78. Quilt #4 I think 2012

I think this is the 4th quilt of the year. This one is a baby quilt, about 45x45, for the school auction/dinner/thingy coming up next week. One of the elementary classrooms made the colorful blocks--they are sharpie marker and rubbing alcohol. Then I trimmed them, squared them to 12 inch blocks with the black and white dot fabric, sewed them together, did a bit of stippling machine quilting, and done. It is already out of my hands and at school for the auction. When I arrived with it this morning I was met by the headmaster who said, "You went home and did that last night? Did you sleep?"

And now I know it takes me approximately 3 1/2 hours to make a baby quilt from fabric to finish.

76. Kwyltz So Far

The first is one I owe Daisy. Her sister has its fraternal twin. Once upon a time, when I was pregnant with Daisy, I was in a block swap of purple and blue batik patchwork blocks. Later on, I divided the resulting hodgepodge of blocks into two sets, one tat was mostly blue and one that was mostly purple. The blue ones were partnered with a blue batik and backed in pink--that one was finished about 3 or 4 years ago. And I got distracted.

These were partnered with a purple and orange batik and backed in orange. It is now done. Daisy asks me why it's so much "crunchier" than Fiona's. I told her to let me wash it a few times and it'll soften up.A bit of quilting closer up.

This next one was a top I finished when, again, Fiona was little and still enamored with Strawberry Shortcake. Back then there were two girls, no boy, and I envisioned the two of them sharing the attic. I also thought my full-sized iron bed was going up there, too. It's now in the guest room and the two of them have separate spaces in the attic and Billy's headed up there ASAP. So this quilt, flannel, backed in flannel, minimally quilted just to hold it together in the, most likely, frequent washing it will endure, is going to be one of our "curl up on the couch blankets." Jake asked, "so...why do we have a Strawberry Shortcake quilt?" and I told him to feel it and then he'd know why. He's a fan of the flannel sheets and all that.

"Well, we'll use it a while, and then it'll get put away and somebody will take it to college as kitsch," he says with a shrug.

This last one is mine. I haven't quilted it yet--it's next in the queue. It's a one-block wonder, all 60 degree triangles, called "Walking Shoes." That's really just for my own entertainment. I haven't made myself a quilt in a long time...

38. Christmas Present Quilt

This one is for my in-laws. The background is browns, reds, and forest greens. A bit of gold. And then on top of that, I appliqued a big forest green bow.

Cozy.

37. Aunt Sheila's Quilt

Sheila and Bill lost their house last summer in a total house fire. Mike's dad and many volunteers put it back together and when we visited in November it felt like a home.

We draw names at Christmas for Mike's mom's side of the family, and I drew Sheila's name. I knew what I had to do.

This quilt is Churn Dash blocks from an internet exchange back when quilt block exchanges were mailing lists instead of websites or groups online. Back then I was the underdog, skill wise. These ladies made much more precise blocks. I received 8 blocks in return for my 8 blocks, and then promptly stored them away for 13 years. Here they finally are, combined with polar bears and other random Christmas fabric to make a 60x60 throw.

Sheila told me this weekend she still had it out. "The living room's still all Bridgettified."

32. Parasol Ladies and Sunbonnet Sues

These two quilts (the Sunbonnet little girl Sues and the older Parasol Ladies) went to my two nieces on Mike's side.

Many of the background fabrics are retired from church (incidental tablecloths, for instance) or from resale shops. They are linen and cotton with a patina of age that makes the whole quilt seem older than it is. I tried to stick to older looking fabrics for the dresses and bonnets and parasols as well, with fair success.

I worked on these dang things off and on all last year. I was so done with them by the time I assembled them in November. Done. But they are lovely and I'm glad I made them (my brother's daughter also has a parasol lady, as does Sophia, and Maeve has a sunbonnet).

31. Christmas Log Cabin & the Underground Railroad

While I've mentioned before that jelly rolls are pretty to look at but not the most useful to actually use in a quilt, this quilt is different--because it is a Log Cabin, which involves an insane amount of little rectangles cut to the right size, it is nice to start with strips already made.

One jelly roll creates exactly 25 Log Cabin blocks with no, I mean no, leftovers.

So if I wanted to really be able to create something more than a throw for the back of the couch at Mike's brother and sister-in-law's apartment, I'll need two that coordinate or match outright.

But this one was pretty. I set it as "Fields and Furrows", meaning the light and dark of each block created diagonal stripes.

Log Cabin quilts have a lot of mystery and tradition built up around them. Different settings that only apply to them (as opposed to other quilts, that can be set on point, with sashing, without sashing, interspersed with plain blocks, etc)--Sunshine and Shadow, Barnraising, Courthouse Steps. It is also the only block, as far as I know, that has a name for one of the pieces in the block: the center square is referred to as the "hearth" and in traditional quilts it is yellow or red. I have heard references to this quilt pattern used on the Underground Railroad (with a black hearth), but, like Aran knitting patterns and Scottish tartans, I believe we are trying to find symbolism where there isn't. I simply cannot believe there was a true meaning behind different quilt patterns flung over the clothesline, in an era when fabric was expensive and quilts were sewn entirely by hand when there was plenty else to get done. I can completely believe that a quilt, any quilt, on the line had meaning: it was a simple sign easily remembered but not easily found out by authorities. But the idea that Log Cabin meant this and Shoo Fly meant that? Seems pretty far fetched to me (especially considering a few of the patterns these researchers claim weren't popularized until the 1930s).....

But I digress. This Log Cabin isn't a sign of anything except Christmas.

30. I Spy a Quilt

I made 2 I Spy Quilts this Christmas. Actually, I made 3 and I still have one waiting in the wings for some baby shower sometime. But Billy received one and Jake's cousin's son got the other. Around the edges in the border I wrote objects to look for in the quilt blocks, and each block is a novelty print with a variety of things to see.

Leo is still too little to really care, but I hear it went over well with the 3 year old recipient.

20. The Story of a Quilt

I taught school, once upon a time. I taught math to middle schoolers in a Catholic grade school, at least that was the last thing I did before I retired to have these kids. The year before I took the job, I'd had a student in my first grade class with Asperger's Syndrome. Very mild in comparison to some, but definitely in that spectrum. He needed everything to be the same. He needed to know what was coming next. And so I learned to be very, very boring. In a good way.

Math went like this, on a two week repeating cycle with no deviation: regular class Monday through Thursday. On the first Friday, we took a test, no matter where we were in the book or with lessons (7th and 8th followed the book, but 5th and 6th skipped around to build our own curriculum to suit). The second Friday, we worked on a project, which was year-long and themed according to year. Fifth grade did consumer math. Sixth grade was the math of sports (statistics, mostly, but some geometry and physics). Eighth grade was the stock market and economics. Seventh grade was 2-dimensional geometry and quilting.

The first quilt block the seventh graders made had to involve a mathematical concept--like the Pythagorean theorem or A=lw or something. Many were very very simple but they still got the idea across. The second quilt block they made was for a quilt to put together and raffle off at the school picnic.

The first year was, well, fine. The second year, they made enough blocks of a pretty 4-point star that we made two quilt tops to raffle off. I got the first one done in time and I remember being jealous when Olivia won it. But at that point I was hugely pregnant and tired and folded the second one up and put it away.

The school closed and life went on. The quilt top lived in my cedar chest with other unfinished projects. I liked it. I thought about that class a lot, who had been my first homeroom at the school, whose names were not lost to me even if I never saw them anymore--but I did, or at least parts of them. A few still came to church. A few had parents who came to church. I liked them. A lot.

This year, I found the quilt top in my cedar chest and felt bad that it had never been brought to the light. I thought about those students and how maybe I was betraying them by finishing it for someone else--but there's no school picnic and anyway, I did complete the first one and successfully raffled it off (earned over $500 on that raffle, too, not bad). I decided I'd done enough penance. And so had this quilt top. So I finished it. I backed it with a pretty celestial print and quilted it with little 5 point stars all over it. Gave it to Jake's sister. It's a twin sized quilt, not just a throw, although I don't know what she's using it for. In that deep blue with multi-colored stars, it could pass for Christmas if it needed to. I'm sure the class of 2002 would forgive me. It has a good home.

16. Hexagons Still Going

A work in progress. It is a quilt top made of hexagonal kaleidoscope blocks. Then they were positioned on the bed, pinned down, and I'm working through them row by row. It's a lot of half-hexagons to piece. And I've been, you know, out of town and busy with other things. But I try to do a bit each day.

The cats have claimed this. They love layers of anything laid on top of layers of anything else. The folded blanket at the end of the couch. The rumpled pajama pants at the foot of Sophia's bed. Doesn't matter. If it's on top, they're going to lie on it.

Bleys, pictured there, will also make it his own. Every day I go in there and straighten up hexagons. Hexagons that are rapidly turning an orangey-white.

15. Spools

These are the spools of thread I went through to make the Christmas quilts. Some of them, of course, were partially used before Christmas quilting began. But some of these belie their original heft--that cardboard tube, for instance, was three times that size in diameter, top to bottom, filled with machine quilting thread.

Some of it was "vintage" thread, picked up mostly at Leftovers back when they had a south city location (oh how I miss Leftovers; the drive to St. Charles is too much for a bag of junk). I picked them up mostly for the wooden spools they were wound on, but that Trusew Polyester was a thin lavender thread I used to put blocks together.

I'm sure this isn't all. I didn't think to start saving spools from this project until October, and at that point I had done some work already. But it's a good indicator, still.

14. Feet

I have three feet for my sewing machine. Here, the sewing machine is footless. Don't pay attention to the fuzz. It's time to clean the sewing machine. But you can see the basics there. The needle, the thread, and the open bobbin case for the lower thread.

This is the machine with its normal foot. When I got this machine, this was the foot that came with it. This foot is fine. You want to piece a bunch of little triangles together? Sure. Sew up a dress for Sophia to wear in a wedding? No problem. But you can't quilt with it. Nope.
For that, you need these. Either of these, but both is better, of course. The first one here is a walking foot. I also use this for very long sewing projects, like banners at church. A walking foot, well, walks. It has "teeth" that match up with the teeth (or sometimes I've heard it called "feed dogs" but I don't know why) on the bottom of the machine. The top piece of fabric gets moved along at the same speed as the bottom. This isn't an issue for small stretches of sewing, nor is it a problem when the things being sewn are thin. But if you combine long lengths of stitches with thick layers of batting and backing, you get a big puckering headache. That's not a pun. The whole thing will pucker and shift and look lousy. The walking foot solves this problem.Why not just use it all the time? I thought that, too. But it is loud and slower than the other basic foot. So I do use it more often than I might if I wasn't a quilter--and it is essential to do things like match up plaids and stripes--but I don't use it for everyday.

The last foot here is an embroidery foot. Like peanut butter goes with jelly, the embroidery foot is useless unless it comes with a plate to cover the feed dogs. More advanced machines have a lever to lower the feed dogs, but I was able to order this little plastic plate to go over them and there you go. Tricked it up just fine. The embroidery foot is for embroidery (duh) and free motion quilting. If you have a machine quilted quilt, all those curlicues and puzzle shapes and stars and waves come from embroidery feet (well, not really--but they could. Most likely they came from a programmable long-arm quilting machine, but I live in a house, not a warehouse, and I just can't go there yet, especially when this works "just fine for government use" (where does THAT idiom come from and why is it in MY head?).
I've had folks ask about quilting on a home machine, and that's how you do it. That's how I do it all, in fact. So much of life is just having the right equipment.

12. My Niece's Sunbonnet Sue

The girls on my Christmas list last year received Sunbonnet Sue quilts. Daisy and the cousin her age had the traditional baby-doll turned to the side Sue, but Fiona and the cousins her age received the girls on swings and parasol ladies instead.

They were ironed on and then blind-stitched down. After that, each one of them was embellished. Some very simply, with a lace edge to her bonnet or something like that. Many of them were decorated more elaborately, however, with seasonal objects and settings. After I was done, I divided them into piles based on how elaborate they were--I didn't want one girl to receive all the really interesting ones--and then randomly assigned them to each recipient. I set them all differently, however. This one, for my niece in Texas, has the Sues/Parasol Ladies all in the center together, with sampler blocks all around.

The girls are sewn onto vintage fabric. Sturdy old pillowcases and discarded linens from church (from incidental tables and maybe from altar cloths--but not the altar at my church because these were all too narrow and way way too long). I was trying for a patina of age, since this is a 1930s pattern. Not all the same white, basically. It was mostly successful I think.

I will not be returning to this pattern, or the more traditional Sue, not for a long time. I worked on these ALL YEAR, constantly returning to this handwork when I couldn't do machine work (on trips, for instance, or at school functions, etc). I'm tired of Sue. But happy about the result.

7. My First Lone Star

It was in the middle of machine quilting this one that I burst into tears. Not out of frustration. It was something else, something I didn't understand.

Something about working on a project that is for a person, not just a project that might one day have a home (like infinite numbers of baby hats, for instance), really puts a lot of mental energy into thinking about that person while you do it.

It wasn't until I started quilting this one that I realized it. Sure, I'd been thinking about Colleen and Tim while I quilted theirs, and probably some about Bevin while I cut up all that double knit, but it didn't strike me until I was finishing this one. Why do I keep thinking about Ian and Ashley and their baby? I kept asking myself. At the time, they were expecting a baby with Down Syndrome and we were all adjusting to this fact and worried for them. The whole time I was fiddling with this dang star (turns out, they are hard to make...) I kept thinking and thinking and finally just started to cry. I had to walk away and work on one for Mike's brother and sister-in-law. Got to think about weddings and San Francisco and cute apartments and kittens for a minute instead of heavy things.

As you probably know from my other blog, they lost the baby in early February and are still going through the emotional and mental calculus required to try to come to terms with that, all that. I know when I make this year's quilt for them, it will be tinged with this new sorrow and new worry and new hope. And it won't be a Lone Star. I need something easier, but more than that, I need something with a closer name. Something about a hearth or family ties.

5. Bevin's Quilt of Shame

I hate double knit polyester. I don't like the feel of it, I don't like to work with it. It is a fabric of shame, something out of the tacky led-astray 1970s and earlier, when we were all told we'd be living better through science. I remember wearing double knit things as a child. My uniform skirt in 7th grade was made from the stuff. It is probably still a skirt somewhere in a diminished but still intact form. The stuff doesn't die.

When I was in college, I visited my friend Marita at her dorm and on her bed was a nine-patch quilt made of double knit. Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes. This was kitschy and almost cute. The jewel tones and the black made it almost Amish in appearance. It still had an awful hand (feel) to it, but it was heavy and never looked unmade or in need of care.

So in the back of my mind I thought to myself, someday I'll make one. Just for the fun of it.

And it stayed on the back burner because there are too many pretty quilts to be made. Plus I found denim and corduroy to be far more visually appealing and soft to the touch if I wanted a big heavy utilitarian blanket. I made several denim blankets in college and a few since then--I have plenty of old jeans in the basement to make more. I have a brown corduroy Rail Fence quilt that I use as the "I am so cold and it's 3 in the morning pull this over me" blanket at the bottom of my bed. In order to make a double knit quilt I would have to, you know, procure double knit. Back burner.

Mike's grandmother died in 2004 and sometime that summer Mary Helen gave us something from her house--Mike didn't have any real requests and, having lived through hideous arguments, bloody knife fights, and molotov cocktail parties over who gets what out of which dead person's house, I wasn't going to say a word. But finally on the 10th time she asked, I said if there was a quilt that didn't have a home, even one in really bad shape, I'd take that.

She brought me a double knit quilt, a rectangle Around the World. Each rectangle was 1 inch by 2 inches and hand sewn in the diamond pattern. Hand quilted. Perfect in every way. Mary Helen's aunt had made it. It was lovely and garish and everything I remembered from Marita's example.

Bevin, of course, saw it at some point and died of jealousy. She's not a quilter because she's too much of a perfectionist. That makes for good knitting but not for good home quilting (sure, if you want to be in shows, perfection is key, but the sampler quilt on the kid's bed does not have to be perfect, it just has to be done).

So when I made my plan for quilts for Christmas, I admitted to Bevin I was going to make her a double-knit quilt, mostly because I knew she had access to double knit, working at a vintage clothing shop. She brought me bags full of the stuff, which I sorted by color family and mostly ignored all year. I planned out my pattern. I liked the Around the World but was afraid of so many pieces. I found a pattern for a Streak of Lightning setting of nine patch blocks in a 1930s reproduction quilt book, making them radiate from the center like Around the World but in a hexagon pattern of sorts. I didn't want all the seams of a 9 patch in that, but I love the sneaky triangle setting that creates Streak of Lightning. I counted the squares, found the clothing pieces with enough open fabric to cut however many 5 inch squares. I watched Hotel Babylon on Netflix and put her Quilt of Shame together.

And I must admit it is the most visually striking quilt I have ever made. Kind of a lumpy picture here, attempting to get as much of it as possible, hovering above the guest bed with my camera. But yeah. I kind of really dig it.

3. Put Up or Shut Up

That was the runner up title for this blog. Either do something or stop talking about it. But there's a pun there, because canning is sometimes referred to as "putting up for the winter." In the end, I quilt more than I put up jam and pickles, and so "ease in fullness" was the title. More on that another time.

But this is my "Put Up or Shut Up" Quilt. I made it for my sister Colleen this past Christmas. Only two photos here, neither of them really that good, alas (December was a busy time). A long time ago I purchased, on a whim, a kit to make a jar quilt. The shtick was using novelty printed fabric of foods, cutting them into a general jar-like shape, putting a little rectangle on top for the lid, and putting these blocks all in rows like they were on a shelf. I found the idea cutesy and endearing, but it aged in my unfinished objects pile (UFOs).

My sister Colleen, my youngest sibling, lives in Columbia, Missouri with her boyfriend Tim. They play bike polo and get tattoos. She works at a library and he works at a local TV station. They live in a little house I've actually never seen but heard described. I'm thinking probably a lot like me and Mike when we were starting out, when "shabby chic" would have been stretching the definition.

But unlike many of her generation (we are of different generations, seriously, I'm firmly in Gen X and she's whatever you want to call the people who come after that), she sews and cooks and cans. I taught her canning, both she and Tim, one summer afternoon with jalapeno jelly. She has the beginnings of a garden and it's all so quirky and anti-traditional and I love the idea.

So this quilt says "Put up or shut up" along one side; the jars of random food (whole watermelons, for instance, and in one case, a pair of garden gnomes) in the middle, and the other side has a few vignettes from housekeeping: a woman ironing, a woman cooking, a woman taking a bath. The border is clothesline fabric with a variety of unmentionables hanging on the line. The back? pictures of vintage patterns.I barely quilted it, since this year was about the snuggly quilt (except Bevin's, but more on that later). I wanted these quilts to get carried to the couch and napped under, not hung on a wall and never touched. Not prize winners. Just fun stuff. But each jar on the quilt says something, mostly writing out the word "Kerr" or "Ball." But some, like the watermelon jar, say other things, like "WTF?" or just a question mark. Because the kit really stretched the idea of what one might possibly can. Whole radishes. Onions. Grapes still in bunches. Hence, I added the gnomes. I would put gnomes in a jar. Especially those two sly ones.