True North

Quilt No. 96

January 2014

I've always believed that just about the only constant in life is change.  This appeals to the science nerd in me, while satisfying the philosopher as well.  Quilting ties in with this rather nicely.  A baby comes along, we make a quilt.  A wedding, a graduation, same thing.  First “big bed”?  Off to university?  A new home? Quilts all around. Life is unpredictable, full of ups and downs, and we all must inevitably endure changes that are often not of our own choosing.  Sometimes it’s just a skirmish and other times it’s all an all out campaign for survival. Quilts still contribute. Quite often, they’re made for cancer patients. Surely the love with which these are constructed has therapeutic value. And while there are no randomized controlled trials to verify the healing power of quilts, I know that it happens.

Life is long, but never long enough.  We must travel through the gains and losses of the years.  This “I Spy” quilt was made for my dear friend Lily after the loss of her husband.  Lily is a poetic woman with more spirituality in her little finger than most of us possess in our entire cell mass!  She and her husband shared a legendary love of nature and, in particular, the nature of Northern Ontario.  Eventually, circumstances dictated that Lily must leave the North for another part of the province. With the loss of her husband as well, it seemed to me the most daunting of challenges.  And so I sought, from a distance, to give her back a little piece of her beloved North. 

Each 3 inch square is a picture of something you would find in Northern Ontario – loons, a fox, a wolf, a bear, various wild flowers, blueberries, trees – so many trees – and of course a penguin.  While in nature these are strictly found in the Southern Hemisphere, the penguin is still valid, since it represents, well, me. Snow, barns, canoes, ferns, cabins – they’re all part of the fabric of our area. Books are also included, since winters here are long, and at times the comfort of an indoor retreat is compulsory. A fairy is waving around her sewing needle (guilty, yes, me again), butterflies are flitting, snowmen are cheering up wintery days.  Fish, ducks, moose, the kind of thing you might encounter in your own back yard up here, they’re all posing in True North.

This quilt captured the imagination of several quilters in my guild and I was thrilled that they too made “I Spy” quilts.  Someone recently asked me why they’re called  “I Spy” quilts.  The only answer I could come up with was that I had taken the idea from a calendar featuring quilts, and that was the name they had used.  I’m not sure if this is a traditional quilt format in the way that “double wedding ring quilt” or “Dresden plate quilt” are, but it is fitting.

 

My Dad was fond of playing the game of “I Spy” with us when we were kids, and the whole family, adults and children, would get in on the fun.  We never tire of recounting the story of the time he said “I spy with my little eye, something that starts with ‘N’”.  My cousin immediately yelled out the correct answer. “Knob!”

Making an I Spy quilt is great fun, especially if, like me, you have a vast collection of what we call “picture” fabrics.  The calendar where I found the idea called them “conversation” fabrics, which I like even better.  I could talk about my fabrics at length, and I appreciate those of you who are too polite to roll your eyes when I do so.  Hopefully I've given you a quilt to make up for it.  I collect these fabrics wherever I go, but I have to sheepishly admit that it is sometimes difficult to figure just how I will use them.  What do you do with Charlie Brown, twelve kinds of frog fabric, dogs, birds, cats, Kirk and Spock, garden gnomes, spools, horses, leopards, Darth Vader, and grapes? If the scale of the photos is right, you can make endless combinations of I Spy quilts.  Other than that, until inspiration strikes, you can simply admire them.  That’s mostly what fabric is for.

If you should ever decide to take on the adventure of I Spy quilting, here are a few tips.  Cut out more 3 1/2 inch squares than you will need so you have plenty to swap around when you lay them out.  This will help you see what looks best.  You can even cut a few of these as you buy new fabrics so you always have a big selection – a worthy idea, but one I've never had the discipline to execute! 

Sticking with a few basic colours can make these quilts a little more restful on the eyes – but maybe that’s not the look you want.  The spy’s the limit on these.

Never hesitate to use your Christmas fabrics in these quilts!  This resolves several dilemmas.  You get to “keep Christmas with you all through the year” (never easy) and you get to use up those Christmas fabrics that you bought fifteen years ago with no particular project in mind. 

The layout of the squares in these quilts is really best done according to value, that is, how light or dark in overall tone they are.  Tone trumps colour in these quilts. If some squares really stick out  -  perhaps the red ones - clump them together into a shape such as a heart or a square in the centre, or maybe around the edge, or in each corner.  Like wild horses, they need to be corralled for their own safety and your viewing pleasure.

Lay out the squares and leave them there for a couple of days before you start sewing them together.  That way you will start to notice the odd square here and there that might need to be moved to a different spot in the quilt.  You can also take photos of your layout.  “Sore thumb” squares show up instantly in the photo.  Adjusting your photo to black and white will make these ones even more obvious.

For the border, using solid colour fabric or a transition fabric (one that changes through a range of harmonious colours) helps unify it and pull all the colours together. It also gives a calming effect to the overall look of the piece.

 Also, I really like these quilt squares to puff up, so I use polyester batting, and quilt by machine in the ditch between the squares, with no additional quilting in the squares themselves.  An all over pattern will just obscure the pictures. 

Just as I hoped, Lily loves her True North quilt.  It’s part of her healing journey, one that I know she will complete in her own way, one step at a time.  To me, she is an inspiration, and a role model, and I am honoured to be a part of her life.

Reach for the Stars

Quilt No. 94

August 2013

There’s nothing quite like frogs when it comes to frolicking. Even a little snow won't slow them down.

Reach for the Stars was entirely inspired by fabrics I liked, leading me to buy them at different shops with no particular quilt in mind (which describes 99% of my fabric collection).  This is the very best way to buy fabric – the possibilities remain infinite.  Eventually these favoured fabrics came together to give a sneak peek at what frogs do when we’re not looking.

When the quilt was finished I figured I’d conquered the daytime world of frogs...but what kind of things did they think about after the sun went down?  Did frogs have aspirations?  Did they have their own way of reaching for the stars in the dead of night?  In The Frog Who Jumped to the Stars Franz tackles these very struggles in his own froggly manner.

My Escape

The Rebuild of Quilt No. 26 from 2002!

Renovations.  Have you ever bought a new bath mat and had it end up costing you thousands of dollars as you upgraded its surroundings to live up to the nineteen dollar bath mat?  The same thing can happen with a quilt, but the expenditure will be measured in hours, not dollars.

Over ten years ago I was surfing the internet when I can across the logo for a medical conference in Hawaii.  It was very simple – two palm trees, plain beach, and a blue background to suggest sea and sky.  I took the liberty of using it as a starting point for a quilt.  My mistake was that I also used it as the end point for that quilt, and it looked kind of plain.  I somehow convinced myself that quilting a single line around the trees was “good enough” - having already moved on to the next far more interesting quilt.  I decided it was fine – a nice logo lookalike.  To prove how fine it was, I hung it behind a door at the cottage but I secretly cringed at its semi-finished state every time I came across it. 

Then, after enduring more than a decade cowering behind the door, the impossible happened. The quilt was wanted by a friend because it reminded her of Florida.  It would have a chance at real love.  Could I stand its way?  I looked at it and gritted my teeth.  It was basically unquilted.  The mismatched wobbly binding wasn’t nearly as charming as it had been when I was in a hurry to finish the project many years ago.  While I didn’t mind parting with the quilt, how could I send such an unfinished and unloved object out into the world?  It would be like sending your child out with a ball of wool stuffed under each arm in place of a fully knitted sweater!

I just couldn’t do it. 

But what I could do was to quilt it now.  There are no rules about these things, no statute of limitations that runs out and prohibits you from altering a quilt.  And, how long could it possibly take, if I just removed the binding and gave it a proper machine quilting?  A couple of hours?  A plan emerged.  I could toss out that old binding since, 65 quilts later, I had a much better fabric stash where there would surely be a piece that actually matched.  Also, I had somewhat improved my binding skills.  Then there was the issue of how much I hated the boring beige fabric that I’d used for the beach/island.  I could change that too!  In my mind this was all going to achieved PDQ.

I began by machine quilting the island.  It looked pretty good.  My confidence soared.  I machine quilted the sea and the sky.  It looked…not so good.  What you do in these circumstances is set the piece aside and look at it after a few days, or in a different light. You can hold it up to a mirror for a new perspective, or have a friend who would never tell you the awful truth come over and endorse it.  I tried most of those strategies, but reality could not be denied.  The sky looked wrinkled and crappy - even worse than the original unquilted version of it!  It was painful, but this was one of those situations where I just had to tear the Bandaid off the scab.  I ripped out the machine quilting in the sky, planning to do it over.  But now, the sky fabric had stretched and it could not be re-used. Don’t think I didn’t try.

I was getting in deeper and deeper.

There was only one possible avenue.  I got out the scissors and cut off the sky.  The sea part was okay, so I left that intact.  I dyed a new piece for the sky and liked it even better than the original.  I’d also learned a thing or two about dying fabric.  Next, I spent a whole whack of time doing test pieces with various battings until I was satisfied.  I re-assembled the top, batting, and backing, and (gulp!) machine quilted it once more.  The test pieces had been worth the effort – the end result was much better. 

One little problem remained. Now the palm tree fronds looked pretty much like Day One after the hurricane of the century.  All that manipulation of the quilt had pulled off most of the fragile pieces and frayed the few brave souls that were left behind.  Yep.  They too were given a date with Mr. Scissors. But now…despite a foolishly large collection of green fabric occupying my drawers, I could not find any that worked with the other colours in the quilt.  It was a great excuse to go to the fabric store and get some new stuff!  And, of course, some other stuff.

So, in essence, I completely rebuilt this quilt, much as one would the engine of a classic car, keeping just a few key parts and replacing all the rest.  There is enough of the original left to pretend it is still the same item.  The tree trunks and the sea from the original quilt are still there, but everything else had been completely replaced, even the batting and the binding.

Now when I look at My Escape, I'm happy with it, and I don’t feel it needs to play wall flower behind a door.  And like a child who has mastered his table manners, his temper, and his zipper, I’m willing to let it go out into the world on its own. 

It was completely worth the effort.

The original 2002 version of My Escape.

Mars or Bust!

Quilt No. 93

April 2013

Quilters are invariably plagued with UFO’s.  To outsiders this seems inexplicable.  Why would aliens be especially interested in quilters? 

When you’re part of a group, you forget that your use of terminology becomes highly specialized.  Doctors get criticized for this all the time. Patients are baffled by their slap-happy use of medical terms.  You leave the doctor’s office and you have no idea what osteokerflugenglockenitis is but you’re pretty sure it’s not good.  It’s hard to believe that quilters could be guilty of the same offence, but they are. 

I was telling my sister, a non-quilter, about upcoming Project UFO at my quilt guild.  Participants would register and pay ten dollars.  Presentation of a finished UFO by the given deadline would result in the return of the ten dollars.  Failed completion would mean that the money would be donated to the guild.

She instantly became fascinated with the idea that we would all be willing to do “UFO” quilts.  I began describing the orangey fabric I was going to use for mine.  It was a piece of “rust dyed” fabric that I'd created by spraying a piece of white cotton with vinegar and then placing steel wool on it.  Amazing shades and trails of rust dyed the fabric orange.  Unfortunately, this piece had fallen into “UFO” status for quite a while after an unsuccessful attempt to turn it into a foggy lake with flamingos in silhouette. 

My sister thought my UFO should feature Mars.  Since the Mars Balloon Lander had such an intriguing shape, she envisioned this as a prominent feature of the quilt.  Just like the YouTube video, it would enter the scene with a giant bounce!  There would even be a “Welcome to Mars” sign to greet the Lander.

I wasn’t really grasping that her UFO concept wasn’t the one that quilter’s are familiar with, but was instead the more usual UFO designation of “Unidentified Flying Object”.  Not recognizing our disconnect we both went on yammering about our various ideas for this unusual background, with me championing flamingos, and my sister off on a tangent on a distant planet.  I finally backed the nomenclature truck up for her, explaining that in the quilt world, UFO means UnFinished Object.

And so what my sister ultimately dubbed “The Nincompoop Challenge” came into being.  This quilt is a mashup of the creative efforts of a quilter and a non-quilter. Occasionally this kind of collaboration leads to completely unexpected horizons.  Flamingos may find themselves lounging around on Mars. 

Quilt Notes

My sister did the original drawing for this quilt as well as the embroidery.  The moons Phobos and Deimos can be seen in the Martian sky, as can a single crystal representing the constellation Sagittarius. The rust dyeing technique left the fabric quite rough, so machine quilting was not an option.  I did a minimal amount of hand quilting, just enough to enhance the contours.  The flamingos were computer printed onto iron-on cotton, oh-so-carefully cut out, and fused onto the quilt.  They seem to be quite content in their new extraterrestrial habitat.

A hasty initial diagram. 

Gramma's Quilt Revisited

Quilt No. 91

March 2013

  

It’s been over fifty years since my grandmother died, and I’m not sure if I remember her face or if it’s just the photos of her that have planted themselves in my memories.  I was six years old at the time.  Some memories are clear – the green canvas hammock stretched between the poplar trees in the “park” at the side of her house.   There was an old enamel stove abandoned on the walkway that led to the outhouse, a rock garden, a rain barrel, a pump house, and a hen house sheltering beady-eyed chickens who might peck me to death...or not.  She always wore a dress. Probably what I remember the best is the fabric of those dresses.

I’ve thought about her a lot over the years.  We shared, well almost shared, a lot of interests – things like playing the piano and quilting.  A quilt top that she had completed but never had a chance to make into a finished quilt was eventually passed on to me, the only quilter in the family.  Many years ago I sandwiched her quilt top with batting and backing and tried to quilt it.  It was my very first attempt at finishing a large quilt and I didn’t get very far with it.  I packed my botched attempt away in a box for over twenty years while I thought about what I should do with it. 

I finally rescued it a few years ago...and I still didn’t know what to do with it.  I had to be brutal with myself and admit that maybe, just maybe, there was the tiniest chance that I didn’t like it as a whole.  Its rows of diamond blocks were separated by a pale green fabric and the two just weren’t happy together.  But it contained so many pieces of fabric that I loved with fervent and rabid nostalgia that I did not want to do any harm.  I removed my pitifully amateur quilting stitches – there weren’t too many.  I tossed out and the batting and the backing.  I even washed the quilt which had become a tad shop worn without having done a single day’s duty, kind of like Prince Charles passing into retirement while still waiting to start his first job. 

I decided that the green fabric was the quilt’s nemesis, holding all the clambering 1940s and ‘50s fabrics at a metaphoric gunpoint.  It took me another year to get up the courage to remove the green fabric, reducing the quilt to long strips of diamond blocks sewn together.  Now I was free to create some smaller quilts that family members who were closest to Gramma could enjoy. 

I started re-piecing portions of the strips together, repairing frayed fabrics, re-enforcing bits and pieces here and there.  I purchased some new fabric that had a vintage look to it and used it as the backing.  Each time I ran into a technical problem I would think about the question in my head at bedtime and wish I could “channel” my grandmother for an answer.  And each morning I would have a solution to my problem. 

Eventually I completed a small quilt for my cousin that could be used as a lap quilt, or a wall hanging, or perhaps as a decorative element on a table.  

The best part of re-working this quilt was how I got to “know” my grandmother.  I came to understand more fully what quilting was originally all about.  As modern quilters we amass giant stashes of fabric, some of which it is altogether possible we will never use.   As I became acquainted with each fabric in Gramma’s quilt, I recognized the leaner times of post World War II.  Every kind of fabric had been used.  I recognized the scrap pieces from her dresses and from my dresses, and some pieces from a covered cushion.  Other pieces were probably from my grandfather’s shirts.  A few pieces matched a doll blankets that been made for me. No doubt some larger, more important garment had been gracious enough to leave a few extra scraps for a blanket to keep a cherished doll warm. The best pieces of all were from a grey silky dress I wore at age three.  There’s a studio photograph of me happily posing in that lovely dress.  The fabric I remember most vividly is the one with the blue background covered in tiny red and yellow diamonds.  This thin cotton fabric was left over from a homemade comforter.  This was the blanket, filled with down and fine chicken feathers, that my mother would pull out when one of us was shaking with chills and fever.  It made magical healing powers, which I suspect have been retained by the fabric bits in Gramma’s quilt. 

Working on the quilt helped me think about my grandmother from an adult perspective, so different from that of a child.  She was a cook at a Hydro power plant. She and my mother produced three substantial meals a day for the men who worked there – seven days a week, through war time and rationing.  How privileged my life seems in comparison as I take twenty seconds to brew coffee in my Keurig and heat up my bagel in the microwave.  And how warm and familiar it seems as I bend over Gramma’s fabric, using my modern electronic sewing machine, finally bringing to life what she never had the chance to finish.   

Acute Frog

Quilt No. 92

March 2013

I agreed to do a demonstration at our quilt guild on how to create a pattern suitable for appliqué.  This was sure to be the proverbial piece of cake.  I always have a couple of quilts of this type in various states of completion.  It would be a simple matter of collecting up all the constituent bits when the time came.  And that time was somewhere in the very distant future.   

Fall and Christmas ripped by like an uncaring tornado.  January, living up to its reputation with white and bitter cold, loomed up on the schedule.  Abruptly, it was less than two weeks until I was to do the demo.

My quilts usually involve scaling up my art work or existing drawings or photos into a pattern that I can then use to make the various shapes for the quilt.  I start with a drawing of a cactus, and I end up with a cactus on a quilt.  Plenty of stuff happens in between those two points. This is tedious work, suitable only for the not-easily-bored.  It involves creating line drawings, and transferring these onto acetate sheets, then onto freezer paper.  Ultimately it yields the pieces that are sewn onto the background. 

There’s always plenty of all those items basking on my quilt table.  Who could have ever predicted that my demonstration prep would fail to coincide with an in-progress quilt?  When have I ever had all quilts completed?  Never before had this situation occurred.  I can only surmise that some sort of conjunction of the quilting planets had aligned to conspire against me.  I was finished every quilt. 

A new project would have to be started, but I didn’t have enough time to jump into a major quilt.  I needed a minor quilt.  A cute frog would do.  But I had to hurry.  And I had to break down my process into steps I could describe, something I’d never before intellectualized. I usually just work in wordless surge of creation. This was more like deconstructing a recipe - taking the cake apart and coming up with the flour, eggs, and milk that were the starting point.

And so I picked a smiling red-eyed tree frog, taken from a calendar.  There was no time to get too original!  Whipping through my preparations, I realized that it had to be not so much a cute frog as an acute frog – according to medical terminology –  “brief and severe”. This episode was definitely that and the usual chronic process – “long and dragged out”– was a null option. 

The Mystery of the Charmed Quilt

Quilt No. 90

March 2013

When I found out that there was Nancy Drew fabric, I simply could NOT believe it.  Sure, I expected to find Harry Potter fabric and Star Wars stuff, but... Nancy?!  Incredible! 

To me, Nancy is the most potent source of nostalgia in the universe – my introduction to actual “books” and the world of mystery!  Who knew there were mysteries going on that people – girls the same age as my sister – were out there solving!  Of course I pictured all this “mystery” as going on somewhere in the “United States of America”, known only to me through the mimeographed map from school – the one on which I’d laboriously printed all the states and all two rivers (Mississippi and Missouri).  Nancy lived in that wondrous, far flung place where each state was a different colour!  And there was more.  There could be hidden staircases!  Surely there was one somewhere in our tiny house – I just had to be diligent, and smart, and I would find it. 

This quilt was made for my friend Bill, a truly loyal Nancy Drew fan, collector, and expert on all things Nancy.  Bill never fails to take the adversities that life unfairly tosses his way and find his own silver linings.  I felt that this deserved some sort of reward.

And so... The Mystery of the Charmed Quilt came into being.  Why “Charmed”?  The Nancy Drew squares were purchased as pre-cut 5x5” squares, called “charm squares” according to official quilting terminology.  I went with a white background, and of course, yellow was a given.  It’s the colour I most associate with the covers of the classic Nancy Drew books.

As for the hidden staircase, I never did find it, but I haven’t given up looking where ever I live. I might just find it yet.

Quilt Notes

This quilt was quilted once, unquilted, and then quilted again.  My first attempts at machine quilting along the edges of the blocks, or “in the ditch” as quilters refer to it, were disastrous.  The skills I’d mastered for free motion quilting were of no help whatsoever.  Apparently ditching it is a whole different skill set.  My first lines meandered like a tired river, but as a testimony to my blind stubbornness, I just...kept...going.  My plan was to rip out what I didn’t like later because it would only be a few lines of stitches...I would master the skill any second.  Well, any minute.  Well, any hour.  Or maybe not.  The lines wandered around like drunken ants trying to escape the Raid factory.  And still I kept going, thinking - like so many fools in a bar - that my prize would look better in the morning.  

It didn’t.  

I decided to check out YouTube to see what I might be doing wrong.  Turns out - pretty much everything.  So I turned back the quilt clock by ripping out all the machine quilting.  I won’t say how long this took, but I did get  more than one movie under my belt as I sat there picking out the stitches.  My next attempt went better as I carefully folded the quilt prior to stitching so that it wouldn’t pull all over the place.  I shortened my stitch length, went slowly, oh so slowly, and used a super sharp Microtex needle.  

The results were far better, still not perfect, but as any quilter (believer or not) will tell you, only a Higher Power can make a perfect quilt. The rest of us can only give it our best shot.

A Horse With No Name; The Ocean is A Desert With It's Life Underground

Quilt No. 89

February 2013

I may not have exactly been to the desert on a horse with no name, but I must say it feels good to be out of the rain.  And it’s been a long journey from the desert to the ocean with its life underground – a journey of almost a year, in fact.  A few other quilts have passed Horse in the queue, going from conception to completion while Horse waited in the background – waited for cacti, waited for a mesa, waited for the dye to dry on yet another piece to be used in the desert floor.  Waited on a technique that would yield anemones, waited on a seahorse, waited on a starfish, waited... and wondered...  would there ever actually be a horse?

I learned a few things from this quilt.  One was patience.  If a design element isn’t working out, the best route after executing multiple failures is no route at all.  Eventually a solution will present itself, in its own time.  I learned that you can actually wear out something you’ve added to a quilt by endlessly folding it and scrunching it during the quilting process (the Agave plant at the foot of the cacti had to be completely replaced after the first one frayed into oblivion).  I learned that keeping all those little scraps of dyed material was actually worth the effort.  I learned that organza, like velvet, should be added to my list of banned substances.  Organza is like just about everything else in life that adds a lot of flash.  It’s kind of hard to be sure if enduring the exasperation is worth it.  In this case, I would have to say yes. 

And I learned one other thing.  Eventually there will be a horse.  But you have to look for him.  And because the horse owns the quilt, he can afford to orchestrate things from behind the scene.

Thanks to Dewey Bunnell (of the band America) who wrote these haunting and intensely visual lyrics back in 1972.  From what I’ve read, a rainy stint in England had him thinking about the Arizona/New Mexico desert near the Vandenberg Air Force Base where he lived as a child.  If “horse” was a code word for heroin, it was probably the brain child of someone else’s imagination. 

Quilting Notes

The sunset was painted with (what else!) Setacolor dyes. The whole quilt was built up on a white cotton background using needle turn applique for larger objects and fused raw edge applique for smaller items such as the seaweed near the fish, the anemones, the sea shells and some of the plants.  Heavy gold thread or wool was couched along horizontal cliff and desert floor lines to harmonize them with the sunset - or sunrise - depending on your preference.

Organza was used in a layer over the ocean floor, and for the starfish, as well as the white wave that separates the desert and the ocean. It was also fused in layers to make the tentacles for the sea anemones.  One grouping of seashells was placed beneath the layer of organza to make them fade into the ocean floor.   Pink flowers and a few Agave leaves were also placed under the organza to give a reflection of their desert counterparts.  

A very small amount of beadwork was added to the quilt – on the starfish, as bubbles for the fish, and on the hand embroidered seahorse.  Small pink and white polished “gem stones” were added to the seashell cluster on the left. 

Most of the quilting and outlining of fused objects was done by machine with gold, red, or copper metallic thread.  Microtex sewing machine needles made the quilting possible.  While metallic thread needles almost worked, the thread inevitably frayed and broke, since the quilt is many layers thick in places.  After I switched to a Microtex needle, the machine perfectly executed anything I asked of it.  In order to machine quilt close to the heavily stuffed saguaro cacti, I removed the free motion foot and used the needle with no foot.  It was scary, but some people climb mountains or jump out of airplanes or wrestle bears -  I machine quilt without a foot.  Now we’re even.

The horse makes his appearance in the photo below.

Here are Dewey’s lyrics in his own handwriting.