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)

Cubist Phase

Quilt No. 121

December 2017

Cubist Phase is a bit of a departure from my usual quilting projects.  It came about because I simply could not resist the lure of something called a “One Block Wonder”.  I’d heard of “boy wonders” and “Wonder Bread” and grew up with “The Wonderful World of Disney”, so anything steeped in wonder gives me goose bumps.

For this quilting method, the claim of being a one block wonder is valid.  All the blocks, including the cube shaped ones, are the same in terms of their shape, so there’s just the “one block”.  But really, the “one block wonder” moniker misses the most exciting attribute of this quilt – all the blocks (excluding the cubes, which are optional) are made from only one fabric.  So it’s really a “One Fabric Wonder” quilt.  The quilt is made up of a whole field of blocks, all from the same fabric, and no two of these blocks are the same.  Surely magic is involved?

The quilt is constructed by lining up multiple layers of fabric so that the pattern is perfectly aligned in each of six layers.  That is, the bird in layer 1 is in the exact same location as the same bird in layer 6.  Where to go from there is far from obvious.  Like learning meditation or heart surgery, you need someone who knows more than you do to show you the way.  That person must guide you down the path that involves cutting these carefully aligned layers into strips and then cutting those strips into triangles, and ending up with something that ultimately turns into a quilt.

Despite my fondness for reverse engineering, I know I would be stymied if I tried to unravel how to construct this by merely looking at a finished quilt.  The whole quilt  appears to be composed of hexagon shapes, but no actual hexagon-shaped individual blocks are ever sewn together for this quit.  Wah?  Half hexagons only get upgraded to full hexagons when neighbouring strips are sewn together.  For this journey, I had to have faith, allow the rules to dictate my actions, enslave myself to obedience.  I had to suppress my natural tendency towards rebellion.  I had to soothe myself with chocolate, drink only decaff, and keep a cold compress handy for my forehead.

Original fabric prior to cutting for One Block Wonder

This quilt also requires patience if you are inclined to be motivated by the creative aspects of making a quilt.  With One Block Wonder, the creativity comes in the later phases when you start auditioning layouts for the blocks that form the hexagons you see.  It’s a waiting game.  Stamina is imperative.

I learned this procedure at guild meetings and a workshop.  For your own guided tour, Jackie O’Brien’s step-by-step videos  will have you one block wondering in no time.

I wanted to keep at least some of the birds and flowers from the original fabric visible as part of the quilt, so I’ve captured some of these “whole” objects on the border with raw edge applique. 

“One Block Wonder” or “One Fabric Wonder”?  This quilting technique is definitely both!

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.

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.  

Deep in the Scrappy Forest

Quilt No 109

January 2016

A frog pops his head up from behind a rock.  He surveys all that he sees.  It’s definitely frog-worthy.  He's met the challenge - he’s deep in a scrappy forest.

I’m beginning to suspect that maybe, just maybe, having limits placed on you might make you a better quilter.  Oddly, this same philosophy applies to child rearing as well.  Too many loosey­-goosey parameters and the quilt or child becomes a wild and unruly beast, an annoyance to everyone in its sphere of influence.  But...add a few limitations and you get just enough latitude to nudge it along to become all that it can be.

This year’s annual guild challenge was to make a “scrappy quilt”.  This means to take all the leftovers from other quilts and make a new quilt out of those. To accommodate quilters at all levels challenges are kept straight forward.  They never involve wild ideas, impossible to achieve technicalities, or the spending of giant sums of money.  Decisions about size or colour or complexity are left up to each quilter.  The fewer the restrictions, the greater the yield of quilts.  The challenge is not so much about following the rules as it is about making the theme your own.

When the scrappy quilt challenge was announced everyone turned to look at their seat mate and nodded their heads approvingly.  Yep.  Everyone had at least a refrigerator-sized pile of fabric scraps they could plunge into.  Ultimately, some people dove into their pile so many times that they made three or four quilts.  In a few cases, previously undiscovered nieces and nephews got new quilts from an aunt they’d never heard of.  

I couldn’t wait to make the challenge my own.

Two weekends after the announcement of the challenge I was at the cottage.  This is a place that is on a lake in the bush (we don’t use the word “forest” in Northern Ontario).  I go there with my sewing machine and a large box of fabric every weekend.  I also cart along a lot of other things of lesser importance, like food and water.  I’ve forgotten various components of these over the years but I’ve never forgotten my sewing machine.  I’ve never even forgotten my sewing machine cord – a common rookie error among quilting workshop attendees.  One memorable weekend I forgot the quilt I was working on.  I just started on another one with what I found in the box, and came up with the tiny quilt, Looking for Atlantis.  I decided to do a repeat performance for the scrappy quilt. 

My plan evolved.  I would make my scrap fabric quilt exclusively out of the fabrics I found in the box.  Generally, I have a couple of quilts on the go.  For every fabric I use in a quilt, a dozen different fabrics may be “auditioned” before I select the final piece, so there’s always a wide variety of fabric battling for space in the box.  Fortunately, I only need small pieces for my quilts, so I can make do with a single largish box.

I had tried to tame the bits and pieces in the box using two bags for scraps.  One had ordinary scraps and the other had scraps that had some sort of fusible material already ironed onto the back.  Fusibles allow you to iron pieces of fabric directly onto the quilt top.  All of the scraps were relatively small and irregular in shape, mere shards left from one quilt or another.  Only the tail ends of quilt binding strips had any straight edges.  I narrowed my challenge even further and vowed to make my scrappy quilt top using only the scraps in those two bags.  There!  I’d made the challenge my own. 

Here are a few items from the scrap bags.

 As much as possible I let the scraps dictate the composition.  Leftover appliqué trees that didn’t make it into a previous quilt were used. The longer horizontal strips near the top of the quilt suggested the curvy lines of forested hills, so I used those just the way I found them.  When I began working on the border I found I was short of fabric. I ultimately had to stray outside of the two bags from the cottage box and add in some pieces from another box of scraps at home.  It wasn’t really cheating, since they were still scraps.  And when you set the limits yourself, you’re allowed to alter them.  I came up with that rule myself.  It’s the spirit of the limits that count.

When all the scraps had coalesced their cosmic dust into the universe of a new quilt, the stars from Lost on the Ocean had found a new home.  The trees from Reach for the Stars were rediscovered, and the flowers from Horse with No Name had moved out of the desert/ocean and taken root near a swamp. The frog near the rocks had recovered from being passed over for a previous post card quilt. 

Surprisingly, the multiple layers of fused fabric I used in this quilt kept it nice and flat, suggesting that I had previously been under utilizing stabilizers.  Who knew?  By doing most of the decorative and raw edge appliqué stitching only on the quilt top everything stayed smooth.  No dreaded ripples took hold after I added the batting and backing and did the machine quilting.  And, best of all, the abandoned quilt scraps settled down happily into their new life deep in their own forest.  They would never be mere scraps again.

Light and Dark in the City

Quilt No. 108

December 2015

Every so often a challenge will come your way.  Sometimes you duck it, sometimes you plunge head long into it, throwing caution and your underwear into the wind.  Light and Dark in the City was kind of like that.  And it all started with a paper bag.

A couple of weeks before Christmas a “paper bag challenge” was announced at quilt guild.  It works like this.  Fabric, notions and sometimes other non-cloth fibre items are put into a small paper bag.  Batting is included, and the quilter who receives the bag must make a small quilt with only the items found in the bag. She can use her own thread and tools, but she may not add any fabric to it.  Sounds pretty simple.  Until you open the bag.

Some of the items in the paper bag.

I’ve never gotten to do one of these before.  Generally, there are only two paper bags, for two lucky quilters.  People who want to give this a shot put their names in a draw.  This particular time not too many people entered.  Everyone was eyeball deep in Christmas preparations at home and the project had to be completed by the next meeting, a measly two weeks away.  My odds of winning one of the bags were considerably better than usual with fewer names in the draw.  And I was pretty darn pleased when my name was announced. 

The bag contained about twenty pieces of fabric in solid colours, or “solids” in quilt world jargon.  The colours were completely random, not necessarily colours you would intuitively partner up together.  There was one print – a black fabric with small white dots.  All these pieces were fairly small and varied in size.  Also included was a placemat sized piece of batting, and two larger pieces of black cotton.  And...a tiny baggie with  red, green, and black woolish pieces in it.  I heard someone behind me say, “Oh, there’s roving too.”  I pretended to know what that meant.  Someone else said, sagely, “Ah, for felting.”  Roving? Felting?  Was it too late to re-raffle the paper bag?  I was supposed to create a quilt and learn how to felt in two weeks?  All while Christmasing-up my house? Gulp.

I brought the paper bag home and placed the pieces on my quilting table.  There were a lot of longish strips – immediately the idea of doing skyscrapers came to me.  I am quite fond of quilting cities (Before, Blue collar).  There wasn’t a lot of time to ruminate about it.  Sometimes I can spend way more than two weeks just thinking about a quilt before I start designing.  This was not going to be one of those times. 

 "Before" a city quilt I made after 9/11.

To get myself started I consulted my favourite coffee table book, Skyscrapers.  This book profiles several famous buildings and gets your mind past the idea that all buildings are tall boxes that are stubbornly rectangular.  It launched my project with a few buildings that were varied in shape, allowing me to comfortably default back to my own building creations...all of which were rectangular boxes. 

I wanted to create a harbour skyline, a long one.  However, this was limited by the size of the batting, which was cut to the dimensions of a placemat.  Ha!  Limiting factor or not, I could at least alter the batting into a long and narrow shape by cutting and piecing it, two activities that basically define quilting.  This generated a new limiting factor – I now had a maximum of 8 ½ inches for those tall skyscrapers.  Not much room left for the water – and no city skyline looks quite right unless it’s on water.  Night time city skylines also have those grand reflections in the harbour water – I wanted to capture those too.  There was just enough room to squeeze in some light reflections using my favourite shiny rayon thread.

To use up the roving - whatever it is - I machine quilted over it to create clouds.  Learning to felt would have to wait for another day.  Or another challenge. 

I finished the piecing and the quilting and turned to my carefully conserved strips of black that I’d saved for the binding.  I was four inches short.  I had three other pieces left that were big enough to help me out – white, hot pink, and the black/white dot piece.  I decided to use the hot pink. To make it look like I’d planned it that way all along, I ran the pink fabric through the printer and printed out the name of the quilt on it.  After many test pieces I was able to sew it on so that the words lined up centered in the quarter inch wide piece of pink on the binding.  Alas, the pink was then too dominant and distracting.  I fused in some strips of black to de-emphasize it as much as I could.  It would have to do – painting black over the pink would have sent me straight to the cheater’s list.

Julie and Linda with their tale of two cities.

I willed myself not to email Linda, the quilter who was doing the same challenge, to see if she would divulge what subject she had chosen for her paper bag project.  When it came time to reveal the quilts at the meeting, we were flabbergasted to find that both of us had created cities.  The cities were radically different with mine horizontal and narrow and distant, and hers an intimate close-up of a warm urban place with an actual felted tree and a felted roof. 

I would have to say that I truly learned a lot from this challenge.  But, nope, I didn't learn how to do felting. I'm saving that for another day.

Never Forget

Quilt No. 47 January 2006 / machine quilting completed November 2015

One minute of silence seems hardly enough time in which to reflect on the wars of the past, let alone the worries of the present.  But in 2005, as I sat at my desk at work, the one minute of silence on Remembrance Day was enough time to have the entire design of this quilt slip past the background of my thoughts.  I put it on paper, and began working on it soon after, completing the quilt in January 2006.  The quilt has since traveled around to a few Remembrance Day displays, but I was never quite content with it.

By 2015 I had an additional decade of quilting experience under my belt, having completed over 100 quilts.  I was “renovating” some of my older quilts – a great way to practice my machine quilting skills.  Just like archery, restringing your banjo, and taxidermy, machine quilting is a skill.  And the only way to acquire a skill is to practice it. Yes, your teachers, your mother and those pesky nuns who taught you piano were all right.  You have to practice.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking that James Bond automatically knew how to slay bad guys, woo beautiful women, and fly any object with wings and a motor.  He had to spend plenty of time practicing all that stuff until he got it perfect.  Machine quilting is exactly the same, minus the bullets and the helicopters.

I was convinced machine quilting this piece would be a couple of afternoon’s work.  Possibly my eyes were crusted over with stupidity – it’s hard to imagine a more inaccurate time line for a project. I first went with a fairly widely spaced round of quilting.  It looked so bad I thought I might have to demote it and use it as a door mat.  At the back door.  I then got serious about doing this quilt right, and machine stitched carefully around every object on the quilt.  Also, the poppies had originally been meant to look as though they were lying on the lawn.  I know.  It never worked for me either.  I added in stems and leaves to push the poppies into the foreground where they belonged.  I then very closely machine quilted the entire quilt.  This caused the side borders to puff out like relentless waves rolling in on a beach.  No matter how much quilting I added to the borders they would not be tamed.  Ultimately, like many things that are defiant without explanation, they had to be cut loose.  Chopped.  Banished.  After all, there was the good of the whole to consider.  A fitting philosophy perhaps, for a quilt depicting the results of war. 

The above photo shows the machine quilting on the back of Never Forget

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Lost on the Ocean

Quilt No. 107

August 2015

Frogs.  They keep showing up in my quilts.  It’s not so much that I love frogs.  It’s pictures of frogs that I love.  I have frog calendars, and frog stationary, and more than one Kermit the Frog hanging around the house.  I have a frog cookie cutter, frog salt and pepper shakers, and a plastic frog next to the kitchen sink that dispenses soap.  With the exception of the dispenser, I did not buy any of these froggly items.  People see frog stuff and they immediately think of me.  It’s pretty humbling.

I do admit that I have allowed the inspiration of frogs to guide my purchases more than a few times – and all of those purchases were fabric.  So, whenever I can, I like to add a frog or two into my quilts.  Sadly, this does not happen nearly as often as I’d like.  So my collection of frog fabric is growing in leaps and bounds.

In Lost on the Ocean, a particularly exotic frog is sailing on his lily pad.  The sun is blasting down on him.  The ocean is swirling.  A mildly frantic concern is starting to nudge at his consciousness.  The heat penetrates his skull and unleashes a psychedelic vista.  He begins to long for the comforts of home...or maybe even just a bit of sunscreen... 

Prairie Points

Quilt  No. 106
July 2015

Apparently, I’m not yet finished with my exploration of what can be done with all those old crewel embroidery pieces that I did decades ago.  Who would have thought that they would find their way back into the creative queue after all this time?

This wagon piece was probably the second embroidery kit I did back in the day.  I found it balled up in a drawer.  To be truthful, I never really liked it much – both the colours and the composition were kind of dull.  After I embroidered it, I never even considered framing it.

So…when I wanted one to just fool around with, this fit the bill.  My general rule of thumb is to never fool around with anything you aren’t willing to lose.  This includes quilts, pieces of fabric, old linens, buckets of ice cream, and friendships.  I wanted to machine quilt  the whole piece rather than cutting out portions to use as I had in Fred and Marty, and The Fox Gets a New Home.  

So, using smoke Wonder Invisible Thread, I machine quilted the details of each object.  I then moved on and did some contouring of the off-white background so that the elements weren’t just “floating around” loosely anymore.  Meh.  It improved it a little.  But only a little.  I added on a medium green cotton border.  Basically that made a larger but no more interesting piece.  Or…maybe I’m just not fond of wagons.  The rabbit in the scene wasn’t prominent enough to pull the piece out of the Land of Ho Hum.  

Eventually I hit on the idea of putting the teal green/blue/beige lumpy wool between the centre and the border.  The teals added enough warmth to wake up the whole piece.  Echoing that colour in the binding brought things together in a much more pleasing way.  

Next came choosing of a name for this quilt.  “A Wagon, A Barn, and a Rabbit” seemed unspeakably lame.  I turned the naming proposition over to my Facebook friends, who, as always, elevated the whole endeavor to a new level.  The names began in the realm of the sublime and poetic, emphasizing the genteel farm scene.  Then…people started to get concerned that the wagon lacked a horse.  This was quickly interpreted as the horse having shirked his duties and run off.  I don’t know much about horses, but perhaps this is the sort of thing they routinely do.  The rabbit, having no duties other than being cute, stayed put.  The tale about the miscreant horse began to morph into titles worthy of country and western ballads.  

At the end of it, the weight of collective brilliance made it impossible for me to choose a title.  I defaulted to a draw.  My friend Helen won the draw with her entry “Prairie Points”.  I thought this was especially fair, since Helen revealed that she had completed the same embroidery piece too.  There was also additional "insider" amusement to be had, since Helen is a quilting friend, and prairie points in the quilting word have nothing to do with prairies or unreliable horses.  They’re a series of folded triangles used to finish off the edge of a quilt.  Maybe the horse ran off with those too.

Here’s a list of titles that were suggested.  Note that the rabbit received as much love as the horse received derision.

Homestead

Home Sweet Home

Rancher's Meadow Caravan

Harvester's Chariot in Grasslands

The Day the Horse Died

Damn That Horse. Died and Left Me to Tow the Wagon

Na minha casa existe paz (translation: My home is a haven)

Peaceful

The Horse Ran Off

Prairie Points

The draw!

Thumper

Rabbit Finds a Home

Rabbit's New Car

Spring

Crewel Summer

Wife Left, The Horse Ran Off: It's Been a Crewel Summer

Rural Exodus

Runaway Horse

Lonely Rabbit

Spring Delight

Amish Homestead

Once Upon a Time

 

The Fox Gets a New Home

Quilt No. 99

Ahh, the early 1980’s.  They were the Crewel Years.  Every department and craft store had a tantalizing selection of crewel embroidery kits.  It was a welcome change after I’d knitted an ocean of sweaters, a platoon of Christmas stockings, and crafted enough Christmas decorations that, three decades later, I still have too many to display.  

Crewel embroidery kits came complete with everything you needed to finish the project. The cloth was delicately stamped with the picture.  Ample amounts of wool in all required colours was included.  This came in one giant hank, like a horse tail, and the first task was to separate out the medium green from the light green from the very light green.  Sometimes they even threw in very very light green.  Separating the colours could take a whole day and would have my mother and I debating rose vs coral vs fuchsia for hours.  The kit would also include a complete set of detailed instructions on how to make every type of required stitch. No matter how many kits you did, they always came up with novel stitches – herringbone, threaded backstitch, closed featherstitch.  Final details were added in with embroidery floss.  The smaller kits thoughtfully included a little plastic frame so that you could get your project ready for display without that time-wasting trip to the store. 

For those with very dexterous hands and the eyes of a sharp shooter there were also extremely tiny embroidery pictures to complete. These ones used only skinny embroidery floss, which came in a 6-stranded format and often required the use of a single thread-like strand for a particular area.  Those kits required gobs of patience and the same quantity of light as your average hospital operating room.  Such was making of The Fox. 

Sometime in the early 1980’s I gave the completed, plastic-framed fox to my sister.  Years went by, and she subsequently gave it back to me.  The circumstances surrounding both situations elude me.  And, yes, she will be horrified that I don’t remember.  Geez.  I made the fox.  What more does she want?  She will give me the complete fox history, and I, having failed to file away those crucial historical details, will be compelled to believe whatever she tells me. 

Despite his meandering life path, I still liked the fox and was happy to have it back in my possession, even in its dated plastic frame.  I threw that away.  I cut around the fox leaving a narrow seam allowance to use when I appliqued it to….I couldn’t think of anything.  I thought I might add it to a postcard quilt for a friend who had moved away, and casually mentioned this to my sister.  Surprisingly enough, she completely lost it.  The last time she had become that mired in emotionality she was at the altar getting married!  Who knew the fox was that important?  I was forced to re-think my position.  I abandoned it in a box of embellishments where it could share equal time with all that other stuff I felt guilty about not using. 

As per usual, years went by with the “in progress” fox in limbo.  One day a quilting friend called me over to her place to share in a windfall.  She had come into possession of a large box of fabric.  Most of these were fabrics of the “outcast” variety.  They were not cotton. Quilters generally worship exclusively at the altar of cotton.  I’m a little more inclined to stray outside of the all-cotton rule, so she kindly shared the box of deliciously slippery shiny fabrics with me.  

There were all kinds of taupes and related colours.  So intriguing!  I cut lengths from several pieces and sewed them together in aimless curves and ended up with a whole lot of sew-what.  I thought maybe the fox could help me out, but I wasn’t sure just how.  

My friend had also given me the fabric I ultimately used for the trees in this quilt.  She described it, and I agreed, as a piece of fabric that was just too special to cut up. The fat quarter (a 20x22” piece) was terrorizing her – too beautiful to use, too beautiful to not use.  It was too small to use in a large quilt, too big to waste.  I have a largely undeserved reputation for bravery with scissors, so she felt the fabric had a better chance of finding its way onto a quilt if she gave it to me.

For quite a while the fox and the enchanting slippery fabrics went back and forth to my cottage in the box I take with me every summer weekend.  One Saturday, a blue fabric that was under consideration for another quilt ended up tucked next to the stalled fox project.  It was fabric love at first sight – the dark blue provided the missing element that the fox had long dreamed of, and the creation of the fox’s new home was on its way.  

So, who got the quilt after the fox found his new home?  Well my sister, of course.  I figure I have a couple of decades before she gives it back to me.