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.