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

My Quilting Goals: November, 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QuiltStorm2008: The Beginning

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

Well, the future is now.

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

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

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

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

Or maybe this:

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

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


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


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

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

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

The Quilt for Niece #1: Done

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


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

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

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

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

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

Clark County Quilters

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

Thursday 10 AM to 5 PM

Friday 10 AM to 6 PM

Saturday 10 AM to 5 PM

Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary

2921 Falk Road

Vancouver, Washington

Maybe I'll see you there on Saturday.

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

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

Around the World Quilts

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



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

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

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


2. Sew the strips together, in sequence.

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

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

I Am My Mother's Son

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

---

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



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

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

It would certainly be a whole different blog.

Show Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14th Annual "Airing of the Quilts"

March 21-22, 2008

Milwaukie Center

5440 SE Kellogg Creek Drive

Milwaukie, OR 97222

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Meme Duty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. I have never eaten at a MacDonalds.

Those seem weird and random enough.