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.

Season Opener: SQ#13 is Off and Running

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

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!

SQ7: Finished

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!

More Fun With Corduroy

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.

Arguably, It's Time to Get Organized

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

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

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.

QS#3: Done

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!

Signing Off for the Summer

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?

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.)

I Second That Free-Motion

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.

QS5!

"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!

"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!

"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!

"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

"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

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

QuiltStorm2008: The Beginning

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?