpt with since I can remember. I used to lie in the grass and make detailed pencil drawings of each blade. I don’t remember anything about Sunday school except that I got to paint on an easel. I spent hours at my neighbors’, Ruth and Sally, coloring in coloring books, well past when that might have been considered age appropriate and probably for many hours longer than I was welcome. My babysitter Cathy taught me to swim, ride a bike, and blend pastels. I tried to carve a wooden duck and discovered, when my dad and I were attaching the head to the body, that I am allergic to wood glue. It burned my skin like fire. A sketch of my friend Todd won some sort award in elementary school and was displayed in the school district’s offices. My paternal grandmother helped me make a stained glass turtle in her studio. My aunt who threw me across the kitchen for eating cookie dough also taught me Japanese calligraphy with ink that starts as a solid brick. I made a futon and a castle in shop and art respectively and felt that both of them were art in their own way. I used the futon as a chair and/or bed for sixteen years. The castle is in a box in the garage right now. While I was in a yearbook meeting I absentmindedly sculpted a grumpy man’s face. I sculpted a clay ear and a metal hand that had nothing to do with one another. I drafted a fan in black ink on white paper and the lines went over the mat and onto the wall. I made a huge orange in architecture class to protect a container of orange juice as I flung it off the top of the library. It ejected the orange juice container, but survived the fall marvelously itself. Based on the same design, I made a huge moon for the dormitory hallway for Halloween. I don’t think one could actually walk past it, it was so large. I took no art courses in college, though I made a six foot tall paper mache fish in my dorm room. I painted the ceiling in David’s room. I made a number of painted bowls. I painted a table. I painted a five-part image of a table with oranges on it. I took about three hundred pictures of Volkswagen Beetles, well before the new version came out. One won an award at the University of Georgia. I sold two more. I made a super-8 film about a girl trapped in a box. I made a super-8 film about a girl in love with another woman who she can’t tell. I made a super-8 film featuring my girlfriend to an Ani DiFranco song. I know. But it was beautiful, especially the shot of the flying seagull. I never edited it together. While in film school I made a collage of the sun from paper cut from magazines. I made a video of a woman cutting off her tongue to color a red velvet cake. After film school I worked at a place called MisterArt.com and made no art at all. Between teaching for The Princeton Review I painted an amazing mural on all four walls of my niece’s nursery. They sold the house shortly thereafter. In law school I painted raindrops splashing in a pool for Georgia Black Women Attorney’s fundraising auction. It sold for $100. In Washington, D.C., I looked through the Smithsonian’s course catalog and found quilting with Jeanne Benson. And that was the rest of my life! I made a single Irish chain for my best man’s first baby. I made an appliqué sampler of the images from the mural for my niece. I made a patchwork pillow for my mom. I made an appliqué pansy for my mother-in-law. I made a patchwork quilt for a law school friend’s baby. I collaged and painted two portraits, one of each of our dogs. In Indiana I joined the Bloomington Quilt Guild and took all their classes in which I started a Sue Spargo quilt and a Mary Buvia quilt and an American Girl Doll quilt. I attended a community quilt in, met a number of lovely ladies including R.J., and started a rail fence quilt. I took classes at the Indiana Heritage Quilt Show in which I started a free-motion machine quilting sampler with Sue Nickels and a lone star quilt with Jan Krentz. I took classes at Shiisa Quilts and started a New York Beauty quilt and a precision pieced quilt and an invisible machine appliqué quilt. I took classes with my sailor aunt and her two daughters at the International Quilt Festival in Rosemont, Illinois, and learned a lot of techniques, but at least I didn’t start any new quilts to add to my unfinished quilts started in classes pile.

I have just moved to California, where I know no one. I searched online for a good quilt guild and I think I’ve found one that’s a good fit, but I haven’t attended it yet. I searched online for a good quilt shop and I think I’ve found one that’s a good fit, but I haven’t gone there yet. In our new home I have a huge studio, but I haven’t unpacked it completely yet.

The Beginning

To Do

2008-09-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Things to do:

Work through Eric Maisel's The Creativity Book.
Quilt Jonathan’s Ella’s quilt.
Start Julia’s Buddy’s bowtie quilt.
Start Rebecca’s quilt.
Finish piecing Nicole’s Will’s quilt.
Start Jennifer’s baby’s quilt.
Quilt Community baby quilt.
Start quilt-block-a-week on B & R’s sampler quilt.
Design Eric's new baby's quilt.
Start Heather's Nola's quilt.
Rinse fabric from Dyeing with Darren class.
Finish appliqueing Rokkaku kite battle quilt.
Quilt Raku pottery quilt.
Make sample sets of batting.
Make sample sets from IQF/Chicago

Books to Get from Library:

Spectacular Scraps by Judy Hooworth
Kirk Varnedoe Pictures of Nothing
Surface Design – a journal; particularly the Fall 2004 issue on Social Conscience and Summer 2004 on Materiality
Simple Sewing with a French Twist by Celine Dupuy
Uncommon Quilter by Jeanne Williamson
Quilts! Quilts!! Quilts!!!: The Complete Guide to Quiltmaking by Diana Mcclun and Laura Nownes
Quilter’s Ultimate Visual Guide: From A to Z–Hundreds of Tips & Techniques for Successful Quiltmaking by Ellen Pahl
Quilter’s Complete Guide by Marianne Fons and Liz Porter
Collaborative Quilting by Fredd Moran and Gwen Marston
Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt by Paul Arnett
Sew Everything Workshop (Spiral-bound) by Diana Rupp (Author)
Sew Fast Sew Easy : All You Need to Know When You Start to Sew (Paperback) by Elissa K. Meyrich
Simplicity: Simply the Best Sewing Book (Plastic Comb) by Anne Marie Soto
Vogue Sewing: Revised and Updated (Vogue Knitting Magazine) (Paperback) by Vogue Knitting Magazine
The Complete Book of Sewing New Edition (Hardcover) by DK Publishing
The American Quilt by Roderick Kiracofe
The Creative Family by Amanda Blake Soule
Art in the Courtroom by Vilis R. Inde

Mission Statement

2008-09-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is a record of my creativity, my attempts to transform my intention into reality. Remember that Tootsie Roll commercial with the jingle, "Everything I think I see, becomes a Tootsie Roll to me!" When I look at the world around me I see art where the singing child in the ad saw Tootsie Rolls. I suspect my frustration lies in my inability to take action based on that inspiration. Here, I intend to exorcise that frustration. Let this be a repository for my curiosity, an aspirational canvas, a viewfinder of renewed potential in all things, a laboratory for inventing private systems and reinventing former skills.