Stitching Slowly

 It's that time of the year when the air quality is dangerous for me. We are not currently suffering from wild fire smoke in our area, thank goodness, but we have neighbors nearby who enjoy cooking in their back yards. And, in spite of the brief burn ban we were under, someone has been burning tree limbs or something. I don't go outside much at all. When I do go out to get the mail or deadhead the roses I wear an N95 mask. Sadly, that has not always been adequate of late. 

Aside from the immediate consequences of toxic smoke/fumes I am usually left with an inability to think constructively for a day or two. So, quilt making has pretty much come to a halt for the time being. On the other hand, the slow stitch movement has been a godsend. In my eyes slow stitching is simply hand quilting or even intuitive embroidery. The originators of the movement, as I understand it, were inspired by the stitching done by a variety of indigenous people around the world. The Japanese have boro stitching, the Indians have kantha stitching, Africans do kawandi. It's all rows and rows of running stitches, the simplest of straight stitches. Same stitch that's used for quilting the layers together to make a quilt. 

I've never been a particular fan of running stitch. I prefer the solid line you get with back stitch. Hand quilting held no appeal for me. (To do; I totally appreciate the hand quilting others do and have done.) Like most others, I began my needlework career by following the lines printed or transferred onto a piece of plain fabric. Eventually I moved on to printed or painted canvases for needlepoint. I've learned the basic embroidery stitches along the way. I was never one to get into the more complex forms of needlework. There are those who enjoy that level of effort, it's not for me. 

My take on slow stitching is more like freestyle or intuitive embroidery. It has been very helpful on days when I didn't have the brain power to build a quilt but needed something to do with my hands. A couple of the little stitcheries I showed in this post came out of a mindless start with scraps and thread. The world of art/junk journaling is also having an influence on me. All this is in explanation of the following. 

I'm not even sure what to call it actually. I began with a strip of muslin about 2" high and 36" or so long. My only thought was to strive for a boho vibe. I used scrap pieces of sari fabric and silks on top of the muslin and then embellished with bits of bling that seemed appropriate.

It has not been an easy thing to photograph. Hopefully, if you click on the pictures you can get a larger image to see the details.

Oh, that multicolor piece with the buttonhole covered ring is a bit of a woven material. There are scraps of quilter's cottons on here too.

The butterfly is a sequin.

At the end is a fiber wrapped bead I bought in one of the Disabled Artists Foundation's auctions. I want to include it with the scroll/wrap but haven't quite figured out how yet. I need a spool or something to wind this around. My hope is that the bead could be used as a closure. The right spool has yet to turn up.

In the interest of full disclosure, here's the back of my work. I make every effort to be neat and hide the ends of my threads. Someone else might go to the trouble of putting a lining on something like this to protect the threads from snagging or other abuse but I can't be bothered. I've learned that sometimes folks like to see the back of the work. That's good enough for me! 

SAL Follow-up

 Let me explain a bit about my ambivalence about blogging. There are several factors in play at the moment, all coloring my perception negatively. I appreciate the encouragement I've received and will probably carry on, although not as consistently as in the past in all likelihood. 

The Perfectionist in me wants to do whatever I do the Right way. That means a consistent posting schedule with upbeat content. Which, when I stop to think about it, is ridiculous if not impossible. I am a human being after all, not a machine. And I have health issues that get in the way altogether too frequently. Most of the time I can accept that and try to work around it but sometimes it does get overwhelming. It's that health issue that prevents me from keeping up with the other bloggers I've come to know and enjoy. I feel guilty about that, compounding the problem. 

I'm not technologically inclined, and lately I've had to deal with two, now three, different laptop computers. Two entirely different operating systems. Aggravating at the best of times. Hopefully we are well on the way to stabilizing that situation, thus making it easier for me to be more active online. (Not that it has stopped me from shopping online!) 

Finally, I seem to have lost my patchwork/quilt making mojo. This might be a temporary aberration; I certainly hope so. A shift in the focus of this blog probably won't affect anyone adversely. It's not like I have a huge following. It just feels like I'm cheating the people who may come looking for quilting content and that doesn't feel good. 

So, there you have it. Having laid my cards on the table, I intend to stop apologizing and move forward. I hope you'll come with me in spite of my weaknesses. 😊 And, just in case I don't get back before Valentine's Day, let me leave you with a little love token I've just completed. 

Front:

And back: 

Just scraps of fabric and batting decorated with intuitive stitching, blanket stitched together. I'm finding these a very pleasant way to escape for a few hours at a time. 😉

There's A First Time for Everything

I've never been one to make New Year's resolutions. I've avoided goal-setting like the plague (or more accurately, the dentist). This year however, I find myself planning and plotting in a way that closely resembles goal setting behavior. I don't know whether to be shocked or pleased. (Actually, I'm a bit of both. Maybe this is a sign of personal growth?)

I want to continue participating in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge this year. I think I'm going to use it again to reduce the quantity of older prints in my stash. I have quite the menu of block patterns I've been making on a regular basis now. I can start by cutting the larger patches for 10" basket and Churn Dash blocks and work my way down to the 1.5" strips for postage stamp stars. I don't have a specific plan for a rainbow quilt but will probably end up using these blocks in my Parts Dept. quilts throughout the year. Of course having said that, I'll probably not use one block in a quilt until the end of the year and then make a rainbow quilt!

I'm going to continue to post every three weeks for the Stitch Along too, or at least try to. I'm reserving that for the needlepoint and embroidery I like to do on occasion. I haven't made a lot of progress since the last post but there will be a little to show on the 8th of January.

Originally I was using Granny Maud's Girl's Bee, Myself & I challenge/sew along to insure progress on my needlepoint and embroidery. When I became involved with the stitch along the BM&I sort of dropped out of my life. Granny Maud's Girl created the challenge to give herself an excuse to make blocks she wanted for a quilt for herself. Following her example, my intention this year is to make Scrappy Trip blocks in my delicious batiks. I will probably follow the color prompts from the RSC but restrict myself to one or two blocks per month. Unless, of course, that project takes over and becomes undeniable. That's been known to happen a time or two. ;- )

I plan to continue to post on the 15th of each month for Kate and Gun's ScrapHappy Day. I don't have any specific plans for those posts at this point. Last year I made potholders out of some of my orphan blocks from the Parts Dept. Most recently I made some string blocks on scraps of batting. I might continue to do that for a while.

I have the binding on my F2F quilt finally and have begun hand sewing it down. I'm having to take that more slowly than I usually do because of some mysterious pain in my left hand. It feels like a sprain, I just don't know how or when it occurred. That will will be finished before the end of January I hope. At that time I'll have to get a good picture of it for you. It was too big for the design wall and is now heavier and bulkier! I still need to figure out how I want to set the dramatic blocks I received during my turn in the second round of the Foot Square Freestyle block swap.

Kate and I have decided there will not be a third round unless someone else wants to step up to oversee the swap.

There's the baby quilt to complete (see previous post), and later on I expect to participate in the Hands2Help quilt along. There's a relatively short list of UFO's to tackle eventually. I shouldn't have any trouble keeping busy this year!

Ahoy Matey!

The Americana lap quilt has been quilted and pruned. I had to go out to buy fabric for the binding; that still needs to be turned into binding. In the meantime I've set the koi pool UFO aside (bottom of previous post) to whip up a baby quilt. Or so I hope, since the baby is due next month!

It all began with this Treasure Island panel I received as a gift from my sister-in-law.

Apparently that was five years ago! The mother-to-be found me and reminded me of the panel when she reached out after missing an opportunity to buy a quilted version of the panel on Etsy. We've been exchanging email since then. What you see above is one of the options I suggested to her.

The tall ship blocks are six inches square.

Two of them are flying the Jolly Roger...

We eventually decided that I would use the ships to create the reverse side for the panel. This is the potential arrangement I currently have on the wall:

I've fussy cut a companion map print into 12.5" squares and a few other much smaller pieces from an old, old print.

I'd like to have a larger sea serpent but the little guy in the picture below is the only one I could find in my stash.

This is going to be fun to create. Keep your fingers crossed that my energy holds out!

One thing I realized after piecing the ship blocks is that block piecing is what works for me for instant gratification. Completing a block gives me more satisfaction than merely running fabric through the sewing machine. Which could be why it didn't occur to me to treat the koi pool UFO as a log cabin block and simply frame it up with strips. I want to make some blocks to go around it! I have an idea of the type of block I'd like to make too. The trick will be to find the right colors and/or prints to create the look I want. It will be interesting to see how closely the finished top comes to the vision of it I have in my head. :- )

Light Bulb Moment

Some time ago Julie shared her scraps of text print fabrics with me. I knew I wanted to make a quilt featuring text prints but at the time I had no idea how I would approach it at the time.



There were prints with text scattered throughout my stash. The first thing I did was to pull them all out, to get a feel for what I had.



Of course I began buying additional text prints shortly after Julie's scraps arrived. Before long I had two piles!


The next step was to decide how I would use these prints. This is the most time consuming step for me, apart from actually making the blocks or parts. Just today I learned something about myself and this process.

I think when many folks come to quilt making it's because they want a certain type of quilt for themselves or their home. Maybe they want a Double Wedding Ring for their bed for example. It wasn't the quilt patterns that drew me in, it was the color and patterns in the fabric. I have always loved textiles but I never enjoyed making clothing. Quilt making provided me a venue in which I could play with color and pattern. So I don't buy fabric to make a Log Cabin or any other specific type of quilt. I buy color, I buy the possibilities inherent in a print. Which can make it hard to figure out how best to use all those lovely prints I've acquired!

There are a handful of blocks that are particularly good at showcasing special prints. Those are the blocks I tend to use the most. I've also found a few techniques over the years that I especially enjoy using. One of those is to layer several fabrics on top of each other, make a few cuts, shuffle the pieces, and reassemble them into a new piece of fabric or a block. I first learned of this method back in the early 1990's from one of Eleanor Burns' books. Since then I've seen it in books by Jan Mullen, Gwen Marston, and Karla Alexander. I suspect there are others out there as well, I'm just not aware of them. The point is that it finally dawned on me that these text prints might be a good fit for a version of a quilt Karla Alexander featured on the cover of one of her books:


I have admired that cover quilt for a long time. In fact, it was the reason I bought the book in the first place. Now, I doubt very much that I could ever come close to copying a quilt someone else had already made but Karla's quilt has served to inspire me to use my collection of text prints in a similar way. The last few days have been spent cutting seven inch by ten inch rectangles from the fabrics in my two piles.

Not all of the prints made the cut of course (pun intended). And I may very well have cut enough starter pieces for more than one quilt! That's okay though, I suspect there will be a child's quilt hot on the heels of this one, featuring some of the fun Dr. Seuss prints that are currently available. I also have a red and white quilt trying to coalesce in the mists of my imagination. It's quite possible that there will be a series of string quilts coming out of the Magpie's Nest in the coming months...

Rules vs. Choices

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will be shocked to see a new post so soon after the last one. When I saw this post over on Julie's blog I had to get in on the discussion. What follows is my two cents worth on the topic of The Rules in Quilt Making.

I have been wielding a needle of one type or another for at least 45 years. I learned to embroider first, as a pre-teen, and the cult of Perfectionism was deeply ingrained by the experiences of my youth.

When I came to quilt making I had two toddlers and another baby on the way. I learned “the rules” from books and magazines and tried diligently to obey them. Of course I started out with less than ideal tools and materials. I quickly discovered that until I could have a rotary cutter and mat there would be few quilts made ‘by the book.’ It took too long to make templates and scissor cut everything.

Twin size quilt for my first granddaughter, which was started when her mother was a little girl.

Even as my tools and skills improved I had no real desire to duplicate the quilts I saw in books or magazines. Nor was I interested in complex or intricate blocks. Then along came Gwen and her first book on liberated quilt making. Freedom! Enlightenment! And encouragement of a kind rarely found in the other books of the era.

Wool & flannel, 17.5" x 13.5"

For me, quilt making is the art form that I’m the most comfortable with, the easiest in which to express my creative urges. It’s not about making the most quilts or the “best” quilts or exhibiting my work or selling my work (although I would not be opposed to generating a little income!). I want my quilts to be authentic expressions of ME and MY life, not whatever the current trend in the quilt world happens to be at the moment. I also want them to hold up over time, so there are elements of the construction process that I’m picky about.

I guess I have high standards when it comes to the construction process. I like consistent seams that are straight if they’re meant to be straight and wavy if they’re meant to be wavy. I press my seams because I like the way they look and behave when that’s done. I like having a design wall as much for the ease and comfort it provides my body as for the perspective it affords. I happen to prefer a rotary cutter to scissors because I like the feeling of being in control that I get with the cutter. My scissors tend to go where I don’t want them to! Of course, sometimes the cutter does too. ;- ) I rip fabric whenever I can. Have you tried that? It’s a rush for those of us who tend to get caught up in Perfectionism.

Quilted with beads & sequins, 17.5" x 16.5"

The beauty of quilt making is that there’s room for everyone. Look at all the choices we have before us: fabric types, print types, the vast range of colors available, the multitude of processes we can bring to the work, and ultimately how we choose to apply those processes in the work we do. I no longer believe in a right way or a wrong way to do things. (However, in some specific cases there are dangerous ways to do things and it would be wrong to encourage someone to ignore those rules.) I believe in learning as much as you can about what’s available, trying out the things that appeal, and then choosing what will work best for the project you currently have in mind.

Rules or not, the question we need to ask ourselves is the one posed by Ben & Jerry: