An Unexpected Tinkering With Fabric

I've been quilting again for the last week or so.  It has been quite a while.

It's a good thing, because I probably have enough fabric stored up to make a quilt face along the lines of the above every day for the rest of my threescore-and-ten.  And I like making something kind of cool out of scraps.

I have to admit, though, that the "What are you going to DO with them?" question can be a little daunting sometimes...

A Wedding Quilt for 2010

Two friends whom I will call "Joey" and "Daisy," although these are not their real names -- they are, in fact, the names of their cats -- got married about two years ago.  After they got engaged, I had a meeting with them to discuss possible quilt designs, showing them various quilt images and asking them to tell me what they liked or did not like about a wide range of different possibilities.  I took notes. Then, I pretty much stopped quilting for a year or so. And then I picked up my project list last fall for the first time in ages and was all like "OMG!  I forgot about Joey and Daisy's wedding quilt!"   This Tuesday, I completed the final finish work, roughly two years after the wedding.  This will be the second time I present it to them; They had it for a few months, bound with safety pins, after I had done everything but the hand-finishing.  This time, though, it's "done-done."

The primary design considerations were:

1. That it wanted to be "symmetrical-but-not-too-symmetrical."
2. That it wanted to consist of a short series of values in a single color.
3. That it be big -- and it is, I think, my biggest quilt to date.
4. That it be "built for speed" -- I was already way behind deadline, and needed to be able to cut, piece, and quilt a lot of blanket in a little time.

I think it came out rather well. Houseplant sold separately.

The Specs

Serial Number: 61

Dimensions: 73" x 97"

Batting: Commercial batting.

Backing: Dark purple flannel.

Begun: 2011, after conceptual work in 2010.

Finished: August, 2012

Intended Use/Display: Wedding Gift.

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.