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.

It's Christmas! (2004)

When I was at my sister's house for Thanksgiving, I finally managed to get a photograph of a blanket I made for her -- four Christmases ago, already.




Here it is:

Oops, wait. Wrong side. That's me (left) and Niece #3 (right) holding that sucker up, so that Mrs.5000 could take THIS picture:

So. Obviously, it's kind of an old-fashioned and very simple pattern, both chosen to match my sister's aesthetic. This was before I started making scrap & recycle quilts, but a lot of the fabrics here, especially in the nine-patches, is from very old scraps that I had come across. The quilting, which you can't really see here, isn't bad -- this is probably the first quilt where I really tried to make the quilting a decorative element.

I used some of the extra pieces from this project to make a smaller lap blanket as a present for my inlaws:

So, that's that.

Merry Christmas 2004!

And 2008!

Finished: "Batik Boxes"

There has been relatively little actual quilting going on lately, but the annual Thanksgiving family-chatter-and-handwork downtime let me finish off one that was threatening to become a perenial UFO. It's called Batik Boxes, and it's one that I also bought the material for and designed (in that order) on a Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving 2004, it says here in my notes. It was maybe 20% quilted at the beginning of this quilting season, so in the scheme of things it came together fairly quickly.

I've long thought of this one as a bit of an ugly duckling, so I was surprised to get quite a few family complements on it. But then, they're family! What are they going to say?

I had intended to do a dense stippled quilting of the orangish fabric, but recently abandoned that idea as more work than the quilt was worth. However, I will say that the workmanship is not at all bad, by my standards. It's likely the last piece I'll quilt "in the ditch" for a while -- I've found I much prefer quilting "near the ditch" -- but I was pleased by how consistently I was able to keep most of the stitches actually in the ditch, without slowing to a crawl.

[The back, with a book on it so that the camera could figure out how to focus.]

The pieceing, which happened a few years ago, was certainly easy. It was just a matter of cutting the two fabrics into two-inch wide strips, sewing the strips together in pairs, cutting lengths in increments of 3 inches + seam allowances, and sewing them back together like so to make the blocks:



The only tricky part was making sure to make the same number of blue-centered and orange-centered blocks.

(illustration made with my favorite quilt design software, Microsoft Excel)

Sara and Patrick's Wedding Quilt: Finished

So this is the gift quilt that I've been working on for the last couple of months. I finished it Saturday evening and gave it away at the wedding Sunday afternoon.

It's a fun, simple graphic pattern, cheerful and hopefully in line with the aesthetic of our friend the bride.

Noteworthy aspects of this one from a construction perspective are:

• it went fast. Without focusing all my effort on this one quilt, I nevertheless managed to whup it out much faster than I've ever made a full sized blanket before.


• it's the second quilt I created with the help of my "Pre-Design Chromatic Evaluation Instrument"! The two key design criteria were (a) the bride likes jewel tones on a light background, and (b) I needed to work fast.


• The original plan called for a simple border rectangle, but I decided to scrap that idea in favor of an unusually wide binding. Hopefully, the wide binding won't turn out to cause structural problems.


• It's backed in royal blue flannel for those chilly Portland evenings.
  

The Symbol Background

It's been a while since I finalized the design for Symbol, which you might remember looks something like this:

A few weeks ago, I also finished putting together the background that the symbol is going to sit on top of.

Those fabrics are a set that my sister picked out as a Christmas gift a few years ago, and when I saw them I immediately knew I wanted to applique something big and red over them. Except, now that everything is ready, I'm not as sure about the "red" part anymore. I haven't actually started placeing fabrics up against it yet -- that will be how the decision really gets made, of course -- but I've tinkered around on the computer a little bit, wondering how various colors would look....

Michael5000 Gets Press

I grew up in a very small town, and I like to enter quilts in the fall shows there and in a few of the neighboring communities. My mom still lives there, so it's kind of fun to have our stuff showing together.

I put Labyrinth in the hometown guild show this year, and ended up with a mention in the local newspaper -- a first, as far as I can remember, for anything to do with quilting. The article gamely tried to be enthusiastic and descriptive, but was written (I suspect) by a non-quilter for a general audience, and so has lots of charmingly meaningless sentences like "Vibrant reds, greens, oranges and blues competed for attention alongside more subuded pinks and pastel tones" and "One visitor... was overheard saying that the exhibition was like being in an art gallery."

My entry was, I'm proud to say, selected for a list of quilts that were singled out for special mention. Most of the quilts on this short list got a one-word description, such as "bedazzling." Labyrinth was described as "mind-wandering." I've never heard "mind-wandering" used as an adjective before, but what the heck. It's praise! I think! I'll take it!

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!