Monday Morning

I'm feeling pretty poorly this morning; I don't know exactly why or what the cause may be. Oh, the joys of chemical sensitivity!

I want to send out a note of thanks for the compliments on my recent work. Your little notes lift my spirits where nothing else seems able to. Thank you for taking the time to stop by, have a look, and leave a comment.

Hopefully I can lose myself in beads and sequins or seaming fabrics together until this passes. Until then...

Journal Quilt Progress Report

My energies of the last couple of days have been focused on my journal quilt for this month. After I got those appliques sewn on I spent quite a bit of time trying to get a feel for what to do next. I auditioned several colors of beads, some other trims, tried a few "theme" ideas on for size...





Eventually I came across some white rice beads. I don't know what else to call them. They're just plastic, they're not bugle beads, they look like large grains of white rice. It occurred to me that they would make a good outline for a tree trunk. So I stitched the outline of a tree trunk. I wanted to get a picture for you when I had only the rice beads sewn onto my ground but DH had absconded with the camera. He and DS went up into the mountains yesterday. They had a lovely time, and so did I - at home! They took pictures of mountains and trees; I created a tree.


Then I remembered a pretty iridescent glass heart bead I've had for awhile. I sewed it on in the center of the trunk. It may be a knot hole, it may be one of those hearts where lovers carve their initials. Who knows?!


Today I have been sewing on sequins to fill in the trunk of my tree. They're not the sequins I bought last week, but they are sequins nevertheless and I have been wanting to do this technique for a while now. I first practiced it in a workshop with Rebecca Rousch. She does some fabulous work! You can sample it here.





I still have no idea what else is going to go on this journal 'page.' I have no idea what significance a tree - or a white tree - may have. I figure I have the rest of the sequining to do on the tree before I'm really forced to make the next decision anyway.

"Helpmates" Revisited

I had a request for a close-up shot of the center panel of my journal quilt "Body & Spirit: Helpmates." I was surprised to learn that clicking on the previous photo of the quilt did not produce the larger image. I just figured that happened to all my photos automatically! I'm no techie, nor am I a photographer. But! I just happen to have a photographer husband who is home today and who was happy to have the opportunity to play with his toys. ;- )

I'm not sure what you're looking for, but hopefully you'll find it in one of these shots:

The fish skeleton, the key, and the ship's wheel are all charms. The clock is a button. The lock was a button also; I cut off the shank to it would sit more closely to the surface of the quilt. I wanted to tone down the color somehow but everything I tried just wiped off. The heart on her bodice is hematite, the bird fetish is shell.

The lily-of-the-valley-type flowers were printed on the fabric. I just went over them with beads and floss, pretty much in the same colors as was on the fabric. There are four fire polished flower beads, a large blue vintage button, and a ribbon yo-yo flower head. Their stems and leaves are all beaded. On these smaller leaves and the lily-of-the-valley flower heads I used what I know as a leaf stitch. It's the kind of leaf you make when you're making a leaf fringe.

I felt very fortunate to have this bit of textile in my stash and to have it fit the theme so well!

Nose to the Grindstone (and if you believe that...)

I hope everyone had a safe and happy Fourth of July. It was actually sunny and dry here! That was some kind of a record! In honor of the Fourth (well, not really, but it does read as red, white, and blue so it seemed appropriate) I got out one of my really old UFO's and finished the top finally. I had taken it out about a year and a half ago after it sat maturing for several years. Sometimes we just need more experience before we can finish a quilt to our satisfaction! At that point I realized why I hadn't finished it yet and took off the borders that were causing the problem. Then I got interrrupted or put it away for some other reason until the other day. I found my notes on what I intended to do with it and just did it. Now it fits the bed the way I want it to and I only have to acquire the batting and buy or make a back for it. It's made entirely of flannels. My intention is to tie this one, probably with a red perle cotton, because that was what I envisioned from the beginning. (What you may not be able to see is that the borders are a solid navy blue. This pic was taken outside on our overgrown bed of creeping juniper.)







The bright orphan blocks were hanging around in the back of my mind, and so was my commitment to make a journal quilt for this month and a baby quilt for the next grandchild. I pulled the blocks out of my orphan drawer and started going through them. Lo and behold, there was a pieced bit leftover from one of my favorite quilts that was nearly the right size for a journal quilt, and it has the right greens in it! So I added some fabric to bring it up to size, basted it to the batting, and spent a good deal of time rummaging around in my stash o' stuff. I still don't have a theme or topic for this quilt, and that makes me uncomfortable, but the whole point of this exercise is to break the confines of my comfort zone. I found a machine made lace applique that has these cool circle elements to it, cut them apart, and sewed them onto my ground. I have an idea for a direction I could go with this but nothing is written in stone. We'll see how it develops...





As for the baby quilt: I put these blocks on the wall today. There are plenty more left to work with but this covers the size DD has requested. It won't have the full Orphan Train look to it but I think it will be a happy quilt in the end. The challenge now is to find the right fabric/print to use to frame up the smaller blocks. I really want to have just one fabric surrounding all of the blocks. I don't have the psychic energy right now to make a lot of decisions about what to put where. This needs to be a simple and quick project, not an ordeal. The Pinwheel blocks at the top and the bottom are leftovers from what was going to be my DD's first "big girl quilt." As it turned out, she never got that quilt. Eventually I made a Log Cabin variation for her when she was a teenager. The best of her Pinwheel blocks went into a quilt I made for her firstborn, but that's another story!

Finn's Rescued Orphan

So I'm a little slow in posting it for those of you who may not have seen this top on Finn's blog a couple of weeks ago, but this is the rescued orphan top I "won" in Finn's give-away! This apparently was the salvagable part of a larger quilt. In my opinion all it needs is borders and it would be big enough to be useful on the couch for snuggling under. What those borders will be remains to be seen however! I'm thinking something simple and plain, to show off the blocks. But we'll see. I have a hard time doing simple and plain. ;-)

I've been looking closely at this top. There are Jacob's Ladder blocks and 25-patch blocks and a couple of Log Cabins that have been made to fit with the other blocks by the addition of single squares or small 4-patch units. The prints are very bright and cheerful for the most part, from the mid-20th century. There are a couple of fabrics that Finn and I think could be the "mourning prints" of the late 19th/early 20th century (they are the black prints in the 25-patch block in the second row, just right of center). All in all a very cool top. For those of us who like that sort of thing anyway!

On a related note, as a result of working on my Orphan Train quilt I now have a better idea of what I want to do with my black & white & pink friendship blocks. I a-l-m-o-s-t started working on it today. I'm not quite ready for another big project yet though. So I'm fishing around for a workable idea for my next journal quilt. I really want to do something with those sequins!!!