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.  

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!