Full Moon

Full Moon 

Quilt No. 133

October 2020

I can't help but feel that this quilt is a complete cheat.

One of the many fun parts of belonging to a quilt guild is doing the challenges. Recently, we did an “ugly fabric challenge”.  Participants brought in a piece from their stash, something that they considered to be ugly.  A draw ensued and each person received their “ugly” fabric, with no restrictions as to how it was to be used, except that it had to be recognizable in the final piece.  In other words, no over-dyeing or cutting it up into confetti-sized pieces, or using it on the back.  It had to be legit.

Some doozey fabric swatches came in, and since the person who donated each piece was not identified, even the purple fabric that looked so attractive in the 1980’s was game. That one, despite the randomness of the draw, went to the purple-hating quilter. Of course.

The piece I donated was viewed by several quilters as “quite nice” and “not ugly at all”.  There was even a comment of “Gee, I really like that one”. I viewed it with fresh eyes and decided that, yes, it was not nearly as unattractive as I had thought. I started to feel a teensy bit sad that I was letting it go.  Hadn' I once loved that fabric? Later on while combing through a drawer of fabric at home, I found that I had given away the wrong piece, and the one that was truly ugly was still grinning at me from the drawer. 

I was hoping to receive something I could really get my teeth into. But when my name was drawn I got a lovely piece of fabric. How could anyone ever view it as “ugly”?  However, while it was not exactly ugly, it did not easily lend itself to the creation of an art quilt. Doing a landscape scene and using it for a shrub or two seemed inadequate. I couldn't come up with an idea of what type of block quilt I might use it in. So, it was ultimately very challenging, and I could not come up with a single idea.  As the pandemic descended upon us, and guild meetings ceased, my thoughts turned elsewhere and the ugly fabric challenge was completely forgotten. 

Months later the guild reconnected via Zoom. There was no ducking it, the ugly fabric challenge was still on the agenda. With a deadline!  I had to dig down through the piles of UFO’s (Unfinished Objects) and USO’s (Unstarted Objects) that weighed down my quilt table and spilled over onto the floor. The pandemic and all of its uncertainties had not been conducive to creative quilting. But it sure had been conducive to creating a giant mess as I tried to come up with something I could work on (other than masks!) that would pull me out of a grinding feeling of despair.  Eventually, a pregnancy (not mine!) came along to save me, and a baby quilt was needed. As I completed this simple project, I noticed the yellow fabric had befriended the so-called “ugly” fabric in the pile.  It made me think of a rising moon with its pale yet inviting yellow tone.

The baby quilt that "saved" me.

The “ ugly” fabric, while not ugly, faithfully lived up to its ability to challenge.  No style of machine quilting and no thread had any visual effect whatsoever.  Metallic thread, Superior Glitter thread, rayon thread – all were simply eaten up in the lush busy-ness of the fabric.  So be it.  I let it gobble up the quilting and have its way.  

It’s never a good idea to argue with fabric.  And while I felt like I was cheating by having a non-ugly “ugly fabric”, the piece was defiant enough to give me a good challenge.  Mission accomplished!

The Owl's Tree

The Owl’s Tree

Quilt No. 132

October 2020

This quilt ended up with exactly zero of the pieces it started out with. It redefined the term “fall”, as pieces fell from favour and were eliminated from the quilt. 

I started out with the Time to Harvest Fall fabric panel.  I have a love/hate relationship with panels – their design often baffles me. My first beef:  why do fabric designers make panels with pictures of unequal sizes?  There is no easy way to cut them apart and sew them into a quilt.  So…the very thing they are intended for – simplicity – is thwarted.  Clearly this is a conspiracy to force us to get out our rulers and calculators and add bits and pieces (alias sashing) until we have a set of blocks that are all the same size and can now be assembled into a whole.  The unlike-sized units on the fabric panel are creatively flustering. Usually, things are deliberately made into standard sized units – charm squares, jellyrolls, bolts of fabric.  Even strips of bacon are all the same length, well, at least until you cook them.

I once had a snowman panel printed with pictures. No two pictures were the same size.  I cut the various snowman pictures out, trying numerous unsatisfactory configurations until my crowning achievement was a Ziploc bag of frayed snowmen parts.  The arranging and rearranging of these shards played out over many sessions and lasted for years. At the end of it I had a single postcard quilt and a bag of bits that continues to make me groan with despair every time I come across it.

 Fabric panels can have a further frustrating challenge.  They’re are often printed with barely half an inch between the individual pictures. It’s also common to have a different colour border printed around each picture.  Being fabric, a certain degree of wonkiness invariably creeps in during the printing process.  The squares are never quite square enough to cut out without a bit of compulsory weeping. That elusive one quarter inch that is needed to cut out and sew the pictures onto the mandatory sashing strips can be impossible to find. 

None of the picture fabric from the Harvest panel ended up in the quilt, despite my best efforts with sashing.  The pieces were ultimately torn out and sacrificed in a desperate attempt to throw a life line to the central owl/tree block. That block came from a pattern in the Piecemaker’s Quilt Calendar from 1997, proving yet again my father’s sage advice that if you keep something for twenty years, you will use it.  However, I would have to say that did not always ring true.  The giant stone millwheel he brought home from the dump exceeded the twenty-year-use-clause, but was ultimately just too big to cart back to the dump. At least it made a good conversation piece, propped against the house.  For the first five years.

To finish the owl quilt, I used another panel, the Autumn Dream Big Leaf Panel from Hoffman. 

This was an impulse buy (my husband’s impulse, not mine), and ended up being yet another panel that I had no idea how to use.  My fabric panel collection is one of my favourites. It must be, because it now occupies more than one box. I keep repeating the same mistake of being seduced by panels that look pretty but offer no obvious way to be used.  I have a friend who says that we are doomed to make the same mistake over and over until we learn the lesson.  She just didn’t tell me that I would accumulate a number of boxes during that lesson.

I cut the leaf panel to make a border for the owl block, using appliqued pieces to hide the seams and/or complete the leaves into whole shapes.  Everything matched up nicely, but the leaves dominated the piece and the tree block receded into visual obscurity.  It was just life real life, where I could never quite pick out the owl in the tree. I eventually hit on the idea of appliqueing the brown fabric into what looks like a border between the block and the leaves.  This tamed the beast enough that I could live with it.

The owl reappeared and settled into his tree and sighed, glad to be done with it all.

This piece was rescued from the original Harvest quilt panel.

My Mother's Cats

My Mother’s Cats

Quilt No. 130

It all started out with a photograph of my grandmother that I had printed out on cotton at least 15 years ago.  I had tried to use it numerous times and failed every time.  This time was no exception, so I’m pretty certain it’s okay to designate that creative path a certified dead end. 

I built the entire crazy quilt around Gramma in the center, but the longer I worked on it, the less interesting it got.  Definitely a contrast problem!  I finally trotted out my Box of Special Things I Don’t Know What To Do With.  This is where I keep all those cute panels and odd cushion covers and weird socks and bits of embroidery that I Don’t Know What To Do With. It helps to legitimize this warehousing process if you mentally capitalize the name of box.

Absolutely nothing in the box worked until I came across these two exquisite sleeping cats done in crewel work. They were on a white background in a piece my mother had done sometime in the 1980’s or ‘90’s.  Cutting them out and using them on a leopard print background added the warmth the other neutral toned fabrics lacked.  Everything woke up.  Except the cats.

Thanks Mom!  And since she got left out of the quilt, here’s a photo of my beautiful grandmother. 

Almost Midnight

Almost Midnight

Quilt No 20, April 2001

Update March 2020

Have you ever looked endlessly at one of your quilts and thought “I love/hate you?” It’s the same feeling I get with do-nuts.  While I was pleased with the sleepy winter village and the big moon and sky of Almost Midnight, my eye kept snagging on the poorly executed binding.  I wanted to replace the binding, but I had no matching fabric for this twenty-year-old quilt.  The drawer full of black fabric was a bust.  Time for Google.

This wasn’t the first time this quilt had me quizzing the internet.  I initially saw a version of this quilt hanging in a quilt shop in a city some two hundred miles from where I lived.  It was charming!  I asked to buy the pattern.  They would not sell it to me. What?! I had to take their workshop to get the pattern. I explained that I lived impossibly far away, expecting them to be sympathetic and accommodating.  They were not.   They even seemed a tad on the gleeful side, saying I was unlikely to even find the pattern elsewhere, since it was from a long out-of-print book.  I would have to say that this is the only time in my twenty-year quilting odyssey that I have encountered any quilt shop employee who was uncooperative.  It’s been my usual experience that quilt shop ladies are the absolute best, and I generally want to shower them with chocolates and praise.  They did grudgingly tell me that the pattern was in an unattainable book called Piece on Earth, and that the quilt title was “Santa Cloths”.  The original pattern had a Santa with a sleigh full of presents where you see the moon on my quilt..

I’m not sure if I turned to Google, since in the year 2000, Google was still a speck in the eye of the internet, and cyberspace was largely an unpopulated wild west.  However, as a librarian, I was pretty familiar with the blossoming digital world, and I persevered until I located a used copy in a book store in California. This type of purchase is boringly ordinary now, but it felt like a glorious victory at the time. When the book arrived I ripped open the package in anticipation.  There was the quilt…but the pull-out pattern had been, well, pulled out.  It was after all, a used book.  However, the vendor had failed to describe it as an abused book.

Photo of "Santa Cloths" quilt in pattern book.

The game was on.  I scanned in the photo

and enlarged it.  I wanted a non-holiday themed quilt, so I replaced the Santa with a moon.  I used up my various black and gold star fabrics that I’d been collecting, and practiced my curved piecing on the moon and the sky.  I hand quilted it with gold metallic thread and capped it off with a less than stellar binding.  In my defense, I’d have to say it looked okay to me at the time…

Here in 2020 I once again found myself consulting the internet on behalf of this quilt, trying to find some suitable black/gold star fabric for the binding - kind of tricky, since in the trendiness of the textile world, this type of fabric is on the outs. However, once again, my search was successful, thanks to Fabric.com.

Our guild holds Sew Days every month or two. Members can take a workshop, or just bring their own project to work on.  These are most definitely “don’t miss” events, as we get to spend a whole day together immersed in quilting and friendship.  A pizza lunch is the equivalent of the cherry on top. My plan was to take this quilt to the next Sew Day. Replacing the binding would be the perfect one-day project.  To prepare ahead, I removed the old binding and repaired a wonky seam so that I could square the quilt up properly.  I’d originally neglected that as well.  While I was at it, I added machine quilting to the buildings and fleece roving for the chimney smoke.  I pondered why two of the houses lacked chimneys, but left it that way, since it was accurate to the original pattern photo.  My guess it those two houses have electric heating.

After I repaired the wonky seam, I got out my long straight edge and tried to figure out where to cut.  This very quickly revealed that the inner border was waaaay off kilter, being much narrower at the bottom than the top.  My chronic eye-balling of the ugly binding had kept this a secret from me until now.  Ugh. No way was this fix going to be completed on a Sew Day!

Now what? There was only one option.  The inner and the outer borders had to go.  I gritted my teeth and removed them. I would have to replace them with new fabric.  But that would give me a three-layered quilt surrounded by an extended area of only one layer of border fabric.  Batting and backing would need to be added in, and at the end of it, there could be no raw seams on the back that would reveal the deed. Double ugh.  Fortunately, I had lots of extra fabric, since Fabric.com had generously sent me several extra inches, as this piece was the end of the bolt.  Or maybe they just knew…

I attached the inner and outer borders as you would normally do on a quilt top.  I then hand basted batting strips to the wrong side of the new borders.  After querying more than a few befuddled brain cells, I figured out that putting facings on the quilt, rather than a traditional binding, would address all the problems, including covering the newly added batting on the back of the quilt.  It worked!  In order to avoid rippling the quilt interior, I added only one machine quilted line around the outer border, to anchor all the layers. 

The straightforward re-binding plan was just like one of those situations where you purchase a new refrigerator.  It’s two inches too tall for its allotted space.  You then need new cabinets…oh  they show the worn-out floor…gee whiz the stove now looks dodgy…It starts out simple and very quickly get complicated, expensive, and guilt-inducing.  But in the end, the whole quilt got an much needed update, and it has now been restored to the “love it” category.