Souls (2022)

 

Quilt No. 143 (Formerly No. 52)

July 2022

I’ve learned quite a bit about quilting in the sixteen years that have elapsed since 2006 when I did the first iteration of this Souls quilt.  You can see how it looked in 2006 here.

Below is the original inspiration for that quilt, as I’ve previously described in that much older post:

Tuesdays with Morrie, a long-standing bestseller by Mitch Albom, tells the true story of his relationship with his professor, Morrie Schwartz. Mitch meets with Morrie every Tuesday afternoon as Morrie progresses through the devastating disease process ALS. His view of life and what is meaningful is profoundly changed as he begins to absorb Morrie’s final lessons.

Mitch Albom writes:

 As my visits with Morrie go on I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that holds it – so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth.

Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns as do we all. That is what they believe.

I’ve always felt that my quilted interpretation of this philosophy was too simple and did not sufficiently honor the waiting animal and human souls.  In 2006, the quilt I made reflected the degree of quilting experience I had at that time. In 2022, with another ninety quilts under my belt, I was finally ready to change it up a bit.

Flying Geese Block

I removed the binding and all of the hand quilting, and discarded the wide black border. After all those years, I still could not come up with an appropriate looking set of animals to grace that swooping curve that cut behind the moon. So, instead of a trail of animals, I put in a strip of off-center curved flying geese. So, where are the birds? There are no actual “geese” – the term “flying geese” means a quilt block made of a central triangle with two end pieces that turn the block into a rectangle. I used a fabric that transitioned though several shades of blue-green so that there would be a colour change with each successive flying geese block in the swoop. The blocks include shimmery gold fabric stabilized with iron-on cotton. A second “swoop” was added in by couching two lines of gold cord and then quilting between those lines.

I re-quilted the whole piece and added quilting in the moon.  I placed wool roving over the Earth and quilted over it to make some nice swirly clouds. This still left the question of where to put the animals. I decided to move them to the outer border of the quilt.  For each animal, I used a line drawing, printed it out, and pinned the printout to a square of black fabric. I then stitched oh so carefully along each line on the printout, and then removed the paper.  Sounds straight forward, but it was an exercise in Herculean patience, as each block took 2 – 4 hours to complete. I then sewed these blocks together to make new borders for the quilt, attached them, and covered up the exposed backs of these squares with a really wide facing on the back of the quilt. To my amazement, it all worked out, and I felt that the souls were finally better served as they waited to be returned to their new lives.

King of the Mountain

 

Quilt No. 137

October 2021

This quilt began as yet another chunk of Setacolor-painted fabric that was looking for a raison d’etre.  It was hanging out with its pals in a dark drawer, a place not known for its easy escape.  Once a piece hits that drawer, it generally stays there, sighing under the weight of newly added layers of unused dyed fabric.  

I wanted to attempt thread painting a pine tree, so I grabbed this piece of wintry fabric.  As the tree took shape, so did the background – suggesting a snowy mountain.  Eventually I completed the lonely tree on the somewhat aloof background.  It was all very sterile looking.  I had no plans to take it any further.

A cut-out snowman intended for another project mysteriously migrated onto the piece, and much to my surprise, brought the whole experiment to life. Instead of ending up in the pile of test bits doomed to anonymity, the piece now begged for the addition of borders, and I was happy to comply.  The King of the Mountain had claimed his realm.

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.

                                                                                                                                                                                             

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.

LM + BD

Quilt No. 103

February 2015

Say it with fabric.  I keep immersing myself in this endless quest.  And when I decided to create a quilt for my daughter’s wedding, it was never more difficult.  It needed to celebrate one of life’s key events, and to wholeheartedly welcome Lucas into our family.  It needed to depict something about them, something they could look back on in their dotage that would make them say “Remember that?”   It also needed to show that as a mother (and mother-in-law) I had at least some understanding of what they loved to do.  I didn’t want them to think that I hadn’t been listening...

Each year they plan their wilderness camping trip with great zeal, selecting the destination, amassing the equipment, working through lists of gear and food, selecting between the “must have” items and those relegated to the “wish list”.  The duration of any camping trip is far shorter than number of hours that went into planning it.  Since this is a many-months-long focus in their lives, I know how much it means to them.  After all, who doesn’t want to conquer nature with a canoe, two paddles, a food barrel, and the luxury of a single roll of toilet paper? 

Fortunately, I had lots of time to plan their wilderness camping quilt - just as well because for the first year of “planning” I came up with absolutely no ideas.  During the second year I came up with several crappy ideas, one of which had park symbol signs stationed along the border in a freakish parade.  Mercifully, that one never got off the design table.

Trying to force a creative idea invariably sends it into that slippery-pig phase where the harder you grasp at it, the more gleefully it eludes you.  In the end all you have to show for your efforts are greasy hands and remembered squeals. 

I finally quit actively thinking about it.  Likely, my subconscious continued to wring its hands over the problem, because not too long after that, I was struck by the image of a tree trunk with their initials carved inside a heart.  It seemed like something they might do, or rather, like something they would talk about doing, and then decide against in order to avoid harming a tree.

Once I had the key element everything flowed from there.  Well…I wish!  It was more of a miserly trickle, with more ideas tossed out than embraced.  I at least knew the concept of what I wanted – a lake, a canoe, an idyllic forest scene where a few animals made their home, and a campfire.  Bit by bit it came together, eventually including a picnic and their favourite bottle of wine. 

My plan was to put ferns along the bottom, and I spent a couple of painstaking hours cutting out fern-print fabric to capture the ferns without the background on which they were printed.  I arranged and rearranged ferns for weeks on end without ever even approaching a pleasing result.  By the end of my endeavours the ferns took on a flayed look, completely shredded from too much handling.  I moved on to flowers, combing through my considerable stash of fabric, auditioning every possible floral piece regardless of colour or size of flower.  It wasn’t much of a surprise to find that method yielded nothing. 

During this time period, wedding planning was going on.  It included a trip to help my daughter purchase her wedding gown.  Of course, this brought back memories of my own modest gown, and I pulled it out of the box that was hiding under a deeply satisfying layer dust.  This sparked conversations with my sister about her wedding gown, so she retrieved hers as well. 

It was pretty clear that styles have changed radically since the 1980’s when gowns were demure and covered as much of the bride as possible.  High collars and long sleeves were the trend, pretty much the opposite of today’s styles.  For my sister and me, there was no doubt in our minds that no one would ever want to wear those completely outdated wedding gowns again.  But that didn’t mean that they were of no further value.  Both gowns had flowered lace in just the right scale to use on the quilt. 

I remove some pieces and started “testing” it.  The lace readily accepted Pebeo Setacolor fabric paint, and was easily transformed.  I made orange flowers from my dress, and orange-pink flowers from my sister’s dress.  Hers also had lace in the shape of leaves, and this I painted green.  The bluebells readily exchanged their bland white existence for one of vibrant blue.

The tree has only a few tender young leaves.  It is at the beginning of its life’s journey.  I removed the sash from my wedding gown and dyed it green.  The synthetic fabric slurped up the paint with gusto, and was relatively easy to use to make appliquéd leaves.  A little silver metallic thread machine quilting gave them the dazzle they deserved. 

I still needed to add the bride and groom into their own personal camping-quilt experience.  Luckily I had one photo of them paddling a canoe.  Since I am not generally on the invitation list for their camping trips (no one wants to portage a canoe, numerous backpacks, food, paddles and one mother) I felt quite fortunate to have snapped a photo several years ago at our cottage. I printed out the photo of them in a canoe, and fused it onto the quilt. 

I hope that this quilt will always hold true for them, and that they will always paddle together through all the sunny days and the inevitable sorrowful days that will build the fabric of their lives.  

Quilting in the Wind - Again!

Quilt No. 62 Gets Some Much Needed Lovin'

As I've said before, most quilters are plagued by UFO's (UnFinished Objects).  It's one of the inexplicable tenets of life that starting a project is ever so much more fun than finishing it. There's that tsunami of enthusiasm, that unadulterated glee that accompanies a new enterprise. This applies not only to quilting, but to pretty much everything else - taking French lessons, teaching the dog to fetch your purse, encouraging the cat to flush the toilet, siding the house.

I like to think I've taken the UFO to a new place.  I now take quilts with FO status (Finished Objects) and demote them back into UFO's.  It's positively perverse.  It's the equivalent of Sisyphus finally getting that cantankerous stone to the top of the hill, being dissatisfied with the way he got it up there, and deciding to roll it down and start all over again.  At least in my case I only roll it half way down.

While I was reasonably satisfied that the design of Quilting in the Wind expressed the story I wanted to tell (see the 2008 blog post) I was never happy with it as a Finished Object.  It's been hanging in the closet since the day after it was finished in 2008.  So it was the first quilt I thought about when I started looking around for a quilt that I could revitalize with some machine quilting.  A practice piece.  Quilting in the Wind backslid into UFO status.

I removed the binding and all the hand quilting.  Yippee - none of the elements on the quilt needed to be replaced, unlike my previous adventure with My Escape.  Lacking a good idea of just exactly what shapes I should quilt into it, I spent hours gawking at it, doodling with my machine, and creeping other quilter's FO's on the internet.  All of that proved to be fruitless.  Ultimately, I just went for it and tried to add in quilted shapes that looked like wind.  Never having actually seen wind, this was tricky.  It called for lots of imagination and plenty of cups of coffee, and not necessarily in that order.

This quilt did prove to be a good learning experience, and my key take away was this.  If you don't know what to do...just jump in.   It actually will come to you.  (Warning: this is not good advice for non-swimmers or pilots who never showed up for their lessons.)

Cloth Mountain

Quilt No. 84

March 2012

I was firmly embedded in my big leather chair reading a quilting magazine when I came across it -  a quilter describing how her fabric stash had become a “mountain of cloth”.  It hit me like a bolt of fabric: Cloth Mountain!  What better way to ransack my bloated fabric collection than by creating an actual “cloth mountain”?  I immediately began rummaging in boxes, dressers, bags, and my four sets of rolly plastic wheely drawers, admiring all the odd fabric bits I’d collected.  But how could I pull all of that loveliness together – and make it look like a mountain?  I’d need a whole lot of little pieces, but I didn’t I want to start randomly hacking tiny corners from a few hundred fabrics.  Perhaps this idea needed time to form on its own.

I resisted the adrenaline rush of first inspiration, and turned my attention back to other unfinished quilts.  I decided that when I had very small left over fabric pieces - below potentially usable “scrap” size - I would put them in a box and audition them later for Cloth Mountain.

After completing Julie’s Garden I noticed there were a lot of nice green pieces in the box.  A picture stared to emerge in my mind.  I would need white transitioning to grey, followed by darker grey, and then on through a range of greens.  And I already had most of the greens!  Now I was able to consult a much smaller number of boxes, bags, and fabric hiding places.  I cut a bunch of mini-scraps and into strips with the rotary cutter, and then sectioned these into irregular squarish pieces, dividing them up by colour and then each colour by value.  This technique is used in confetti quilting but with much smaller pieces.  It also requires a layer of tulle on top to hold everything in place. I wanted the mountain pieces to stay loose and shaggy, to resemble a cast off pile of random fabric bits so I had to do this without the tulle.

I found some stabilizer with grippy dots on it and drew a mountain on it. I began at the white peak of the mountain, and using monofilament thread and free motion quilting, loosely tacked one small section of pieces at a time onto the stabilizer, keeping the pieces loose looking.  It worked fairly well as long as I remembered not to fold the fabric during the quilting process.  If I did that the pieces would dump all over the place and have to be re-placed – again and again.  Eventually I got the mountain entirely covered.  It had almost as many pieces on it as the floor did.  The pieces migrated throughout the entire house and are still showing up in inexplicable places - like the drawer under the kitchen stove (which I swear contains pots and pans, not fabric).  I sewed the now “stablized” and assembled mountain onto the hand dyed background.

Now... what to put on the mountain?  My original rough drawing contains miniature skiers and snowmobilers, questing hikers, and a sewing machine perched at the summit.   All of this, when rendered in cloth, looked ridiculous – the scale was just too odd.  The design wall inside your head is far more forgiving that the one in front of your eyes!  I went back to thinking about what the concept was for this quilt.  It was a mountain of cloth.  And what had my personal mountain of cloth generated?  So far, 85 art quilts and related works!

I have digital photographs of all of these, but how to go from these to cloth, and how to keep the printed photos small enough?  Resizing 85 photos to less than half an inch across seemed likely to be a lifetime pursuit rather than a way to finish a quilt.  I noticed that the computer screen showing the quilt photos as icons looked like it might do the trick.  I did a screen capture of these icon pages and printed them out on iron-on printable  cotton.

When cut out into individual quilt photos the icons were the exact right size... if only I knew where to put them. Equally spaced around the border? The whole piece looked like a jumble. There was no place for your eyes to focus. On the mountain? They were completely lost to the eye.

The only empty area was the sky. But how would these 85 quilts get into the sky – what excuse would they use? A bird? A plane? Superman? A kite? That was it! I strung the icons spaced out along white strings behind the kite, but it still didn’t work. I sent a photo to my sister to get her input. She suggested that the quilt icons should not have spaces between, that they should touch one another. Brilliant – now they formed a continuous line that was pleasing to the eye. And so they came to be launched as the tails of a kite, stretching from the sky to the bottom of the quilt where a road sign announces “Cloth Mountain, Population 85” - celebrating of all my quilting projects so far.

Harvest

Quilt No. 79

September 2011

This quilt was made from a one-piece printed centre panel – hence none of my usual pain-staking bit-by-bit piecing was required. A fully printed quilt ("panel") is commonly known by quilters as a “cheater ” – but these can still be great fun to do.  The challenge is to make it your own unique creation. My husband spotted this one in a quilt shop in Elora, and since he liked it so much and he is such a perennial good sport, I bought it to make for him.

In theory, all I had to do was to add the borders and quilt it. On my first attempt, I began by hand quilting it. Meh. It looked like nothing. I ripped out the stitches, but left in all my gold hand stitching around each individual leaf.  It looked nice and had taken me just about forever to complete. Next, I tried machine quilting it, but I made a mess and had to rip it out. No matter what I did the quilt looked like it needed a long course of Prozac. It was dull, listless, no life to it at all. I ignored it for a long time as other quilts passed it by on the queue to completion.

One day I rediscovered it in the bottom of a box of UFOs (UnFinished Objects). I suddenly realized what it needed! All the windows were too dark. I cut each one out and replaced the dark brown window fabric with yellow fabric. The houses were now alive and occupied, as though each family had finally returned after a long absence. And, having replaced my semi-ancient sewing machine, I was now able to enhance it with gold and copper metallic threads. Of course none of these show up in the photo. Getting a good photo of a quilt is about as likely as having Nessie pop up in front of your camera lens.

Blue Collar

Quilt No. 77

September 2011

If nothing else, this quilt is a testimony to my tenacity. It spent just under two years “stalled” in one phase after another, passing through an almost infinite number of iterations – some good, some bad. Almost every piece was added on and then taken off - two, three or more times. I left the whole thing suggestively close to the garbage can more times than I’d like to count. And yet, finally, the end result did emerge.

The song Blue Collar, by Bachman-Turner Overdrive was the starting point for this quilt. While this song is much less well known than their iconic Takin’ Care of Business, it is my personal favourite from their repertoire. It’s an unusual rock-jazz fusion, or at least that’s my guess – I’m not exactly an expert on music genres. Perhaps it’s Fred Turner’s lyrics rather than the music that makes Blue Collar such an intriguing theme.

In the song, a blue collar worker on night shift implores daytime workers to withhold judgement of his world - a world they have never experienced. While the daytimers are snoozing, and maybe even looking down their noses at the blue collar workers who toil at night, they're missing out on the mysterious beauty of the city at “four in the morning.” To that end, I’ve tried to create a night time city scene that celebrates the world of this blue collar worker. He sits on a park bench with his lunch pail at his side. Fish frolic in the fountain, and flowers and trees are bathed in the lights of the fountain and surrounding city. A full moon in a “diamond sky” overlooks an array of tall buildings and trees.

Quilting Notes

The buildings have an odd, fanned-out perspective that differs from the perspective of the objects in the park. This was quite challenging and meant that I could not add in objects between the park and the buildings since these would have required yet another perspective. Much too crazy/impossible!

Two fabrics were used for the buildings. One was a silk tie patterned with blue oval shapes. When taken apart, a neck tie has a much larger quantity of fabric in it than you might imagine. It was kind of tricky to find a fabric for the solid coloured buildings, but I eventually settled on a placemat that Fabricland was selling for practically nothing – I could see they were desperate to get rid of it. I machine quilted the placemat buildings with blue thread to harmonize them with the tie fabric buildings.

The blue trees near the buildings also came from a single silk tie, yielding two shades of blue by using both the back and front of the fabric. This tie was a freebie from my Quilt Guild. It was intended to be used in a bow tie block . When I went to cut the tie for this block, I could tell that the material was too thin to use in a bed quilt – but, gee, didn’t it match the Blue Collar colour scheme perfectly. Happily, I was able to jettison all my previous unsuccessful tree attempts, including the ones I had to already sewn onto the quilt. So that no one at Quilt Guild would be any wiser, I substituted another tie to make my bow tie block. So far my husband hasn’t noticed...

The roadway started out made of denim fabric. My original concept called for an actual blue collar to be used in the quilt, but after a very long series of unhappy experiments, I concluded that collars are pretty ugly on anything other than clothing. Better to stick with a metaphorical collar than an ugly quilt.

Next came the park. Almost every object you could ever hope to find in a park was tried and/or considered. The bench was going to be the park’s focal point, but no matter what size I used, it looked, well, foolish. It needed something to go with it. I hesitated to attempt a fountain – it seemed like an impossible challenge. I spent about three months looking at pictures of fountains on the Internet. Nothing else seemed to be feasible. I went into my “what the hell” mode. Of course, fountain number one did not work out - after being thoroughly bonded onto the quilt. It had to be coaxed off when I decided to change the road and replace the grass with a different fabric. I found that I had barely enough of that one irreplaceable piece of specially dyed sparkly fountain fabric. It didn’t help that while Blue Collar was “stalled” I had used up most of that piece for the Lodestar quilt.

The whole time I was completing the quilt I was smug knowing that I would not have to struggle to figure out how to quilt the sky. Diamond skies? Are you kidding? A nice straight-forward cross hatch pattern would yield great diamonds. But... it made the sky look not like diamonds, but like the inside of a winter coat. This threw the quilt into yet another stall, and every new idea for quilting lines only made it look worse. Finally, in a frenzy of “less is more” I simply followed the perspective lines of the buildings and decided to go with machine quilting instead of hand quilting. I added Jolee’s Jewels (crystals) to the sky. Elsewhere in the quilt, glass beads and metallic threads in sliver and copper helped to further develop the sparkly night time look.

While I pretty much ground down most of my teeth into nubs trying to get through this quilt, I am, at very long last, satisfied with it. And I’m immensely grateful to BTO for this inspirational song. I hope I have done it justice.

View the Video: Blue Collar - Bachman-Turner Overdrive

Close Up of Fountain

Lyrics to Blue Collar - Bachman-Turner Overdrive (Fred Turner 1973)

Walk your street 
And I'll walk mine 
And should we meet 
Would you spare me some time 

'Cause you should see my world 
Meet my kind 
Before you judge our minds 

Blue collar 

Sleep your sleep 
I'm awake and alive 
I keep late hours 
You're nine to five 

So I would like you know I need the quiet hours 
To create in this world of mine 

Blue collar 
Blue collar 

I'd like you to know at four in the morning 
Things are coming to mind 
All I've seen, all I've done 
And those I hope to find 

I'd like to remind you at four in the morning 
My world is very still 
The air is fresh under diamond skies 
Makes me glad to be alive 

You keep that beat 
And I keep time 
Your restless face 
Is no longer mine 

I rest my feet 
While the world's in heat 
And I wish that you could do the same 

Blue collar 
Blue collar