Quilting the Jennifer Challenge

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....

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.

Two Complex Shapes: Done

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:

The December Lack-of-Progress Report

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!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaargghhhh!!!!

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...

The Name That Quilt! General Election

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

(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

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.)

The New Face of Machine Quilting

I've been quilting like a madman for the last few weeks. For the first time this fall, I've really got into the rhythm of it, when you get to work with the machine and it's all you want to do for the next couple of hours. Very soothing.

Since I've been getting pretty confident about my new machine quilting skillz -- hubris? -- the project that has been getting the most attention has been this thing called "Batik Boxes" that I planned out on Thanksgiving 2004 and have been kicking around very slowly ever since. It was pretty obvious from the outset that it wasn't going to be an especially interesting piece, so it has stayed at the bottom of the project pile.

Since it is kinda ugly, though, it is a good candidate to be the first full-size piece for me to machine quilt. So, I devoted 3/4 of my quilting time to it over the last week, and voila, here is the completed face:


Now I have to decide exactly what the quilting pattern will be. As I get more comfortable and confident, I think I'm going to really like this part of the process -- it's a whole 'nuther level of decision making going into the piece.

For now, though, it's kind of nerve wracking. Even though it's kind of an ugly quilt face to start with, even though I'm trying to give myself lots of space to make mistakes and be a beginner at this, I also definitely want to do a good job with it. Ideally, to have people say things like "wow, I can't believe he's just a beginner." Yes, I admit it: my name is Michael and I'm a praise junky.

Anyway, I know a couple things for sure. I will quilt "in the ditch" -- along the seam between pieces of fabric in the quilt face -- around the outline of each block, and then around the three concentric squares within each block. After that, I want to do dense stippling, the kind of stuff I've been practicing for the past several weeks, on one color or the other. That should create an overall texture. If I was to densely quilt the blue fabric, say, the blue squares would lie flat and the orange ones would puff up a little bit. It be a cool effect, or at least that's the plan.

Now, Plan A was to stipple down the blue fabric. Warm colors tend to rise into the foreground, whereas cool colors visually recede, so it seemed like having the orange puff out a little bit would complement that. To test this, I made two extra blocks, quilting down the blue on one and the orange on the other. And, lo and behold, the one with the orange quilted down looks better.

But wait, we're not through. We still have to talk about thread color. (Hey! I don't roll my eyes about your hobby!!)


If you look at the test patch with quilting in the orange, the part that really stands out is done in light grey thread on the right side of this image. And I'm all right with that, because I was doing pretty well and the pattern looks cool. But the problem is, I think the quilt as a whole will look better if the quilting is more subtle. In fact, I'm leaning towards using an orange thread that is more subtle -- so subtle, in fact, that it's almost invisible in this image (it's along the top of the larger orange square).

Usually, you wouldn't call orange thread "more subtle" than grey. The deal is that in this case it would blend with the orange fabric, of course.

Anyway, it will take me a couple of weeks to do all of the ditch quilting, which has to be done before I can start the quilting, so if any of y'all want to weigh in on the gray vs. orange question, knock yourself out.

Oh yeah, a fresh anecdote. I was pinning this one out (pinning the back, batting, and face together, to get it ready for quilting) and ran out of safety pins. Because it's close, and I'm all, like, neighborhood-minded, I decided to try again with the local shop where they mistook me for a plumber last year. And, damn it, I got the same suspicious, what-are-you-doing-in-here vibe this time. "You just had to have a pack of safety pins at 10:15 on a Saturday morning?" I got asked, which struck me as both unnecessarily sarcastic and an odd question for someone to ask who was selling safety pins at 10:15 on a Saturday morning. I want to like my local shop, but I'm just not getting a good vibe in there.

Later.

More Masculine Machine Messing-About

My Machine Quilting teacher told us we should keep an eye open for potential quilting patterns in the stuff we see in everyday life. So, when I saw the linguistic symbols on the cover of this book, I decided to give it a try.





















What I did was photocopy the cover of the book, enlarging the pattern a little bit. Then, I pinned the piece of paper on top of the practice quilt top. You can just sew right through the paper, so after you follow the outline of the pattern, you end up with a quilt that has a piece of paper sewn to it. The paper tears off pretty easily, since it's been perforated by the needle, but it is kinda boring and time-consuming to get rid of it all. On this little practice piece, I spent as much time getting rid of paper as I did in the actual quilting. Looks kinda cool, though. I think I'm getting better.

I want to throw something in here that is not explicitly quilt-related, but maybe it's tangentially relevant to this blog. You be the judge. It is a quote from Nick Hornsby's excellent book Fever Pitch, a memoir of his obsession with soccer and, in particular, the Arsenal club. Highbury, I should mention, is the stadium in London where Arsenal play.

Masculinity has somehow acquired a more specific, less abstract meaning than femininity. Many people seem to regard femininity as a quality; but according to a large number of both men and women, masculinity is a shared set of assumptions and values that men can either accept or reject. You like football? Then you also like soul music, beer, thumping people, grab¬bing ladies' breasts, and money. You don't fit into either camp? Macho, nein danke? In which case it must follow that you're a pacifist vegetarian, studiously oblivious to the charms of Michelle Pfeiffer, who thinks that only leering wideboys listen to Luther Vandross.

It's easy to forget that we can pick and choose. Theoretically it is possible to like football, soul music and beer, for example, but to abhor breast-grabbing and bottom-pinching (or, one has to concede, vice versa); one can admire Muriel Spark and Bryan Robson. Interestingly it is men who seem to be more aware than women of the opportunities for mix 'n' match: a femist colleague of mine literally refused to believe that I watched Arsenal, a disbelief that apparently had its roots in the fact that we had once had a conversation about a feminist novel. How could I possibly have read the book and have been to Highbury? Tell a thinking woman that you like football and you're in for a pretty sobering glimpse of the female conception of the male.

Adventures in Machine Quilting

As it turned out, there's only so much flack I could have been given about my wussy pink & mint green test quilt for the machine quilting class. That's because there was only one student in the class besides me. So, the drive out to Damascus every Tuesday for three weeks didn't turn out to be a real community-builder, but what the hell. I certainly learned a lot about machine quilting, and probably more importantly was forced to practice.

Here's what that quilt top looked like after the dust settled:


















Yeah, I know it's not particularly attractive. But it's the techniques that matter, and I'm kind of excited about those. Some, like the rose in the center and the ferny thing in the upper left, use tracing paper; the pattern in the border and the leaf on the upper right corner both use freezer paper. The really precise grid is made using blue painters' tape, of all things, which I quickly bought in every available width from the neighborhood painting supply store. I like precise grids. Controlling personality.

Now that football season is in full swing and Sue and I have finished up a guest room remodeling project that sucked all energy out of every other endeavor -- even, gentle reader, this blog -- for weeks, I've had two Saturday afternoons straight to work on quilt things. I've done a lot of assembly piecing on the Labyrinth, but I also spent some time assembling "sandwitches" out of old, crappy fabric -- including the sheets I bought for my first apartment in Kansas! -- and small pieces of scrap batting that I've been saving like an octogenarian recluse for the last decade. (It is a little troubling that this hoarding behavior was ultimately justified and rewarded).

The point of the sandwitches is just to have them on hand so you can regularly practice machine quilting technique. In theory, it will eventually start to feel natural -- and that's actually happening, a little bit. On Wednesday, I even had a glimmer of an idea that I could eventually get pretty good at it. In the meantime, I plug away at creating lovely masterworks like the following.....
















Sue describes the flower as "hippilicious," which will have to do for a beginner.

That's all for now! Thanks for reading!

Tell me how masculine this one is, Mom!

I've spent the morning getting a test piece ready for my machine quilting class, which starts tomorrow night. It was the first September in a long time when I got to say, "Dude, classes haven't even started yet and I already have homework. Lame!"

Because it's just a test piece to practice with, I mostly just wanted to use fabric that wouldn't otherwise be useful. Plus, I thought it would be good to use really light colors, so I will be able to see my stitching more easily. Using a basic pattern dictated by the class packet, here's what I came up with:


Sue's comment: "You're pretty brave, going in there with all that pink."

When I went out to the shop to buy the class supplies (most esoteric item: "Golden Threads Quilting Paper") the woman behind the counter said "hey, don't you have a mother who lives down in Bandon?"

"Yeah, great memory," I said -- I hadn't been out to this shop, Pioneer Quilts in Damascus, for two years.

"Well, you stand out," she said.