State of the Craft

Two More Gift Quilts

2011-01-27T09:00:00.000-08:00

I gave two quilts for Christmas this year, both of them StormQuilts. SQ#13 started off more or less on a lark, but as it developed I realized that it was both very warm and very wide, both qualities treasured by Mrs.5000. So after I finished it in early December, it mysteriously disappeared until it emerged from under the tree.

It's very warm because it is batted with a quilt -- one of those dubious ones you see at home goods stores, "hand-made" under presumably dreadful conditions and from the cheapest possible materials. This one, found in a raggedy state at "The Bins," was ideal for batting.

The quilting, which I don't have a good picture of, is straight lines down the tan and red columns and a simple curvy dealie that I made a template for down the green columns. Making a template is pretty sophisticated, for me.

SQ#6, meanwhile, had been sitting for a long time on the "unfinished" shelf. When I took it up to my sister's house for Thanksgiving to finish the binding, Niece#3 seemed to bond with it, so it turned into a Christmas present for her.

SQ#6 and SQ#7 are sister quilts, both built around a high-contrast central square medalian. The two medalians are opposites, each made of four triangles cut from the same set of strips.

Whereas SQ#7 ended up square, SQ#6 is a more practical rectangle. Not knowing quite how to quilt the area that had been tacked on to make it rectangular, I just reused the template I had made for SQ#13. Voila!

The Specs

Serial Number: 53.13

Dimensions: 73" x 90"

Batting: Old commercially-made quilt.

Backing: Royal blue flannel. (Although this piece had been sitting around the house for a long time, it was technically not scrap or salvage. But, I wanted it to be extra-comfy for Mrs.5000, so I bent the StormQuilt rules).

Begun: September, 2010

Finished: December, 2010

Intended Use/Display: Gift blanket.

Serial Number: 53.06

Dimensions: 80" x 60"

Batting: Section of an old commercially-made child's quilt.

Backing: A dark green synthetic fabric, once a graduate school roommate's curtains.

Begun: January, 2009

Finished: November, 2010

Intended Use/Display: Gift blanket.

Unquiet Dreams

2011-01-19T22:11:00.000-08:00

I finished Niece #2's coming-of-age quilt, officially titled Unquiet Dreams, back in early December, but thought it polite to hold off showing it here until Herself got a chance to see it. She's had it for a few weeks now, so now it's ready for public inspection.

In terms of design (which I wrote about here) I think it's about as close to unique as you can get with parallel strips at this point in the history of quilting. In terms of construction, it's a mitigated disaster. You can tell that I had terrible problems with cutting on the bias and in getting my geometries lined up properly, and that great bowing in the lower left-hand corner would cost me my quilting license among some serious practitioners of The Craft. The mitigation is that it was intended and received as a quilt for use; it is (despite its look and title) pretty soft and snuggly, with a very cozy flannel back. A very cozy, cherry-red flannel back.

Along with the color palette, the quilting was to Niece #2's specs. I used my own "doodle" style of free-motion machine quilting, which with a seam-spacing of a little under half an inch renders a very comfortable texture. That the quilting is in the form of a single uninterrupted line of extreme convolution and length is also an invitation to the obsessive-compulsive in all of us.

The Specs

Serial Number: 58

Dimensions: 61" x 92", with unfortunate deformations.

Batting: Purpose made medium-loft, 50% cotton, 50% bamboo fiber.

Backing: Red mottled flannel.

Begun: September, 2010

Finished: December, 2010

Intended Use/Display: Gift.

I Will Never Make a Quilt This Bad Again

2010-11-07T19:30:00.000-08:00

...I mean, maybe I'll make one that you think is uglier, but I doubt I will reach such technical depths again.

I used to number my quilts when I started them, instead of when I finished them. Since this one I just finished is #35 -- when Purple & Blue was #57 -- you can get a sense of how long it was in the hopper. In fact I started it sometime in 2001.

In fact, I started them in 2001. They were to be four separate panels, roughly 2 1/2 feet square, each representing one of the four seasons. The plan [over there to the right] was kind of mathematical, with central strips of eight inches flanked outwards with strips of four inches, two inches, one inch, a half inch, and a quarter inch. Then there would be a "central" piece one diagonal space from the center, and an around-the-world type cycle around that.

Oh, and this was going to be my big adventure in hand quilting, too. I had never done any, so it was my big opportunity to learn and practice the ancient and venerable art, etc. etc.

Well. Progress was brisk in the early going, and within only three years I had fall and winter pieced out.

Occasionally, I did a little hand quilting on them. But not very often. The project petered out. Then, in 2007, I pieced the other two seasons. And then, nothing. They've been a perennial "to do" item ever since, but never one I had any particular enthusiasm for.

This September, I realized that I really don't have any interest in hand quilting, nor in tripping over the quilting hoops all the time. I tossed them in a free box, then turned my attention to the Four Seasons. "Why on Earth," I thought, "would anyone, including me, want a quartet of panels that had to be hung separately but in a set?" Not being able to come up with an answer, I went about a highly jerry-rigged process of sewing them together into one single unattractive wall hanging! Here it is:

You'll note that it already looks a little dated; that's what happens when you spend nine years. Nor do the color value schemes quite match; they weren't intended to be seen that close together. I had fun with the wacky spiral quilting, after ripping out the hand quilting. But it's obviously cobbled together; check out the amazingly un-square bottom edge (it's worse viewed from the back, since the four panels weren't even backed with the same fabric). What really slays me, though, is the elegant center join:

Well, live and learn. The point is, it's finished.

Dimensions: 48" x 46" (Not square!)

Batting: Assorted.

Backing: Two different kinds of dark blue.

Begun: 2001, 2004, and 2007

Finished: October, 2010

Intended Use/Display: I have no idea.

Mail Quilt Lucre

2010-10-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

I got very small quilt in the mail this summer from my quilting buddy Jennifer!

I know she is not the first person to do this, but I was impressed both by the zippy little miniature and by how well it worked. There was nothing to stiffen it -- it just used regular batting -- but the intrepid employees of the USPS endured whatever rain, snow, sleet, and hail necessary to get it from Keystone State to Beaver State. Sweet!

Thanks, Jennifer!

Mondrian I

2010-10-04T20:50:00.000-07:00

It has been sitting around almost-done for a long time, but a few weeks ago I finished the piece I'm calling "Mondrian I." It's a rendering of Mondrian's Composition in Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black in scrap corduroy. This is admittedly kind of a weird concept, but... well, you be the judge, jury and executioner. The title "Mondrian I" kind of gives away the secret that I'm thinking of doing more Mondrianana.*

Here's the real deal, right, for a point of comparison. The altered palette was driven mostly by the particular box of scrap fabric that happened to wash up in my attic -- a large box worth found by Mrs.5000 at an estate sale for a buck a few years back -- but I think really gives the fabric rendition a nice identity all its own. The quilting follows the nap of the corduroy at roughly the width of the black framing pieces, all of which are cut so that their grain runs up-and-down, regardless of whether they are horizontal or vertical pieces.

Dimensions: 58" x 58"

Batting: A thin mattress pad from "the bins" -- this is a 100% scrap-and-salvage quilt.

Backing: A sheet of scrap khaki.

* I made up this word! Like it?

The Quilt for Niece #2: Design Development.

2010-09-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

Last week, I talked a little about how I interviewed Niece #2 about her quilt preferences in order to come up with this plan for her graduation quilt.

(I didn't mention that I drew the above while thinking with Caspar David Friedrich's The Wreck of the Hope on my mind, mostly because I forgot but also because people sometimes look at you funny if you mention art-historical influences for quilt designs).

Anyway, with the basic concept in place, the next step was to figure out the relative widths of the strips. One option was just cutting them all to the same width and fudging the angles, but we're talking about Niece #2 here and I wanted to shoot a little higher than that. To help me get the geometries right, I used simple graphics software to overlay a more exact pattern over the original sketch.

This seemed pretty good, but I wondered if I could create a sense of depth by making the top "shard" with thinner strips. I came up with this:

I checked with N#2, and she agreed that this second version was better.

After that came the torturous application of high-school geometry, as I experimented with different strip widths. Ultimately, and despite the numbers on the above mock-up, I decided that making the vertical black-white strips 3.25 inches wide will yield the right size of blanket. That makes the stripes of the three shards, from bottom to top, 2.9, 2.3, and 1.45 inches wide, not exactly measurements that are marked on your standard quilting rulers. Cutting the fabric involved quite a bit of eyeballing, with some help from this "annotated" mockup:
At this point, I have lots of strips cut long, and a vague hope that I'll actually be able to tie all those weird angles together. Maybe it will be easy? But I totally doubt it.

Devil's Claw

2010-09-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

A Collaboration With a Stranger from an Earlier Generation

In September 2007, I wrote about a "salvage mission" to make something out of a set of 20 hand-pieced blocks, almost certainly from the 1930s, that I had discovered in a box of scrap fabric. They were, as I said at the time, nothing objectively special:

the craftsmanship is moderate at best, the fabric quality was poor to begin with and has not improved with age.... They are neither uniform in size nor especially square. Any given side can vary between 12 and 14 inches.... Nor do I have any idea who made them; certainly no one with any connection to me or my family.

And it was love at first sight.

Two months later, I had worked out a quilt face using sixteen of the blocks. And then things slowed down dramatically. With fabric as poor as all that -- you can see my green desktop right through that muslin, did you notice -- I knew the quilting was going to have to be pretty dense and pretty structural to keep the thing from disintegrating within a few years. For a year, I was too hesitant to even begin quilting. Then, at some point, I quilted in the basic grid, but still balked at working within the individual blocks.

Last spring, I finally bit the bullet. It was a lot of work, and lasted me through a couple of classic novels on tape. By June, though, the quilting was finished, and I was able to take the piece on a vacation with my wife's family to bury threads and finish the binding. Sometime in the summer, I made a sleeve for it. And last Friday, I was finally able to hang it.

So here we are:

Here's a little more detail:

An individual block:

And here's a look at what I came up for a quilting pattern. Eight-pointed stars and pentagons!

I am, I'm afraid, quite pleased with myself. I'm going to be a bit quilt-insufferable for a while. I just wish my collaborator, whoever she (presumably) was (almost certainly), could share the moment.

Dimensions: 86" x 86"

Batting: Commercial low-loft cotton

Backing: A subtle white-on-white calico, which is the same fabric used in the latticework on the quilt face.

A Quilt is Born

2010-09-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

When Niece #1 graduated from high school, I set a precedent to launch all four of my favorite young punks into adult life with, you know, a blankie. Now it's #2's turn. I sent her a collection of my quilts (with a few of Rebel's thrown in for good measure) and had her tell me what she liked and didn't like.

Things that N#2 like include stripes, asymmetry, and a look inspired by modernism. Sweet! They also include black and red, which are the only two colors of fabric that I do not have coming out of my ears. For the first time in a couple of years, I will actually have to buy short lengths of fabric. But that's OK.

After some fussing with graph paper, I had two designs I liked. They are not something I myself would want to sleep under -- hence the working titles -- but hey, I'm not Niece #2.

UnQuiet Dreams #1

UnQuiet Dreams #2

N#2 has given the nod to the second -- as I'd hoped! -- so at some point I will be moving into fabric acquisition mode. Probably it will become "UnQuiet Dreams," dropping the "#2", and "UnQuiet Dreams #1" will disappear into the vast literature of quilts that never happened. But who knows?

The 2010-11 PreSeason List

2010-09-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

2009 - 2010 feels pretty much like the quilt season that didn't happen, but I don't think that' entirely true. We'll see! In this post, I've just copied last year's Pre-Season list over, and we'll just sort of annotate it in color to make this year's list and to get a sense of what happened over the last 12 months.

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First Priority

Top priorities to finish this year. It would be nice to get ALL of these done.

Devil's Claw -- This is one I've talked about a lot in the last few years. The face is complete, and it's been pinned, so it just needs quilting and binding. "Just." -- Well! This took a lot of quilting! But I'm happy to say that it is only half a sleeve from finished. I'll probably finish it next time I watch a movie.

Jennifer Challenge -- Me and my friend Jennifer both bought a set of fabrics, and she is currently putting the hanging sleeves on the quilt she made with hers. I started cutting and piecing mine last night. I need to catch up, or Jennifer will hurt me. -- Finished!

Mondrian I -- My awesome (if I do say so myself) reproduction of a Mondrian painting in scrap corduroy. The face is finished, so it needs a back, some batting, and some quilting. -- This one only needs a sleeve.

Symbol -- Another one I've talked about a lot here. The face background is complete. I need to select a fabric for the symbol and finish the face. -- The face is mostly finished, but I pinned it to the back and batting before remembering the symbol's diacritical marks. Shouldn't be a problem.

StormQuilts -- I have four of these on the First Priority list, but I won't belabor the details. -- I finished three of those four.

So that's really not so bad in the first tier. In fact, it's so good that we'll STOP RIGHT THERE and ignore the Second, Third, and Forth Priority Quilt goals. You can see them here, and for the most part, nothing whatsoever happened with them. So either I was good at identifying my priorities, or disciplined in pursuing them.

So let's say the main priorities this year are:

1) Finish and show the Devil's Claw

2) Finish and show Mondrian #1

3) A New Project: Design and Create a Quilt for Niece #2

4) A New Project: Design and Create a Wedding Quilt for Austin and Vida

5) Finish the Symbol

6) Finish SQ #6

7) Finish SQ #13

8) Finish the mess that the Four Seasons Project turned into (I'll talk about this later).

And then see what's down there in the other priorities. Meanwhile, of course, I can always

9) Zip out SQs #14+ if I feel like it.

That seems ambitious enough for now.

Season Opener: SQ#13 is Off and Running

2010-09-04T20:09:00.001-07:00

It's the opening Saturday of the college football season, and therefore of course opening day of the 2010-2011 Quilting Season! Unfortunately, my #1 team is under suspension, but my emergency backup team, Oregon State, put up a pretty good fight against #6 TCU.

As the pregame rigmarole was happening, I thought about some various season-opening tasks I could do, such as getting a mental inventory of projects in progress, coming up with a list of ideas for new projects, or even just organizing fabrics. But then I thought -- no, I just get some momentum going. I want to some good old fashioned cutting and sewing without thinking too hard.

So here's a one-game face for a new Storm Quilt -- It will be SQ#13.

Now this is obviously not a masterpiece, but I love it because it's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of when I came up with the QuiltStorm idea. It is, of course, made of scrap and salvage. The green is from a piece of salvage that's been around for years, the red is a poly/cotton gingham that I bought at 50 cents for 2 3/4 yards at an estate sale last weekend, and the beige was a sheet with a big hole in it that Mrs.5000 brought home out of a freebox earlier in the week. The thread was garage-sale C&C -- from your garage sale, Sarah, if you're reading this. The batting and back are still to come, but they'll be salvage too.

But more to the point, it was FAST. The StormQuilts were supposed to be made simply and quickly, but I immediately started getting fussy and reducing the scale of the pieces. That takes time. Whereas, a full-size quilt top that can be conceived, cut, sewn, and pressed during four quarters of football -- that's fast enough to deserve the "storm" appellation.

Game on, people!

StormQuilt #12: Finished

2010-06-05T21:55:00.000-07:00

After I finished Purple and Blue last week, I did a little straightening up in my project room and was surprised to see how far along so many projects were. The goofiest example was the twelfth of the QuiltStorm series, QS#12, which was finished except for perhaps 45 minutes of thread-burying. In a rare sun-break -- the City of Roses has been having record-breaking rain this spring -- I took it out on the back porch and finished it up.

Like all of the StormQuilts, it is made out of 100% scrap and recycled materials. In this case, the face and binding are all scrap corduroy. As if that wasn't heavy enough already, I batted it with an old mattress pad. The backing is an old dark blue flannel sheet from a set we discarded last year. Definitely a winter-weight piece.

It's 72" x 48" and quilted exactly like you see in the picture. It has been fun to work in corduroy (I used fabric from the same batch of scraps in SQ11 and in the Mondrian Quilt (which is basically finished except for a hanging sleeve -- another project that has been sitting around teetering on the edge of finished)). Whoops, got lost in my parentheses there. What I meant to say is, it has been fun to work in corduroy because it takes quilting really well. Your lines really stand out in it.

I've been getting some serious quilting on, and I'm going to be able to put some more time into a couple pieces over the next week, so hopefully there will be a parade of smug little "finished" posts occasionally this summer!

Purple and Blue

2010-05-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

Here's my first finished piece in however long. I don't really have a name for it, other than Purple and Blue. It's officially Quilt #57 (although it's probably about the 70th quilt I've made. Long story). It measures 69" x 90". And it looks pretty flat & dull here -- my wife ran off for the week with the good camera.

The "inspiration," such as it was, was an attempt to clear out some space in my drawers of blues and purples. Anything scrappy that was longish and narrowish got cut into two-inch strips. I sewed those strips together pretty randomly end-to-end to good a big heap of 100" strips. Here they are hanging on a bamboo pole in the quilt room.

Once I had enough strips, I just laid them out in the hall, making sure that no two pieces of the same fabric were too close to each other, and that none of the join seams in the strips lined up too closely.

After that, it was just a matter of sewing the thing together. It's backed with three pieces of cheap blue and grey flannel sewn together, and batted with a scrap bedspread I found for a pittance at a thrift store. The quilting just follows the vertical grain, with two lines about 1/4 inch from the edge of each strip. It is heavy, and cozy, and is probably the best-looking quilt per hour of time invested I've ever made.

He Lives...

2010-05-20T20:28:00.001-07:00

I've been sneaking in a little quilting...

This Blog is Under Wraps

2009-12-31T21:40:00.000-08:00

State of the Craft is currently inactive. I am still quilting, but at a fairly slow pace for the time being, and I am somewhat out of touch with the wider quilting community.

I will likely feel like writing about quilts and quilting again some time in the future. In the meantime, if you feel like following my various adventures -- including, possibly, quilting -- I publish pretty much daily at The Life & Times of Michael5000.

SQ11: Finished

2009-11-10T20:43:00.000-08:00

You saw the face of this one last year, but here it is completed. It's made from salvage denim, backed with green cotton material that was probably curtains in its past life, and batted with an old poly blanket. It is nothing if not warm.

The quilting is pretty visible here, and simply followed the -- what's the word I'm looking for? -- the grain of the corduroy. ~~I'll point out, too, that the photograph makes it look yellower than it really is, which makes it look a little dirty, which it isn't.~~ UPDATE: I got a better photograph, so the colors aren't all yellowed out now. The blue and gray is actually pretty sharp in person. If I do say so myself.

Quilting the Jennifer Challenge

2009-10-28T23:31:00.001-07:00

I did virtually no quilting in September and the bulk of October, mostly because I was doing other interesting and worthwhile things instead. Started edging back up to speed this week by quilting the Jennifer Challenge. I decided on the quilting pattern rather spur-of-the-moment, and I'm making all of those curves with a walking foot. Seems to be working....

The Jennifer Challenge

2009-08-30T18:21:00.000-07:00

In the last post I mentioned the "Jennifer Challenge," which my friend Jennifer seems to think of as the "Michael Challenge," where we both bought six fabrics about a year ago and did the obvious thing. And now both of us have finished the faces, and have finally revealed to each other what we've been working on all this time. I think you will agree with us that they are, as Jen put it, "freakishly similar."

Here's one:

And here's the other, not yet quilted:

Are we peas in a pod, or what?

The 09-10 PreSeason List

2009-08-16T18:54:00.000-07:00

Well, it's August, and right on schedule I'm starting to get interested in quilting again. I even did a little piecing last night. That means it's time for the list that I always make this time of year, my priorities for the coming quilt season. It's a long list, but then you probably understand that. There are always so many more quilt ideas than there is time or energy to make actual quilts.

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First Priority

Top priorities to finish this year. It would be nice to get ALL of these done.

Devil's Claw -- This is one I've talked about a lot in the last few years. The face is complete, and it's been pinned, so it just needs quilting and binding. "Just."

Jennifer Challenge -- Me and my friend Jennifer both bought a set of fabrics, and she is currently putting the hanging sleeves on the quilt she made with hers. I started cutting and piecing mine last night. I need to catch up, or Jennifer will hurt me.

Mondrian I -- My awesome (if I do say so myself) reproduction of a Mondrian painting in scrap corduroy. The face is finished, so it needs a back, some batting, and some quilting.

Symbol -- Another one I've talked about a lot here. The face background is complete. I need to select a fabric for the symbol and finish the face.

StormQuilts -- I have four of these on the First Priority list, but I won't belabor the details.

Second Priority

Second Priority quilts would be awfully nice to finish this year, but hey, I'm realistic. Hopefully, I'll make some solid progress on these, at least.

Mondrian II -- Already have it picked out!

A Couple of Child Blankets -- For some children of my acquaintance. If I was a good person, these would be First Priority.

Labyrinth II -- Most of the cutting is done for this sequel. I started the assembly, but ran into problems. I need to do some thinking and figure out how to get it going forward again.

Four Seasons -- I thought this was the world's oldest UFO, but I recently learned about an even older one. But it's MY oldest UFO.

StormQuilts -- I have three more of these on the Second Priority List

Third Priority

If I blast through the above and have time left over -- an unlikely prospect at best -- I might take on one of these. Or, I might putter with one from time to time with the idea of having it ready for serious attention next year.

The Legacy Quilt -- One I've talked about, but haven't done much with.

Labyrinth III -- I haven't even designed this one yet. I just like the idea of doing more Labyrinths.

A Project I'm not ready to tell you about.

Another Project I'm not ready to tell you about.

However many additional StormQuilts would get me to the ultimate goal of twenty.

Fourth Priority

Fourth Priority is a holding pen for ideas I hope to work on sometimein the future. For now, I'll just give you the working titles:

The Sarah Horowitz inspired light on light-light design

Requilting my own baby quilt

Oregon Map II

Yet Another Project I'm not ready to tell you about.

And Another One.

A wall hanging using my mom's Silhouette technique.

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There you have it! More quilting than I could possibly accomplish! Let's see how far I get!

What are YOUR quilt goals for the coming fall and winter?

SQ7: Finished

2009-07-29T17:44:00.000-07:00

It's not technically quilt season, and in fact nobody's doing much of anything right now while a massive cloud of superheated steam rests sullenly atop the City of Roses. But last week I got a sudden burst of quilting mojo and, over the course of three or four nights, did the quilting and binding for StormQuilt #7. And here it is:

Again, like all of the StormQuilts, this one is made completely from scrap and salvage materials. Here's a detail showing the squiggly quilting, which came back to me pretty easily despite not having practiced for the better part of a year.

Then, having finished that, I put all my sewing stuff back away for another month or so. This little burst of activity was kind of like the "exhibition season" before quilt season kicks off in earnest at the beginning of September. Until then, I'll be continuing a gradual deep-clean of my studio space and planning out my quilt priorities for the fall. See ya then!

Summer Recess

2009-06-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

State of the Craft is off on blog vacation for the summer! Publication will likely resume in September with the beginning of the 2009-2010 Quilt Year!

The Northwest Quilters 2009 Show

2009-05-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

A few of you who have Reader know I wrote this a month ago, but never got around to adding the pictures. Check me out! I'm catching up!

Last year, I wanted to display quilts in as many shows as possible. Really, it seems like I spent half of the spring either attending a quilt show or on my way to drop off or retrieve a quilt. This year, not so much.

In fact, I've been a real quilting hermit. There were a couple of days when I couldn't make it to my guild's meeting because of a schedule conflict, and after that they had programs scheduled that were way too -- for lack of a better word -- girly. I'm just not into, for instance, learning how to make a quilted purse. Call me crazy. After a while, I hadn't had contact with the guild for half a year.

So I was out of the loop enough to forget that the guild's annual show would be in early spring this year, instead of early summer. By the time I caught on, it was way too late to submit work. But, I had just enough wherewithal to get my name in as a volunteer. I was what they used to call a "white glove lady" but which they were this year just calling "white glove." I appreciated the change.

And here's the thing: the show was awesome! In terms of organization and of the quality of work, it was easily among the best three shows I've ever seen. It got great press, and probably three times the number of guests as we had in recent years. So, that made me think that maybe I want to be less of a quilting hermit now, and get back into the community. It kind of inspired me, like. We'll have to see if the inspiration really "takes" or not, but in the meantime I've submitted a few of last year's quilts to be shown at the big summer outdoor show in Sisters.

I took several photos at the show based on gut response -- these are just a few of the ones I liked the best, with no particular reasoning applied.

The "I Would Never Make One Like This, But I Love It Anyway" Category

"Lady Liberty," pieced by Carol Brown, quilted by Carol Parks.

"Carley (Prairie Flower)" by Marjorie Rhime

"Most Amazing Story" Category

...and the story:

"These Quilts Give Me Ideas" Category

"Nine Blue Characters," pieced by Ann Johnston, quilted by Oswego Quilters.

"Batik Woven Star," pieced by Trudi Luther, quilted by Barbara Schulenburg.

"No Payne No Gain," by Maureen Orr Eldred.

Bins and Bottlenecks

2009-03-31T22:54:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to get back to work on a more formal quilt, and leave the StormQuilts be for a little bit. But that didn't work out. It turned out that I had so many StormQuilts laid out but not quilted that I didn't have any safety pins left to get the backing and binding on the quilt I wanted to make progress on, Devil's Claw.

One solution, obviously, would have been to go out and buy some more safety pins, but that seemed like it would just be contributing to my habit of leaving things half-finished. So I took the other approach, and jumped back into quilting on the StormQuilts. And, it's been going pretty well. I've got one that's finished, another that's finished except for the thread-burying, and one that is 3/4 quilted. I'll get some pictures of those to you next time.

Meanwhile, I went on an excursion to address another bottleneck -- battings for the StormQuilts. I made another excursion down to "The Bins," our Goodwill Outlet Store that blurs the line between rummage sale shopping and dumpster diving. For a pittance, I filled the back of my truck with blankets, fleeces, heavy flannel sheets, and mattress pads that seemed too damaged or discolored to find a new home in their first life. Two of the blankets were faded commercial quilts, the kind that are made on the cheap in China and sold in department stores. I like the idea of using a worn-out commercial quilt as the batting in a StormQuilt -- it's a nice twist on the historical practice of using old quilts to bat the new.

The heap of scrap batting, after washing, burying my ironing board and sewing table:

The heap of scrap batting, tamed, pressed, and folded:

More Fun With Corduroy

2009-03-21T19:59:00.000-07:00

Well, you can't use all your scrap corduroy replicating famous works of art, of course. Here's a quick face I made with other pieces from my Big Birthday Box o'Corduroy.

Like a lot of my quilts it's an "original design" that I doodled out on scratch paper -- but, since it's so simple, I'm sure that tens of thousands of other people have had the same idea before me. Probably it's a traditional quilt pattern with a long-established name. Possibly you are itching to tell me what its name is in the comments, even now.

Kind of a handsome one, I think. It's officially designated StormQuilt #11.

Speaking of How Hard It Is to Do Something Original...

I've been walking around all week feeling I was possibly the cleverest person ever born to have thought of replicating an abstract painting with scrap fabric. Well, of course I'm not the first person to think of that. It turns out, in fact, that frequent commentor Jovaliquilts' daughter did the same thing for her first ever quilt. Also, Jovali Jr. did a better job than me of matching the colors of her original (although, to be fair to myself, I guess I wasn't really worried about color matching).

Here is Jovali Jr.'s quilt....

and Here is the painting she replicated, Ellsworth Kelly's Colors for a Large Wall.

Neoplasticism 2.0

2009-03-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Synchronicity, part 1

So last summer Mrs.5000 found this big box of scrap corduroy for a buck at a garage sale and hefted it home a good mile or something so she could give it to me for my birthday. Mrs.5000 understands me.

Meanwhile, in 1921, Piet Mondrian painted one of his famous grids of rectangles and primary colors. (Neoplasticism, I think the genre is called. The de Stijl movement! i iz likes art history.) This particular one is usually called Composition in Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

And so eventually the idea of "What shall I do with the corduroy?" rattling around in my head ran up hard against the idea of "you know, of all the painting genres, the de Stijl stuff is the one that would be most susceptable to a treatment in quilt form. From that collision was born a Bee in my Bonnet*, which involved compulsive internet searches for the simpler of Mondrian's work and appraising sorting of my corduroy trove.

Once I found Composition, I transferred its grid onto graph paper, made some very rough color equivalences, and started cutting. And when I say "rough" color equivalences, I mean a not-as-light-as-it-could be grey for white, burgandy for red, golden tan for yellow, and a dark, greenish blue for blue.

Nevertheless, I am very happy with my little "Mondrian Quilt" face. Indeed, I bet its one of the best adaptations of Mondrian in scrap corduroy to have been achieved on the West Coast this year!

Next question: how am I going to quilt this sucker? I guess I'll have to try to be guided by the obvious question: How would Mondrian quilt it?

Also:

The is the 100th State of the Craft post. Huzzah!

Arguably, It's Time to Get Organized

2009-03-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

I've been a very different kind of quilter this year than I was in 2007-2008. Last year, I was all about putting quilts in shows and being part of the community, and I had this detailed work plan that I actually followed. This year, I haven't even been attending Guild meetings, let alone putting pieces in shows. I haven't been nearly as interested as creating my best work, but rather on just playing around with recycled materials. And although I've still been quilting, it has been sporadic and on random projects, sometimes new ideas that I just plunged halfway into as soon as I had them. All this has been to such an extent, in fact, that I had lost track of how many projects were even in the hopper.

I spent a half hour this afternoon doing a little project census, and the results are sobering. In addition to about 20 "regular" projects in progress, I've got a whopping seven (7) StormQuilts in some stage of assembly. Which is kind of crazy. But now at least I have a list of what I'm working on, and can maybe concentrate my efforts a little bit.

This beast over on the right is the face for SQ10, which I made about a month ago. It was jointly inspired by Quilty's success with using t-shirt fabric and a purge of my overflowing drawer of well-past-prime shirts. I had no interest in preserving the designs on the shirts as such, so just cut all of the useable fabric into 8 1/2" squares. I do like the way that the ghosts of the lettering and logos from the shirts creates a little extra visual interest, though.

As you'd expect from t-shirt fabric, there is some serious limpness going on here. I will need to back it with something relatively stiff, I think, to keep the end product from being a completely shapeless mass.

I Still Quilt, Encore

2009-02-09T19:59:00.000-08:00

So, the quilting action here at studio5000 continues to be mostly focused on the scrap/recycled "StormQuilts," which is good because my mother unloaded another zillion yards of scrap fabric from her collection earlier tonight. I'm going to have to keep making StormQuilts just to keep liveable space in the house, tucked in among the fabric storage.

Some of you were interested to see what would happen with the complementary squares I cut for SQ6&7. Well, here's SQ7 (I think), which has three borders and is rectangular. It's a little hard to see the edges, but the lighter blue is actually the batting, in this case a beat-up old child's blanket.

And here's SQ6, which I think is fairly handsome for a piece made from salvage materials. It reminds me of VERY old-school quilts -- not 100, but 200 years ago. It is pinned out and ready for quilting, but I have no idea how I'll tackle that.

I HAVE been quilting on SQ5, though. It is all green, and I thought I'd get brave and experiment with free-motion. I feel pretty positive about the results, at least on top; there are some really ugly tangles underneath that I choose not to show you at this juncture.

But how 'bout them leaves? I'll go back at the end and double or triple the main "vine," so it doesn't look so scrawny compared to the leaves.

Meanwhile, inspired by this post from the Libster, I turned a purge of my closet into raw material for QS10 (or thereabouts). Quilty says that working with knits wasn't so hard after all, so nine ratty old t-shirts went under the knife. I'll let you see how that all works out.

I Still Quilt

2009-01-18T10:59:00.000-08:00

So, yeah, I'm still quilting. In general, I've been paying less attention to fancy designed quilts this year, and more on the recycled scrappy quilts. Not that I've entirely abandoned the designed quilts -- there are three of them that I putter with from time to time -- but when I've sat down to quilt I've just generally felt like doing something quick and easy. And there's nothing quicker and easier than pieceing together one of the StormQuilts.

State of the StormQuilts

People often tell me that the StormQuilts -- those are my scrap, salvage, and recycled lap blankets, remember -- are terrific. Then they pause and ask, "but what are you going to DO with them?" An excellent question, and one I didn't really have a great answer for. This little crisis was resolved by Christmas, when I gave the four completed SQs away to siblings and in-laws. To dignify them just a bit, and to explain them, I made this label for them first:

And, it seemed to work, in the sense that no one angrily threw the offered quilt down and shouted that they were insulted. Plus, it made for a very economical Christmas!

Meanwhile, the production of new StormQuilts grinds unstopably forward. Heres' one, SQ9 if memory serves, pinned out.

And here's the simplest yet, yet also possibly my favorite. It's SQ8, I think.

And then here's the slightly more complicated centers for SQ6&7....

...or SQ7&6....

Yesterday, I pieced these centers together and put a couple of borders around SQ6. It's quite handsome, and I'm sure I'll be showing it to you soon.

Of course, this reintroduces the question of "What am I going to DO with these?" Well, we'll find out eventually I guess.

It's Christmas! (2004)

2008-12-24T16:07:00.000-08:00

When I was at my sister's house for Thanksgiving, I finally managed to get a photograph of a blanket I made for her -- four Christmases ago, already.

Here it is:

Oops, wait. Wrong side. That's me (left) and Niece #3 (right) holding that sucker up, so that Mrs.5000 could take THIS picture:

So. Obviously, it's kind of an old-fashioned and very simple pattern, both chosen to match my sister's aesthetic. This was before I started making scrap & recycle quilts, but a lot of the fabrics here, especially in the nine-patches, is from very old scraps that I had come across. The quilting, which you can't really see here, isn't bad -- this is probably the first quilt where I really tried to make the quilting a decorative element.

I used some of the extra pieces from this project to make a smaller lap blanket as a present for my inlaws:

So, that's that.

Merry Christmas 2004!

And 2008!

Finished: "Batik Boxes"

2008-12-03T22:35:00.000-08:00

There has been relatively little actual quilting going on lately, but the annual Thanksgiving family-chatter-and-handwork downtime let me finish off one that was threatening to become a perenial UFO. It's called Batik Boxes, and it's one that I also bought the material for and designed (in that order) on a Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving 2004, it says here in my notes. It was maybe 20% quilted at the beginning of this quilting season, so in the scheme of things it came together fairly quickly.

I've long thought of this one as a bit of an ugly duckling, so I was surprised to get quite a few family complements on it. But then, they're family! What are they going to say?

I had intended to do a dense stippled quilting of the orangish fabric, but recently abandoned that idea as more work than the quilt was worth. However, I will say that the workmanship is not at all bad, by my standards. It's likely the last piece I'll quilt "in the ditch" for a while -- I've found I much prefer quilting "near the ditch" -- but I was pleased by how consistently I was able to keep most of the stitches actually in the ditch, without slowing to a crawl.

[The back, with a book on it so that the camera could figure out how to focus.]

The pieceing, which happened a few years ago, was certainly easy. It was just a matter of cutting the two fabrics into two-inch wide strips, sewing the strips together in pairs, cutting lengths in increments of 3 inches + seam allowances, and sewing them back together like so to make the blocks:

The only tricky part was making sure to make the same number of blue-centered and orange-centered blocks.

(illustration made with my favorite quilt design software, Microsoft Excel)

Sara and Patrick's Wedding Quilt: Finished

2008-11-03T23:19:00.000-08:00

So this is the gift quilt that I've been working on for the last couple of months. I finished it Saturday evening and gave it away at the wedding Sunday afternoon.

It's a fun, simple graphic pattern, cheerful and hopefully in line with the aesthetic of our friend the bride.

Noteworthy aspects of this one from a construction perspective are:

it went fast. Without focusing all my effort on this one quilt, I nevertheless managed to whup it out much faster than I've ever made a full sized blanket before.

it's the second quilt I created with the help of my "Pre-Design Chromatic Evaluation Instrument"! The two key design criteria were (a) the bride likes jewel tones on a light background, and (b) I needed to work fast.

The original plan called for a simple border rectangle, but I decided to scrap that idea in favor of an unusually wide binding. Hopefully, the wide binding won't turn out to cause structural problems.

It's backed in royal blue flannel for those chilly Portland evenings.

The Symbol Background

2008-10-29T21:27:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I finalized the design for Symbol, which you might remember looks something like this:

A few weeks ago, I also finished putting together the background that the symbol is going to sit on top of.

Those fabrics are a set that my sister picked out as a Christmas gift a few years ago, and when I saw them I immediately knew I wanted to applique something big and red over them. Except, now that everything is ready, I'm not as sure about the "red" part anymore. I haven't actually started placeing fabrics up against it yet -- that will be how the decision really gets made, of course -- but I've tinkered around on the computer a little bit, wondering how various colors would look....

Michael5000 Gets Press

2008-10-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a very small town, and I like to enter quilts in the fall shows there and in a few of the neighboring communities. My mom still lives there, so it's kind of fun to have our stuff showing together.

I put Labyrinth in the hometown guild show this year, and ended up with a mention in the local newspaper -- a first, as far as I can remember, for anything to do with quilting. The article gamely tried to be enthusiastic and descriptive, but was written (I suspect) by a non-quilter for a general audience, and so has lots of charmingly meaningless sentences like "Vibrant reds, greens, oranges and blues competed for attention alongside more subuded pinks and pastel tones" and "One visitor... was overheard saying that the exhibition was like being in an art gallery."

My entry was, I'm proud to say, selected for a list of quilts that were singled out for special mention. Most of the quilts on this short list got a one-word description, such as "bedazzling." Labyrinth was described as "mind-wandering." I've never heard "mind-wandering" used as an adjective before, but what the heck. It's praise! I think! I'll take it!

QS#3: Done

2008-10-05T22:25:00.000-07:00

It's not exactly a finish to write home about, but it's the first finish of the 2008-09 Season, so here I am blogging about it.

This here is QuiltStorm #3. (Last seen here.)

QS#3, the fourth (!) StormQuilt to be completed, is batted with an old mattress pad and backed with some sort of stretchy, slightly slippery synthetic fabric. Using this unfamiliar material was what gave my quilting on this project such a, shall we say, singular aspect. I think what happened was that when I pinned the backing fabric out taut, its elasticity let me stretch it out quite a bit. Then, after the pinning, it snapped back to its smaller relaxed state. This means that the area of the face is quite a bit greater than the area of the back, which in turn means extreme puffiness on the quilt front.

It was difficult to get the quilting right under these circumstances -- and in fact, I didn't. It is without question the worst technical quilting I've ever done. But I learned a lot from dealing with the challenge, which is what QuiltStorm is all about. And, in a kind of sloppy, naive sort of way, I actually kind of like how it looks. I'm not crazy about how distorted the overall shape of the blanket is, but the crazy puffiness is kind of fun.

Other projects are coming right along! See ya soon!

The Boring Progress Report

2008-09-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

Why boring? No pictures, that's why.

The Wedding Quilt. Has been coming together right on schedule. I will be putting the finishing touches on it the face this week. But I don't like showing pictures of wedding quilts before I give 'em away. So.

Batik Boxes. It has been a long time since I thought this would be an interesting quilt. I just want to finish it now to get it DONE. I guess it's been long enough since I last talked about it that I can justify showing you a picture:

It was maybe 25% quilted two weeks ago. I think I'm up to around 60% now. It will be a less complex quilting pattern than I originally intended, but it's not worth throwing a lot of detail work at.

Symbol. Well, I finalized my faux-symbol for this one. Here's what I finally settled on (OK, OK, I guess I had some pictures after all):

I'm not sure yet exactly how I'm going to transfer that onto fabric, but we'll worry about that later. Meanwhile, I've been pieceing the background part together. It looks pretty cool.

QuiltStorm. And I've been tinkering with some of the StormQuilts, too. But I'll just bother you with finishes for those.

That's all this time!

The Show Situation

2008-09-15T14:16:00.000-07:00

I was all fired up about quilt shows last year and decided I was going to enter pieces in ten shows in 2008. That started to fall apart when I missed the Sisters entry deadline by a country mile. Then, the Pacific Northwest Quiltfest in Seattle turned down Labyrinth, which was fine. Then, the Northwest Quilting Expo here in Portland first accepted Labyrinth, then said it was too big, and then two people from the Expo were telling me too different things, and it became more of a hassle than I wanted to deal with in summer. And by now I had missed the deadline for the Columbia Gorge show and figured, eh, who needs it.

Meanwhile, I turned forty in August and threw myself a birthday party featuring, among other things, a retrospective quilt show upstairs! It was fun to "curate." I started with a properly somber-sounding exhibition title:

The hallway walls were festooned, if that's the right word, with quilts of various vintages.

And the bedroom showed off another several pieces.

So, it was a fun and fairly easy to show things off.

I had pretty much decided to punt on entering any more shows for now, but my mom suddenly got fired up for me to enter the fall shows in and around Hometown5000, so I humored her. You have to humor your mom. So, a few pieces hung in a show this last weekend. This morning, rather incredibly, alert reader The Calico Cat sent me this link:

www.flickr.com/photos/jerrylovesquilts/2858241234/

...which is really pretty amazing, as to the best of my knowledge Calico lives about 2500 miles from Hometown5000. I had forgotten I even had a quilt in a show, but I did, it was photographed, the photo was posted on the internet, and Calico happened to see it, recognize it, and tell me about it. What are the odds?

The bad news is, they hung it sideways. The good news is, it doesn't matter.

Next Weekend

If you happen to be within striking distance of the beautiful South Coast of Oregon and feel like catching some quilts NEXT weekend, I'll have two pieces in the 2008 Festival of Quilts in Gold Beach. It's Saturday and Sunday at something called the "Event Center at the Beach"; I've been told it is one of the better local shows in the Northwest.

Looking for a Sign, part IV

2008-09-03T21:45:00.000-07:00

OK, to bring yourself up to date on this "Looking for a Sign" business, you should first read Tuesday's post.

Then, make sure you've read yesterday's post on the Life & Times.

OK? Good.

Having looked at the last itteration ("Symbol #4") in yesterday's post, Fingerstothebone suggested:

You can try closing the bottom so that the 2 pointy ends meet up, and then extending a downward gentle curve to reference, but not copy, the two curls at the top.

So when I did that -- and oh yeah, pared down the upper left "arm" of the figure -- it ended up looking like this (Symbol #5):
And that got me thinking that it might look lighter, and more alphabetic, if I made the upper-left arm and the bottom curl into two separate elements. When I did that, and flipped the whole thing on its vertical axis, it looked like so (Symbol #6):
Then I flipped it vertically (Symbol #7)...
And finally rotated that puppy twenty degrees to the left (Symbol #8).Out of all of the options presented here and in earlier posts, are there any that particularly appeal to you? Please feel free to jump into this democracy-assisted design process!

Looking for a Sign, part II.

2008-09-01T14:10:00.000-07:00

It's the first ever post featured both on the Life & Times and State of the Craft! I'm so efficient I can hardly stand myself.

Last year I asked my readers of the Life & Times of Michael5000 blog to suggest a neutral symbol for me to use as the dominant element of a new quilt. I wanted something that appeared to have meaning but that was actually meaningless, or that meant something completely trivial. I wanted a signifier without a signified, for all y'all who have dipped into semiotic theory. "Why?" you might ask. Reasonable question! I've got no answer for it, however.

The readers came back with some fabulous suggestions! But then the suggestions pretty much just laid around the studio floor for a year, until last week. Having put Symbol on my quilting to-do list, though, I clearly needed to start thinking about what the symbol in Symbol would be.

To review: Symbol is going to use a set of neutral batiks that BigSister5000 gave me for Christmas a few years ago. They will to be pieced together too form a very simple background, and then the symbol itself will be appliqued over the top of them, probably in scarlet. If all goes well, it should look attractive and interesting. With me? Good.

OK, so back to the question of the symbol. As I started chasing down the leads that readers had tossed me, I got kind of interested in the concept of the irony mark. I love the irony mark! Although, if people used it, it might reduce the impact of irony. Ironically. But anyway, in terms of this project, it is perhaps both too meaningful, and too graphically simple to be impressive when rendered at four feet tall.

Similar considerations torpedoed the interrobang.*

I flirted briefly with this symbol for something-or-other from mediaeval alchemy. I could have reversed it or something. But I ultimately rejected it for being, maybe, just a tiny bit too figurative. Which is to say, it looks just a little too much like a critter.

Heather's suggestion of letters from the ancient Soyombo alphabet of the Mongolian language -- see why I pose these questions to readers? -- was pretty awesome. I think they are lovely. I was afraid of what the straight lines of the right and top sides would look like at large scale, though. It seemed like they might be too rigid.

Then, I thought I had it! The letter "aum" in the Devanagari alphabet, used in Hindi and several other languages:

It's lovely! It's curvy! It's simple! It's arbitrary! But... as I soon found out... it is the most common graphical symbol of Hinduism out there. My "arbitrary" symbol was just as content-free as a crucifix, star of David, or yin-and-yang symbol.

Back to the drawing board.

Another reader, G, had suggested I look into Maori design, and I was taken by this pendant I had found:

I don't know if that shape conveys meaning in a Maori context or not, but I wasn't taking any chances. I took out the details on the top left to reduce it to a more graphic level, flipped it around the vertical axis, and "cut a hole" to make it look slightly more caligraphic. Here's what I came up with:

Now, here's the question: Have I successfully come up with a completely arbitrary symbol? In other words, have you ever seen this shape in a corporate logo, in religious iconography, in a foreign alphabet, or anyplace else? 'Cause I don't want to make this thing and discover I've just made an elaborate advertisement for the Americaplump MegaAgriCorp, Inc., or whatever.

* Very possibly the first ever use of this sentence in human history.

The 2008-2009 Pre-Season Report

2008-08-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

And, after a busy few months during which I didn't think about quilting at all, here we are with only a few days between us and the first college football games of the year (Oregon State at Stanford, Thursday the 28th; Oregon v. Washington at Autzen, Saturday the 30th). And you know what that means, football fans! That means it's time to QUILT!!!

[Crowd Roar]

Yesterday, I worked out a "game plan" (last football metaphor. I promise.) for the 2008-2009 Quilt Season. Unlike last year, when I tried to focus on getting out some show quilts, this year will be more about utility quilts and skillbuilding.

First Priority

I've got a quartet of pieces that I'm putting in my first priority category this year. Only one is underway, and two of them haven't even been designed yet, but I'm expecting them to be relatively simple and fast-moving projects.

Sara's Wedding Quilt -- With no plan or ideas, and an 11-week timeline, this one will be at the top of the to-do list immediately.

Labyrinth II -- Second place on the to-do list, this one has already been mocked up on graph paper. Beyond that, I'm telling you nothing -- except to say, it's a much simpler design than the original Labyrinth.

Devil's Claw -- This is the one I used to call "Indigo Stars." It's well underway, and a probable candidate for the spring shows.

Six-Fabric Challenge -- My friend Jennifer and I each bought quarters of the same six fabrics. The challenge is to make something a yard square, without comparing notes. I haven't even thought about the design yet.

Second Priority

Batik Boxes -- 'Boxes was on the Second Priority list last year, too, but it didn't get touched. This year, I'm putting it on the to-do list from the get-go, and I'm hoping to finish it. (If it seems strange that the to-do list isn't just the First Priority quilts, the reason is that I don't want to focus all my energy on just quilts that are most important to me. That would stress me out. I want to be working on some low-pressure pieces, too)
Four Seasons -- Seven or eight years old now, this project is getting pretty long in the tooth. I made progress with it last year, and would like to put it to bed this year.
Symbol -- A couple of Christmases ago, my oldest sister gave me a great set of neutral batiks. I am going to use them as background for a vivid non-symbol. Hard to explain. It should go quickly after a little design work, and it is the fourth item on the starting to-do list.

Third Priority

If I blast through those seven projects and am feeling good, I might take on one of these. Or, I might putter with one from time to time with the idea of having it ready for serious attention next year.

The Legacy Quilt
Labyrinth III -- Not designed yet, but I suspect I will end up playing with the labyrinth concept for years to come.
Scrap Fabric Quilt -- An experiment with my collection of found, non quilt-weight fabrics.

Fourth Priority

There are six quilts in this category, It's unlikely that I will touch more than one or two of them this year, if any -- Fourth Priority is more of a holding pen for ideas I hope to work on sometimein the future. For now, I'll just give you the working titles:

Sarah Horowitz inspired light on light-light design
Requilting my own baby quilt
Oregon Map II
Denim Quilt
Silhouette
Flags of the Forgotten Lands

StormQuilts

Finally, I will be making some progress in the QuiltStorm project. There are two StormQuilts basted and ready for quilting, and I will be selecting designs for three others as we get this season underway.

So:

That makes thirty-three quilts (16 normal + 17 StormQuilts) are on my plate! Nine of which (4 normal, 5 Stormquilts), I am supposedly going to be actively working on. This should keep me out of trouble for a while.

Anyone else ramping up for the season?

w00t!

2008-06-08T21:41:00.001-07:00

Un. Be. Lievable.

But I'll take it.

It's for Labyrinth.

You have no idea how happy this makes me. Does that make me a dork? I can live with that.

O.K., we now return to our regularly scheduled Summer Sabatical. See you in August!

Signing Off for the Summer

2008-06-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

I havent' shown the first finished QuiltStorm quilt, which is (strangely enough) QuiltStorm #4. It's the first time I've ever sealed the binding by machine, rather than tacking it down. The technique looks, um, not quite perfect when you look at it up close:

...but looks just fine once you get your face out of it. And I figure these are quilts to be seen from a distance.

QS#2 is right behind it, with only a half-hour or so of work remaining.

The 2007-2008 Quilt Year is Officially Over!

And that's all for now! SoTC is now officially on its yearly summer sabatical. I'll be back in August to gear up for the new quilt season.

In the meantime, by the way, I'm going to scrap the "Quilt Blogs by Men" webring. The platform that hosts it is very cumbersome, and not worth the trickle of traffic that the ring has seen. Apologies to those who went through the work of setting it up.

Meanwhile, if you are in the City of Roses, maybe I'll see you this weekend at the Northwest Quilters annual show (I'll have two pieces in it). Or, maybe I'll see you in Sisters in July. Or in Seattle in early August. Obviously, we're going to have a lot to talk about when I get back from break.

Have a great summer!

Am I Done Quilting QS#2?

2008-05-17T21:29:00.000-07:00

The problem with this whole QuiltStorm thing is that, even though the quilts are supposed to be fast fast fast, I keep thinking about quality control. Well, I guess that's a good thing, since it's supposed to be a skill-builder.

I've got a question for you. On QS#2, here, I made roughly parallel meandering lines widthwise across the quilt at about 2" intervals. Does that look like enough to you?

Functionally, it's fine. I found a thin wool blanket to use as batting (per Libby's idea), and the backing is a high-quality surplus bedsheet, so this sucker is going to be both warm and comfy. But, I've wondered whether it would look sharper if I doubled up the quilting, either by adding new lines between the existing quilt lines, or by adding lengthwise lines to make a kind of meandering grid.

Or, should I just declare victory and bind that sucker? What do you think?

(To get Mrs.5000's fancy camera to photograph the back of the quilt, I had to put the book on the quilt to give it something to focus on. Undifferentiated olive green was blowing its little camera mind.)

One Good Reason to Quilt

2008-05-15T23:42:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of Jovali's post about Quilts in Their Native Habitat, here is an almost perfect picture from the today's inbox showing our new friend Baby Roy resting on his quilt.

(The quilt is the one I did the walkthrough on earlier this year.)

I Second That Free-Motion

2008-05-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

In the end, Rebel only beat me to meander quilting by about a week. I finally bit the bullet and did free-motion quilting over an entire quilt surface. I used QuiltStorm #4, and here's what it looks like:

And on the flip side....

Fairly crude, plenty of mistakes if you know what you are looking for, but all in all a great learning experience, and that's what these StormQuilts are for after all. It still needs a binding, of course.

For QS#4, I used some kind of synthetic knit back and a flannel sheet for batting. It quilted easily but is, predictably enough, a bit limp and very light -- a summer quilt, perhaps. Meanwhile, I've got QS#2 and QS#1 pinned up and ready to quilt next. I used a thin old wool blanket for batt in one, and a mattress pad in the other, with cotton sheet for backing on both; I think they are going to be both warmer and a bit more snuggly when they are done.

Lazy Man's Stashbuilding

2008-05-04T19:06:00.000-07:00

It was supposed to be a quilting-free week, so how did I end up spending so much time with fabric?

My mom is paring down some of her stuff, and showed up at my doorstep on Monday with four large shopping bags packed with fabric. A tactical error on her part; she could have waited a few months and called it a generous birthday present.

I spent much of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings preshrinking and pressing, until I had the loot separated out like so:

For those of you keeping score, that is (left to right) two piles of non-quilting weight fabric, some suitable for the QuiltStorm project as backing; one big pile of quilting fabrics of at least a full yard length, one pile of quarters, halves, and such, one pile of big scraps, and one pile of small scraps. And all of this stuff is premium grade. What a bonzanza!

Saturday morning, within minutes of having sorted out all of the above, Mrs.5000 suggested we walk down to the Sunnyside Neighborhood Useful Goods Swap. Well, you see where this is going...

One small stack regular fabric scraps, one stack of flannels and torn but highly salvageable flannel bedding, and a small stack of childrens' denim clothing from the throwaway pile. The latter aren't considered wearable, so I'll add to my stack of 6" denim squares.

I may never have to actually ~buy~ fabric again. I'm just going to let it come to me.

QS5!

2008-04-26T17:42:00.001-07:00

"QuiltStorm" is my current project. The goal is to make around twenty very simple quilts, very quickly, from scrap, salvage and recycled materials.

QuiltStorm Quilt#5

Comments:

Where QS1 had the sophisticated theme of "blue," this one explores the concept of "green." I find it a little bland, but Mrs.5000 claims it's her favorite of this first batch of five. It is slightly wider than the others, for no particular reason.

And with that, I'm going to back off for a bit. I declare a quilting-free week! After which, maybe I'll lay a few of these suckers out.

QS3!

2008-04-25T19:21:00.000-07:00

"QuiltStorm" is my current project. The goal is to make around twenty very
simple quilts, very quickly, from scrap, salvage and recycled materials.

QuiltStorm Quilt#3

So, when I finished QS#3, it looked like this:

Comments:
It's basically the same set of solids as in QS#2, except with fewer lights. Only those two pale yellow strips, in fact. And when I finished it, and saw how strong those two light strips were as design elements, it drove me kind of nuts that they were offset to the left, with nothing special on the right to balance them. So, I removed the rightmost four strips and added them, plus one extra strip to get the pacing of colors better, to the left hand side. Now it looks like this:

Much more satisfying, to me anyway. I'll probably need to add a little supplemental strip to that short red piece eventually, but that's no biggie.

QS#3 is an awful lot like QS#2, but that's not such a bad thing.

QS4!

2008-04-24T20:27:00.000-07:00

"QuiltStorm" is my current project. The goal is to make around twenty very
simple quilts, very quickly, from scrap, salvage and recycled materials.

QuiltStorm Quilt#4

Q: #4 already? What happened to #3?

A: I'll explain tomorrow.

Comments:After QS#2, made entirely of solids, here's one that is emphatically not made from solids. This kind of look is perhaps what most people were expecting from the description of the project, and surely there will be several more, I bet, that share this level of visual chaos. It's kind of a crazy quilt without the crazy quilting, you might say. Good for someone who has a highly scrappy aesthetic going already. Perhaps not such a great quilt for a dude.

There is a sequence of four darks that stack up on the right side, and no similar block of visual weight anchoring the left side. I'm trying not to let that bother me. But it's hard.

QS2!

2008-04-23T21:06:00.000-07:00

"QuiltStorm" is my current project. The goal is to make around twenty very
simple quilts, very quickly, from scrap, salvage and recycled materials.

QuiltStorm Quilt#2

Comments: Made entirely from solids, this quilt has a certain "mid-century office" feel for me. Or, it could be used to represent a mediaeval tapestry in a junior high costume drama. Like QS1, this one feels pretty masculine. A good quilt for another dude, but not the dude who has QS1, because he doesn't need TWO quilts...

QuiltStorm III: The Storm Begins

2008-04-22T21:31:00.000-07:00

"QuiltStorm" is my current project. The goal is to make around twenty very
simple quilts, very quickly, from scrap, salvage and recycled materials.

A few weeks ago, emphasizing that the QuiltStorm quilts are going to have very simple pieceing indeed, I gave this design as an example:

If the more charitable among you thought I was kidding, you were wrong. That is indeed the design for this first series of five "StormQuilts."

The first two faces are complete at this point, and numbers three, four, and five aren't far behind. Just for fun, I thought I would show them in all their modest glory over the next few days.

So, with no further ado:

QuiltStorm Quilt #1

Comments: When Jovaliquilts asked me if the StormQuilts would be completely random, I admitted that I probably wouldn't be able to keep myself from imposing some organizing principles, and that has obviously happened. QS#1 is a collage of cool blues and greens. My mother would say it has a "masculine look" -- she tends to say that about all my quilts, but in this case she would be right. This would be a good quilt for a dude.

---

Hey, Speaking of Jovaliquilts...

Her current post, about two quilts that were made by (probably) her grandmother, was the coolest thing I saw today. I'm making scrap utility quilts for the hell of it, but these came from a community that made scrap utility quilts because they needed the blankets. You need to check out this post for the graceful simplicity of the "everyday" blanket, and the scrappy vitality of the "fancy" one. Priceless!

QuiltStorm Part II: The Gathering Storm

2008-04-20T15:55:00.000-07:00

Edit: This just in: I'm Famous! I'm featured on a podcast! It's the CraftyPod "Men Who Craft" Show!

After my first post on the QuiltStorm project, I got many helpful suggestions on what I can use for scrap or salvage batting. So, since I was running early for my guild meeting last week, and since “The Bins” (which I talked about a few weeks ago) is close to where we meet, I decided to poke around and see what I could find. I left with about 27 pounds of (mostly) batting surrogates, and some serious curiosity to find out what is going to work as batting, and what isn’t.

The haul included:

A thin wool blanket. Perfect!
Two fleece blankets. Rather small. I may have to custom design some of the quilts around available scrap batting sizes.
An open-weave throw blanket, probably acrylic. Well, maybe it will work....
Two large flannel sheets. I’ll use these as batt instead of backing, because they are unattractive and slightly discolored.
One “101 Dalmatians” flannel sheet. Total batt.
Large Commercial child’s quilt, sports theme. I’ll probably cut this one in half, and use it as batting for two StormQuilts, which are only going to be lap-sized.
One mattress cover. I’ve used a mattress cover as batting before; it was heavy but effective.
One very large, heavy sheet. This is slightly discolored, too, so I will fold it double and try it as a batt.

I paid twenty-seven dollars for all that crap, plus three other large sheets that I can use in StormQuilt faces and a few random pieces of scrap fabric. Think I got ripped off? Well, the final odd item in my haul was a pair of wool dress pants, virtually like new, in exactly my size (36W, 32L) and the very item of clothing I had been trying to find recently. Weird, huh? Just another little thrift store miracle.

Oh, there was also one other thing. A Linus Quilt. It’s very simple and a little slapdash, but still in very good shape. I’m not sure why I grabbed it; I think I had an irrational reaction against seeing it in there among all of the castoffs. Stupid me; I took it away from where it might have been picked up by someone who needed a nice baby quilt. Any suggestions for what I should do with it now?

Meanwhile, the first five StormQuilts are in some stage of assembly. What I’ve done is pick out and order the strips for each quilt, then sew them together in pairs. After I press down the seams, I sew pairs of pairs together, but also start on the new quilt. So for instance, in the coming round I will put together

14 pairs on SQ5 ("StormQuilt #5," that is)
7 chunks that are 4 strips wide on SQ4
3 chunks that are 8 strips wide (with one 4-strip chunk left over) on SQ3
and two halves of SQ2
and, I’ll put in the last seam to finish the face of SQ1.

As you’d probably expect, they all look pretty scrappy and scruffy, but basically pretty good as well. I’ll get you some photos soon.

Happy Quilting!
M5K

My Quilting Goals: November, 2001

2008-04-13T20:29:00.000-07:00

Most quilters seem to have more ideas for projects than they could ever possibly get to. I'm continually making, revising, re-revising, and discarding lists of potential projects, and I think I'm fairly typical in that way.

I was flipping through an old notebook last week, and a list of my intended quilt projects from November 2001 fell out. It was a strange souvenir from a point when I was trying to decide whether or not to take quilting seriously (I eventually decided that, yes, I will). It was also a good reminder of how these lists are, sure, very much subject to change, but also of how some of the things that you put on your to-do lists sometimes actually get done.

Like a lot of my quilt project lists, the 2001 plan laid out three top priorities and several "other" potential projects that I could maybe work in if I found the time. And here they are, the quilts I intended to make six and a half years ago, along with the stories of what happened, or didn't happen, next.

"1) Autumn Puzzle" For this, my top priority on the list, I have... no real memory of what I had in mind. I can kind of put together what I must have been thinking from the title, but I don't remember wanting to make such a quilt or why I thought it would be a good idea. This one never even made it to the graph paper stage.

"2) Denim Quilt" This one, my first ever scrap-and-salvage quilt, DID get made. A clunky design from 6" x 6" squares of scrap denim, it is an unlovely but incredibly warm (and heavy!) winter blanket.

"3) Log Cabin Quilt" This turned into Log Cabin, the piece that was to occupy much of the next four years of my quilting life. It's possible that I started the denim quilt and the log cabin piece imagining that they would be easier than the "Autumn Puzzle," and would be a good warm-up for it after a couple years in which I hadn't done a lot of quilting. That would have been good reasoning, but apparently I got immersed in Log Cabin and forgot all about the piece that I was ostensibly warming up for.

"--> Around the World for {redacted}" This one is kind of funny and kind of sad. My relationship with the person in question had never been especially stable, and the gesture of friendship that I had in mind in November 2001 is especially ironic now, since I have only seen the person at three or four formal events in the intervening years. Maybe if I'd actually made the quilt, we'd be closer friends today. But, I kind of doubt it.

"--> Landscape With Animals" One of the first quilts I made, the Cow Quilt, has always been a crowd-pleaser. I've often thought about making a bigger, better version of the same idea someday. But so far I haven't."

"--> Book of Flags" This was a strange idea for a quilt-and-bookarts project, and I actually did quite a bit of work on the text (although none on the quilting) before shelving the idea sometime in 2002. I recently dug it back out, tinkered with it a little bit, and changed it from its complicated original form into a still strange but much simpler blog project. It no longer has much to do with quilting, but at least it is seeing the light of day. You can see bits of it here, and here.

"--> Kim & MB" This was to be a wedding quilt for friends, so it's kind of surprising that it's the last item on the list. Did I think that I would knock the other six items out in a few months, and then get to the wedding quilt? Surely I wasn't ~that~ naive. It might be that I was just unsure of whether or not I could pull a good wedding quilt off, so I was waffling about whether or not to try. Whatever the case, I ~did~ make the quilt, and presented it to the lovely couple the following summer.

Overall, this makes my completion rate about 3 1/2 out of 7. I suppose I could do a lot worse than to hit 50% on all of my to-do lists.

QuiltStorm2008: The Beginning

2008-04-05T01:41:00.000-07:00

I've alluded several times now to a project I'm calling, tongue firmly in cheeck, QuiltStorm2008. Always before, I referred to it as a project I would be taking on sometime in the vague future.

Well, the future is now.

Last weekend, Mrs.5000 and I made our way down to "The Bins," which is formally called something much more diplomatic, "The Portland Goodwill Outlet" or like that. It is where merchandise that can't be sold at a regular Goodwill goes to die. It's great. There's a big, unadorned industrial space with concrete floors and no decoration whatsoever. The stuff on offer is literally heaped in long rows of rolling bins, with next to no organizing principle whatsoever. After a given bin has been literally rummaged through for a few hours, it is rolled back offstage, and a new bin is rolled up to take its place.

No matter what you buy, it's 69 cents a pound, so long as you buy at least fifty pounds of it. Last weekend, I bought fabric.

Six washing machine loads later, I was ready to commence the pressing and folding of, at a rough guess, around 150 yards of salvage fabric. But first, of course, there was some minor disassembly to be done; although I found several yards of whole cloth, most of this haul was in the form of sheets, curtains, futon covers, and clothing. My rule was to avoid anything that would likely attract a buyer -- no matched sets of sheets or wearable clothing allowed. Basically, I was reclaiming waste textiles, in bulk.

This motherlode of cotton and cotton/poly salvage will now join pieces from my existing collection of sub-standard fabric to make up the raw materials for QuiltStorm. The idea is to create a series -- an "edition," as they say in Mrs.5000's bookarts circles -- of very simple, very easy to make, 100% recycled lap blankets. I've prepared about 20 different designs, but they really all just boil down to sewing a lot of strips together. Here, as mocked up on the fabulous MicroSoft quilt design utility "Excel," is a typical example.:

Or maybe this:

Now, you may be wondering "Why? What is the point of all this?" And that's a reasonable question. But I've got answers!

I've been spending a lot of quilting time lately challenging my precision and my ability to do fairly detailed work on a bunch of labor-intensive projects. It seems like it might be liberating to work very quickly and loosely on projects that have more room for error.
Having a lot of scrappy quilt tops around means I'll be able to experiment with machine quilting technique without it being a stressful, high-stakes business.

If it turns out that the finished quilts are really cool, I'll have a lot of really cool little quilts on hand.

And, the recycling aspect of the project really appeals to me. It's theoretically possible that the raw materials I'm using would have found another buyer if they hadn't found me, but I'm fairly certain that 90% of it would have continued to circle the drain for a short while, or maybe a long while, and then wound up in the landfill. The idea of using them for something useful and interesting, instead, makes me feel connected to the practical roots of the Craft.

I've started by cutting out backs for an ambitious number of, um, "StormQuilts." Eighteen, if I count them correctly (20 would be a nicer, rounder number, but I'm sure that salvage fabric will continue to trickle in). Now, I'll just start cutting lots and lots of strips, and sew them back together to make the faces.

One concern I have -- well, "concern" might be overstating the case, but anyway -- is that if these guys are going to be 100% recycled, I'll need to use scrap or salvage batting. I have enough scrap batting and batting-like stuff for about five quilts, but after that I might have to actually go out and buy batting for these things. Does anyone have ideas for alternative salvage batting?

The Quilt for Niece #1: Done

2008-03-29T22:12:00.000-07:00

The Quilt for Niece #1 isn't really called that. It's called "[Neice #1]'s Quilt," except with her actual name. Discretion on the Internet, see.

I had been thinking for a few years that I would make graduation quilts for each of the four (4) neices, and when Niece #1 finished her junior year last spring, it was time to either fish or cut bait.

Since I don't have enough day-to-day contact with her to have a great read on her aesthetics -- she lives far from the City of Roses -- I come up with my "diagnostic instrument" so that I could find out what kinds of quilts she likes.

Her single favorite quilt from the deck of examples was actually one of my own pieces, one I made for Mrs.5000 back when she was still Girlfriend5000. It is the one shown below. Niece #1 liked the squares a lot, even thought the color scheme was not especially to her liking Her own color tastes tended to run to greens with some kind of strong value contrast across the quilt surface.

So, I decided to use the pieceing pattern from Mrs.5000's quilt, but using Niece #1's color preferences and, while I was at it, a much denser and more visible quilting pattern. It's the first time I've re-used a design, and it was interesting to revisit the procedure for pieceing it together. Even though the pattern is all squares, they do not line up in blocks, so getting the thing together requires some moderately complicated sewing.

The new piece looks much different than the earlier one, as you can see. My mom says it looks like moonlight in the forest, which sounds fine to me. It is flannel-backed and, hopefully, durable enough to withstand a few years of college life. I stuck a temporary hanging sleave on it last weekend; it will appear at the Clark County Quilters 33rd Annual Quilt Show this week. Here's the info:

Clark County Quilters

33rd Annual Quilt Show
April 3, 4, 5, 2008

Thursday 10 AM to 5 PM

Friday 10 AM to 6 PM

Saturday 10 AM to 5 PM

Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary

2921 Falk Road

Vancouver, Washington

Maybe I'll see you there on Saturday.

After the show, I'll take the sleave back off, pack it up, and that will be that. No more graduation quilts for a bit. Niece #2 is only a freshman, so I'll hold up on starting hers for now.

Next time: I'm starting QuiltStorm2008 tomorrow! I'll explain what I'm up to, one of these days....

Around the World Quilts

2008-03-23T10:29:00.000-07:00

An "Around the World" quilt looks something like this:

It's a very gratifying kind of piece to make, as it looks a hell of a lot harder than it really is. What you see when you first look at it, if you don't know the trick, is just how many individual pieces of fabric there are. Even in the little piece shown above, there are 15 little (1 1/2", 1" cut) squares in each row and column making, what, 225 pieces total. But! you do not have to cut out and sew together 225 pieces in order to make an Around the World.

Here's the trick. (I will illustrate with images from the very finest quilt design software application available, the name of which is “MicroSoft Excel.” Ask for it at your quilt shop!)

1. Once you've chosen your sequence of fabrics -- at least seven, in a clear progression from light to dark color values, is best -- cut long strips of each of them.

2. Sew the strips together, in sequence.

3. Cut new strips, perpendicular to the original ones, out of the units you made in step two. Make them the same width as you cut the original strips in step one.

4. Then, piece these new strips back together, offsetting them by one fabric width each time.

Voila! There's a little more too it, of course, but you get the basic idea.

I've only made two true Around the Worlds, the one above – it was a gift for my mother, which is the very definition of "coals to Newcastle" -- and this one, which you've seen before.

Then there's also a few that have played with the Around the World idea, like this one from 2000:

Or these two, from 2006. These are called Partway Around the World I & II; one hangs at our house, and the other belongs to friends in England. So, the name is a kind of double-meaning sorta dealie.

Incidentally, although all of these I've shown are wall hangings, it's possible to make very large quilts with the same method. You just either a) make your strips wider, b) use more fabrics, or c) repeat your sequence of fabrics two or three or four times. It looks great, but I've never done it myself.

OK, I’m out of here. Thanks for reading.

I Am My Mother's Son

2008-03-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

I wrote a long time ago about how I started quilting. Summary: In 1994 I was sick, I stayed with my parents for a few months, I got fascinated watching Mom quilt, and one thing led to another.

I've been wondering lately how much I've been influenced by the specific piece that Mom happened to be working on that summer. Here it is:

Now, to be clear: I would never make this specific piece in a million years. I don't know if I could, for one thing -- when my mother does something, she tends to do it right -- but also, it's a bit, well, girly, isn't it. Hearts aren't really my thing. There, I said it.

Nevertheless, I think this quilt had a really profound effect on me. Let's start with its method of construction, in which a pattern is formed from a grid mosaic of 2-inch squares (1 1/2" finished, for those of you taking notes). The first eight quilts I made were all composed with 2-inch squares; Cow Quilt, my fourth quilt [shown at right], had a few larger blocks interspersed, but the basic idea was still the 2" grid. My ninth and tenth quilts mixed things up by using different sized squares, but they were still basically grids. It wasn't until the eleventh quilt I made that I finally tore myself away and used something other than squares. It's as if the grid was what quilting was for me, because the one time I had watched somebody else quilt, that's what she was using. Any deviation from that, I had to make up on my own.

Another thing: Mom, and me, were both very impressed and influenced by the Deidre Amsden's "Colourwash" books (my first quilting memory is getting Mom an Amsden book off of her Christmas wish list and thinking, "Woah, this is awesome!"), but if you are familiar with that genre you'll notice that Mom's heart doesn't look at all like the conventional colourwash or watercolor quilt. Mom was a lot more interested in using fields of color, and that gives her piece a lot of its power.

Well, maybe it's just that I, too, am drawn to fields of color. Or maybe it's the influence of that heart quilt. Whichever, I can watch myself experiment with my own far less subtle fields of color all the way from my very first quilt:

...through, say, my 10th quilt, a Scrabble board:

...or my 20th quilt, the unlovely Green, Blue, Purple, the name of which gives away what I was experimenting with:

Or even this wedding quilt I made for my friends Mary Beth and Kim in 2002:

Looking through my photos, it seems like at least a good half of my quilts are still working out the implications of that first quilt I watched my Mom make, trying to create a pattern using fabric value, in the colourwash tradition, but with a fairly blunt use of pure color.

Both of these qualities, by the way -- the 2-inch grid and the colourwash-with-fields-of-color -- are running riot in the last major piece I've finished, Labyrinth, or in the Quilt Map of Oregon I showed in the last post.

---

All of this makes me wondered what would have happened if Mom had been working on some other project when I happened to be sick. If she had been working on one of her more classic colourwash quilts, how different would my own ideas about design be today?

Or what if she had been working on this one? I might not have ever become a quilter; I admire this all-green piece on a technical level, but I can't imagine that it would have fired up my enthusiasm for color and mosaic. If it had somehow got me quilting, I'm pretty sure that the work I'm doing today would look quite a bit different than it does.

Or here's a scary thought -- what if I had found a really good book, and hadn't gone in to watch Mom work on her quilt at all? It would have been a whole different life, I'll tell you what.

It would certainly be a whole different blog.

Show Season

2008-03-09T18:16:00.000-07:00

The half of the year that I call "Quilt Season" is the opposite half from when almost all of the quilt shows are. I made the arbitrary goal a while back of putting quilts into ten (10!) shows this year -- they are listed in the sidebar -- and the first one is coming up in two weeks. It's the 14th Annual "Airing of the Quilts" in Milwaukie (Oregon), and I've entered Two Complex Shapes and Quilt Map of Oregon (might as well put pictures of 'em up yet again, I suppose!). When I dropped them off and registered them yesterday, one of the women referred to me as "the new good-looking young man from the Guild." Well, I'll take it.

I mentioned all this to a non-quilting friend last night, who was puzzled by the whole concept. Was I entering the shows in order to sell the quilts? Hell, no. Well, then, why was I bothering with it? Probably it's a sign of how immersed I am in the whole process that it had never occurred to me to think of the question. But for all that, I think I came up with some pretty good answers.

I suppose the starting point is that you show a quilt because you consider quilting a medium of artistic expression, as opposed to, say, an esoteric method of blanket manufacture. You make things "to express yourself," or at least to bring into being an idea that you thought was interesting, and to have people see that and, with any luck, think that it's cool validates your process. Put another way, you want attention. Recognition for your work. Ideally, praise. Well, who doesn't?

Connected to this is that participating in shows is a way of participating in the community. Shows are quite literally put together communally by quilters. They are generally fairly festive affairs, places where people can get together and share ideas, feedback, praise, and of course sotto voce nasty remarks about each others work. The more quilts submitted, the bigger and better the shows are, so to a small extent submitting your work is a way of pitching in.

Finally, putting work in shows is for me a way of lighting the proverbial fire underneath my buttocks. Planning to have Quilt X in Show Y gives me, first and foremost, a deadline. It has to be done in time. Moreover, there are going to be a lot of knowledgeable people looking at it, so that encourages me to do better work. If I want to get something into a juried show, I know I need to bring my absolute A-game. And, participating in shows in general has forced me to gradually learn more about the generally accepted standards of excellence in quilt shows as a whole.

There are shows and there are shows, of course. For this Milwaukie show, anybody can show anything, and I expect it will be a fairly low profile event. So, I'm not showing my best, brand-new stuff; I'm saving that for my Guild's show, in a few months. Even at the intermediate level that I operate at, it's fun to save the "major debuts" for the "high profile venues."

Here's the details on the Milwaukie show. Live in the City of Roses? Then maybe I'll see you there!

14th Annual "Airing of the Quilts"

March 21-22, 2008

Milwaukie Center

5440 SE Kellogg Creek Drive

Milwaukie, OR 97222

-------------

Meme Duty

I was tagged by The Quilted Philosopher a while back, and it's about time I did something about it. The concept is pretty broad -- I'm just supposed to "post 7 weird or random facts about myself." Here goes:

1. I followed objects with my eyes at birth. The doctor put me down, walked away, noticed, came back, and said "You aren't supposed to be able to do that." I don't remember this, of course. But my mom says so.

2. In high school, I won my division of Oregon's state mathematics tournament. Twice. Yes. Thank you.

3. I have a large map of the United States on which I keep track of every county I've been in. Sometimes I will fly to a city, rent a car, and drive around for a while, checking out the area and collecting new counties.

4. I like kids, but never wanted to have kids of my own. So, I didn't.

5. I'm not above painting my face green and yellow if it might help the fortunes of the University of Oregon football team. This confuses some of my more intellectual friends.

6. Although not at all a religious person, I have a blog about the Bible. This, also, confuses some of my more intellectual friends.

7. I have never eaten at a MacDonalds.

Those seem weird and random enough.

Salvage Fabric: A Biography

2008-02-29T23:54:00.000-08:00

OK, so it's 1995, and I just learned to quilt last year, and I'm a graduate student living in the university ghetto of Lawrence, Kansas. Most of the other students have just left town for the summer, and my girlfriend and I know that there will be rich pickings in the dumpsters that line the alley behind my house. And we're right -- in a few hours of mildly unseemly scavaging, we're going to score several pieces of furniture, some wearable clothing, office supplies, a couple of CDs, and other miscellaneous low-budget treasures that light-travelling students have shed rather than haul with them to the next adventure.

In my take is a dress that someone, or someone's mom, has made by hand. It's nothing that my girlfriend would wear, but I've learned to know quilting-weight fabric when I see it, and I'm thrilled to have something new for my little stash. I disassemble the dress into its component pieces, and wonder what uses I might find in the future for my big score...

1997: Bits of the fabric find their way into the pieced border of my first full-sized quilt.

1998: I use the fabric in a very scrappy "Around the World." The piece ends up winning a blue ribbon at the county fair when a error in the published rules creates a category that only it fits into. I feel famous!

1999: A single square of the fabric shows up in a little wall hanging, the last piece I make in Kansas.

2005: Several pieces of the fabric find their way into the big Log Cabin.

2007: Squares of the fabric show up in a child's blanket.

I sometimes wonder if the woman who used to wear that dress still remembers it at all. I've still got plenty of fabric from it left. I'm sure I will find at least a few more uses for it before it runs out....

The 2007-2008 Quilting Year Halftime Report

2008-02-26T23:05:00.000-08:00

[If you happen to be related to me, you probably shouldn't read this post until after May, 2008.]

This Saturday and Sunday just past was probably the last big quilting weekend of the 2007-08 Season. Longtime readers will recall that the Quilt Year, in my world, begins with the first Oregon Ducks football game in September. Since I generally listen to at least two college football games every weekend throughout the season, the autumn months are when I make the most dramatic progress. Things typically slow down in December due to Christmas preparations, pick up again for January and February, then start to lose steam about, well, now.

There are lots of reasons for the slowdown, but the biggest is that spring in Oregon starts around Valentines Day. Outdoor recreation, work on the house, travel, and the garden all start to make their demands on the weekends, and within a month or two they'll want my time after work as well.

That doesn't mean that I'll stop dead in my tracks, though. I used to not touch quilting at all from Mayish to August, but I those days are pretty much gone. Still, progress is likely to be a lot slower, more putter-ish, and with no whole weekends given over to a particular quilt project.

So, as we enter the slack half of the year, it seems like a good time to look back at the goals I set at the beginning of the season and see how I did. Here goes.

FIRST PRIORITY

The three quilts I was most bound and determined to finish this year were Ice & Fire, Labyrinth, and the high school graduation quilt for Niece #1. The first two are safely and completely finished; I've submitted them both for my guild's annual show, where I'm confident they'll be accepted, and submitted Labyrinth to the Pacific Northwest Quilter's Association biennial show in Seattle, which I'm much less confident about. We'll see!

The graduation quilt was the focus of this last weekend. I finished its quilting, which was only about 1/3 done at the start of the weekend, and made and attached the binding. It still has quite a bit of handwork to be done, as I bury the threads, seal the binding, and attach a sleave, so there will be a few movies in my near future. It should be done in time for me to enter it in the show of a neighboring quilt guild, up in Vancouver, Washington, before I send it up to Alaska. Since I warned the fam off up at the top of the post, and since I doubt my neices spend too much time hanging out on their uncle's quilt blog, I'll give you a quick shot here of the graduation quilt, still with all of its shaggy threads hanging out all over.

SECOND & THIRD PRIORITY

There were three quilts that I listed as being my second priority back in August. It turns out I haven't touch any of them since. I guess I had a change of priorities.

There were four quilts I called my third priority, and I made good progress on three of them. What I'm now calling "Devil's Claw," although that name is in flux, went from being a vague wish to do something with the old blocks I'd found to being a complete quilt face. I also completed faces for the last two of a set of Four Seasons that I've been puttering with for ages. These two projects continue to capture my imagination, and will likely be ones that I make some progress with over the summer. It would be nice to put "Devil's Claw," in particular, in some fall shows.

The other third priority quilt was Two Complex Shapes, which I completely requilted to good effect. I trotted it out for show and tell and the guild earlier this month, where it had an interesting love-it-or-hate-it effect. I got a few compliments, but as I was showing it a few people were only a few notches short of heckling (I followed it with Labyrinth, though, which shut them up pretty effectively). I'll put it in a few smaller shows later in the year, I think.

WHAT NEXT?

Well, finishing work on the graduation quilt is the main thing. Tinkering with Devil's Claw and Four Seasons will probably occupy a few summer hours. A couple items from my Second Priority list -- a scrap utility quilt and something called Batik Squares -- will probably finally get some attention. And then there is the plan I keep refering to with the code named "QuiltStorm 2008," a project to make a large number of simple lap quilts from scrap and recycled materials. That should be fun.

The summer months are also a good time to do non-quilt sewing, the little garment work I do and the baby's blocks I like to make. There's some mending piled up. And... I am almost afraid to mention it... there has been some design work for a Labyrinth #2. Maybe I'll explore that in the coming months, or maybe not. We'll see.

Lastly, some time in August, I'll do the very last thing I need to do every quilt year. That, of course, is to draw up a list of goals for the coming quilt year.

JUST CURIOUS

Do you do more quilting in the colder and darker half of the year? Are you happy with your progress over the winter?

How to Make a Quick Crib Quilt, Part III

2008-02-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

Interestingly, I have taken longer to write about making the quick crib quilt than I took actually making the quick crib quilt. This suggests an easy rule you can follow to speed up your quilting exploits: Don't blog about them. But what fun is that?

Also: when I started writing this thing, I thought it would all fit into one longish post. It has turned into three bloated posts. So, although I still maintain that basic quilting is, at its heart, actually pretty easy, there is clearly a little more basic knowledge involved than I had quite realized. Interesting.

Anyway.

We left off last time with the three elements of your quilt -- the front, batting, and back -- all securely fastened together with safety pins. [I should confess to you, incidentally, that it took me a full decade to realize that you want to use safety pins, not straight pins, for this. Not only do they stay in place much better, but they are, as the name implies, safe. They do not rip through your flesh throughout the quilting process. Why did it take me ten years to figure this out? Because I'm an idiot, that's why. But enough about me.]

Step Twelve

Quilt That Sucker (Time: variable)

There are many long books out there about quilting, which is the stitching that holds together your three layers so that you can take those safety pins out. I will restrict myself to a few brief notes here.

In theory, unless you happen to have a long-arm quilting machine lying around the house, you could either machine quilt or hand quilt this thing. Hand quilting is like they do it in the movies, where you use a little hoop and actually put all of those little stitches in by hand, with a needle. Yeah, I know, it sounds nuts, but it is actually a marvelous art form and I have a lot of respect for its practitioners. But it is manifestly not what you would call "quick," so we're not going to use it for this quick piece.

In essence, machine quilting is just running the three layers through your sewing machine for a while to attach them together. Preferably, you want to have the pattern of your quilting be something that will enhance the design you created with your pieceing. In this sample, I quilted along several of the pieceing seams, or "ditches," putting a line of stitches about an eighth of an inch to both sides of them. On the border, I ran three vaguely parallel meandering lines in white thread against the star pattern of the border. This pattern softens the dark fabric a little, breaks up the strict geometry of the piece, and in my mind, has a nice Milky-Way look against the night sky.

General Quilting wisdom:

Pick thread that are going to go well with your top and your backing. Top thread goes through the needle, backing thread in the bobbin, and they don't have to be the same unless you want them to be.

As with fabric, there is a lot of old, surplus, and extremely cheap thread out there in the world, and frequent readers will not be surprised to learn that I have found uses for such stuff. However, machine quilting is not the place to skimp on thread. This is where the structural strength of your piece comes from, so even for a utility piece like this you will want to use at least a mid-range thread no more than a decade old.

The greater the density of your quilting pattern -- the "tighter" your quilting pattern is -- the more durable your piece is likely to be. However, if you get carried away and start putting more than around a line of quilting per inch, your blanket is going to start to get scratchy and stiff.

The "looser" your quilting pattern, the more important the quality of your thread becomes.

Since you are quilting for speed, have your quilting pattern be either one long continuous line, or lines that go from one edge of the piece to another. Quilting lines that start and stop in the middle of the piece are a pain.

For quilting in straight lines, as I did in the pieced portion of this quilt, a walking foot is the schizzle. Best $25 I ever spent on quilting gear.

If you are actually using this guide, and are curious about "free motion" quilting, just put it out of your mind for now. Come up with a quilting pattern that uses straight lines, and work at getting all of the quilting stitches nice and even and exactly where you want them to be. We'll worry about free motion some other day, perhaps once I get to be any good at it myself.

There are many, many ways to mark the surface of a quilt to get the pattern on it before you sew. They all have their pros and cons, but they all time time. For a little crib quilt like this, though, I recommend just eyeballing it (unless you have a marking method that you want to experiment with, in which case it would be a perfect way to practice!).

Step Thirteen

Attaching the Binding (time: maybe 45 minutes)

There are a million ways of doing this. We'll do mine, naturally.

The binding is the piece of fabric that protects the edges of the quilt. Once again, you need to pick a fabric that, at about a 3/4" thickness, will make the rest of your quilt look good. It should also be a reasonably strong fabric, as it will get a lot of wear, and shouldn't be a fabric that you know bleeds dye, as it may get sucked on. In this case, I chose to use the border fabric for the binding as well, but that is by no means necessary or even the norm.

Cut a strip of your binding fabric at 3" width for each of the four sides of your piece; make them at least 6" longer than the length of each side, and preferably a foot or so longer. Fire that steam iron up to it's highest steam-producing level for maximum effect, and press each strip in half all along its length, bad side together. You end up with 1 1/2" strips of doubled fabric, with the good side visible on both sides.

Pin these strips to the quilt. The two cut edges should be lined up exactly with the raw edge of the pieced top. Center your strips before pinning so that the excess length hangs off evenly from each corner.

Then, sew the strips to the rest of the quilt with the usual 1/4" seam allowance. Start and end each strip 1/4" from the edge of the quilt face. (This will work out so that each strip's first stitch begins where its neighbor's last stitch ended. If you accidentally leave a gap there, it's worth going back and fixing it.

Step Fourteen

Mitering the Corners (time: 5 minutes)

People make a big deal about this, but it's easy peasy. At each corner, fold the face of the quilt together so that the two edges are against each other. Where the excess of the binding strips are hanging off, pin them together.

Starting directly across the strip from where the seams attaching the binding strips end, sew the two strips together. Go halfway across the strip at an angle of 45 degrees away from the quilt.

Then, take a right angle turn, and sew back toward the quilt,

ending up at the point where both binding strips meet at the corner of the quilt.

You should end up with a little arrow pointing down the strips, away from the quilt. I usually then turn around and go over the seam a second time, for strength.

Then, poke the arrow inside out with a seam ripper, et viola!!!

Step Fifteen

Tacking Down the Binding (time: a couple hours)

Get a good, mid-length movie. Some quilters prefer NetFlix or Blockbuster for this, but I generally check them out from the library. I am usually a fan of international movies, but it is important to get a movie in a language that you understand, as you won't be able to catch every subtitle. A dialogue-driven drama is best, since you won't have to focus on the screen so much.

Start the movie. As you watch, pick a spot along the binding, and, using a needle and thread, make a stitch that nips a few threads into the "nose" of the binding, and a few threads on the back of the quilt just inside of the seam that attached the binding strip to the front. Make a knot in the thread, sealing the binding down to the quilt back, and then make a few supporting stitches on either side of the knot.

Now, you are ready to tack in earnest. Insert your needle under the quilt back at the knot, run it about 1/4" within the quilt, along the binding seem. Holding the edge of the binding in place, push the needle back up through the back so that it nips into the binding again. Pull the thread through, then dive the needle back into the backing where it just came out, advance another 1/4", and repeat ad nauseum. When you get to the end of your length of thread, make a little knot like you did at the beginning. You will probably need to go through 3 or 4 threads to get through a crib quilt.

I always thought this was a "whipstitch," but I see I was dead wrong. Whatever. Sorry I'm not doing a better job of explaining it.

Make your stitches shorter than 1/4" inch close to the corners, as they will get a lot of stress there. Make sure there is a stitch right next to the seam at both sides of the miter. Also, this is another place where you don't want to be using cheapo thread.

Instead of movies, some people prefer doing this step while at family events, on flights, or at staff meetings if your office is sufficiently relaxed. Whatever.

Step Sixteen

The Warm Glow of Completion (5 minutes)

It's a lovely feeling, but it is usually quickly replaced by a restless enthusiasm for the next project. Congratulations! You've got the bug!

Thanks for reading this rambling primer. Doubtless all of this has been explained better by others, elsewhere. If you know of any good sites, you might want to post them in the comments for the benefit of any newbs who are trying to follow my rambling directions and getting lost.

How to Make a Quick Crib Quilt, Part II

2008-02-14T21:30:00.000-08:00

OK, let's get back to the crib quilt.

So far, we've got it to the point where the design is finished, but we still have some work to do to get it to the point where it's a serviceable blanket.

Step Eight:

Add a Border. (Time: Maybe 20 minutes)

Borders aren't strictly necessary, and I often don't use them on my serious projects. Oftentimes, though, they frame and highlight your design to good effect. For a utility quilt, there's the added bonus that they add quite a bit of area to your piece with a minimum of effort.

You want to pick a fabric that is going to look good with your design, of course. Darks are usually, although not always, better than lights. Look for pieces that echo some of your design's more common colors; or, if your design is primarily in a single color but with traces of a second color, experiment with a boarder in that second color.

Audition border fabric by just setting it next to your finished design. If you are buying fabric for a border, take your finished design to the shop so you can be sure of getting a good match.

I hit the jackpot on this sample quilt, finding an old piece of discount fabric in my collection that was almost exactly the right size to work for both the border and binding (see below). It is a very dark blue, which works to frame and accent the checkerboard pattern of the main design. Although it makes the piece darker than usual for a baby quilt, the fact that it shows stars in a night sky make it appropriate for a night-night. The stars also echo other stars scattered through the main design, and really set off a crescent moon in the upper right.

I cut the border fabric to strips of uniform width (although you can use different widths for the top/bottom and left/right strips, too). In this case, I made the border strips the same width as the blocks in the main design, to keep a harmonious visual look. I cut two of the strips to the design's height, and sewed them onto the design's left and right. Then, I cut the top and bottom strips to the quilt's new width, and sewed those on as well.

The top is finished!

Step Nine:

Backing (Time: 5 - 30 minutes)

It's possible to have a pieced design on both sides of a quilt, but most commonly you just put a single piece of fabric on the back. I like to use flannel for blanket backs, as it is a very warm and gentle fabric, and feels good against the skin, but regular cottons are fine too.

As with border fabrics, you'll want to pick something that looks fairly reasonable with your quilt top, and if you are spending money, it's a good idea to audition your backing before you buy.

For the current project, I once more go with materials at hand and choose an old fitted flannel sheet that I found somewhere. Its jaunty stripiness is an antidote to the darkness of the border fabric, and the fact that it is a used fabric, although is will likely decrease the lifespan of my finished product, will also make it soft and cozy right out of the box.

Cut the backing so that the quilt top can sit on top of it with at least an inch or two of margin on all four sides.

Step Ten:

Batting (Time: 5 - 20 minutes)

The easiest thing is to run out and buy yourself some crib quilt batting.

Once you've quilted for a while, though, you'll notice that you end up with a lot of long, thin strips of batting scraps left over from your larger projects. To save cash and resources, I'll occasionally assemble these scraps into a piece of batting large enough to work for a crib quilt by simply holding two pieces of batting next to each other and running them through the sewing machine with the needle set on a wide zig-zag. The resulting seam is surprisingly strong, and only really needs to last until you quilt the piece anyway. The only trouble I've ever run into with this was the time I used bright red thread for the zigzag stitch, which was then very visible through the thin, light fabrics on my quilt's face. Oops. Lesson learned: Use white thread for tacking batting.

For this projects, I tacked together two scraps left over when I cut the batting for Labyrinth. Cut your batting to about the same size you cut the quilt back.

Step Eleven:

Laying Out (45 minutes)

What I call "laying out a quilt" is getting the top, batting, and back into position relative to each other, ready to quilt. It's surprising how many different ways there are to do this. I'll just tell you how ~I~ do it.

I lay quilts out on our bedroom floor, which has a nice, tight, low-loft carpet. For bigger pieces, I have to adjust the furniture, but not for a little guy like this one. First, I take the backing piece and spread it out, good side down, on the floor. With some heavy duty pins, I fasten it to the carpet, stretching it just a little bit in t the process so that it is pinned out taut.

Then, I lay the batting on top of the backing, and spend some time smoothing it out so it lies naturally and evenly, with no folds creases. If it is new batting and having a hard time "relaxing," you can hold an iron a few centimeters from it and give it a good blast of steam.

Next, the quilt top goes on top of the pile, good side up. Because you gave the backing and batting a few inches of margin, you should be able to center the top now so there is an inch or more of margin on all four sides. Like you did with the batting, except more so, spend a lot of time smoothing the top out until it sits very evenly on the batting and backing.

Finally, fasten the three layers together with safety pins. What? You don't have safety pins? Maybe I should have mentioned this earlier: you'll need a lot of safety pins. Start in the center and work your way out to the edges, making sure the quilt is keeping its unskewed, rectangular shape.

Warning: the first time you do this, you will probably end up fastening your quilt to your carpet. As you practice, you'll go through a stage where the quilt comes up easily enough, but with an interesting velcro sound as 100 pins pull free of where they were just slightly embedded in the carpet. Eventually, you'll figure out how to put in the safety pins so that your quilt pulls up completely smooth. It's all in the wrist.

Your crib quilt is almost finished! You can even kind of use it at this stage! But you shouldn't.

We'll finish it next time in "How to Make a Quick Crib Quilt, Part III: The Final Chapter"

In Praise of Cheap Fabric

2008-02-08T20:01:00.000-08:00

After reading the reactions to Part I of my baby quilt primer, I'm inspired to leap to the defense of cheap fabric. Several commenters were surprised by my use of lower-grade material, and thought I was doing new quilters a disservice not to discourage them from using premium fabric.

Those objections represent the majority opinion in the serious quilting community, and I respect that. But, friends, I am here today to deliver the minority report.

Here goes.

The first objection, from Linda, was that new quilters would be turned off by "the frustrations of working with the cheap crap." This confused me for a while, because for simple straight-stitch pieceing, the cheap crap doesn't really handle any differently than the expensive crap. Does it? But I'm wondering if we might have a definitional problem confusing the issue. Let's talk about three categories of fabric:

Premium Fabric. Typically has a nice high threat count from good cotton fiber, tending towards better dyeing and fastness of color, generally sold at specialty quilt shops for $9 to $12 per yard.
Discount Fabric. Lower threat count, often somewhat "loose" after a coating of starch is dissolved during the initial washing. Wide range of dye quality. Generally sold at, um, chain craft outlets for, on average, $2 to $3 per yard.
Salvage. Stuff that's not 100% cotton. Stuff that used to be sheets or clothing. Stuff that is stretchy or limp or smells like your grandma's house in 1972 when you iron it. Generally found at thrift shops or in boxes at the side of the road that say "free," or cut out of clothes, or handed to you in a garbage bag by a well meaning person who asks "Don't you sew or something?"

Now then. My experience is that Salvage fabric can be, yes, very frustrating to work with. (I must mention in passing, though, that my buddy Sara whupped out her first quilt from, if I recall correctly, upholstery samples, quickly and with gleeful abandon. But she's a can-do sorta girl.) Discount fabric can be harder to deal with than premium if you are working on the bias, or if you are doing applique with small pieces. But for good old cut-out-squares-and-sew-them-back-together pieceing, again, I've never noticed it handling any differently from Premium fabric. I don't think a newbie would either.

Jeanne (whom I can't find a link to, sorry) pointed out that Premium fabric is more durable in the long run, and there's no doubt about it. It's 100% true. Absolutely. But the point is also easily overstated, I think; Discount fabric is not the flimsy tissue it is often made out to be. For my first decade or so of quilting, I used discount fabrics almost exclusively. Many of those pieces are now ten to fifteen years old, and to my knowledge none of them have any serious structural issues. My first blanket-sized quilt has been in practical use on my bed every day for 12 years now, and it's fine. The first child's quilt I made saw constant use by a toddler who grew up, as they do, and is now in junior high, and it's been handed down to little sister now. It has a huge ink stain on it from an unfortunate incident along the way, but the fabric is completely intact. It has lasted longer than it needed to!

In Praise of Premium Fabric

Now the truth is, although I still have acres of Discount fabric in the stash, I almost never buy it anymore. When I buy fabric now, I go the Premium route. There are excellent reasons to buy Premium fabric; here are my Top Four in increasing order of importance.

#4 - The durability is better over longer time spans.

#3 - The color fastness is often, although not always, better.

#2 - When you buy Premium, you support the quilt shops that are the hubs of the community.

#1 - Premium fabrics are, typically, on average, more beautiful. Obviously, that matters. For a serious artistic project, they are the obvious choice if you can afford them.

In Praise of Discount Fabric

But having said that, I really resist the idea of telling a new quilter that Premium is the only way to go. Because it's not that Premium fabric is, like most products, 20% or 50% or 100% more expensive than the Discount equivalent. It's usually 400% to 500% more! That kind of price differential makes using Premium fabric a very, very expensive way to make all of the mistakes you are going to make, and to work through those first naive design ideas you are going to come up with, when you are first starting out.

The thing is, if Discount fabric is off-limits the craft becomes strictly the domain of the well-off. The reason that I only used Discount fabrics for so long, after all, is that they were simply all I could afford, and I have never been anything resembling truly poor. Even at that, and even at the Discount price, my finished tops used to wait sometimes for Christmas gift certificates so I could afford backing fabric for them.

The only reason I can buy Premium fabric now is that I've reached enough of a level of mid-life affluence that I have extra money to throw at my hobby. I buy it because I CAN. If I had played my cards differently, though -- if I had wanted to have children, for instance -- I seriously doubt I could afford the good stuff now. But I would still want to make an occasional quilt.

In Praise of Salvage Fabric

Even though I can afford Premium fabric now, I still don't see the point of making utility quilts from it. For utility quilts (and remember, I consider a working crib quilt to be a utility item) I like to reach back to the practical origins of pieceing. I like the challenge of making do with what is on hand, imitating -- albeit in great comfort and without the desperation of necessity -- the way that earlier quilters made practical use of available scraps during the many centuries when fabric was a precious commodity.

Times have changed, of course. The drunk who once staggered into my mom's quilt class to announce "these are the ladies who cut cloth apart and then sew it back together!" was not the only person to notice that modern decorative quilting has strayed a long way from its practical roots. Well, that's fine. But I get a great deal of satisfaction out of finding use for the Salvage fabric that washes up on my shores. It's kind of a fun game, trying to keep it out of the landfill by doing something useful and attractive with it. That's what the QuiltStorm project (stay tuned!) is going to be all about, and that is why, in the next post, you will see me use an old flannel sheet that I found on the sidewalk as the back for my highly scrappy crib quilt.

And yes, that's a highly SCRAPPY crib quilt. With an "S." It looks great! If I do say so myself! It is by no means archival, but I betcha it will stay in one piece longer than the baby will stay a baby, which is as long as it needs to. It's comfy and cozy and warm! And the total materials cost, fabric, batting, and thread, was: FREE. 100% scrap and salvage.

How to Make a Quick Crib Quilt, Part I

2008-02-05T22:22:00.000-08:00

Crib quilts are fun to make. It's nice that they are so SMALL -- it makes them easy to handle, and they go fast. Plus, there is no reason to get all fancy about a piece that is going to be repeatedly barfed on and then, later, dragged through mud puddles. You can be more relaxed and experimental with a crib quilt than with something you are making for grown-ups, where you run the risk that people are actually going to be looking at your work for years to come.

If you are an experienced quilter, remember: most parents will be stunned and delighted that you made their child a quilt, but will have no particular sense of its relative quality. And the baby, of course, has no idea what's going on. The crib quilt is therefore an opportunity to showcase, shall we say, your fastest work.

A crib quilt is also a great place to start for a newbie. Are you a newbie? Do you have a sewing machine? Splendid. Let's shred. (If you are an experienced quilter, you can read along if you want to, but really, you already know all of this stuff.)

Step One:

Get a bunch of fabric squares that are all the same size. (Time: Variable)

I cut low-end fabric scraps into 3", 4", 4 1/2", and 5" squares and keep them on hand for exactly this kind of thing. I keep an eye out for juvenile and pictorial scraps at the right scale, and once in a blue moon I'll even buy an eighth of a juvenile fabric just so I'll have some some animals, buildings, vehicles, and other whimsical images on hand for crib quilts and fabric blocks. Kids groove on the images, and they give the quilt some value as a vocabulary-builder when its owner first starts talking.

If you don't have a fabric collection on hand, you'll just have to cut your squares, unless you know me in real life, in which case you can just use some of mine. I've got tons. If you actually go out and BUY fabric for a crib quilt, I encourage you to get the cheapest material you can find. There's no point in shelling out for premium quilting fabric; it's not going to look any fancier than the buck-a-yard sale stuff from JoAnne's after a few dozen barf-and-wash cycles.

Step Two:

Lay out your squares. (Time: 30 minutes)

This is the fun part. I went for kind of a dark/light checkerboard effect here, but any kind of pattern seems to work fine. I've done crib quilts with jumbled jewel-tone squares and one with no pattern whatsoever, and they ended up fine. Keep moving pieces around until it looks good. It's never a bad idea to go away and do something else for a while, and then come back and see if you still like it.

Step Three:

Keep the squares organized. (Time: 15 minutes)

Once you are satisfied with your design, you'll have to have a system to keep your layout intact (unless you are going to sew them together immediately, which would be perfectly acceptable. I'm not the boss of you). Here, I'm keeping each of the eight columns together. I've turned each into a stack, making sure to pay attention to which way is "up" for each piece, and to be consistent about having the top of the quilt be the top of the stack. I pin each stack together, along with a number that is faced right-side up (it's a good idea to underline your 1's, 6's, 8's, and 9's). On stack one, I note that it is the left-hand column.

Step Four:

Sew strips together. (Time: 5 minutes/strip)

This should go quickly -- it's just attaching each piece to the one above it with a quick, short seam. (For each seam, you put the two "good" sides together and sew a straight stich 1/4" from the edge of the fabric -- the infamous "quarter inch seam allowance.") You'll end up with a bunch of really long, skinny strips of pieces.

Step Five:

Press seams open. (Time: 1 minute/strip)

On the back side of each strip, you need to press each seam open and flat with an iron. But here's where things get controversial. Most quilters will tell you that you then need to "press it back closed," ironing both edges over to one side or another in an alternating pattern from strip to strip. But I don't do that anymore. I press those seams open and leave them open, and find this gets me better results in the long run. I'm definitely in the minority on that score, though.

Some experts say that you should not use a steam iron for quilting. This is because they are silly. Steam not only makes the iron more effective, it also produces a highly satisfying hissing noise and dramatic clouds of vapor, and you wouldn't want to deprive yourself of that.

Step Six:

Pin Strips Together. (Time: Variable)

Now you need to start sewing those strips together. The length of time this takes is going to depend on something that seems a little esoteric at first: how concerned you are with your corners meeting up precisely. This is something that quilters tend to get pretty exercised about. Me, for instance, I don't like my corners to be off by more than two thread widths.

To make that happen, I use special, extra-fine pins to attach the strips together, with at least one pin at every place where seams are going to meet. It takes a while, and is not an especially exciting part of the process. If you are a beginning quilter, you can aim for a lower standard and speed up the process a little. If you decide to "go for a rustic look," or if you just don't give a damn, you wouldn't really have to pin at all. You could just wing it. I've never done that, but it sounds very liberating.

Step Seven:

Continue Pieceing. (Time: About as long as Step Six)

Once you have sewn all of your pairs of strips together, you just take out the pins, press the new seam open (and press it back shut, if you want to), and then pin neighboring pairs together to continue assembling the quilt face. The nice thing about this process is that it accelerates as you go. In this example, for instance, we started with eight strips, so I had to pin four pairs together. After that first round, I only had to pin two pairs of pairs. That second round left two chunks of four columns each, so it was just a matter of pinning those two pieces together, and....

Voila! The main area of the quilt face is finished!

However, it's still very thin, small, and fragile. As it stands, it's not gonna keep a little punk, er, that is, a beautiful precious baby, very warm. We still have some work to do.

So, tune in next time for "How to Make a Quick Crib Quilt, Part II: The Revenge."

Slow News Day

2008-01-31T23:34:00.000-08:00

There was another onslaught of abundant, unlooked-for, and not-entirely-wanted free fabric this week. Three boxes full, mostly odd scraps in odd weights and in the styles of yesterdecade, it washed up at work somehow. Since I have somehow become known as the hatchetman of scrap fabric, it fell to me to get rid of it. I spent all Wednesday evening washing, pressing, and sorting this crap. Probably not the highest use of my time, but -- I'll admit it -- weirdly satisfying.

One box of larger chunks will move on to SCRAP, a highly cool non-profit here in the City of Roses that is my fabric donation destination of choice. One garbage can full of the dregs will go to Oregon Waste Management, Inc., with the rest of the household trash. That only leaves about 500 piles all over my studio floor, some of which might eventually end up in regular scrap quilts, some of which might work for the "QuiltStorm" project I mentioned briefly last time, and some of which may end up being useable in other folk-style or utility quilts. The place looks like a dry cleaners exploded.

It's a Ring!

The other piece of news is that the "Quilt Blogs by Men" BlogRing has literally doubled in size since the last post!!! That's right: now there are TWO blogs on the ring. Thanks to Feed Dog for signing up.

Now, for all those other male quilt bloggers out there.... of which there must be one or two.... right...? Hello...? Guys....?

OK, that's enough. I'll be back sometime this weekend with a bona fide quilt-related post. Promise.

A Quilt Blog Post With No Pictures of Quilts

2008-01-28T21:29:00.000-08:00

Finishing so many major projects all at once left me sort of dazed. So, after three posts in a row about finished quilts, I'm taking time out today to talk about the transition back to quilting business as usual. This will probably be more useful for me than it is entertaining to you. Sorry about that.

What Should I Work On Next?

With a couple of months still before nice weather starts to shut down the 2007-2008 quilt year, I've completed two of the three projects (Ice & Fire, Labyrinth) that were the top priorities on my list of goals. The third one, a graduation quilt for Niece #1, is definitely my biggest concern at this point. Fortunately, it is coming along just fine; I finished its face last week and pinned it out last night. Unfortunately, it will be quite a while before I can show it to you here, what with it being a present and all.

Meanwhile, an unanticipated (by me, anyway) pregnancy of a long-time friend means I need to take time out to put together another crib quilt. I'm actually already well into this project, officially Quilt #52 -- I pinned this one out yesterday, too -- and I'll be writing about in detail in the next couple of posts.

Afer those two gift quilts, one big priority is to finish the Four Seasons pieces. I pinned out the last two of those yesterday, too, so that puts them into handwork territory, where I can just tinker with them as opportunities come along.

(If you were counting, I pinned out four different projects yesterday. It was a real pinfest. The tip of my left index finger looks like hamburger.)

Also possible priorities for the rest of this season are the Batik Boxes quilt, the Scrap Blanket project, and the Devil's Claw/Indigo Stars piece. The "Legacy" or "Heritage" piece that I originally thought would be a priority for this year, I'm now thinking I'll put on hold for the time being.

Finally, I've been developing a plan for creating 12 to 20 quick, cheap, and easy lap quilts in a project I'm calling, with characteristic excitability, "QuiltStorm2008." The idea is to work entirely with scrap and salvage materials, and to go for a very simple, highly scrappy aesthetic. It will give me some opportunities to experiment and practice some skills, and to generate a lot of simple utility quilts in a big hurry. More on this madness as it develops.

Blogrings

I've decided to get back onto a blogring. I've joined "Quilt Studio" as member number 278 or something, and look forward to getting to know the neighbors over time. I seem to be up and running on it. If you are visiting from Quilt Studio, please ignore this dull post and go down to the previous one, which is quite good.

And, because I am quite mad, I decided to create a blogring for male quilt bloggers. To my knowledge, there is at least one other such creature. If you happen to know of any others, please have them come and join my ring. It's likely to get pretty lonely, otherwise. As of right now, the ring is fully functional, except that since I'm the only member the "next site" button leads from my blog to my blog, the "previous site" button leads from my blog to my blog, and so on.

Exuberance

Her's what happened to my daily readership after Exuberant Color linked to my post about Labyrinth:

There's a reason E.C. commands that kind of readership. Her work is the absolute shizzle, and she's got a tons of ideas and insights to share. You should check it out. Go! Now!

Labyrinth: Done

2008-01-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

Labyrinth
2003 - 2008
68" x 94.5"

Sometime in 2003, a friend told me about the practice of walking a labyrinth meditative as a spiritual or meditative exercise, an idea I had not encountered before. She explained that, technically speaking, a labyrinth is different than a maze in that a labyrinth is not a puzzle, and it has no decision points. It is simply a winding and convoluted path that leads inevitably to a final destination.

Inspired by this much information about traditional labyrinths, and not knowing some other facts that are arguably kinda significant -- that they are supposed to begin at an edge, work through a pattern of concentric circles, and end in the center, for instance -- I charged headlong into creating my own version of a labyrinth on graph paper. Like many of my best designs, the basic ideas were set down during a staff meeting at work. The resulting design has its beginning and end points in opposite corners, and has no relationship whatsoever to concentric circles, but is in every other way (which is to say, in no way at all) a classic traditional labyrinth.

Initial construction was held up by real life while I got married, bought a house, and moved in with my wife, but by late 2003 the adventure began. Since the design requires around 3000 2" x 2" squares, there was obviously a lot of preliminary cutting to be done. For a clear contrast between the labyrinth "path" and "walls" I could only use fabrics that I think of as "darks" and "dark-darks" against "light-lights." In other words, I was afraid the path would lose definition if I used pieces with anything but the very lightest color value. In retrospect I may have overdone this a bit, but in the moment it forced me to scout for and buy a lot of very light fabric in 2003-2005.

Each square was individually placed to create interesting patterns between individual pieces, as well as improvised patterns of color on larger areas of the quilt surface. Those color patterns were, in turn, constrained by rules built into the original "map" of the quilt; essentially, progressively warmer colors are allowed towards the center of the piece. A subtle pattern in the tints of the "path" operates independently of the obvious pattern in the colors of the "walls."

The sheer scale of the project required a special approach to construction. To get a flat area big enough to do the layout, I had to disassemble our bed and clear the bedroom floor. This gave me enough space to construct a third of the quilt at a time. In fall 2003 and winter 2005, I took advantage of long weekends when Mrs.5000 was out of town; for the last round, early last year, we moved into the guestroom for a few days. I laid out the two outside sixths of the quilt first, the two intermediate sixths second, and then the middle third last; for this reason, an incredibly savvy observer might notice the fabric quality and range improving closer to the middle.

Once laid out, the individual pieces were carefully stacked and labeled for the long, tedious process of assembly into strips over the coming months. Because I only realized after assembling the first sixth -- what is now the bottom of the quilt -- that a standard sewing machine foot is not exactly 1/4" wide, that section of the quilt, like everything from my first 10 years of quilting, has the seam allowances subtly screwed up. The bottom edge is a tiny bit shorter than the top edge, and you can tell from the picture that this makes the lowest part of the quilt pucker a little bit. This is the kind of thing that quilt judges just hate. Well, heck with them.

With the face completed and assembled by last September, I took a month or two off from Labyrinth while doing the machine quilting on a few other projects. This was a deliberate decision, as it let me practice and get my most egregious mistakes out of the way on quilts I'm less invested in. Ice & Fire having been my most densely-quilted piece to date, and Two Complex Shapes immediately surpassing it, Labyrinth has a yet denser quilting pattern, and over a much larger surface area to boot. Although the machine quilting was finished between Christmas and New Year, that left plenty of detail work left. Over the last several weeks, I've been gradually burying threads, attaching and sewing down the binding, and attaching a sleeve. I finished all that last night.

I noticed this week that two years ago, in the third post of this blog, I mentioned Labyrinth and guessed that it would be completed in 2009. So, according to that estimate I am in the very rare and gratifying position of having finished something a full year ahead of schedule. It's nice.

Two Complex Shapes: Done

2008-01-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

It's Another Finish, People!!

A few days after wrapping up Ice & Fire, I had another finish, putting the final touches on Two Complex Shapes on the Friday after Christmas.

It's the second time I've finished this quilt, actually. It was "finished," or so I thought at the time, in 1999, and it was actually the main piece of decor in my old apartment's living room for a number of years. More recently, though, I'd become dissatisfied with its minimal and poorly-executed quilting. With its large pieces outlined "in the ditch" (and some supplementary tieing of the biggest pieces), 'Shapes had always lacked something in the texture department, and in recent years had begun to sag.

I was pretty sure it would look better if I went back in and overquilted it in a denser pattern, but I'm very happily surprised with how MUCH better it looks. The change is kind of hard to capture on film, but it's pretty dramatic in person. Here's what it looked like before:

I like Two Complex Shapes for its uniqueness. I've never really seen another quilt piece quite like it. When I designed it, back in 1999, I was dating a painter, and had developed an interest in abstract modern art. This was an attempt to create a quilt piece inspired by that tradition. The specific design began as a doodle I made while one of my undergraduate students was giving an oral presentation of his term project. When he was finished, I had a design I liked a lot, but realized I hadn't paid attention to a word the poor guy had said. I gave him a "C," reasoning that if it had been an especially good or an exceptionally bad presentation, it would have held my interest better.

The teal fabric of the background was leftover from a set of living room curtains I had made earlier in the year. I picked out the orange to match it for a kind of "corroded copper" combination that I like a lot (I used the same basic colors later for Log Cabin). Cutting out the large, irregular shapes was brutal. I managed to get them more or less accurate, cutting with scissors (!) on the floor of the girlfriend's painting studio. "More or less" accurate -- in the top half of the smaller complex shape, you can really tell that the fabric has been coaxed and cajoled into position.

The quilting pattern -- the part I added this fall -- is a triumph of one-inch painter's tape. Since the background is quilted in those one-inch parallel lines, each of which gets interupted once or twice by the shapes, there were approximately six zillion loose ends to bury once the sewing itself was done. Finally, I replaced the previous slim hanging sleave with one at the standard 3 1/2 inch width, which gives me the option of putting it in shows.

The thing I like best about the new 'Shapes is the collaboration between 1999 Michael and 2007 Michael. I like the younger guy's design, and I like the older guy's machine quilting. I didn't tear out the old, crude quilting and tieing, so all of the old flaws are still there. Plus, there are a few new flaws thrown in for good measure -- this is the quilt, you might remember, that taught me that painter's tape and scissors don't mix. But for all that, I'm pretty happy with it. And, it's done!

I can see the patch, but I bet you can't.

The back side looks kind of cool, too:

Ice & Fire: Done

2007-12-29T14:08:00.000-08:00

It's a Finish, People!!

I finished Ice and Fire in a binge of handwork on Boxing Day.

Officially Quilt #40, it was started on Thanksgiving Weekend 2004. Like a few other of my quilts, the design and fabric selection happened independently of each other, then merged together. I don't remember which came first. The design was just this little notebook sketch:

It would turn out later that working with so many triangles would pose some challenges for me. I'd have to make special templates for them, and arrange for eight 45 degree points to more or less meet at the center of every block. But for now, all of that was in the future. I just liked my design.

It would also turn out that this is a venerable old pattern, with a traditional name (although I can never remember what it is), that people have been making for at least 150 years. This is par for the course. When you work with simple geometric shapes, like I like to do, you are not going to stumble on much that has never been thought of by the generations upon generations of quilters that have come before you. Such is life in the fiber arts.

Meanwhile, the day after Thanksgiving brought with it the traditional annual spending binge at the early morning JoAnnes sales. At the 2004 sale I bought two sets of cheap batik fabrics with the intention of using them for some unspecified future project. My mom rolled her eyes at both of them. Regarding the set of four that went on to be used in Ice and Fire, she has subsequently been forced to recant. (On the set of two that make up the still-unfinished Batik Boxes, she was pretty much right, as you'll see sometime next year.)

Eventually, I noticed that I had a set of four fabrics and a design that needed a set of four fabrics, and came to the obvious conclusion. I made most of the blocks in the 2005-06 season, moving at a steady but slow pace. Getting the eight-point meets as accurate as I wanted them took a lot of doing, and plenty of re-doing too. All of the blocks were complete by the beginning of the dismal 2006-07 season, but I didn't manage to do anything but get them assembled and pinned to a back that year.

Something else that happened in Fall 2006 that would indirectly benefit the piece, though, and that was the machine quilting class I took from Helene Knott. That taught me, among many other things, the painter's tape trick, which I used extensively with Ice and Fire. Just as importantly, it gave me the confidence to increase by as much as three or four times the density of my quilting on large pieces.

The actual quilting happened over the last four months, and in October the SoTC readers helped me pick the name. I finished the binding at a guild meeting on December 10, and got to show it off as "close enough" to done at that point. Finicky detail work and the addition of a hanging sleeve on the 26th officially took it over the finish line. It's the first time I've finished anything for half a year, and the first time I've finished anything besides a baby blanket in a year and a half, so "done" is a good feeling.

The December Lack-of-Progress Report

2007-12-18T22:09:00.000-08:00

Hmm, I've left the post that talked about being sick up for three weeks. My quilt-blog discipline went to hell when the Q4P blogring bit the dust. But just in case anybody has been wondering: I'm fine. Healthy as a horse. A healthy horse.

December has been a tough quilting month. One reason has been the end of the college football season, which takes away my guaranteed weekly intensive quilting times. The other reason has been, of course, Christmas. I do love me some Christmas, but it certainly does take vast swathes of times with all of the planning and cooking and buying and making and wrapping and this and that and the other thing. Hard to keep the momentum going on the craft projects.

The upside is, I have several projects needing only some final handwork to get finished, and several days of holiday downtime with the family coming up in which to do handwork. You do the math! I'm hoping I can start bragging about some finished projects soon.

Here's the bin full of my Christmas homework.

It has Ice and Fire, Two Complex Shapes, and all four of the Four Seasons in it, along with everything I'll need to work on them. Which is a lot of homework -- I'm betting on winter weather forcing everyone to stay indoors and spend a lot of time gabbing -- but I'm also going to be bringing along Labyrinth. The quilting on Lab' is about 80% finished, and I must say I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along....

Happy Holidays to all you fabulous readers, and to everyone you know, and to everyone else too!

This is Not a Post!

2007-11-26T19:11:00.000-08:00

I got sick last week, and wasn't able to make the yearly Thanksgiving trip up to my sister's place.
In terms of momentum on my immediate quilting goals, it wasn't too bad of a hit. I lost all of the primo handwork time that comes with hanging out with the family at the holiday, but gained tons of home-sick-not-able-to-do-much-but-quilt time. I made plenty of progress, actually, especially on Saturday afternoon during the sad dismantling of the so-recently great University of Oregon football team.

Not a Quilt For My Sister!

Since we were going to be at her house, I had really hoped to get a picture this year of a quilt I made for my sister a few years back, but never adequately photographed. I was going to share it with you in this very post.

In its place, here's Kandinsky's 1923 painting Black and Violet.

Not a Family Tradition!

Not travelling to my sister's place also meant skipping the holiday tradition my mother and I have: waking at 5:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving Friday and going down to the local JoAnne's to take part in the early-morning sales. We've been doing this for six or seven years. Even now that I'm too snooty to buy much actual fabric at JoAnne's, there's still plenty of other stuff on major sale; in particular, I usually lay in a year's supply of batting.

My plan was to take a charming little photo montage of this yearly adventure and to post it here for posterity. Alas, because I was sick at home, it never happened. So, instead of a cute shot of Mom as the two of us sneak out of my sister's house, here's Whistler's famous Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist's Mother.

This was going to be a picture of the other shoppers lined up in the rain and dark! Instead, it's a picture of a Depression-era breadline.

Obviously, since I wasn't there, I couldn't ask anyone to take a shot of Mom and me together. In its place, here's a picture of actor George Clooney with his mother.

The crowds inside were one person fewer this year, but if they were anything like usual they likely looked something like the chaos and horror evoked by Picasso's masterpiece Guernica.

That's Not All!

Actually, it is. I'll be back with a real post, one of these days.

Collaborating With Strangers

2007-11-18T19:32:00.000-08:00

I seem to have a reputation as somebody who knows how to get rid of unwanted fabric, and I'm called on in this capacity more often than you'd think. I skim the best for myself -- of course -- but I also have a pretty good idea of which charities would be interested in which fabrics, and how to get the fabrics to them. And, I know when something is just garbage.

Early this year, a big cardboard box of scraps landed on my lap. Initially, I thought it was one of the worst hauls ever. Lots of shirting, much of it literally from old chopped-up shirts, and stretch fabrics galore in wildly unfashionable colors and patterns. I took the box home and ignored it for a while, and only a few days later set myself to the task of sorting it out. In the bottom, wadded up under all of the dross, I found this:

It is a complete quilt top. Each of the blocks has a woman's name embroidered in the center, most of them old-fashioned first names but a few "Mrs. x" and one, interestingly, "Mother." And that was that. No other clues at all.

It was a quandry. It represented far too much work, and was inherently too cool a thing, to throw out. But it was also far too much someone else's project for me to want to devote weeks to making it into a finished quilt... and what would I do with it then, after all?

Deciding it needed a good home, I put it on Ebay as an unfinished quilt top. It worked. It was bought by a woman in Salem who adores it, and who does intend to finish it. She has an interesting theory about its history. Like me, she thinks that its original construction dates to the 1930s. It seems possible that, after the person or people who made the blocks got them together, they suddenly looked way too much like a certain symbol being used by Nazi Germany. There's no way to prove this one way or the other, but it is an interesting and plausible theory.

Indigo Stars

The other treasure in the bottom of this unpromising box was the set of Indigo Stars I wrote about a few months ago.

Earlier this year, in a box of scrap fabric, I found a set of 20 hand-pieced blocks, a star pattern in indigo-on white. They are, in a sense, nothing special -- the craftsmanship is moderate at best, the fabric quality was poor to begin with and has not improved with age. Nor do I have any idea who made them; certainly no one with any connection to me or my family. And of course, I am completely smitten by them, and want to do something lovely with them.

The stars all look more or less like this:

It's a very handsome pattern, but the individual blocks vary by as much as two inches in height and width from each other, and many are in and of themselves noticably out of square. So, in order to incorporate them into a larger piece, I first needed to put a frame around each block, and then trim all of the new "block-in-frames" to a uniform size.

I am REALLY pleased with the way it is working out. The arrangement seems both to set off the uniformity of the original blocks to good effect, which is after all what you want in a traditional block quilt, but also, if you get up close and personal with them, to showcase each block's idiosyncracies.

Mrs.5000 and I have wondered a lot what my unknown collaborater, probably a woman of modest quilting skills (or someone whose most proficient quilter days were in the past or in the future) working in the 1930s, would think of what I have done here. I hope she would like it. She would probably be surprised to see me in my studio, listening to the football game and taking occasional breaks to catch up with my moves in online Scrabble games.

Game Plan

Having completed the face for Indigo Stars, I'll be putting it aside now for at least a few months. I've got a new set of short term goals, a little aggressive but I think doable. By the end of the next three weeks, I would like to have Two Complex Shapes and Ice and Fire ready to hang, the graduation quilt for Niece #1 basically pieced (excepting borders), and the quilting finished on Labyrinth.

Onward! I'll report back.

Progress Report at Week Ten

2007-11-13T13:29:00.001-08:00

Zowie, it has been a quietly busy couple of weeks, but I've still managed to sneak in bits of quilting progress here and there, supplemented by an all day binge on Sunday. Time for an official progress report.

First Priority Projects

Ice & Fire -- Is done, except for the handwork. It still needs some threads buried, the binding tacked down, and a sleeve. But, with the handwork-intensive holidays coming up, that makes it as good as done.

Graduation Quilt for Niece #1 -- The pieceing on this sucker is going much faster than I expected, despite the complications of its irregular layout. I'd say it is 50 - 60% assembled at this point. I'm not showing any pictures of this one, though, since it's a gift.

Labyrinth -- I worked up my nerve on Sunday morning, which was surprisingly difficult, and started into the machine quilting in the afternoon. It is a big sucker, so the sheer bulk of it creates some difficulties even though I'm using a very straightforward quilting pattern. I'm surprised by how much fun it has been, so far. I'm quilting along the "path" through the piece, so it is kind of like I'm enacting the meditative practice of walking the labyrinth, except with a sewing machine needle. Here's what it looks like, from my perspective:

Three or four hours in, and I'm maybe 15% through the quilting.

Second Priority Projects

Somehow, I have completely skipped over the second priority projects so far this year. Funny how that worked.

Third Priority Projects

Indigo Stars -- This one has just FLOWN together, which makes sense what with my anonymous collaborator having done all of the heavy lifting 70 years ago. The top is 90% assembled. And might I add, it's going to look smashing.

The Four Seasons -- No particular progress on these. I need to buy a matching backing fabric for the two newer ones.

The Symbol -- Still WAAAAY back in the planning process for this one.

Two Complex Shapes -- This requilting project is, like Ice and Fire, all over except the handwork. I just need to bury (lots of) lose threads, and re-attach the hanging sleave. And it looks terrific, thank you very much, as long as you don't notice the patch I had to make for it.

Fourth Priority Projects

Well, I skipped over the Second Priority, but I didn't skip THAT far over the Second Priority.

----------

Dogme: Addendum

Here's another little piece of Dogme. Or maybe Bunnyme. I don't know if this is a common thing or a local thing, or if my mom is maybe just nuts, but when she started me quilting she suggested you "should," in a scrap quilt, "hide a rabbit." In other words, there should be a fabric with a rabbit somewhere in the design, but inconspicuous.

In general terms, I think this means that it adds to the experience of a quilt if you incorporate surprises, things that aren't going to be noticed on first examination but might be discovered at second look, or third look, or several years down the road. So especially when I'm making a quilt as a gift, or for a child, I always try to hide some metaphorical "rabbits."

But I hide literal rabbits too. Here's the one in Labyrinth:

...aaaaand I'm outta here. Have a good day!

My Quilting Dogme

2007-11-05T21:23:00.000-08:00

Dogme

If you watch European movies at all, you probably remember the "Dogme" movement from a few years back. A group of Scandinavian directors came up with a list of fairly arbitrary rules, a "dogma," about what would and would not be allowable in their films. Because the rules they chose were pretty spartan -- no background music was allowed, for instance, unless it was music that the characters in the movie would hear -- most American audiences hated Dogme films. I kind of liked them, though, and I especially thought that the IDEA of the dogma was kind of interesting.

Regardless of what the rules are, actually, I tend to enjoy artwork that is created within a set framework. Whether its the limited vocabulary of shapes available to a traditional Haida artist, or the self-imposed mathematical obsessions of a piece by Sol Lewit, it's fascinating to see an artist react and respond to, and be inspired by, the constrictions of their own dogmas. (Of course, available technologies, as well as the cultural norms of artistic training and consumption, create subtle dogmas for EVERY artist. But we won't go there.)

The point of all this is that I've been thinking about my own dogmas lately. Mind you, I've never sat down and said, "The following are going to be the rules of my quilting." No, my dogma has evolved over time, according to what specific kinds of work I enjoy doing, and according to what I like my final product to look like.

I imagine most people who have made more than one or two quilts have their own dogmas, though they might not think of it that way. Some people only do hand quilting, some people are only interested in applique, some people really only want to work with batiks. Whatever. It's their M.O., their style, their artistic choices.... their Dogma!

My Dogme

I use Simple Geometric Shapes. Almost everything I've made has been an arrangement of squares, rectangles, and triangles.

I do Simple Straight Pieceing. People do tremendous work with paper pieceing, in which cut paper shapes are used as a foundation that adds a great deal of precision and allows the pieceing of very intricate patterns. But for some reason, I haven't been tempted by this technique yet.

I create Simplistic Quilting Patterns. This has more to do with my skill level than conscious choice. But, that's part of where dogmas come from.

I make Nothing Figurative. My quilts are relentlessly abstract by design. Anything pictoral has to come from the fabric.

I use No Photoimages. You see an increasing number of quilts incorporating photographs that have been printed onto fabric. But, you won't see this in my quilts.

I use Jewel Tones. I tend to use bright, saturated colors, along with very light fabrics that bring them into relief.

I use Single-Color Prints. I tend to gravitate towards fabrics with a pattern in a single color, rather than fabrics with a multi-color pattern. The exception is with batiks, which I love and which -- contrary to many other peoples' dogmas -- I will happily use side by side with conventional prints.

I use Straight Cotton. No silk, no wool. Very occasionally flannel. Anything else goes into the bin for "other" fabrics with the corderoy, jersey knits, and fake fur.

Catme

Longtime readers may know my ancient kittygirl, Yoyo:

But I don't think I've ever introduced my step-kittyboy, Caliban:

They are showing off progress on the "Indigo Stars" project, which has really been flying along. In fact, I've made a bunch of progress on several projects. I'll brag about it in a few days!

My Machine

2007-10-24T11:06:00.000-07:00

So this is a sentimental story about a man and his sewing machine.

It's an old machine, a 1973 Kenmore, back when they made 'em out of metal and therefore fairly indestructable. It isn't great, and it certainly isn't fancy, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm able to use it for the rest of my life.

I was in graduate school when I learned to quilt, so there was really no possibility of buying something as extravagant as a sewing machine. I planned on, for the foreseeable future, doing my designing and cutting at home, then pieceing everything together as quickly as possible on my mom's machine at Christmas and Summer breaks.

While this was happening, my older brother was buying his house in Ashland, Oregon. It was one of those "as is" home sales, meaning that he also ended up buying lots of miscellaneous crap stored in the basement. Amongst that crap was the old Kenmore.

"What should I do with this sewing machine?" he asked my mom.

"You know, your brother would really love that as a Christmas present," she told him.

"Really?" he asked.

And that's how I got my sewing machine. He gave my sister a circular saw. It was the best Christmas ever.

Why I Love My Sewing Machine

1. It's old enough to be cool. Keepin' it real!

2. It does everything a sewing machine needs to do: it makes a straight stitch, on very rare occasions a zig-zag stitch, and a couple times a decade a buttonhole. All you need.

3. It took a while, but I found a walking foot for it. (That's a gizmo that grabs the fabric from both top and bottom, instead of just the bottom, to feed fabric under the needle.)

4. Also, although I can't "lower the feed dogs" (never mind), I can still do free motion quilting with a "darning plate." I like having a "darning plate". How many guys do YOU know who have a "darning plate"?

5. That metal indestructibility thing is O.K.!

6. And, not to get all after-school special on you, but hey! My brother gave it to me!

Why I Will Get Another One Next Year

Next fall, I will send the last student loan check into the black hole. Then, by way of celebration, I'm gonna get me a new machine. Here's why.

1. The actual sewing surface on the Kenmore is only about three inches by eight inches, which is waaaaay too small for quilting.

(although things got much, much better when I got a custom "Clutter Gutter," which is an awesome supplemental sewing surface made for exactly this purpose by a woman here in Portland. I can't recommend it highly enough.)

2. It doesn't have a very wide "throat." The opening on the right side of the needle is average at best. When you are working on a full-size quilt, you have to ram a lot of twisted up fabric and batting through that space, so you don't want it to be small. A big throat is the main thing I'll be looking for in a new machine.

3. A few modern gizmos are cool. Getting the top and bottom threads at the same level of tension is a technicality that's important, and a real pain in the butt on an older machine. On lots of new machines, that's super easy. Also, you can set most of them so they always stop with the needle down. That's important, because it gives you more control when you're stitching around a corner.

4. The old machine is, well, old. It needs to be repaired every few years.

5. It's a HUGE pain to oil. Really. It takes, like, a half hour.

6. If I had two machines, I could host a little craft night sort of dealie. Or maybe take a student. That sort of thing.

Audience Participation Time

So that's the story with my machine. What's YOUR machine like?

[Last Year in SotC: I was working on my machine quilting skills, and my practice pieces were looking pretty cool. I'm not doing anything very intricate right now. But, I'm actually machine quilting real quilts, instead of just practicing, so that's a big improvement.]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaargghhhh!!!!

2007-10-20T12:01:00.000-07:00

I. Cut. Into. A. Quilt.....

I was trying to cut off some of the painter's tape that I've been using to mark quilting lines, and of course the fabric stuck lightly to the tape and so I was cutting into fabric too.

After considering the obvious options -- suicide, joining a monastery, throwing my sewing machine through the window and never, ever, ever doing any quilting again, ever -- I got to work on, sigh, a patch.

Tell me it's not too visible? Unfortunately, it's a little worse in real life, but maybe not terrible terrible...

"Ice & Fire" It Is!!

2007-10-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

The chads have been examined, the ballets have been counted, and the Name-That-Quilt is officially "Ice & Fire." Thanks to everyone for your suggestions and votes.

Better yet, I had a little consult this week with master quilter Mom5000 (which reminds me, I should do a post on Mom5000 one of these days) and she gave me the advice I wanted to hear: call the quilting on, um, "Ice & Fire" mostly done (there's still a little detail work left to do), and bind that sucker! So it looks like it will be the first finished project of the season.

Housekeeping

I've been doing a little bit of sprucing up around the blog. It looks a little less spartan around here with a background in the masthead, for instance. Did that a couple weeks ago.

I've just added two new lists of links down the left side. The first one, "Community and Quilt Shops," will seem perfectly normal to quilters but maybe a little strange for non-quilters. Why a list of shops? Well, you have to understand that a good quilt shop is not only a place to buy fabric and gear, but also a hub of quilting culture. It's where classes are taught and ideas are exchanged. They are kind of the -- to get a little overwrought -- spiritual homes of the craft.

The second new list is of quilt shows that I've either been in before, or would like to enter pieces for in the future. I'm adding this list partially for your information and edification, of course, but even more as a challenge and reminder to myself. It's fun to put quilts in shows, and it's good to remember that you WANT to put quilts in shows. It keeps you focused on improving.

The shows I've listed are a real mix. A couple are larger, regional affairs, and several are of course in or near the Portland area, where I live. The last three, though, are on the South Coast of Oregon, where I grew up and where my parents still live. I like to keep a toe in the quilt scene down there. The larger quilt shows have their own websites, but for the smaller shows I've just linked out to sites that mention them. If you happen to know of other shows in the Portland area, I would be interested in hearing about them.

Cheers,
M5K

The Seam Allowance

2007-10-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

The current Name That Quilt standings:

Ice and Fire -- 3
Star Halos -- 3
Saturn's Night Sky -- 1
Refraction #4 -- 1
Evening Star -- 1

If you haven't voted, check in here and throw in your two cents worth. Polls close next weekend.

Don't know what I'm talking about? Check here.

Or, if you would like to help me come up with a good symbol....

I'm soliciting ideas related to another quilt project at my other blog, here.

The Passion and Intrigue of the Seam Allowance

It seems like most of the people reading SOtC at this point are quilters themselves. Originally, most of the readers were non-quilters, and I was trying to explain the basics of the craft to them. Did anybody actually read these introductions to someone else's hobby? Who knows. But today, in the original spirit of the blog, I present this fascinating discussion of the Seam Allowance.

To start with: You don't want to think too hard about the details of how a sewing machine works. You just don't. It's hard to figure out, and it doesn't seem like it should actually work, and you'll forget it almost immediately, and just have to work it out again next time you get curious. Basically, though, you've got two threads -- the top thread and the bobbin thread -- that interlock at every stitch through the two (or more) layers of fabric that you are sewing together.

Now, the weave of the fabric is what holds the threads in place. Because of that, you don't want your stitches to be right next to the cut edge of your fabric. If the stitch is too close to the edge, the fabric will unravel in no time, and your seam will come undone.

In quilt-making, there is a nearly universal standard distance between the edge of any piece of fabric and the stiching used to piece it. That distance, called the "seam allowance," is one quarter of an inch.

In designing quilts and cutting fabrics, it's really critical to remember your seam allowance. If you want your quilt to consist of 5" squares, you have to cut 5 1/2" squares -- 5" plus 1/4" on all sides. If you want to alternate between 9" squares and little 3 x 3 checkerboards of 3" squares, you need to cut 9 1/2" and 3 1/2" squares. (If you are going to cut a triangle, or anything else that isn't rectangular, it gets more complicated. You'll be doing some applied geometry.)

When you are -- to use my very least favorite quilt term -- "fussycutting," or cutting a specific piece to make it ~exactly right~ for where that piece is going in the quilt, you have to think about the seam allowance. Anything on the outer 1/4" is going to disappear; it gets pressed, or literally folded, under the quilt face.

Here are some two inch squares from the Oregon Map Quilt, before pieceing. Keep an eye on that one three across and three down. See how much yellow it has in it? We don't like that. But we're not worried. Also, notice the square on the lower left, the one with purple grapes all around its edges.

Here are the same squares sewn into strips. Now they are 1 1/2 inches wide. Much of the yellow in three across, three down is folded underneath now.

And here are the same squares in the final product, with the strips sewn together. The yellow is gone. And there's just a couple of grapes left (representing LaGrande, actually) in the fabric that was on the lower left. The rest of the purple is safely out of sight, hidden in the seam allowance.

When I started this post, I made myself the challenge of trying to write about seam allowances in a way that would be accessible and interesting to the non-quilter. And I see that I've failed miserably. Ah, well.

See ya next week!

The Name That Quilt! General Election

2007-10-07T17:13:00.000-07:00

Name That Quilt!

First of all, thanks to everyone for your excellent quilt name suggestions. I took them, tampered with a few of them, and picked five that I like. Since I believe in doing things in a open and democratic fashion, I will leave the final determination to a vote of the SoTC readers.

Over on the right is yet another picture of the quilt in question.

Here are the candidates. Vote!

Evening Star
Refraction #4.
Ice and Fire
Halos
Saturn's Night Sky

Speaking of Group Participation....

My friend Jennifer and I had the idea earlier this year of seeing if we could round up a group of people interested in making quilts based on Decemberists songs. A "quilt challenge" sort of thing. I haven't really done much with the idea, because I just don't think the demographics are probably right. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If you think the Decemberists quilt challenge might be right for you, please follow this flowchart:

Do you quilt, or would you like to?

If so, have you ever heard of the Decemberists?

If so, do you have some enthusiasm for the music of the Decemberists?

If so, can you imagine having the time and inclination to create a quilt based on a Decemberists song?

If so, let me know.

Quilt Season 2007: the Progress Report!

Labyrinth is still on the back burner for another week or two, although it was really sweet of several readers to protest this. I prepared the binding for it yesterday, but won't be putting that on for months yet. My plan is to start quilting it in a couple of weeks.

Name That Quilt is also on the back burner. I have finished my minimal quilting plan for it, and am thinking about whether I want to keep going and double the current quilting density, or just to decide that finished is good and declare victory. I'd actually like to get my mom's input on this, so it may just stay on the back burner until the next time I see her.

Niece #1's Graduation Quilt has made huge progress. I spent about 4 hours last weekend just laying it out, piece by piece, on a big sheet on the bedroom floor. Then I went through and pinned every piece to the sheet. I will probably start pieceing the face together next weekend.

Four Seasons is also on the back burner. I've assembled the faces for both "Spring" and "Summer," and now I need to find backing fabric that more or less matches what I used on the other two. I'll probably do most of the actual assembly over Thanksgiving.

Indigo Stars hasn't progressed.

With so many projects having reached a back-burner stage, there's also another one that has joined the active pile. On my pre-season goal list, I mentioned Two Complex Shapes, a wall hanging I made back in 1999. In terms of pieceing and design, 'Shapes is pretty cool. Unfortunately, I made it when my actual quilting skills were minimal, so it was very crudely quilted and, in part, tied. After years of hanging, it is a little saggy. Jovaliquilts commented that it doesn't look finished, and I completely agree. So now, eight years later, I'm finishing it.

I'm using the painter's tape trick again, and I can already tell I'm going to be really happy with the result. See how much better the partially quilted areas already look, compared to the still unquilted areas? (The brighter blue at the bottom is an area prepped with painter's tape and ready for quilting.)

An Acheiveable Goal

I haven't been to a meeting of my guild for a long time, but I'm going tomorrow night and should be going regularly from here on out. There are meetings every month, every other month they are held in the daytime, when I work. So, I go to a meeting every two months.

I won't have any completed projects this time, of course. After this meeting, though, I think I should be able to present a strong completed project at "Show and Tell" every two months, all the way through to next summer. So that's my goal.

On a minor note, I've finally finished posting photos to the entries from the first year of SoTC, from back when it was on "Friendster." So, if you want to dig around in the older posts of this blog for some reason, they're ready for you.

Wrestling With Quilting Pictures, Plus a Tag

2007-10-01T22:13:00.000-07:00

(Here to Name That Quilt? Go two posts down, to this one.)

Geez, getting a photo of quilting in a red-color area of a quilt is murder! The photos I posted yesterday, which were supposed to show the quilting on the Name-That-Quilt, did no such thing.

I try again. These ones look pretty good in their original 3000 x 2000 pixel resolution; hopefully as they are displayed here they will at least give you the IDEA of how the quilting looks.

Here's what it looks like on the back (with lots of orange threads sticking out that haven't been buryed yet).

Did that help? No? Oh well.

I've Been Tagged!

...by Su Bee of "Pieces of Time." So I'm "it."

The game is to describe yourself with adjectives beginning with the letters of your name. Should be doable, let's give it a whirl...

M is for male. Which is not a particular distinction -- roughly half the planet shares this trait, and no I do not expect a medal. It is maybe significant in a quilting context, however.
I is for independent. I don't like following other peoples' patterns.
C is for color, um, "color-loving." I've always had a base-of-the-spine attraction to bright colors. I probably wouldn't be quilting if I didn't.
H is for historically conscious. This is becoming increasingly important to me, especially as I've started to take on some projects with blocks that were originally made decades before I was born.
A is for amateur. I do not claim to be an expert at this.
E is for equiangular. Phew! Had to get something in there that got across my enthusiasm for the basic simple shapes: squares, rectangles, and triangles.
L is for lines. I'm finally starting to get comfortable with the actual lines of quilting that finish a piece. About time.

And now I notice that nothing in the tag says that your adjectives have to be about quilting per se. Damn, that explains why it was so hard.

I guess I should keep the tag alive by offering it forward: Rebel? Quilty? Gl? Want in on this? Don't feel obligated on my account....

The Quilting Pattern on the Name-That-Quilt

2007-09-29T21:42:00.000-07:00

Are you here to Name That Quilt? That's going on here.

Rebel asked about the quilting pattern I'm using on the Name-That-Quilt quilt. It's basically concentric lines at one inch intervals within some of the shapes of the pattern. Here's what is looks like, kind of, although all of the red in the design makes it kinda difficult to photograph:

I'm pretty happy with how exact I've been able to get the quilting lines. Want to know how I do it?

Painter's tape!

Since the tape is an inch wide, you just stick it to your quilt face in adjoining strips. Then, you sew in between the strips.

I actually finished this stage of the Name-That-Quilt quilting today. The question I'm mulling over now is whether I want to do more quilting on it -- maybe even go in-between those one-inch lines to make concentric shapes 1/2 inch apart -- or whether this much is good.

(In fact, I did more quilting today than any other day, ever. I decided last week that today was going to be breakfast-to-bedtime quilting -- The Quilting Death March, I've been calling it, with my usual impeccable good taste -- and it turns out that you can get a hell of a lot done when you throw a whole day at it. I'll show you what I've been up to in a progress report next weekend.)

Name That Quilt!

2007-09-27T16:06:00.000-07:00

As Quilt #40 zips towards the finish line, I'm starting to wonder about its name. At some point, I fell into calling it "Stained Glass Batik," which is not terrible but not great either. Since there is a whole genre of "stained glass quilts," and this ain't one of them, it seems kind of misleading. But on the other hand, no other name has grabbed me either.

Therefore, I am turning to you, the State of the Craft readership, for help in my time of need. Please! Help me name my quilt!

Here are the rules, because I like making up rules:

1. Submit your suggestions in the comments section.
2. Submit as many suggestions as you like.
3. If I really like one of them, I'll use it and you WIN!
4. Maybe there will be some kind of prize, if you want. A fat quarter or something.

How does that sound?

I Didn't Have Enough Projects Going

2007-09-23T12:55:00.000-07:00

On the bus to work the other day, I sketched out a quilting "work plan." I listed the four projects I've been working on this September and what specific tasks I'd been doing on them week by week, then projected out three more weeks. Strange behavior? Sure. But, this exercise in overblown project management made it clear that a couple of quilts were reaching points where they'd have to be set aside for a while. Since I've been enjoying the pace of having four different projects to work on, that gave me an excuse to bring a few other pieces up into the active pile over the next few weeks.

Here's the progress report for the last two weeks:

Labyrinth: I've laid it out and pinned it to its backing and batting, so it is ready for quilting at this point. But, I'm still quilting Batik Stained Glass and for some reason don't like the idea of having two pieces at the machine quilting stage at the same time. So, Labyrinth is the one that leaves the active pile for a few weeks at this point.

Batik Stained Glass: All of the loose threads from the "cool" areas have been buried, and about 1/3 of the "warm" areas have been quilted. I'm postponing for now the decision on whether there will be another finer round of quilting after this first go-round. It is looking pretty good....

Niece #1's Graduation Quilt: is now underway! At the beginning of last week, I set out a cutting mat and the fabrics I had selected...

...and over the course of the week, gradually cut out a couple three hundred squares in the various sizes I'll need. It went faster than I expected, and I might be able to do some preliminary laying-out next weekend, depending on how things go.

Four Seasons: Two weekends ago, I showed pictures of a layout for the "spring" piece and a fabric selection for the "summer" piece of this, this, um.... what's the word for it? Two elements makes a diptych, three makes a triptych, but is there such a thing as a quadtych? No?

Anyway, I was a little dissatisfed with the innermost two fabrics in "spring," and also thought that the innermost two fabrics of "summer" were a little too, you know, springy. So I did the obvious thing, and transferred the "summer" fabrics to "spring," and found two better fabrics for summer. And now we're good. I'm in the process of assembling both of them at this point.

And Introducing Project #51: Indigo Stars

The project I selected to take Labyrinth's slot in the active roster is a salvage mission. Earlier this year, in a box of scrap fabric, I found a set of 20 hand-pieced blocks, a star pattern (anybody want to ID it for me?) in indigo-on white. They are, in a sense, nothing special -- the craftsmanship is moderate at best, the fabric quality was poor to begin with and has not improved with age. Nor do I have any idea who made them; certainly no one with any connection to me or my family. And of course, I am completely smitten by them, and want to do something lovely with them.

There's no way of knowing what my anonymous collaborator had in mind, back in the (probably) 1930s. My own original idea had been to simply alternate the blocks in a checkerboard pattern with a nice white-on-white print, which would provide a simple but not especially striking setting in which to show them off. That idea seemed pretty good until I started measureing them yesterday, so I could figure out how much white-on-white I would need. That's when I realized an important ramification of the iffy craftsmanship -- they are neither uniform in size nor especially square. Any given side can vary between 12 and 14 inches. Eek! So much for a checkerboard pattern.

After an hour or so of fussing with fabrics on hand, and a page of notes, diagrams, and calculations on graph paper, I came up with Plan B. In Plan B, each individual block will be custom pieced to 2-3" indigo borders, which will produce a somewhat larger block a uniform 18" square. These will be placed in either a 4x4 grid or a 4x5 grid (we'll see), set off by a three inch sashing (if that's the right word) of white-on-white. It will look just a tiny bit like this:

Having got that far, I hopped on the bike and rode to our local fabric megastore, where I drove the cutters a little batty with a change of mind and a stock check before coming up with two fabrics that I think are going to be do the trick. It's been prewashed and pressed, and is ready for cutting.

And that, my friends, is the State of the Craft.

Dude! Check Out My Stash!

2007-09-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

Love Your Stash

It's not surprising that most quilters accumulate a fabric collection. Every project generates a certain amount of scrap fabric, and fabric gets purchased for projects that never quite manage to happen. Plus, since people who quilt have a lot of of native enthusiasm for fabric in the first place, it's not too startling that most quilters occasionally -- or frequently! -- buy fabric just because it's pretty, it speaks to them, and they'd like to use it in some future project, someday.

What is strange about stashes is the love/hate relationship that so many quilters have with their collection. I have seldom heard anyone boasting, reveling, or simply sharing the joy of owning a lot of really beautiful yardage. By all appearances, most quilters love to hate their stash, and hate to love it. Within the community, quilters constantly joke -- and I mean constantly -- about their "addiction" to shopping for fabric, about their concealment of fabric purchases from spouses, about their fabric storage problems, about their need to get rid of fabric or "go on a fabric diet." Fabriholic and stashbusting are well-worn psuedo-words in the culture.

There's a nervous undercurrent to all of this joking. Talk about the stash comes with a little edge of... something. Guilt, I think. Fabric costs money, after all, and there seems to be a sense among the (mostly) women who quilt that it's a questionable use of money. A sociologist would probably say that women have been conditioned to feel ashamed of spending money on their own activities, rather than on their husbands and children. And she might be right.

I can't relate. I love my stash. My feeling about having a large fabric collection (which I was inflicting on Rebel just this morning) is that there's nothing wrong, if you've got the dosh and the space, with keeping supplies and materials on hand to fuel and support your creative endeavors. "As an active and proficient craftsperson," I sloganized, "you should be proud of having the essentials of your craft on hand!" That's my view, and I'm stickin' to it.

Welcome!

I am lucky to have a small room that I can devote mostly to quilting (although my computer stuff, our household businessy stuff, and other various odds and ends share the space). It is perhaps a little more, um, rough-hewn and utilitarian than most quilt studios. Here's what it looks like.

The heart of my stash, pieces from 1/8 yard to 1 yard, is held in twin IKEA "Robin" dressers. With 8 perfectly-sized drawers apiece on smooth sliders, they feel like they were custom-made for fabric storage. Safely away from sunlight, folded fabric can be stored vertically, like index cards. A little strip of every piece in the drawer is visible at a glance. I have two drawers apiece of blues, greens, purples, multicolored prints, and batik prints, one drawer apiece of rusts, reds, aquas, and solids, and a two-drawer sequence of black-and-whites, yellows, browns, and oranges. Within the drawers, fabrics are roughly organized by value. It sounds more finicky than it really is.

The "chifferobe" (a word I have never heard uttered by anyone except my mother) in the other corner holds special sets: African fabrics, 2-inch wide strips, a group of batik half-yards that my big sister gave me for Christmas, and the tie-dyes I made last month, for instance. There's another crate for extra storage on top of it, and a little stereo on top of that, but I had the "Four Seasons" pieces set up for reference when I took this picture.

Turning to the right, you find my studio closet. There is a shelf for musical equipment, but also four little bins for scrap pieces (cut squares, uncut blues & purples, uncut greens & aquas, everything else) and about a dozen shoe boxes holding (among other things) juvenile prints, cut denim squares, unused blocks from old projects, flannel scraps, 4", 4 1/2", and 5" squares, and good-for-nothing-but-machine-quilting-practice fabric. (This is also where the household mending goes.)

Pwew! Had enough? But wait. Because oodles of unused space was left under the roof when our house was built in 1906, I was able to cut a door into the left-hand wall of the closet, lay down a plywood floor, and wall in the attic space behind it to create a storage room. It's not all fabric storage space, naturally, but there's room for these tubs of batting and larger flannel pieces. Quilt books and magazines go on the bookshelf on the right.

Finally, two tubs of large pieces, 2 yards and longer. I keep these separate in case they need to be backs, or to be the dominant fabric in a quilt. A third tub is usually here as well, full of the non-quilt fabrics that tend to wash up at my feet, everything from stretch synthetics to upholstery fabric to fake fur.

If you are doubting the wisdom, or sanity, of holding on to this much fabric, here's a lil' anecdote: This morning, I started cutting fabric for Niece #1's graduation quilt. I'm going to need, among other things, a couple hundred 3 1/2" square blocks for this project. That's a lot of work, so you can imagine how pleased I was to discover in my stash a stack of around 100 blocks already cut to 3 1/2" square! They have been waiting for this moment ever since I abandoned the project I originally cut them for. In 1994.

Thanks for taking the tour. I'm proud of my stash. You be proud of yours, too!

New Quilt Year: the Second Weekend

2007-09-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

Quilt Year 2007 - 2008 is off to an aggressive start! I'm continuing to pour effort into my four chosen projects -- so far, resisting the temptation to dig any deeper into the project pile -- and have been very happy with the progress. And if Mrs. 5000 has made a few pointed remarks about housework equity, well, I can catch up with that.... in a while. She won't get too angry. I think.

Progess Report:

Stained Glass Batik. As the OSU football team got their big, mud-slapping Beaver tails handed to them on Thursday, and during the first half of Oregon's exhilerating win over Michigan on Saturday, I finished the first round of quilting in the "cool" areas of this quilt, which is about half of the total surface. I'm very happy with the progress. I'll need to spend a few hours of hand-work time with it before doing the other half, hiding the many loose threads by burying them within the quilt. I'll also need to pick out which specific thread I want to use for the top thread in the "warm" areas.

Labyrinth. I selected and prepared a backing fabric, and laid out a sheet of batting to relax and lose its folds and wrinkles. After work on Monday, I'll take apart our bed so that I can use the whole bedroom floor to do the pinning. For you non-quilters, "pinning" is the process where you stick together the three layers of the quilt -- top, batting, and back -- in preparation for the quilting. You have to spread the back out fairly taut for it to work well, and I do this by pinning it into a carpet. For a big piece like Labyrinth, the only carpeted space in the house big enough is the bedroom, sans bed. Mrs. 5000 has agreed that we can sleep in the guest room on Monday night. She is a trooper.

Niece #1's Graduation Quilt. This one is still in what you might call "pre-production," but I did some thinking and some pencil-and-paper work with the design. I also entered it into the "official" list I keep of my quilts. Auspiciously, it is Quilt #50, which means it is more or less the 50th project I've started. It doesn't necessarily mean that it will be the 50th project I'll finish. Stained Glass Batik is Quilt #40 on the list, and Labyrinth is Quilt #37, and they are both conspicuously unfinished!

The Four Seasons. Numbers #35a - 35d on the list, this aging fiasco is the oldest unfinished project I have going. Last weekend, I was working on picking out a series of fabrics for "Spring" that would match the color values in "Fall" and "Winter."

After a little editing this weekend, and quite a bit of laborious cutting, I
have this "rough draft" laid out:

And, feeling good about the progress, I went ahead and picked out a possible
color sequence for "Summer."

Blogging About Blogging

Joining the Q4P blog ring has been great! Hello to everyone who has stopped in from the blog; I really appreciate all of the kind comments to last week's post! It has been fun to start to explore other blogs on the ring as well!

I've also been spiffing up State of the Craft a little during my lunch hours. The posts from the first year, back when SotC was on (shudder...) Friendster, were until recently lumped together in one big ugly unreadable post called "The First Season." I've gone back and separated those out; not all of them have their images yet, but they will in a day or two. I've been going back and indexing everything, too. Why? you ask. Well, why not?

Cheers!

New Quilt Year: the First Five Days

2007-09-03T20:25:00.000-07:00

I've managed to put some time into quilting on all five of these first days of the 2007-2008 season, and it has felt good to get my head back into some projects. I feel like I made some solid initial progress. Right on.

I concentrated my effort on four projects from my list. Or maybe that's not the right word. Maybe I dispersed my effort over four different projects from my list. Whichever. In any event, here's what I did:

The Four Seasons. "Fall" and "Winter" are basically done. I laid out a possible color sequence for "Spring," and dropped by our local fabric megastore to fill in one gap. I'll let that sit for a week or two, and then revisit the sequence to see if it still looks good.

Niece #1's Graduation Quilt. I pulled fabric -- greens and tans, largely -- to try to establish a basic color set for the piece. Again, I'll just play with the colors for a little while until they feel right, before I start doing any cutting.

Batik Stained Glass. Did a respectable amount of tedious machine quilting on this one. That's going to be a constant for a while -- lots and lots of tedious machine quilting. Lots and lots and lots of tedious machine quilting. Why do we do this, again?

Labyrinth. This was the exciting one. When I started the weekend, this 3000-piece project was still in seven pieces. Lots of pinning, and a few quick sessions of sewing and pressing, brought it to the "finished top" stage. This thing has been in the making for four years, by the way, so it's especially nice to have it reach this point. I'm cautiously happy with it. Here's a sneak preview for ya:

The Focus Question

Do you work on one thing at a time, or do you like to have several projects moving forward at once? I can see why having just a single iron in the fire would be a good idea, but I like to mix up what I'm doing in terms of cutting, pieceing, pinning, quilting, and so on. Plus, I get excited enough about a variety of quilts that it's hard for me not to be distracted from the main one I'm working on. In addition to the four quilts above, there are no fewer than four additional projects from the queue that are also kind of on my mind. Is working on eight projects simultaneously allowed?

Fabric is Yet Still Drawn to Me

My odd little streak of tripping over free fabric everywhere I turn has slowed, but not stopped. Mrs. 5000 brought me home a yard or so of a nice upholstery fabric, and maybe five yards of a very handsome linen, but she had actually shelled out a few bucks for them at a garage sale, so it wasn't really free. I found about a yard of a faded maroon solid in a free box on my Saturday run, which is not great but if nothing else will be good for machine quilting practice. So maybe my luck is winding down. But I'll still keep my eyes open.

It's New Quilting Year Eve!!

2007-08-29T22:21:00.001-07:00

The time has come. The days are noticeably shorter, and there's a crisp, wistful hint of autumn in the air. I've spent much of the evening converting my studio space back to quilting formation. The sound gear is back under its covers, stacks of notebook have been filed away, the sewing table is unfolded to its full size. We're ready to roll. For tomorrow is the first day of quilting season.

Long-time readers know that traditionally, the quilting year begins with the first University of Oregon football game. And indeed, I am first and foremost a Duck. But I'm actually ready to fly the flag of any college team from my fair state (you can read here if you have an inexplicable desire to know about my college football loyalties, or if you just have oodles of time on your hands), and while the Ducks aren't playing until Saturday, the Oregon State Beavers take the field at 7 PDT tomorrow. And I'll be right there with them. Quilting.

A Couple Shows

As if to celebrate the new year, although actually just by coincidence, I'm sending my warhorse Log Cabin back on tour. It will be in my home town, Bandon, Oregon, at the quilt show of the annual, heh, "Cranberry Festival," September 6 to 9, or something like that. After that, it should be at the "2007 Festival of Quilts" in Gold Beach, Oregon, September 16 and 17. And after that, I think I'll retire it from shows -- I've shown it pretty much to death.

Fabric is Still Drawn to Me

After I wrote the last post, about how I keep bumping into free fabric, I went out for a run and had to cut it short when I ran into a big box of fabric that somebody had put out for free on the sidewalk. I include photoevidence for an unneccessarily sceptical quilt blogger who I won't mention specifically, but whose name sounds like "Guilty the Hipster."

The green and the stripey flannel were actually bedsheets when I found them, but a few minutes with a good pair of scissors made them into several yards each of extra-width fabric. The purple is two yards of good quality quilting fabric. The tan was a very good matched set of sheets which, for better or worse, will continue to serve in a sheet capacity for the time being.

Q4P

I'm in a ring of quilt blogs! Cool! The little navigation panel for it is up there on the left somewhere, if you want to poke around.

Happy New Quilt Year, Everyone!

Fabric is Drawn to Me

2007-08-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

I had a lovely vacation and family reunion. I won't go into details, as not much happened that had anything to do with quilts or quilting. Yet, as happens, I came home with many yards of fabric that I hadn't had when I left.

Usually, this would mean that the carefree spirit of life on vacation had loosened my pursestrings, and that I'd made the mistake of wandering into a fabric store with no particular project in mind. People who quilt do this with startling predictability, and this is why you will frequently see a) inexplicably thriving quilt shops in most towns that are tourist destinations, and b) many, many quilters, myself included, with the arguably decadent "problem" of figuring out how best to store their mountains of fabric.

But that wasn't the case this time. Instead, I kept running into boxes of free fabric. There was one in the doorway of a church near my parents' place. There was one at a yard sale that I just happened to walk by. And my mom had some scraps on offer, as well. So, even though I was being fairly picky, I still ended up with all of this for the very good price of free.

Then, my sister got a bee in her bonnet to do some tie-dyeing. Now I had never tie-dyed before, despite having attended the University of Oregon, so I did jam down to the local fabric store to get some yardage to experiment with. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with the results, but they are pretty satisfying to the (strong) hippie side of my aesthetic.

I used a white-on-white fabric for that one, which turned out really well. You can see it better in this detail.

Here's a whole spectrum I did on various white-on-whites.

And finally, here's an experiment with blue and yellow dye on a strong black-on-white fabric. I'm not crazy about this specific result -- although it does have a certain Go Ducks! je ne sais quoi to it -- but I think dyeing onto black-on-white has serious potential.

Oh, just to follow up on last week: my color-planning cards were a hit. Niece #1 did not even seem to think I was crazy, and I feel like I have a good sense of her quilt-color aesthetic now. Once she was done, everybody else wanted to be tested too. Hopefully, they understood that taking the test doesn't mean a quilt will automatically be forthcoming. If they didn't, they're going to have a long wait....

Toward a Diagnostic Instrument for Pre-Design Chromatic Evaluation

2007-08-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

Which is to say, I think I've come up with a way of talking with people about the color schemes they would like in a quilt that's being made for them.

Statement of Problem: Why bother? Well, I've found that people (including me) have a hard time talking about color. Everyone has their favorite colors, of course, but "green" is not really enough to design a quilt around. People who are color savvy will sometimes list their favorite color combinations, and a rare individual will also throw in an idea of color quality, with words like "pastel" or "jewel tones" or "smoky."

But since a quilt design needs to encompass not just color, color combinations, and color quality, but also color value and the relative proportions of all of the above across the quilt surface, it's pretty brutal to talk about without looking at quilt images. So, you end up flipping through a stack of quilt books and magazines, looking at a random selection of posibilities, slapping down sticky notes everywhere, and it's a huge mess. Well, no. It's not really that huge of a mess. I'm just trying to get you all excited about my innovation.

Innovation: I selected 38 images that represent a wide range of possible quilt color combinations, and mounted them on cardstock, like so:

Methodology: The subject is instructed to sort the cards into three piles based solely on colors. One pile is the color combinations that the subject really likes, the second is the color combinations that are "all right," and the third is the color combinations that the subject doesn't like. When the piles are complete, the interviewer and subject examine the stack together, looking for common themes in the subject's choices.

Results: I tried this out with Mrs. 5000, who is always ready for anything, at lunch today. It worked, in the sense that I learned things about her color taste that I hadn't realized before. She is not crazy about extensive white or very light areas on quilts, for instance, and has more of a thing for jewel tones than I expected.

Conclusions: Encouraged by this first trial, I will apply the procedure to Neice #1 this coming weekend, in preparation for beginning the design of her graduation quilt. Hopefully, it will help me come up with a quilt that will be all, like, aesthetically pleasing to her.

The 2007-2008 Pre-Season Report

2007-08-04T20:45:00.000-07:00

I said a few months ago that I would just take my disappointingly pristine quilting "to do" list from last year (which, you may recall, sucked for quilting purposes) and make that my list of goals for 2007-2008. But as the official September 1 kickoff date looms closer, I've found myself worrying over a new "to do" list like a dog gnawing on an old bone. Want to know what I've come up with? Well, too bad, because I'm going to tell you anyway.

First Priority

Stained Glass Batik*, pictured, is one I've talked about on the blog before. It is pieced and layered, and I did a little bit of the quilting last year. It wants to be ready to show in the spring, which shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

Labyrinth is another piece that I hope to have ready for shows in the spring. It is very nearly pieced after four years of work, and should be relatively easy to quilt. I will speak of it no further at this time, as I think it is pretty cool and don't want to jinx it.

The first of my four nieces is graduating from high school next year, and I've decided that I'm going to do the graduation quilt gift thing. Fortunately, my oldest niece is partial to squares, and not a real maven for intricate floral applique or something.

Also Things I'm Pretty Geared Up For

Batik Squares (pictured) is really just an exercise piece. It's not very attractive, but I'd like to finish it and get it off the table.

Getting started on making a piece from the stack of blocks hand-pieced by my grandmother's stepmother in the early 1930s.

Making a highly scrappy "recycle" piece from the gobs of, uh, non-traditional fabrics (including blue fake fur?) that find their way to my storage closet.

Things I'd Like to Do If There is Time

Create a simple setting for a stack of star blocks from the 1930s, origin unknown, that landed in my lap earlier this year. In indigo and white, using cheap fabric, and made with frankly atrocious craftsmanship, they are a very motley set that I nevertheless find pretty charming.

Complete a Four Seasons set, of which there is (after like six years) one complete and one half-complete. I don't even know if I like the concept anymore, but damnit...

Combine some groovy medium-light neutral tone batiks my big sister gave me for Christmas into a background; and then applique a big, aggressive, cherry-red shape over the top of it. Something that looks like a Chinese word, or a letter from an imaginary language. Still thinking about this one.

Requilt, or overquilt, Two Complex Shapes (pictured). It's all saggy now, but might be showable if I could give it interesting surface textures.

Things I Would Like to Do, but Realize I Will Probably Not Have a Chance of Getting To Really

Repairing the little quilt my great-grandmother threw together when I was born. Never anything approaching a work of art, it is now arguably 20 years overdue for the trash. But hell, I'm kind of sentimental. Don't tell the guys.

An asymetrical, simple geometric piece of light fabrics on light-light fabrics, loosely based on some work of book artist Sarah Horowitz. Squint at the image to the right, and maybe you can imagine what I have in mind.

Another map of Oregon, this time based on population density instead of landforms. I know, I know. What can I tell you? I used to teach cartography.

* (The names I use here are kind of working titles. I might give 'em better names, once they're finished.)

Your Job, gentle State of the Craft reader, is to keep me on task. Remind me of this list if I seem to have forgotten it. Ask probing questions. Taunt if need be.

Thanks for reading!