Lodestar

Quilt No. 76

August 2011

Lodestar – this is a star that shows the way. We all know of at least one lodestar that’s been pretty influential in the history of humanity. This one is much less lofty – a simple shooting star on a winter’s night. A mouse, a rabbit, a dog, a cat, and a squirrel look up and contemplate in the silence of the night.

I arrived at work one morning last winter to find a manila envelope had been stuffed under my door. I instantly knew that my friend Lily was the source. I am often the beneficiary of beautiful poems or scenes or other items that she is kind enough to share with me. Each time I am amazed that she would take time out of her life to share these treasures. On that particular day it was a packet of some of her favourite Christmas cards that she and her husband had received this year. The night scene with the reverential animals immediately captured me. “ Why not?” I thought. I would take a break from torturing my way through my own quilt designs and do one based on this card. The original art work of Eva Melhuish certainly needed no improvements from me! I just hope that when Ms. Melhuish created this scene, it went a lot more straight forwardly for her than it did for me.

At first, things went along smoothly. Scaling up the card into a pattern was a breeze. I just happened to have a background that I’d painted ages ago lying around that worked perfectly. I had used my usual Setacolor paints and achieved nice snowflake shapes by scattering oatmeal flakes over the wet surface of the fabric. Animal-like fabrics were also surprisingly easy to find at Fabricland. I even found a furry piece that did a pretty good mock up for the tabby cat. What could possibly go wrong?

Then I came to the trees. Recreating them seemed beyond my grasp. I tried drawing them, finding usable pictures of them, and taking actual photos of trees. Nope. I tried going abstract and I dyed fabric for them at least threes times, cutting them out in tree shapes, blobby snow shapes, anything that vaguely might be construed as being tree-like. Nope. I looked at pictures of snowy trees and branches on Google until my eyes grew twigs. Nada.

When I encounter this type of impasse I invariably use the same helpful strategy. I quit. Quitting can be good. Quitting can be merciful. I set the project aside where I can't even look at it. This was pretty distressing because the “set aside” projects were starting to take up a lot of space. They were blooming like weeds on ripe manure.

After a few months I looked for tree pictures - again. I finally found one tree that would work, so I scaled it up and altered it to yield four trees. These I printed out on cotton, using the ink jet printer. I know, you think it can’t be done, but the printer doesn’t care one bit as long as you have the cotton attached to some sort of stabilizing paper. Oh yes, and ink jet ink is not waterproof so you want that cotton to be commercially prepped for printing. If you’re an annoying a do-it-yourselfer like me you can do the fabric prep with Raycafix or Bubblejet Set, all very tedious, but tedious is what quilters live for. The printed trees were too pale, so I re-painted them with Lumiere paints.

The other big stumbling block was the squirrel’s tail. I had been thinking about how I would do the tail for months. It would be so much fun! It turned out the materials I had set aside for tail try-outs were all useless, totally useless. I had three kinds of fake fur, two kinds of real fur, three kinds of fuzzy fabric, and a package of strips that could be made into chenille. None of the fur or fabric worked out for reasons too boring and distressing to describe. I was not worried, since I really wanted to use the chenille anyway. In the original artwork, the squirrel’s tail curls around in the most fetching way. I would make the chenille do the same thing! But the strip of “chenille” I had was just a piece of flat fabric. It requires some kind of special brush to turn it into actual chenille. Chenille is not an exotic entity, it’s merely some kind of psychotically frayed fabric. This I never even imagined all those years I lay under my super-special chenille bedspread when I was a kid. I thought it was some kind of wonder fabric that probably came from a secret, carefully guarded factory in the faraway Orient. Not China, or Japan, or Taiwan - a much more mystical and exotic Orient. But no, you just get some loosely woven chunk and fray the hell out of it. What a dream buster that is. And to further destroy my fantasy, it does not make the excellent squirrel tail I had dreamed of.

I made another trip to Fabricland and found just the right colour of fake fur, with just the right length of pile. Lucky me – I only had to buy a strip 60 inches wide and 4 inches long to make a three quarter inch tail. But it worked, even though it didn’t curl in a fetching way. This I was willing to overlook. What I could not overlook was that cut wisps of fake fur drifted all over the house, gracing rugs, tables, black pants, computer screens, the even the toilet seat. Who knew fake fur could be so ubiquitous?

Wish You Were Here

Quilt No. 75

August 2011

This quilt accidentally grew out of the fabric salad that lives on my desk. The first thing to appear was the dyed square you see in the centre of the quilt. It hung around for months while I tried to figure out if this test piece could have any possible use. Next to appear were some delicious turquoise-blue fat quarters from my friend Ruth, who sent them to me for no particular reason at all (other than that she is a wonderfully creative and endlessly thoughtful person). These gravitated towards the dyed piece. Next I discovered a fabric with perfect palm trees, a treasure reclaimed from the never-ending sale of fabric bits hosted by the Hospital Auxiliary. That was also the source for the weird wool that frames the centre piece. I can’t remember where the green border fabric was found, but more than likely it came from same source. Eventually all these elements came together to form this scene. The dolphins? They just swam in there because it looked so inviting.

Quilt Notes

The central square section was dyed with my usual favourite Setacolor dyes. Elmer’s School Glue No-Run Gel (Blue) was used as a resist. It’s applied to the fabric and allowed to dry before the dye/paint is added. Glue covered areas remain free of dye.

The entire quilt was machine quilted, giving me the opportunity to use 3 or 4 of the possible 1000 stitches my sewing machine apparently knows. Now only 9,996 more to try...

Posssum Block

June 2011

This appliquéd block features a mother possum and her three babies. The block is 18x18 inches, and is part of a larger quilt, Woodland Creatures, that is being completed by the Timmins Quilters Guild as a fund raiser. Possum boys, left to right: Freddie, Bennie, and Joey.

Donna this is for you.



Gone Sailing

Quilt No. 74
February 2011

What do carnation pink, orange, and silver have in common?   Absolutely nothing. Pink and orange together remind me of that odd advice, "blue and green should never be seen, except inside the washing machine."  I never agreed with that, but it makes for a better poem than you could squeeze out of the words "pink" and "orange".  This is because orange is basically a cranky colour - friendly with brown, tolerable with yellow, complimentary with blue.  It has only a few friends. But.. orange with pink? And silver?

This colour combination was what I ended up with in the guild's "Crayon Challenge".  We dumped a box of 64 crayons into a bag. Each person pulled out three random crayons.  All crayons went back into the bag between picks, so I wasn't the only one to get the endearing carnation pink crayon. The crayons picked dictated the fabric colours to be used by that person to make a quilt.  Quilters were allowed to add two additional colours of fabric to make their quilts.  The only common factor was that everyone picked unsettling colour combinations.

Sailfish. What evolutionary or divine engineer could ever have come up with such a creature? The long beak, the ribbed sail, the inevitable jumping pose?

My fascination with these fish began when I was a six-year-old with a sore throat. Back then if you were sick you stayed in bed. If enough time went by before you rallied and demanded to return to your outdoor world of skipping ropes and can-kicking, the doctor was called. You didn’t go to his office - he came to your house, accompanied by his mysterious black bag. A stethoscope and thermometer would be pulled out. Other stainless steel medical equipment would slyly feign innocence in the bottom of the bag. Hushed words and tiny pills in flat pink boxes would be dispensed. Eventually you would get better. As the years went by the practice of medicine changed, and the doctor’s time became more and more precious. Forces beyond his control tethered him to the office or the hospital. House calls vanished. A sore throat came to mean a trip to his office.

Our doctor had a mahogany desk littered with papers and inexplicable medical paraphernalia. There were no toys and few magazines. A foray into the medical world was a serious thing. You were to sit and contemplate your lot in the waiting room, not guffaw over the jokes in The Readers Digest. There was, however, one frivolity that escaped all this desperation. An enormous sailfish - a trophy from a fishing trip - had been stuffed and mounted on the wall directly behind the doctor's desk. I can still remember all of its splendid and dusty details. It gleamed with a greenish varnish-like finish, and if you stared at it long enough, it would wink at you.

All fabric used in this quilt has been hand dyed. The sailfish was inspired by a  pin I bought at an antique store in St. Jacobs. I put it in the scanner and used this file to create the scaled-up version of the sailfish you see here. 

Nelson

Quilt No. 73

September 2010

Meet Nelson - the Library Cat. Since he is displayed in a library window where both his front and back can be viewed, so he was constructed as a double-sided quilt.

To create Nelson’s sleeping place, I photographed a stack of medical books and recreated them in fabric. Fonts and their colours were selected in Microsoft Word to closely resemble those on the actual books. The letters were printed out on printable iron-on fabric. Each letter was cut out individually, a testimony to what a super sharp pair of tiny scissors can do. The lettering for the Merck Manual was printed out as whole.

Nelson’s welcoming backside features the page edge view of the back of his stack of books. His cat toy doubles as the quilt label.

To read more of Nelson's story and to find other Library Cats see Half Nelson.

Half Nelson

All wrestling puns aside, this is indeed a half Nelson, since he is currently an “in process” quilt. This is Nelson’s front section, and when I unite it with his back section, plus a cozy stack of medical books upon which to sleep, he will become a full Nelson. So don’t worry about those pesky frayed edges – they will disappear in the seam allowances when Nelson is finished. Chances are he won’t even wake up.

Nelson is destined to become a Library Cat, and will take up residence in the window beside the door of the staff library at Timmins & District Hospital. He will take his place in history with all the cats that dwell in libraries around the world. Most of them are real living, breathing cats, but as you can see, Nelson is special, since he is flannelette. He won’t ever cause librarians to fret over the changing of his litter box. Nelson has adopted his very fine name from one of the most common and beloved medical library texts, the Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics.

You can meet lots of other Library Cats all over the world by going to
http://www.ironfrog.com/catsmap.html


But you won’t find Nelson there. At least, not yet.

Summer Vacation

Quilt No. 71

March 2010

I did a brief session at the guild on how to dye fabric with Setacolor dyes. I was worried about taking dye into a room where we would be showing finished quilts, so I kept my demonstration very small, using a 10x14 inch piece of fabric placed on a cookie sheet. We left the fabric to complete its dying/bleeding process on the top shelf of our library cupboard.

During our next guild meeting I pulled out the fabric, and we all admired it. Then came the inevitable question, “So what are you going to do with it?” Do? I had thought my commitment was fulfilled with the passing around of the dyed fabric. Suddenly it had the feel of an unfinished recipe. Sure the ingredients were there – but where was the completed dish?

It seemed to me that there were all ready far too many in-progress quilts floating around my quilting table. I would let myself turn the dyed piece into a quilt only if I could do it quickly. I decided to machine quilt it, since the sun was begging for the addition of flames. But what to add to this weird sunset? I thought about silhouettes, working my way through and discarding the most obvious ones, such as crows, gulls, herons, humans, palm trees, and horses. That left space ships. And so here you see a space ship bearing a friendly alien - an alien who is relaxing on his summer vacation.

Quilt Notes

The piece was sandwiched with Fusible Warm Fleece. It made the machine quilting with rayon thread surprisingly easy. A silk tie rescued from Value Village was used for the space ship and the binding.

My Mother's Prayer

Quilt No. 70

March 2010

Quilters are often plagued by UFO’s. They lurk around and slop buckets of guilt on us. But unlike the usual kind of UFO’s, which are Unidentified, Fly around, and probably house aliens with questionable intentions, the UFO’s that dog quilters are more benign. They consist of all those projects that got launched but haven’t yet reached the Nirvana of completion. They are UnFinished Objects. And they are mostly alien free.

My Mother’s Prayer is a UFO of a sort. Sometime around 1948 or 1949 my mother completed a cross stitch of the prayer, Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep. She was a young, busy mother at the time, and somehow this piece of embroidery never made it into any sort of frame that would allow it to be displayed. As Mom went on with other endeavors, other crafts, and other children, the piece got buried deeper and deeper, and was largely forgotten. Every few years she would come across it as it languished in a dresser drawer or a cedar chest. It followed her wherever she lived. I can’t even say exactly when it passed into my hands. I followed suit and stashed it in a drawer.

Recently, at quilt guild, a friend loaned me a book about making existing linens and embroidered pieces into quilted wall hangings. Eventually I connected the dots and realized that I could finally release my mother’s prayer from decades of seclusion and end its “UFO” status.

Quilt Notes

I found an off-white cotton that matched the embroidered piece reasonably well and added borders to make it larger. The outline and details of each embroidered child has been hand quilted. Likewise, the outline of each letter of every word has also been hand quilted. My initial vision for this quilt was one that included extensive quilting on the border. I spent a massive amount of timing trying to achieve that goal. When I finished it, I could see that this did not compliment the detailed embroidery - it ended up competing with it! I stared at it for weeks, trying to convince myself that it looked great. Or acceptable. Or vaguely okay. I finally gave in to reality. The quilting on the border had to be removed. Eventually I settled on an un-quilted border with a scalloped edge.