Gift from Africa

Quilt No. 127

February 2019

Ah, the vibrancy of Africa. This quilt was a fun departure from the tediousness of my usual constructions.  And it is very much a Gift from Africa, the fabric having been “gifted” three separate times.

It was first “gifted” to a friend of mine (Gift No. 1). She was given a large piece of Veritable Real Java Print in the 1960's when she worked as a nurse in West Africa. She had stored it faithfully and carefully for many years, possibly with a twinge of guilt.  If you don’t sew, how do you honor a large piece of exotic fabric?  After fifty years there was still no answer to that question. When I asked her if she would care to contribute fabric to my Tree of Life quilt, she thought of the African fabric, and gave me all two meters of it (Gift No. 2). After I made two leaves for the Tree of Life, there was still two meters of fabric remaining. It was in perfect condition, a testimony to the high quality and longevity of the cotton.

I felt that both she and the fabric deserved some kind of reward. I decided to make a lap sized quilt for her (Gift No. 3). For this this quilt, I used one of the large central motifs printed on the fabric, and added five borders on the sides, and four borders on the top/bottom. The vibrant green border fabric gives it a sort of "forest" feel, an almost organic ooziness. For the flip side of the quilt I chose a serene white, to match her décor. During the machine quilting process, I matched the thread colour on the quilt top to the colour of the fabric.  However, I kept the thread on the back of the quilt (the bobbin thread) white in case all that colour took her whole living room hostage. She could always display the calming white side of the quilt.

As I was working with it the fabric intrigued me so much that I wanted to learn more about it. It was obviously “African print fabric”, made in Africa, right?  Wrong!

I discovered that, historically, most “African print fabric” was made in Europe. In present times it’s mostly made in India or China.  So, in essence, the only thing “African” about it is the market in which it is sold.

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries Europeans were busy exploring the wonders of Indonesia.  One of those wonders was the exquisite local wax print fabrics that were made in Java.  Local artisans were very skilled in the technique of painting wax onto fabric to act as a “resist” when dyed. The fabric was painted/dyed in several sessions to achieve very detailed double-sided prints, a tradition likely borrowed from India.  Excellent quality batik-style “wax prints” were the order of the day.

When the entrepreneurial Dutch discovered this fabric, they sniffed out a potential business opportunity. They carted the fabric back home. Surely with a little automation they could crank out this fabric more easily and more profitably!  A bit of industrial tinkering ensued and they came up with a wax resin process, applying the resin mechanically with rollers.  It looked a lot like the Indonesian fabric, but instead of being a true double-sided batik, the print was only one sided.  It also had a less pristine more “crackled” appearance. Undaunted by their results, they sailed back to Indonesia, planning to undercut the fabric market.

Instantly, the Indonesians pooh-poohed this one-sided fabric. They weren’t buying it. The Dutch were stuck with the fabric. If they had been Fabricland, they would have had to rid themselves of it in a buy-one-get-two-meters-free sale.

As happens with many adventures with new products, this wasn’t the end of it.  As the Dutch sailed to and from Indonesia exchanging goods, they stopped to trade and resupply in West Africa.  There was already a bit of a demand for the Javanese fabrics there. Locals had become familiar with them in the early- to mid-1800’s.  Western African soldiers had been sent to fight in the Dutch East Indies. Upon return, they brought back Javanese fabrics for their wives. Locally, only a limited amount of fabric was being made, so new fabric was always welcome. The primed African market gushingly embraced the new fabrics the Dutch were offering. Gradually, these fabrics came to be known as “African print fabrics”.  This planted the idea that the fabrics were African made. The Dutch happily forgot about their failed Indonesian marketing scheme and began designing fabrics that would appeal to African tastes.  African print fabrics remain hugely popular today, and regardless of manufacturing origin, they are a joy to work with and to behold.

For more on the history on these fabrics, visit Mazuri Designs.

Look Up at the Stars

Quilt No. 129 

January 2019

"Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up."                Stephen Hawking     (1942-2018)

Stephen Hawking’s words bring us not only wisdom but comfort.  I thought of them many times as I worked through this quilt.  “It matters that you don’t just give up”.  I’m pretty sure Mr. Hawking wasn’t thinking about quilting when he said those words!  More than once they kept me from throwing the unfinished quilt and the torn-out remnants of my hair into the dumpster.  As I chugged along for ten months, there were many technical issues that made me want to just give up.

How to capture a life lived in a wheelchair but not defined by a wheelchair?  How to keep the delicate organza layers from shredding? How to get white text onto dark fabric?  How and what to quilt on the borders?  How to keep the differentially quilted surface flat? How to keep plugging away after the tedium of the first several hundred beads had not only drained my patience but set my teeth on edge?  All this had to be resolved.  And every bit of it was infinitely trivial in comparison to what Hawking would have faced each day of his adult life. 

Diagnosed with ALS in his early twenties, and given a prognosis of only a few years of survival, Hawking somehow conquered the odds. He not only lived into his mid-seventies, he managed to unravel the physics of black holes and teach us about the origin of the universe.  He became a best-selling author, a husband and father, an esteemed professor.  He traveled widely, including into space, collaborated with colleagues, championed the disabled.  He became a familiar character in pop culture, doing gigs on Star Trek, The Simpsons, Big Bang Theory, and despite not having anything other than an electronic voice, contributing to the recording of a Pink Floyd song (Keep Talking).  The first thing friends and colleagues say about Hawking is what a great sense of humor he had.  So, when you consider that all of this was achieved despite great physical challenges, “Don’t just give up” is more than a trite piece of advice. Hawking clearly lived by those words.

I’m inspired by life stories of survival and achievement. This quilt, designed on the day of his death March 14, 2018, strives to capture the famous scientist as the beauty of the cosmos opens up to him on his final journey.  I tried to imagine something with enough light to take the darkness of the unknown universe and make it sparkle as it welcomed Mr. Hawking.  I spent much time experimenting with gold thread, organza, beads, and crystals to chase away the darkness. At times I was knee deep in test pieces! Even adding text to the quilt became a major obstacle.  After working my way unsuccessfully through lettering by machine quilting, hand embroidery, and painting, a desperate search lead me to sheets of printable organza. By placing the words for the quilt in a Word “text box” with a dark background I was able to achieve the white font that I wanted. 

Gravestone at Westminster Abbey

If you view the details of the gold free motion quilting on the border of the quilt, you will find planets (including Earth), stars, galaxies, the Starship Enterprise, moons, and Hawking’s Equation.  Prior to his death Hawking requested that this equation be placed on his gravestone.  This is located at Westminster Abbey, between Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, placing him with very esteemed company. 

The whole time I was working on this quilt I was considering various options for its title. In fact, it was finished before I settled on a title. One very early morning I was tossing ideas around in my head while making coffee.  “Look Up at the Stars” I said to myself, involuntarily glancing out the kitchen window.  It was still dark.  Most of the sky was blocked by the house next door, so I could only see a small part of it.  In that tiny bit of jet-black winter sky there was a single very bright star, or perhaps a planet. In over thirty years of making coffee and looking out that window, there had never been a star in that spot. I stopped auditioning titles.  The cosmos had made its selection known. 

Hawking discovered that radiation can escape from a black hole, contrary to what was previously believed.  So, it would seem that black holes aren't entirely black at all. Instead, they emit a glow now called Hawking radiation to honor his mathematical equation.  This extends our understanding of how the universe grows and changes over time.  Well, for some of us it extends our understanding. I would not include myself in that group.

Stephen Hawking recognized no limitations personally or professionally.  He had many lessons to teach us that were beyond mere astrophysics.  After his death, Hawking's children released a statement with this quote from their father. “It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.”

What mattered was not how different Stephen Hawking was, but how much like us he was.  For that alone, I thought he deserved to be honored with a quilt.

Hawking’s Equation

T = Temperature (radiation temperature)

H = Planck’s constant (quantum mechanics)

C= speed of light (from Einstein’s formula)

8 π = meaning it is spherical

G = Newton’s gravity constant

M= mass of a black hole

K= Boltzmann’s constant (energy of gas particles)

After the Fire

Quilt No. 124
August 2018

Ah, summer.  Hot weather, such hot weather.  We’re supposed to enjoy a pleasurable wallow in this sweaty scenario, but it can’t all be Popsicles and gallon jugs of sunscreen.  While summer does lend itself to many appealing options for activities, quilting is not always one of them. Often it's just too hot. Of course, you can always take your quilting stuff outside, but it’s usually even hotter out there than it is indoors.  On the plus side, the light is usually better out there, so at least you don’t need to drag your OttLite with you. Forget about the ritual slathering of the sunscreen.  A few dabs of that on a quilt and it will easily collect enough dirt to take first place in the County Mud Pie Contest.

Short of indulging in madness, it’s pretty hard to deny that we are in the grip of climate change.  Each year the extreme weather events notch up a little higher on the scale.  In this summer of 2018, hundreds of forest fires in British Columbia Canada have given that pristine area the worst air quality in the world.  It’s so smoky that tourists can’t even find the mountains.  People are forced to hunker down indoors hugging their air filters.  Two thousand kilometers away in the middle of Canada, Manitoba is sharing that bad air quality thanks to the prevailing winds.  Here in Northern Ontario numerous fires threaten remote communities. Pleas have gone out to forest fire fighters trained in previous seasons to rejoin the effort.  All these brave souls here and in other countries will put their safety on the line to protect communities and populated rural areas.  But not everything can be saved. For decades to come, people will be shocked when driving through these burned over areas, the war zones of climate change.  And while fires have always been a natural part of the life cycle of the forest, it’s still a bitter pill to swallow when we see an area completely spoiled with blackened trunks and exposed rocks. 

I wasn’t actually thinking about how any of this related to quilting when I started the quilt that became After the Fire.  By late June it seemed that every quilt I had started had become too large/hot/sweaty/complicated as I gave in to my usual battle with heat induced Summer Funk. The only way for me to power through this annual take down was to sweep all current projects under the bed and start a new one. At least they could keep the dust bunnies company under there. The enthusiasm of a new project can sometimes bring a full halt to Summer Funk.  But on the down side, pulling together a new bunch of fabric requires soooo many, many watts of heat-releasing brain power. 

To avoid having to sift through drawers and boxes of fabric, I turned to my scrap bag.  My beloved scrap bag has burgeoned into a bloated whale that would scare Captain Ahab out of his socks and into a diaper.  It even has a companion bag that holds all the scraps with fusible ironed on the back. Mixing ready to fuse fabrics with plain fabrics is guaranteed to ruin your iron, your ironing board cover, and your good nature.  Like church and state, the only chance for sanity rests in keeping these things strictly apart.

With no particular idea in mind I pulled out scraps, favouring the blue ones.  Hmm, didn’t these resemble sky and water when laid horizontally in rows.  Next, my eye fell on the wood grain fabrics.  There were only a few narrow strips left, since I’d used these in several other quilts, most notably LM + BD.  What wonderful bare tree trunks these fragments would make…

 

Preliminary fabric layout.

I had also recently acquired several fabrics from a friend’s collection. Her sand coloured fabric was the perfect sand/rock fabric I needed!  I also liked the piece of lace she had saved, and wanted to include it as part of the quilt.  And so…another Scrap Bag Challenge quilt was born.  As it took shape I could see how much it resembled the look of a forest after it had been swept by fire.  When this happens there is a long pause after the trauma of burning and before the green begins to shyly creep back.  Bit by bit life reclaims its territory.  It’s a humbling and patience-inducing experience to watch this process of forest renewal.   

Like real tree trunks, the ones on the quilt have a variety of colours, due to different dyeing sessions for previous quilts.  Here they ended up looking like different tree species.   I used Derwent Inktense Pencils to darken shadows on the left-hand side of the trees, and to enhance the shadows on the ground.  Machine quilting with silver metallic thread added light to the right-hand side of the trunks.  The lace? Well, such a serious topic needed some sort of whimsical element. Lace, like life, will always find a way.

Solo Fish

Quilt No. 123

February 2018

The year’s guild challenge was to do a “curves” quilt.  This definitely threw my fondness for straight edges into disarray.  Thinking outside the box is always troublesome, especially when your box is strictly straight edged and symmetrical.  If you were to chip open my skull and peer in at my brain, the convolutions would likely be arranged in perfectly straight rows of long boxes with  crisp right-angled edges.  What you wouldn’t see is any of those snakey sausage-like structures.  So “curves” as a point of inspiration didn’t leave me awash with great ideas.

Several months went by and the idea bank had a balance of zero.  Less than two months until deadline…

While working on Space Fish, I made some large folds in the background fabric.  This resulted in a lot of excess fabric on the back.  I cut the excess from the three folds and set these rectangular pieces aside.  Stacked together, I had to admit they had some appeal. 

I found a piece of dark blue polyester satin to use as a background for the rectangles.  The top of this piece had been hacked off in an asymmetrical curve, a leftover from some other long forgotten project.  Without even trying, I’d found a curve! 

The next thing I needed was a focal point.  I paraded many objects over the fabric until I came to the antique fish pin my husband had bought for me at Relics.  Finally, things were going swimmingly.  Adding in a few satiny waves suggested by the fish, I had it – the layout for my curves challenge quilt!

Space Fish

Quilt No 122

January 2018

There are no fish in outer space.  I think that’s a darn shame, so I’ve made it my mission to correct the fishlessness of space.  Somebody had to do it.

The background of this quilt is a piece of fabric I painted with Setacolor light sensitive dyes.  I overlaid it with cheese cloth and foil confetti stars.  I’m pretty happy that I did this outside, because the lawn mower was still blowing around tiny foil stars a whole year later.  Had I done this indoors I would probably still be spotting stars in my oatmeal or consorting with the crumbs under the stove. 

The fish are my first attempt at what I call “extreme trapunto”.  (Trapunto = stuffing).  I put fusible on the back of the fish but only fused the outer edges, squeezing the shapes while fusing them, so that they bulged outward.  This allowed for plenty of stuffing, yielding fish that are on the high end of the extreme plumpness scale.

Space Fish was quilted with various gold metallic threads plus Superior Glimmer thread to give it a little more sparkle.  You need that sort of thing when you’re in deep space.  Life in a nebula can be lonely, even for a fish.  

The Pond at Old Tranquility Farm; Kexy and the Fairy

Quilt No. 120

October 2017

View this quilt in the NJS 2018 gallery

Over the last year or so I kept seeing fairy creatures everywhere.  This hadn’t happened to me since I was five, and my dad and I worked our way through “Fifty Famous Fairy Tales,” one story at a time.   I still have the book’s alarming illustration of a green-ink line drawing of Rumpelstiltskin seared into my brain.  The artist certainly captured the rumpel, not to mention the stilt and the skin!  Fairies are once again popular.  They’re in gardens where they have houses, furniture, flower pots, or just humble doors backed up against tree trunks.  They grace t-shirts and cupcakes, make their appearance in calendars and continue in their unbroken stint as popular Halloween costumes.

So I thought -- wouldn’t it be fun to do a quilt with a fairy on it?

I looked at lots of pictures of fairies in Google images.  They certainly were plentiful and elegant.  Once again the lush illustration style popular in the early 20^th century story books caught my eye.  So many enticing fairy creatures to choose from!

I’m also rather fond of quilting frogs, so when I found Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s 1922 painting with both a frog and a fairy, I knew it was the one.  The fairy was particularly beautiful, so gentle with her captivating pink dress and gauzy wings.  And the frog!  He was the quintessential frog that we all dream of – plump and green with an essence of royal frogginess that hinted at a princely lineage.

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite's Original Artwork

I was in fact, so enamored with Outhwaite’s artwork, that I completely took leave of my senses, forgetting the rules I have about things that I don’t quilt:  hands, faces,  feet. There’s a special subcategory of frog hands and feet that I particularly like to avoid, having previously driven myself to the brink of insanity while trying to needle turn the fabric to make slender frog fingers.  It was just like childbirth.  I completely forgot how wretched it was the first time around, leaving myself open to repeating the suffering.  And in terms of suffering, the frog and the fairy did not disappoint.

Their genesis in fabric was long and dizzying in its repetitiveness.  I became a card carrying resident in the land of Do-Over. At one point I was calling the quilt The Six Faced Fairy, a much needed bit of levity that took me through the six tries it took to do the fairy’s face.  Her arms took four tries, and her hair, dress, and legs a mere two attempts.  Only her wings were nailed on the first pass. What I learned (re-learned) from this was that my rule about no faces, hands, or feet, is completely valid.  However, I didn’t think Ms. Outhwaite would have approved of me adding galoshes and mitts to her fairy. 

I like to name a quilt early on in its creation, but this one remained nameless until after it was completely finished.  Nothing came to mind other than the utilitarian “Frog and Fairy” possibility.  Ugh.  I didn’t even know their names or their story.  Observing them, it’s clear that they are embroiled in a situation.  A question is being asked, or a plea is being put forward, or maybe a controversial point is being painfully explained.  Yet, despite having birthed them from the fabric fragments in a drawer, I could only guess at the topic of their debate. 

I needed to find out more about these two characters who had eaten up six months of my creative life.  The illustration is from the story book, The Little Green Road to Fairyland.  It’s an Australian book written by Annie Rentoul, and illustrated by her sister Ida Rentoul Outhwaite.  Ida’s illustrations were so captivating that the stories were crafted around them, not the reverse which is the usual case.  While very popular in Australia and England, I don’t think any version of the book was released in North America.

According to the combined international listings in the online WorldCat catalog, only one library in Canada has a copy, (none in the U.S), and that library is over 800 km from where I live.  Considered a rare book, it seemed unlikely they’d be willing to mail it out on interlibrary loan.  Purchasing a used copy of this almost 100 year old book was also out of the question at a cost exceeding $US 200. Sadly, no copies are scanned into Project Gutenberg.  I was going to have to get creative if I wanted to dig up the name of that frog! 

Wouldn’t libraries in Australia have a copy of the book?  I looked in the online catalogs of their national and state libraries, and they did indeed have the book in their various collections.  On the website of the State Library of South Australia, located in Adelaide, I noticed that there was a form I could fill in to ask a reference question.  Bonus - international requests were accepted!  And what could be a more important international question than the names of this frog and fairy?  I filled it in and sent them a photo of the quilt so they would know which illustration was of importance to me.  After two weeks and plenty of breath-holding on my part, my answer arrived.  The frog is named Kexy.  Disappointingly, the fairy has no name, and is simply referred to as “Fairy” but the location in the book places them at Old Tranquility Farm.  I had my answer and my quilt title: The Pond at Old Tranquility Farm; Kexy and the Fairy. 

I still don’t know what their debate is about, but since they refused to reveal it in the six months we spent locked in mortal quilting combat, perhaps it’s too personal and I shouldn’t pry.

                                                                                                                                                                                             

Polar Bear Dip

Quilt No. 119

June 2017

I live far enough north that bears are a constant source of conversation. I’ve encountered them quite frequently. On the edge of the city where I live they’ve come within a few feet of the front door.  They’ve roamed around our yard with police in tow.  They’ve climbed trees in the yard, refusing to leave until  someone got serious with a tranquilizer gun.  (No bears were hurt – but one wheelbarrow was demolished by a falling bear).  At our cottage bears have graced all parts of the property with their blueberry spiked droppings, left half-eaten fish on the path, and found and mauled our food cooler that had been sitting on the deck for less than five minutes.  So for these and many more reasons, we think about bears quite a bit.  Of course, we are not that far north, so all of these bears are black bears.  This is a desirable state of affairs, since black bears are generally quite easily frightened off.  Polar bears?  Not likely to be shooed away by your thrown sneaker.

It seems kind of unfair then that I would do a quilt with polar bears rather than black bears, but whoever said that life was fair?  (Your mother doesn’t count).  

The polar bear design that I turned into a small wall quilt originated at NeedleworksStudio in Cochrane Ontario.  It was designed by Christina Doucette for Row by Row Experience.  For the uninitiated, Row by Row Experience goes on in quilt shops in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.  Each shop designs a block that incorporates the theme for that year.  Each one usually has a local flavor.  The blocks are long and narrow, meant to be sewn together with other “row” blocks.  Add borders, and voila, a full sized quilt emerges.  Of course you don’t have to combine rows, you can stay with just one and use it as a wall hanging or table runner. 

Polar bears are perfect for a block that originates in Cochrane.  It isn’t far enough north to have polar bears dropping by, but it does have a state of the art Polar Bear Habitat.  You can even watch them live if you aren’t lucky enough to be within driving distance.

My husband liked this block when he saw the kit displayed in the shop.  I pretended not to notice that he was hinting that I buy it.  I already had too many unfinished projects on the go – no time left for bear essentials. 

It kind of nagged at me that I hadn’t been more generous and offered to make if for him.  A year later a friend was down-sizing her stash and gave me the pattern and some fabrics she’d already picked out for it.  Destiny was looming.  The bears were coming for me.

I went ahead with some of her fabrics and some of my own.  I found a short fiber plush-like fabric in my drawers of “whites” that was pretty much the most ideal polar bear fabric in the history of mankind.  Clearly this was karma in its purest form.  I even managed to get the nap of the “fur” going in the right direction.  Once you’ve touched one of the polar bears on the quilt it’s as addicting as stroking a cat.  You will be back for more.

The northern lights proved problematic.  I didn’t want to risk pulling in a small section of the background with the close stitching of “thread painting”. Without proper planning you will pay for this with ripples somewhere else in the quilt.  I tried some fancy stuff with organza, but just like everything else I’ve ever tried to do with organza it was a flop. Actually, I came up with something that looked like a smoky shrub, a foolish object for an Arctic sky. I finally hit on the idea of using up some of my precious wool roving (where DO you buy that stuff without having to buy something the size of a football and the price of a car?).  It worked out pretty well until I ran out of it.  I consulted my Weird Wool Drawer and found one ball that had wool varying in size from skinny strings to fat wool.  I stripped out the skinny strings, chopped out the fat wool parts, and I had some DIY roving.  Best of all, I’d finally used something out of that drawer.  It’s a sizable collection of wool oddities that are almost never useful. I think it’s in cahoots with the organza. 

The Weird Wool Drawer

 

Cranes

Quilt No. 117

February 2017

This is the thing about being a card-carrying rule follower – challenges become irresistible.  All those delicious rules!  They channel unbridled creativity right into the cozy end of the funnel.  Instead of falling prey to the loosey-goosiness of too many possibilities, there is a path that is already laid out.  Certain things can be done, certain things cannot.  It’s pure heaven for a rule follower!

The year’s quilt guild challenge was to create a “medallion quilt”.  My definition of “medallion” is personified by Mr. T. and mountain of bling.  How would I ever come up with a quilt based on that?  Fortunately, as the description of the quilt version was revealed, it became clear that it had nothing to do with gaudy gold neckware. Whew!

A medallion quilt is one that has the center of the quilt as its focus.  Borders are added around that portion.  The center can be a printed fabric panel (sometimes a picture) or something pieced to give the impression of a whole, for example a lone star.  Turns out - thanks to my sister - I had just the right thing for my medallion quilt lying around in my bloated pile of impulse purchases. 

The center panel of this quilt is a piece called Greeting the Moon, from Red Rooster Fabrics. I saw it when I was attending the Quilt Canada 2016 event.  I wanted it, but I also wanted pretty much everything that fell within my line of sight. So I didn’t allow myself to buy it.

On Day Two of Quilt Canada I casually mentioned the crane panel to my sister.  She knows I’m pretty fond of red-crowned cranes, having used them before in my Hibakusha quilt.  I still have a bit of fabric left over from that quilt.  I would it put in a safe if I had one.  It’s that special.  I’ve used that crane fabric a few times for postcard quilts for friends who were battling cancer.  So far these cranes have been very successful.

“I saw this panel of cranes that I really liked” I commented as we wandered on blissfully blistered feet.  “Did you buy it?” she asked.  I admitted that I had not.  “Well go get it now” she said.  I started stammering about having already bought enough stuff and how I didn’t know what I would do with all of it.  My sister was already dragging around a pack sack loaded with my purchases, pretending she wasn’t my personal pack horse.  (Did I mention she’s a non-quilter, and just about the world’s greatest sport?)  She short circuited my blathering by drawing herself up to her full Big Sister Height.  Then she lasered me with her well practiced Big Sister Glare.  “I said GO. Get it. Now.”  I knew better than to defy her.  She is older than me and taller than me and she has assured me that she is smarter than me.  I’m at least smart enough to know not to argue with her.  I obediently slunk over to the vendor and bought the crane panel.  I didn't even worry about what I might do with it. 

A few months later the President’s Challenge was announced at quilt guild - the medallion challenge.  Too bad I had nothing, nothing at all that I could use for this challenge.  What a lack of foresight on my part, considering that quilt stores sometimes shop at my house, due to my vast fabric selection.  Maybe I wouldn’t be able to muster anything at all for the challenge.

Eventually, during one of my rummaging sessions in my fabric stash, I unearthed the cranes panel.  It was an absolutely ideal starting point for the challenge!  Turns out my sister is right.  She is smarter than me.  Do not let her know I’ve confirmed this.

I’ve added five borders on each side of the panel, and four on the top/bottom of this quilt.  I was going to give it a “light” machine quilting using metallic thread and just outline a few waves here and there.  Meh.  I’d be done in two hours.  But...once I got started on the waves, a few lines here and there made no sense to the eye or the quilt.  It became every line that got quilted.  

Of course, the bottom of the quilt became narrower and narrower in comparison with the top.  Quilts must be quilted with equal density over the whole surface, or you get rippling. This is a rule that can’t really be gotten around, kind of like gravity.  If you go crazy quilting it tightly in one section, you must repeat your act of craziness in all sections. This meant I had to climb that mountain of quilting all the way to the top, equalizing it by adding in waves and clouds.  I actually thought I might never finish, that I would perish at my machine because I’d failed to take along enough supplemental oxygen to get me to the summit.  By the end, my sewing machine and I had become one, a cybernetic organism that lived only to make stitches and trips to the snack drawer.  We took turns doing both.  

Eventually it did come to an end - I couldn’t find even a tiny section left where I could add any more stitches.  I declared the quilt finished and my love affair with cranes over.  Completely over.

Dave the Dachshund

April 2017

It can’t always be about quilting.  I know.  It’s a travesty.  It ends up being necessary to put everything in life into one of two categories: 

• Category 1:  Quilting
• Category 2:  Not Quilting

Category 1 takes in all quilt related activities including thinking about quilts, talking about quilts, reading about quilts, and actually occasionally making quilts.

Category 2 takes in, well, everything else, including eating, sleeping, and painting the kitchen.  Ugh.

Category 1 is quite elastic and can be stretched to include sewing if the item in question can be somehow related to quilting.  For example, sewing pyjama pants is a quilting activity, since sometimes I wear them while I’m quilting.  Sewing to repair clothing falls into Category 2, as it is an essentially nasty pursuit that misuses time that could be more appropriately devoted to Category 1.

Watching the TV series The Great British Sewing Bee is a Category 1 activity.  This show is a low calorie version of The Great British Bake Off.  I had to abandon watching that one after I dragged the TV into the kitchen so that I could commune with the chocolate chips during the show. 

They don’t do any quilting on The Great British Sewing Bee, but it does cover a lot of the same skills that quilters use. I’ve completely fallen under its spell.  It’s the stitchery equivalent of Survivor – 10 sewing enthusiasts duke-ing it out for top dog status.  One person must leave “the sewing room” each episode.  At this point, the moderator who makes the announcement chokes back tears.  The sewing contestants all cry, and I sob inconsolably into the arm of my leather chair. 

As the GBSB camera wandered from table to table, it became evident to me that all the cool kids had huge and amazing pincushions they had made for themselves.  The one that made me whimper with envy was the dachshund.  Who doesn’t love this adorable unpronounceable and un-spellable breed of hound?  The beloved “wiener dog”!  I wanted my very own wiener dog pincushion.

I currently keep all my pins in a dish on my psychotically cluttered quilting table.  I rarely have a session at the table where I don’t knock this dish onto the floor, strewing the contents all the way to the house next door.  It’s become a ritual that I’ve learned to endure.  Picking up all those pins every day is keeping me flexible. My fine motor skills are top notch.  I could get one of those magnetic pin dishes, but then the pins get magnetized and my scissors become an unusable porcupine-like object.  Un-clamping magnetized pins is worse than a crawl around the carpet and has no therapeutic value whatsoever.  But... a pincushion that doubles as a cute animal companion?  That struck me as the ideal solution. 

I easily found the free pattern for Dave Dachshund at Sew magazine.  It wasn’t too complicated.  I even managed to avoid being dissuaded by the word “gusset”.  (It’s on my list of Hated Words).  Within a single day, Dave was lolling on my quilting table and radiating advanced cuteness.  I couldn’t actually stick any pins in him though.  My Facebook friends (pet lovers all) were quite vocal about implementing a “no-stab” rule for Dave.  I didn’t have the heart to point out that Dave is made of cotton and lacks a nervous system.  So the pins have stayed in the dish, and Dave has been put in charge of it.  And to his credit, he’s only spilled it twice.

Sailing at the Farm

­­Sailing at the Farm; A Paper Bag Challenge

April 2017

Lois/Joan/Julie Collaboration

Never turn down anything chocolate - or anything quilt related when the challenge gauntlet is thrown down.   This quilt is the end result of one our “paper bag” challenges at our guild. The challenge works like this.  One quilter fills a paper bag with some fabric scraps and notions.  Whoever gets the bag has to make a small quilt using the contents. They’re allowed to add their own thread and imagination, nothing else.   At least a piece of every fabric or item in the bag must be used.  To add to the fun the bag contains a whole bunch of alarmingly unharmonious fabrics.  Some people love this challenge.  Most are neutral.  The rest would rather have their hair set on fire. 

Last fall Lois was charged with coming up with a challenge. When she revealed the two paper bags, everyone in the room either looked at the floor or suddenly noticed something of spellbinding interest in their purse.  To be fair, everyone already had at least one too many projects in their queue.  I wanted to grab one of the bags right away, but I hated to appear greedy.  I’d done this type of challenge before  (Light and Dark in the City). It was time to let someone else to have a chance. 

It took a while for the two bags to get picked up. Both went to people who volunteered an absent member for the project.  Hint: never miss a meeting.  One bag got passed around, and eventually it reached my friend Joan.  She did the background and then became the victim of evaporated enthusiasm. She set it aside.  We kicked around some ideas, but I could see she’d already moved on.  The quilt got added to her pile of unfinished projects, with the fabric-in-waiting and the things that were no longer as much fun as when they were started.  If you are a quilter, you know this feeling well. Projects that once tapped you on the shoulder while you were sleeping and dragged you to your machine at six a.m. eventually became dreary.  You start thinking about breaking up with them.

 

Joan's Background

I offered to take this one and finish it under the pretense of heroism, but the truth was I’d wanted to do one of these all along.  And, since the background was completed, all the heavy lifting had already been done.  All I had to do was swoop in and find the story. 

There were some blue and white blocks in the bag that hadn’t been used yet.  Turning them on point, I recognized their true calling. They were sail boats!  I added grey strips to the water, and added more grey fabric at the bottom of the quilt.  I reduced the size of the sky.  A beautiful day for sailing emerged.  

From the bag, I added the flowers (buttons) and used the 3 colours of embroidery floss for stems and leaves.  The unseen farmer was way instantly way happier with his little house by the sea. 

Finally, I machine quilted it with metallic thread in the water and sky.  I would never normally have added a light coloured binding, but that was the only fabric left that was big enough.  Surprisingly, it made the piece look like a snapshot of a farm by the sea. There was still one jarring piece of brown fabric left.  It fell into conflict with every other fabric in the quilt. I used it on the back as a border for the label.  No one had specified exactly where the fabric had to be used.

And the fate of this quilt?  It will find a whole new home as the door prize someone will win at our upcoming quilt show.  

Finding Mankind

Quilt No. 118

March 2017

This is one for the doodle addicted.  You know who you are.  You embarrass yourself at meetings as the doodle that began as a few innocent marks in the margin of your notes becomes cultivated into pages of swirls and triangles and leaves with veins and warts.  Harry Potter is defeating a Lord of the Rings dragon, and both are wearing top hats.  Suddenly, you snap back to reality in a quiet room.  All the faces around the meeting table are now turned to the bloom on your page.  The question the chairperson has directed at your deaf and doodling ears is a complete unknown.  You dredge up your best all-situation answer - “It could be possible.”  I’ve learned this the hard way.  Corporations frown on doodling.

The other circumstance that fosters doodling is the telephone call.  Meetings held on the phone are the worst.  At the end I must tease out my notes from the grip of butterflies.  Fish with large eyes muddle the key points and bubbles obscure the phone number of the key person I’ve been assigned to contact.  I’m also a home doodler.   I was talking to my sister on the phone when Finding Mankind found me.  She is unaware of my doodling ways, and I find it best to keep it that way.  At the end of the phone call I look over the doodles and then throw them away.  However, in this particular one I spotted a man.  He was difficult to distinguish from the background, just like mankind cannot easily be extracted from his environment - despite lofty thoughts to the contrary.  In this quilt you must look carefully. Eventually you too will find mankind.  

Wysocki's Victorian Street

Wysocki’s Victorian Street

Quilt No. 115

September 2016

I’m still feeling the inspiration of the crewel, crewel world of embroidery-quilt fusion.  Metaphorically, it’s like jumping out of a plane.  Once you cut the embroidery out of its background fabric, you are on an unwavering trajectory.  Hopefully the conclusion will be a pleasing one, but failure to open your parachute or execute a satisfactory quilt will have the same critical ending.  There will be a splat.

It seems lofty to say it, but this quilt started out as a Charles M. Wysocki painting.  His works are fascinating to examine, simple in appeal, rich in detail, rendered in warm tones.  Many of his compositions are fictional towns or villages reminiscent of American life from the 1800’s to the 1930’s.  They beckon you to pack up your steamer trunk and move in.  We can’t all own a Wysocki painting, but we can experience his art through the Wysocki calendars and jigsaw puzzles that have made him so well known. Converting his art into crewel embroidery kits gave us another way to enjoy his designs.

I was surprised to learn how similar his method for creating a painting is to designing an art quilt.  Wysocki did not paint existing places, but used his imagination to take ideas from several sources and bring them together into a new and convincing scene. The  Swoyer's website gives us a peak at the steps involved

Wysocki's method of working is painstaking and methodical. When he gets a concept for a painting, he first draws the various elements on small pieces of tissue paper. There might be two or three or as many as dozens of such mini-pieces. These are moved around, or changed, or developed, or all three, until he is satisfied that he has a balanced composition. He might then do an overall drawing on tissue and then embark on color. If the color is not going properly, he will start all over again to redesign. Sometimes a painting will take weeks to develop. Sometimes all the many elements fit easily and everything seems to fall into place.

I too have used this method, and taking elements from numerous sources, moving them around endlessly until they cooperate and form a into something that matches the murk of my mind’s eye. This was the technique I used for Horse With No Name.  I’ve certainly never been as accomplished as Mr. Wysocki, but having used the same technique does give me some appreciation for the patience it takes to continue rendering a work of art through the frustration of the initial unsuccessful stages.

It was a humbling experience to take Wysocki’s brilliant artwork through yet another rendition in its path from painting, to crewel embroidery, to quilt.  The original framed embroidery had a plain background that left the street floating unanchored in the picture frame. I wanted to take it back a step in time and ground it with earth and sky.

My mother had completed this embroidered piece in the 1990’s.  It hung on the wall of her Ohio home for many years, proudly flying a tiny American flag in her American/Canadian household.  Many years later, the piece looked out from the wall of her Canadian home, the flag still flying and unconcerned with its new location.  Regardless of the location, visitors always paused to admire her handiwork and choose a favourite house on street. 

When I decided to give this embroidery the “quilt treatment”, it took me more than a few weeks to get up the courage just to un-frame it.  Washing it by hand was the next scary step, but both the embroidery and I survived the act.  The background shrank in unison with the crewel wool, but the embroidery floss did not shrink at all. 

My next step was to stabilize the piece with fusible cotton.  I trimmed the background off, carefully snipping around the trees.  I sewed the earth fabric to the sky fabric, and fused the embroidery onto that.  This stabilized everything nicely, and allowed me to machine quilt it with “invisible” thread to give a more three dimensional look to the buildings, people, horses, and so on.  A considerable amount of “touch up” needlework was needed because of the variable way it had shrunk during washing.  I saved this step until the quilt was completely finished so that any additional problems caused during quilting could be fixed at the same time. I finished the quilt with a wide black binding. Surprisingly, the piece went back to looking like…a framed picture.

During the process of quilting this piece it was easy to become lost in the detail, leading to an appreciation of the care and skill both Wysocki and my mother had poured into its creation.  I felt he had scrupulously achieved one of his key goals for his work. "I want drama and light, carefree times or a lonely, heartfelt memory." All of these come to life when you're strolling down Victorian Street.

Who's There?

Quilt No. 114

September 2016

Comfort. It’s a bad thing.  Despite the fact that it’s the thing we most desire when we’re toiling away at work, or when we’re swishing our butts around on those metal chairs they set up at graduations, comfort is no longer a good thing.  And the most offensive part of comfort?  Your own personal comfort zone!  It is now imperative for you to remain outside of it, where you will produce new and wondrous works of art.  It doesn’t matter if you gnaw off your arm in frustration along the way to making that art.  It doesn’t matter if you have less fun than the last time you had a root canal and a bunion removal on the same day.  Just like a marathon session of childbirth, the suffering will be erased from your mind when you see the finished product.  At least that’s the theory.

I hear it over and over.  “Get outside your comfort zone.”  This pretty much goes against the grain.  Humanity has spent more than a few millennia courting comfort.  Nearly all of technology has been developed in the name of comfort or its cousin, convenience - which is really just another way to garner comfort.  Ordinary things like eye glasses, air conditioning, bear spray, and Prozac have been invented to give us comfort.  We are genetically programmed to wallow in the blissful comfort of sofas, slippers, and Spandex. But in the same way that adversity fosters the creation of art, tossing aside your comfortable ways and plowing into the danger zone will win you the rewards of creative glory.

My take on this? It’s pure phooey.  All this “reaching” and ‘”stretching” and “pushing” is best saved for episodes of yoga or hockey or putting on those extra small pantyhose you bought by accident.

It is perfectly appropriate to step back inside your comfort zone.  Breathe in the euphoria.  It’s the zone where you are meant to be!  That’s exactly what I did with this quilt.  I deafened myself to the nay-saying anti-comfortists and did a quilt in the appliqué style with which I am infinitely familiar.  It felt utterly liberating.  I didn’t spend hours trying to figure out how to do something novel.  I was free of the grind of problem solving and trouble shooting and cussing over the fact that I was cussing too much. 

This quilt, made from a drawing I saved a few years ago, was a dose of fun.  I was captivated by the owl’s expression and the intimate winter setting.  A story is hanging in the air waiting to be told.  It’s early evening.  The snow has just begun its tentative descent.  The tree trunks huddle together in the sparkling snow, gathering in the silence that marks deep winter.  The owl opens his pink door to see a surprise.  Who’s there?

So, I’ve taken back my comfort zone and in the process I’ve learned something.  Not every endeavor has to supersede the last one.  I can’t believe I didn’t know that.  Sometimes “success” is just satisfaction.

Annoyingly, I’ve lost the source where I found this picture, so I can’t give proper credit to the artist.   While allowing my comfort-addicted brain too much leeway, I simply cannot remember where I found the original drawing.  Book?  Internet? Fever dream?  I wish I knew.  I’m still looking.

October 24, 2016 Addendum!  Thanks to the TinEye Reverse Image Search engine I've located the source of the original drawing for this quilt!  I uploaded the image of the drawing I used to create this quilt and easily found that well known children’s book author and illustrator Arnold Lobel (1933-1987) was the artist.  The drawing, Owl At Home, is the title page for a book of the same name that Mr. Lobel wrote.  He is also the author/illustrator of many other children’s books, including one of my favourite series, Frog and Toad.  Mr Lobel’s Owl At Home drawing came up for auction in 2009.  It was expected to fetch $US 10,000 – 15,000, and was sold along with famous works by Ted Geisel (Dr. Suess) and Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are).

Killbear Pine: The Canadian Wilderness

Quilt No. 110

March 2016

This year the quilt guild I belong to decided that we were suffering from an embarrassment of riches. It was time to spend like drunken sailors, but instead of cases of rum our plunder would be quilting workshops.  And we wouldn’t go to the workshops, we would have them come to us.  Such is the power that can be wielded when the membership fees finally exceed the expenses.   

For part of our spree we brought in quilter/designer Joni Newman. Her simplified stained glass technique lends itself beautifully to the creation of quilts that capture the Canadian wilderness in a style that is reminiscent of The Group of Seven. 

I remember learning about The Group of Seven in high school art class.  Well…I sort of remember.  When I did a little neuronal fact checking, the bits at my disposal included that there were seven of them and they were artists.  Trees and rocks were involved - especially lonely singleton trees clamped onto rocky shorelines. Tom Thompson came to mind.  I was definitely a little fact impaired. 

Looking to round out my knowledge, I discovered that most of what I knew was incorrect.  While The Group of Seven started off with seven members, they actually ended up with more than seven.  No one thought to change the group name.  They were officially active from 1920-1933, and while Tom Thompson was a major stylistic influence, he was never a member, having passed away in 1917.  And yet we still associate his iconic painting, The Jack Pine, with the Group of Seven.  In essence, their most famous, representative painting was done by a non-member.  It doesn’t get any more Canadian than that.

The Jack Pine/Tom Thompson 1917

Believing that a distinct Canadian art could be developed through direct contact with nature, the Group was best known for their paintings of the Canadian landscape. Over eighty years later we still adore their paintings and I still yell “Group of Seven!” whenever I spot a lone gnarly pine tree against a backdrop of granite.

I was able to add my own touch to Joni’s Killbear Pine design by pillaging my stash and using some of the blue fabrics I’d previously dyed.  The particular design is based on the scenery of Killbear Provincial Park, located on the Georgian bay shoreline of Lake Huron, part of Ontario’s Great Lakes. 

Seagulls

 

Quilt No. 111

April 2016

This quilt started out decades ago as a piece of crewel embroidery crafted by my mother.   A single long panel contained the scene of seagulls on a beach.  It was framed without glass, lounged around on one wall or another for many years, and eventually was packed away when my mother moved.

Original embroidery, removed from frame.

I felt it still had some life left in it so I thought about how I might use it to create a new quilt.  I removed it from the frame, washed it, stabilized it with fusible cotton, and sectioned it vertically into pieces.  These pieces were then fused onto the dark blue fabric.  A border was added and the piece was machine quilted.  I could almost hear the seagulls squawking.

You could trace the trajectory of my mother’s life by her needlework.  Earlier pieces of traditional embroidery included decoration and borders on table cloths and hand towels and more than a few dresser scarves. You don’t hear the term “dresser scarf” too often anymore, but at one time a young lady’s trousseau had better contain at least a dozen if she was going to snag a husband.  I assumed that dresser scarves no longer existed in the modern world but when I Googled the term I was proven wrong.  Walmart has a couple of dozen stamped dresser scarves that you can order.  The needlework and the lamplight is up to you.  You might also want to call them “table runners” if you’re in a more contemporary mood.  So while the need for a trousseau has been shed along with the girdle, Walmart and women have at least managed to preserve the dresser scarf tradition.

After many years of marriage and the demise of the traditional dresser scarf – which was deemed as out of style by my mother in the late 1970’s – my mother took up crewel embroidery.  Dimensions Crafts and other embroidery kits were available everywhere and in every degree of complexity.  My mother worked her way through many of these during evenings ensconced on the couch with my dad, watching Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, and Bonanza.  It was put away for Hockey Night in Canada – you can’t do needlework and follow the puck at the same time!

After my dad passed away, Mom put away the crewel work.  It felt too sad, too tied up with Dad who was no longer on the other end of the couch.  A decade passed and my mother remarried.  She returned to her embroidery, sharing 60 Minutes and Alf with a new partner in the adjacent Lazy Boy.  She returned to her crewel work.  No picture was too complicated as she worked her way through the complicated stitches that grew into flowers, birds, whole towns.  Sadly, that partner was taken from her as well, and her desire for needlework faded away once again.  But my mother had a truly indomitable spirit.  In her eighties she once again thought about doing needlework, and asked me from her hospital bed if I would bring her one of her untouched kits.  I worried that her physical limitations would just end up frustrating her, but kept my fears to myself.  We spent a pleasant afternoon unpacking the wool in the kit and sorting out the colors, debating which strands were pink, light pink, very light pink, or coral.  The success of crewel work depends as much on organizing the numerous wool strands by colour as it does on the crafter’s ability to wield a needle. 

During her hospital stay Mom did some of her very best crewel pieces and delighted visitors, staff, and other patients with her progress and the generous gifts of her completed works.  Once again it brought both contentment and purposefulness back into her life.  Little did she know that it would also have the power to reconnect us in the future.