A New Quilt

So I made a quilt.
 

The enterprise has been in grievous disarray for some years now, during which the quilting room gradually filled with crap and detritus and great drifting dunes of litter and dust.  During that time, I would occasionally decide that it was time to get fired back up, and launch into cleaning the room, or taking an inventory of unfinished projects, or otherwise "getting ready."  Heavens, in Summer 2016, I apparently decided to muck out the blog!  

What I found in all of these self-conscious rebirths was that the startup tasks were so daunting, my determination never lasted to the point when I would do much sewing together of cloth.  A machine that was almost always giving me mechanical problems didn't help any.

Early this fall, I started thinking about sewing scraps of blue together.  But this time, with no preamble of cleaning the room or making a formal design, I just found a container of blue scraps, pushed a heap of rubble off of a folding chair, turned on the machine, and started sewing.  That proved to be enough fun that eventually it seemed worth taking on a new challenge, clearing off the ironing board.  By the time that the sewing machine's mechanical problems rendered it unusable again, I had enough momentum to hie me to the repair shop.  When it was clear that we had passed the point of repairs, I coughed up the cash for a new machine.  Maybe I'll tell you that story someday.

I had to buy a new iron, too.

Eventually, I shaped my little blue patches into strips, made some vertical light-light strips to give the thing some structure (and, to be honest, for ease of assembly), and by gum I finished it.

I've been working on some old projects too.  The room, though not what you'd call "tidy," has become... shall we say... navigable.   Who knows, maybe someday I'll even attend to my quilt blog!

The Specs

Title: none 

Serial Number: Hmm... actually the records are also in a bit of disarray currently.

Dimensions: I'm... not sure.  I'm sure there's a tape measure around.

Batting: An grubby old electric blanket.  Before using it, I had to rip out all of the wires and elements, which was good fun.

Backing: Pieced horizontal strips of scrap flannel. 

Quilting: Horizontal straight lines.

Begun: August 2019

Finished: October 2019

Intended Use/Display: Blanket.

Provenance: I'm keeping it myself.

You can see that the angle of the back is a few degrees
off of true.  Aligning fronts and backs is not
something of which I have a knack.

Niece #3's Graduation Quilt

My third niece graduated from high school in 2014, and by that Christmas I was starting to feel that I should do something about getting a start on her graduation quilt.  On Christmas afternoon I asked her some questions about preferences, colors, and so on.  Then I holed myself up for awhile with the internet, and gathered a bunch of images of quilts that seemed related to what she had described, saving them on a Pinterest page.  That night, she gave me the thumbs-up and thumbs-down on that little virtual quilt collection, leaving me with a set of nine that she liked. 

Looking at these, I decided to try again with a concept I used, not terribly successfully I think, in a wedding quilt a few years ago: mottled blues and whites in a grey lattice.

This time, I would put the lattice on the normal ordinal orientation -- squares instead of diamonds -- and not try to get cute with the shading of the lattice.  I'd try to get away from a single big monolithic pattern.  And, I'd try to see how far I could get from blue, and still have it be basically a blue and white quilt.

So, I cut a whole lot of squares:

And started arranging them, mostly randomly:

The further you get in assembling this kind of quilt -- unless you've planned it all out from the beginning (which sounds like it would be better, but in some ways gives you less control over the final product) -- the more you have to make decisions about how the various pieces are going to sit relative to each other.

Anyway, eventually you sew everything together and there you are.  In this case, there I was on December 20 of last year, just in time to stuff that sucker in a box and make it a twofer graduation/Christmas gift.  It's the thought that counts.

 

Honestly, it's one of my favorites of the quilts I've made.

The Specs

Title: "Niece #3's Graduation Quilt"  
Serial Number: 75

Dimensions: 95" x 66"

Batting: Commercial batting from recycled plastic bottles.

Backing: Strips of solid flannels.  Didn't get a picture, apparently. 

Quilting: Following the lattice frame.

Begun: Christmas 2014

Finished: Just in time for Christmas 2015

Intended Use/Display: Blanket.

Provenance: In use, as far as I know.

Raisa's Quilt

The proximate cause of my current flurry of quilting activity was two babies that arrived this spring.  New babies are of course in need of bedding, like the flowers need sunshine.

What I discovered when I waded into the workshop was that I had already finished and given away seven of the eight so-called "Quick Children's Quilts."  I improved and finished the eighth one for one of the Spring 2016 babies; I talked about that project last month.

That obviously left me with another baby to get swaddled!  Rather than start from scratch, I decided to take some outtake blocks from a full-size quilt that was (and is) still under construction, with the working name "Somewhat Crazy Quilt."  As the title suggests, this quilt will be like an old-fashioned "Crazy Quilt" in that it is made from piecing together irregular scraps of fabric.  It differs from the classic crazy quilts in that there is no fancy top-stitching involved -- I don't do fancy top-stitching -- and in that the craziness is constrained by regular square blocks, set off within a near-white lattice.  (I wrote about making the blocks for the Somewhat Crazy Quilt on the other blog in November 2014).

So, I put together 12 leftover blocks from that project, and came up with this:

I pieced together some scrap flannel for the back and a few scraps of commercial batting for the insides, then gave it a bit of free-form quilting and a quick machine binding.  Boom!

Now, the girl who got this quilt is little sister to the girl who got the "Four Dragons" quilt a few years ago.  I'm told that when the new quilt got home, big sister immediately claimed it for herself, without necessarily relinquishing title to the older quilt.  Well, that's their business to work out between themselves.  I just like knowing that they're getting used.

The Specs

Title: Raisa's Quilt 

Serial Number: 77

Dimensions: 52" x 40"

Batting: Pieced commercial batting.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.  
Quilting: Loose, squiggly machine-quilted grid.

Begun: May 2016 (from existing blocks).

Finished: May 22, 2016.

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

Provenance: In use as intended.

Symbol

Hey, I finished something!  Mostly!

This is, for better or worse, a quilt with an idea behind it.  But before I tell you about that, take a look at the picture.  What do you think of it?

The Story:  Once upon a Christmas my oldest sister gave me a set of green-brown fabrics that I immediately realized I wanted to use as a background for something.  In late 2007, I asked readers of my blog to comment on a range of simple symbols I had found or suggest new ones, because I was looking for "one single very bold symbol on a relatively neutral background."

Then, nothing happened for a year.

Then, there was a flurry of action!  Over three days, I polled blog readers again as I presented a basic shape, then twisted and turned and pinched and elaborated and deformed it, partially in accordance with their suggestions, and always trying to move it away from any obvious or known cultural associations.  I called this process "Democratically Aided Design."  It was fun.  A couple of weeks later, I announced that I had finalized my symbol, also deciding on the spot that it had no "right side up."  Six weeks after that, I had put together the background, and I asked folks what they thought about colors for the foreground.

And after that, I don't remember much!  There's a series of photos from no later than October 2013, but probably earlier, that show me how I scribed the symbol onto paper at the appropriate size, cut it out from the fabric, and then appliqued it onto the background.

Then at some point I must have backed it, batted it, quilted it, and bound it, because when I started pawing through my quilt stuff a few months ago, there it was.  I had basically finished it, put off the boring bit of putting on a hanging sleeve, and forgot about it.  Because I'm an idiot.

The Idea: In my defense, the boring business of putting a sleeve on this quilt is quadrupled, because it needs to be able to be hung with any side up.  And that's because this quilt doesn't really display a symbol so much as it is "about" the nature of symbols.  When our brains see a simple or moderately complex graphic device, we automatically try to interpret it.  If you want to get all fancy and intellectual at this point, you can talk about the arbitrariness of the sign, but it's not required.

"What does it mean?" is usually the question people ask about the symbol.  Was that what you thought?  People will ask, even if I've just explained how it was designed.  Over the years, I've received a healthy handful of emails from strangers asking if they could use the design for jewelry for their sweethearts or tattoos to get together with their sister or friend, which is kind of interesting because -- not to belabor the point -- it doesn't mean anything.

And, this is somehow important, it means nothing no matter which side is up.  So ultimately, it needs four hanging sleeves, which are very boring to sew on.  I've put on two so far, so I figure that's enough to call it "done."

The Specs

Title: "Symbol"  
Serial Number: 78

Dimensions: 64" x 64"

Batting: Presumably commercial batting.

Backing: Green flannel.  
Quilting: Machine quilting, some following the applique and some in concentric squares.

Begun: Actual work started October 2008

Finished: Hung for the first time July 2016

Intended Use/Display: Wall hanging.

Provenance: This one's a keeper.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part VI

A few months ago, I found myself with two new Babies of Note entering the world, and figured it was time to get cracking on the ol' quilting front.  When I took stock of the works-in-progress department, which was in considerable disarray, I eventually determined that I had one baby quilt face left from the "Eight Quick Children's Quilts" series.  It was the one I'd called #8, but that's not why it was the last one.  It was the last one because it was the boring one.

Well, obviously you can't give a baby a boring quilt.  It might screw up their development!  So, after mulling over the situation for a bit, I decided to add some warmth and visual interest by intercutting it with some bright orange stripes.  "Bright orange stripes," with the orange contained in a thin dark outline and the stripes overlapping each other in a weaving pattern, was an idea I used to tolerable effect to liven up another lackluster pattern, in 2014's "Jennifer Challenge Quilt II."

Did it do the trick this time?  You make the call!

The parents like it, that's the important thing.  It's possible that the baby herself will weigh in eventually, but it's still a little early for that.  (If you just can't wait to see a toddler be adorable about a quilt, though, I encourage you to revisit the video in last Friday's post.)

The Specs

Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #8
Serial Number: 69

Dimensions: 50" x 36"

Batting: large scrap piece of commercial batting.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.  
Quilting: Close machine-quilted grid.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: May 8, 2016

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part IV

"But Michael," I hear you asking. "Didn't you kind of jump from 'Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part III' (in May 2013) to 'Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part V' (this week)? What about Part IV?" Good catch, you!

The reason is, I already kind of did Part IV on my other blog awhile ago. Um, April 2014. How time does fly! Here's what I said there, at the time.

---

I haven't been doing much quilting.  I don't know if I even identify myself as a quilter anymore.  But I did finish an actual quilt recently.
 

It is made from scrap and recycled fabric, and has lots of jolly frogs and bugs and whatnot.  Its new owner is the new daughter of the one-time Dork of this blog, G.  Here she is, hanging out with a stripy friend:

 
What does she think of her new bedding?  Well, let's be frank, she's probably not doing much critical thinking yet, being still pretty new to the open air.  But who knows, perhaps she will find herself like-minded with Natasha, who is a bit older and 2500 miles away but who also has a Michael5000 quilt.  Natasha's mom recently wrote to say:

Just wanted to let you know that your quilt has been blanket # 1 in Tashi's crib for the last several months.  It is not too clingy, too hot or too cold (not to mention quite beautiful and interesting to look at).  Every night and nap, I say, "Do you want Michael's blanket?"  and Tash says, "Yes, Michael's blanket."  And I pull it over her.  Then if it's colder out I say, "Do you want Ruthie's blanket too?"  And She says, "No, Michael's."

Ain't that adorable?  It's almost enough to make me want to make more quilts.  For Natasha, anyway. 

---

So yeah, that's what I had to say back in 2014.  But obviously the State of the Craft readership, if there is one, is going to want more details than THAT!

---

The Specs (G's Daughter's Quilt)

Pompous Title: "8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #2"
Serial Number: 63 

Dimensions: did not record.
Batting: did not record.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel, mostly crazy zebra stripes.  
Quilting: Diagonals across individual blocks.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: March 2014 


Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.
Provenance: Quilt is in adorable use.  I mean, check this out.  It's almost ridiculous.

---

Right on! Let's get a look at Natasha's quilt, too!

The Specs (Natasha's Quilt)

Pompous Title: "8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #1"
Serial Number: 62

Dimensions: 45 1/2 x 56 1/2
Batting: Extravagantly pieced scraps of commercial batting.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.  
Quilting: A very wavy grid in metallic orange.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: June 2012 


Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.
Provenance: A few months ago, owner's mom said that Natasha is still into her quilt.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part V

I suppose you could say more cutting things about a fellow than that he has fallen down on the job of documenting his quilt output.

Right?

Well. I suppose the most pressing question on everybody's mind is "Gosh, Michael, whatever happened to those eight children's quilts you started knocking out four years ago?"

Why, in fact I finished the last of them last month! But this post isn't about this one.  This one is about the third-to-last of them I finished, which I gave away sometime in early 2013.

In case it has slipped your mind, this series was all thrown together from my stock of premade squares, and I used mostly checkerboard patterns.  Obviously we're not talking about particularly adventuresome design concepts, here.  That being said, I really like this one!  The rich maroon and green trim (which was just some salvage bedding) lends some dignity to the proceedings, and though I say it myself the off-kilter diagonal quilting was an inspired choice.

I also like that this one has a subtle theme.  There are four Asian-style dragons scattered through the piece (they are in light blocks, if you want to go looking for them).  That made it appropriate for the Bhutanese-American little girl that the blanket ended up with.  Look up the Bhutanese flag if you don't believe me.

The back was pieced together from a riot of smallish flannel scraps.  Again, of the eight quilts, this one seemed best aimed at the household it ended up in.  Doesn't it look kind of South Asian?  Also, if you look closely at the back, you can notice something that I had completely forgotten about: I interrupted the quilting pattern in order to pick out the four dragon squares.  Again, I have to congratulate the 2012-13 version of Michael5000.  He seems like he was pretty on the ball, to judge from this quilt.

The Specs

 
Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #7, "Four Dragons"  
Serial Number: 68

Dimensions: 54" x 41"

Batting: did not record.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.  
Quilting: Conventional machine quilting with scrap thread at 30 degree diagonal.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: June 2012, according to my suspect records

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

Provenance: As of this writing, still in active use as intended.

Green

Another joint post with some other blog I do.

I made this one for my parents, who recently celebrated one of those birthdays that is divisible by five. 
 

 
You might remember it from such recent posts as "How to Pin an American Quilt."  The pins are all gone now, of course; they held the three layers together until I put in the lines of stitching that are doing that work now, and then went on to pursue solo projects.  I'm pretty pleased with the piece, which is a good thing.  My mom's technical mastery of quilting is about a zillion times my own, so even though I understand that it will be used and valued, I cringe at the thought of her noticing the details. It is kind of like this one from three years ago:
 

Except it's, like, green. It's such a simple design that it's almost not a design at all.  The devil, as usual, is in the details.  You have to work pretty hard when you want to make something look like you threw it together randomly.  If you really do throw things together randomly, all sorts of screwy fragmentary patterns will start to emerge, and it will look like crap.  So, the essence of a piece like this is making sure that similar color values and textures don't end up together very often, and don't cluster, and don't recur in any particular pattern across the width of the quilt, but that they're not too obviously segregated either.  I did a better job of engineering the random look with the new one, having had three years to study the flaws of Purple & Blue.
 
The older one is still my favorite, because, well, purple and blue, but my parents have a green living room and and I guess you could say that the new one was an "occasional piece."  That it had the happy side benefit of helping me thin out my green fabrics was merely a side benefit, I assure you.

The Specs

Name: Let's just go with the pattern of Purple & Blue, and call this one Green. 
Serial Number: 70

Dimensions: I forgot to measure it, dang it.

Batting: Commercial batting.

Backing: Cream patterned flannel Quilting: Two parallel lines near the edges of each stripe

Begun: February, 2013.

Finished: April, 2013.

Intended Use/Display: Blanket for use; Birthday Gift.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part III

Last summer, I rattled out faces for a number of children's quilts (the number was "eight," in fact). After an epic excavation of my workspace, I have confirmed that three are still under construction. Four are already in the hands of various adorable children, as described here and here. Make it five.  This one went out to one of my work partner's three year old girl last week.  He claims she likes it.  He claims, and has supported with photographic evidence, that she insists on sleeping on top of it, rather than underneath it.  He claims she wakes up in the middle of the night and talks to the animals in it.  I am unclear whether he sees this as a positive development. The pictures aren't very good -- that's what happens when you don't check image quality before you give 'em away.

The Specs

Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #5, "Green Checkerboard"  
Serial Number: 66

Dimensions: 51" x 46"

Batting: Pieced scrap batting.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.  

Quilting: Conventional machine quilting with scrap thread.  The top thread is a metallic, a first for me.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: February 2012

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part II

Last month, I wrote about making a short stack of childrens' quilts and giving the first few away.  Last night a third one found its new owner, who quickly got tangled up in it and crashed to the hard floor on the back of his head.  I thought this might lead to mixed feelings about the new blanket, but no, he seemed to like it.  In particular, he liked the frogs.

I originally laid this one out just from squares of plaid and checkerboard fabrics, and still think of it as "the plaid one."  Mrs.5000 pointed out from over my shoulder that it was looking awfully somber for a child's quilt, and that's when the frogs and other critters started making their appearance.  Framing it with some scraps of blue and white stripey fabric I had lying around was a fortunate inspiration.  It's hard to see in this crappy photo, but I'm especially proud of my mitering job at the corners.  The binding is from a scrap piece of, if I'm not mistaken, linen; we'll see how that works out.

Unfortunately, I gave it away not noticing that there were unburied threads, but fortunately the new owner lives nearby and I can make a repair house call.

The Specs

Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #4, "Plaid."

Serial Number: 64

Dimensions: 55" x 47"

Batting: Pieced scrap batting.

Backing: Pieced scrap flannel.
Quilting: Conventional machine quilting with scrap thread.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: June 2012

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

Eight Quick Childrens' Quilts, Part I

Like many people who have a "making" hobby, I have a long "to-do" list of projects, some partially finished, some of them fleshed-out design concepts waiting to be brought to life, some of them really just pieces of fabric or found fragments looking for a home, and some just general notions of things I'd like to do.  I bet that, given an hour to paw through my notes and storage compartments, I could come up with more than 100 quilts on my theoretical to-do list.  Most of them will of course never be made.

Every year or so, I decide to draw up a priority list of which quilts I really want to make progress on, like some sort of needle-arts air traffic controller assigning landing slots at the great destination airport of all projects.  This kind of list usually structures my creative activity for four to six weeks before all discipline breaks down and I just work on whatever I'm most engaged in.  But the interesting thing is -- and I think I am completely normal in this respect -- it's not like older concepts progress steadily towards the front of the line, and new ideas take a number at the back of the queue.  Instead, a new idea is more likely to jump immediately into production, and the older projects I've been intending to start for ten years are no closer getting underway than they've ever been.

Anyway, I think what happened six weeks ago is that I was making some symbolic gestures related to the organization of my materials stash, and realized that I had saved up rather a lot of 4", 4 1/2", and 5" squares.  I make squares in those three sizes when I end up with smallish pieces of fabric that I know won't be especially useful to me: juvenile or novelty prints, ugly prints, border fabrics, "cheater" fabrics, reproduction or genuinely old-fashioned fabrics, and so on.  I can make blocks with these, but I can also use them pretty readily to make quilt faces that are just simple grids of squares.

Like so:

Face for "8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #8."

I brought my boxes of these pre-cut squares downstairs, with no particular agenda in mind, and just started dealing them onto the dining table like I was playing solitaire.  Over the course of three or four evenings, I ended up laying out ten separate quilt faces.  And since then, since these have been pretty simple pieces, easy to work with, I've been able to get six of them completely finished.

Last weekend, we took all six of them over to the home of some young people of our acquaintance -- and by "young people," here, I mean people who still depend on their parents (also friends of ours) to dress and undress them.  I wasn't especially expecting that they would be too too excited about a gift of bedding, but when the little girl was asked if she would like to pick a blanket for herself after dinner, she indicated in the affirmative.  And it turned out that after dinner, before anyone could bring up the subject or come up with some sort of system, she marched over, pointed at one, and said "Can I have this one?"  "Yep!" I said.  "You can!  Here, it's yours!"  Whereupon, her brother came over and said "Can I have one too?"  "You sure can," I said.  "I want the black one," he said.  And so I gave it to him.  And they ran over and spread their quilts on the floor side by side, and started playing a game that involved running in circles on the quilts and shrieking.  I felt that the whole thing had gone off magnificently.

---

The One the Little Girl Chose

The Specs

Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #4, "Pastel."

Serial Number: 65

Dimensions: 54" x 47"

Batting: Pieced Scrap batting.

Backing: Flannel from a damaged fitted sheet, recovered at the Bins.
Quilting: Conventional machine quilting with scrap thread.

Begun: May 2012

Finished: June 2012

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

---

The One the Little Boy Chose

The Specs

Pompous Title: 8 Small Scrap Quilts for Children #6, "Stars and Planets."

Serial Number: 67

 

 

Dimensions: 56" x 43"

 

 

Batting: A wonky piece of scrap batting.

Backing: Vertical strips of scrap flannel recovered from the backings of previous quilts.
Quilting: Conventional machine quilting with scrap thread.

 

 

Begun: May 2012

Finished: June 2012

 

 

Intended Use/Display: Child's blanket.

Two More Gift Quilts

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

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

...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.

Mondrian I

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?

Devil's Claw

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.