I started the second quarter of the year with an overly ambitious list of sewing goals, but I was sidetracked by some very rewarding printmaking class projects, then preparations for a summer of vending quilts and home dec items at local fairs and farmer's markets. Nonetheless, I managed to complete half of my goals. Here's the original list, along with results.
1. Cedric's zombie shirt -- DONE!! He cuts quite the figure in it, too:
2016 Mom Awards: don't even bother challenging me this year
Young artist at work, in bespoke zombie attire
2. Secret Gift Thing #1 (Birthday shirt for my husband) -- DONE!!
This new goofy circuitry one makes 14 (!) shirts in his summer wardrobe.
3. Secret Gift Thing #2 (Father's Day present) -- DONE, and even (briefly) blogged!!
4. Orange Hexagon wallhanging, with Basic Mixologie mini-charm pack -- DONE!! I love this pattern and I love this fabric.
5. Gypsy Wife quilt -- NOPE. Not even close. But two of my students have finished theirs, so that's something!
6. Kitchen decor for my aunt -- DONE, and delivered! Placemats weren't part of the finished collection, because they didn't fit on the table, so the full set included a runner, four pillow covers, dinner napkins, and a pair of hotpads as a fun little addition.
I combined the Charley Harper fish print with a rich plum that looked like suede. Two pillows in each color combo.
The plum pillows looked spectacular. The fabric was to die for. (I think it was a Ricky Tims Rhapsody print.)
She has a long narrow glass table, so I made the runner 10x80". It was a gorgeous coppery brown that looked nice with all of her prints, including the upholstery sample from her built-in bench. Thin strips of all the other prints and some coordinating scrappy ones stretched the whole way down in a single line.
The mitered double-sided napkins looked spectacular, and so substantial!
7. Craftsy BOM quilt -- DONE!! I love this quilt so much. I did some really impressive custom free-motion work on each individual block, then as I assembled it I added a little more feathering in the negative space (dark grey Plus signs) to anchor the pieces together. I couldn't be happier with the finished project!
Sampler blocks by Amy Gibson for Craftsy (2012)
The back of my Craftsy sampler quilt -- so much delightful orange!!
8. Kandinsky quilt -- NOPE (I have really been slacking on the art quilting) 9. Quilting my Vintage Spin quilt -- NOPE (but it's first up for Q3)
The first quarter of 2016 is behind us, and it was a productive few months here. I had nine specific goals for the 2016 Finish-Along, and I worked through six of them (so so close on the seventh!).
Hexagon suns quilt -- DONE (but not blogged yet -- I'll take some photos and do that tomorrow)
Best. Day. Ever. herringbone quilt -- nope. I'll probably finish the quilting tomorrow, and the binding is all ready to attach, so I'll just slide this one into the Q2 goal list.
Triangle Tiles pattern finalization -- nope. But I'll be teaching this as a class in July at Lisa's Clover Hill Quilts in July, so that will be done in Q2 as well.
Skinny Mini quilt swap -- DONE, although I never received one from whoever my partner was. Sad face emoji. I posted a photo on Instagram, but I can't seem to get the link to work from the laptop and my iPad screen shattered today. Weeping face emoji. How sad is that -- I have to type out my emotions instead of using the handy options that the good people at Apple (apple fruit emoji) have pre-coded for me.
Zombie shirt for my 12-year-old -- nope, he asked me to wait until the weather warmed up so it would be the right size for him to wear all summer. I like his optimism that he could grow through an entire (oversized) size in three months. The zombie fabric still awaits my attention. Zombie emoji.
Two beer shirts for my extra-tall and hard-to-fit brother-in-law -- DONE, although I didn't blog them earlier because he wants to keep them secret until his big festival sometime this month. I won't tag him or put the photos on instagram with a million beer hashtags until I get the go-ahead, but I suppose his tribe isn't creeping my blog too often. Winky face emoji. I think (I hope) I finally have the pattern sized correctly for him, which means before too many more holidays he will have a closet full of custom barbecue shirts of the zaniest fabrics on the market. My husband has over twenty of these, I think -- I'll have to compile a photo collage sometime because his closet is an absolute hoot. Photos of the new beer shirts are below.
Yesterday I drove to Northampton to attend a meeting with the local group of the Modern Quilt Guild. So glad I did! Their meeting space is the common house for the Rocky Hill Cohousing community just outside of Northampton, and it's spectacularly beautiful. Timna Tarr spoke about choosing quilting motifs that best finish a particular project, a topic that I've been particularly interested in recently. I shared a few of my Sol LeWitt projects that were inspired by my trip to MassMoCA several years ago, including my bed-sized replica of Wall Drawing #1112.
This was a really fun project to work on. I cut the six basic colors of Kona into 3.5" strips, then rolled them onto empty paper tubes threaded onto an old broomstick. Starting from the middle (four squares), I determined which patch to use next by rolling dice: A six-sided die determined the color, a 12-sided die for the strip length in inches, and an 8-sided die for an extra eighth-inch measurement. The only limitation I put on the process was that a color was not allowed to touch itself in a previous row (from LeWitt's original rules for this piece). Once I had the 90" log cabin sewn, I quilted it using the lines in another of his wall drawings, concentric circles from the center and arcs from all four corner points. Again, I rolled a 6-sided die to determine which color of thread to use in each ring. LeWitt's work is perfectly "quiltable" -- about half of his wall murals are suitable as patchwork, and another set of his works are simply rules for groups of lines, perfect as quilting motifs. A complete quilt project like this one, then, superimposes the lines over the color patchwork.
I had initially made a smaller version of this same wall drawing as a sort of "test run" for the process. For the smaller one (1" strips, 27" finished), the quilting lines were from another of LeWitt's line pieces: 10" straight lines, overlapping in all directions.
Wall Drawing 86: Ten thousand lines about 10 inches (25 cm) long, covering the wall evenly. (Sol Lewitt, MassMoCA 2003 installation)
(I confess that I went through a really serious Sol LeWitt phase right after that first museum trip.)
I won't be able to make the NMQG November meeting way up in Shelburne, but once I see how the full-time spring schedule is going to treat me, I might try to go again...visiting Northampton once a month doesn't seem like a huge hardship. Thanks to the NMQG for their kind welcome!!
Neon! What else is there to say? Just looking at it makes me want to find some jelly shoes (ouch) and big dangly earrings. I love this quilt so much, and I am so pleased that it will soon be on its way to brighten the nursery of a fresh new baby girl!
How do you like the new blog look? It's feeding directly into my newly overhauled website as well!
Last night we enjoyed a great JAM (that's "Journals and More" because we've really expanded our reach from our original task of monthly journal page-size projects) meeting. The theme to kick off summer was Games. I had literally dozens of ideas for this topic. I love the graphic elements of board games; you really get a glimpse into the design zeitgeist of a particular era from the illustrations used in board games. I considered projects based on some really ancient games like Ur and Senet...
The Royal Game of UR, played in ancient Mesopotamia well over 4500 years ago.
...some classic traditional choices like checkers, backgammon (both of which other group members ended up interpreting for their projects), and Chinese checkers, which would have enabled my hexagon addiction...
Chinese checkers...on an isometric triangle grid!
...some more obscure games that I played growing up in the 70s and 80s, like Bonkers, Connect Four, and Tri-Ominos (which is still going to happen on a larger scale, probably as soon as I get back from the Vermont Quilt Festival...). Take a look at this commercial from 1980 -- can you believe how much wholesome fun that family is having?!? I demand to know why they don't show at least one, if not both, of the kids scowling and threatening to flip over the whole damn table. And the parents haven't once checked their cell phones or gotten up for another drink. LIES, I tell you! Corporate lies!
I even considered some video games like PacMan and Q-Bert, which of course was played on a tumbling blocks screen:
QBert must have been designed by a quilter.
Ultimately, I chose a childhood favorite that was more of a plaything than a game, even though it did come with some vague "rules." I found a simple clipart, enlarged it in PowerPoint, and traced it onto some solid red Kona prepared with whatever fusible I had handy. (I don't know if it was Steam-a-Seam, Heat-n-Bond, or Wonder Under.) After a few evenings of painstaking scissor work, the rest of project went together in a flash:
Barrel of Monkeys! quilt: "Ex unitate vires" (2015, Angelina Kendra)
The only quilting I did on the solid yellow background was the curved barrel lines. These were tricky to implement, not least because I was working without a functional walking foot. I used a 12-wt yellow Sulky thread, and I started and stopped between every segment of the hanging monkeys. Once the monkeys and the quilting lines were finished, it was a very cute little project that would look adorable on a nursery wall. Someone should get on that.
The little monkey on the bottom looked like he was exhibiting a little independent streak. There's a Polish proverb that translates as "Not my circus, not my monkeys" (meaning, of course, "not my problem") which was just PERFECT for this little guy. I can pronounce written Polish (thanks to six weeks of a continuing ed class that I took during the grad school years in Blacksburg, VA), but I had to rely on a Google search for the original Polish words for his protest sign.
Not my circus, not my monkeys
In contrast to Mr. Not-My-Problem, I realized that the others were stronger for hanging together. Their Solidarność flag is the emblem of the 1980s trade union in Poland that was the impetus for the fall of the Communist regime in that country. The day I was finishing this, the NY Times Magazine cover was "Labor's Last Stand." I couldn't stop thinking of how cunningly the current crop of union busters have secured the sympathies of the people who would seem to benefit most from some united strength. I guess we can thank modern globalization for the continuing unraveling of worker's rights in this and every other country. There's always a hungrier mouth willing (or forced) to produce for even less reward. The name of the finished quilt is "Ex unitate vires" ("Strength in unity"). Good luck on your own, little guy.
Fun fact: "Solidarity" (solidarność) was the answer that I missed in the 1990 New Castle News Citizen Bee, thus dropping me out of competition. I did a lot of flirting with my now-husband Barry at that Bee event:
That's Barry and me, front and center. Not thinking about Solidarity one little bit.
Aurifil is hosting a Designer of the Month program, featuring little quilts that are fast to make. I didn't get around to the January program, even though it was by one of my favorite designers, Gudrun Erla (from Iceland!). February's project by Joanne Figueroa was cute though, and it showed up just as I was pondering what to do with the small remaining length of my background-neutral architectures yardage:
I can't get enough of this as a background -- from Carolyn Friedlander's Architextures line.
I just pulled out some scraps from near the tops of various heaps, because this pattern didn't need much of any one fabric. It took an evening to make the top, then another couple of sessions to do the spiral quilting. I did nine separate spirals, starting in the center of each block with a thread that matched that block. I did a little echoing around the edges using grey, because I didn't want the floppy edges that sometimes happens when you don't quilt evenly the whole way to the binding. Cute cute cute! I'm looking forward to doing the rest of these over the coming year.
Chunky Churndash mini -- 23 x 23"
Close-up of quilted spirals on Chunky Churndash mini
Special guest blogger today, my 11-year-old son Cedric!
I have been working on this quilt for about two months now after my Settlers of Catan quilt was over the size limit of the Vermont Quilt Show Festival, but I am very happy with how this quilt came out. It is based off of the game Magic: the Gathering, which I have a lot of fun playing and looking at the art of. I chose the border and back to look like the famed card Black Lotus, which gives you all five colors of mana, which are the five symbols on my quilt. The name, Alliance of the Planeswalkers, is inspiration of the Lorwyn Five, which are the five main planeswalkers of Magic. There is one for each color, and the silver background is meant to stand for colorless cards, mainly artifacts. The quilt is going to go onto my bedroom wall.
Cedric's Magic: The Gathering quilt (29" diameter)
Black Lotus fabric on the back of the Magic quilt
(Note from Mom: He did this himself, the fabric planning, the measuring, the ironing, the cutting, the applique circles, the y-seams, and the quilting!! I helped only with digitizing and embroidering the symbols and with the binding. He's feeling some righteous pride!!)
Cleaning closets. Unfolding quilts. I like to store my finished projects on the bed in our guest room so they won't get permanent creases. Here's how I "made the bed" yesterday. Gulp. I'm starting to worry about the ceiling collapsing onto our family room.
Rapid City in autumnal scraps
California Kendra Cousin Challenge from 2012
Nouveau New Wave
Log Cabin a la Lewitt
Northern Lights - full spectrum
Just Can't Cut It
Comic tumblers
Grad Plaid
BQ Intrepid Explorer quilt
Taupe batiks
Chopsticks
Tracking Sandy
Perfect Square in black and white
Bright scrappy triangles
Modern Sochi!
Seahorses in hexes
Holiday Grand Opening
Pink Rink
Batik Challenge -- my first attempt at FMQ
Made but not submitted for Keepsake's Nine-Patch challenge
Hunter's Star
From class with Carol Taylor
Cheddar No Crackers -- Tula Pink charms
Ghastlies meet the Bard
Serenity Now!
I made this in high school (1988?). Candlewicking blocks, bad hand quilting.
Forest Floor Lotus
Mister DJ in cool scraps
Cloud Nine in Floragraphix
And then, quilts happily stacked, I basted up another:
