fabric reflections

Thankfully No More Thangles

2010-10-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

Last January friend Cheryl and I

started celebrating "Thangles Thursdays"

Below is Cheryl with the completed pieced top:

We both created the same top
though mine has darker blue sashing
and wide black borders.

Mine is off to Ebony for my
first ever quilt completed by a
professional long arm quilter.
Check out her amazing offer here

Autumn Amish

2010-10-26T14:13:00.001-07:00

From this:

To this:

In one lovely day.

Catching up on posting the
fun times sandwiched
between planting 50
trees and shrubs
along the new fence line
this past summer.
This was my entry into the
Liberated Amish Group.

ICE for Michelle

2010-09-29T19:02:00.000-07:00

This is the block I received from Michelle for our
Chicago Modern Quilt Guild Challenge.
Lots of prints - really different from my usual style.
That's what challenges are, right - to stretch us?
Clearly she was headed toward some flowers.
I just changed the scale a bit for a
Lady Bug Picnic:

I used the striped fabric to make the
squares for the flower pot &
the mini quilt on the clothes line.
For the fruit tree I was
channeling Kathy York.
(Big thanks to Michelle for
reattaching the buttons that fell off - oops!)
My favorite bit is the plate
on the picnic table:
Michelle's blog is "Bacon then Eggs"

End of Summer Celebration

2010-09-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

In honor of September as "National Sewing Month"
I've returned with this lovely
end of summer treat -
The completed "ICE Challenge" quilt that
I received from Jessica in August.
Isn't it beautiful?!!!
She started with my original block
and material & added only grey.

My favorite bits are:
the cool continuous block quilting
the bi-color pieced binding
and the wonderful diagonal stripe.

Thanks Jessica - you're a wonder!

Blogger's Quilt Festival Waterfall Return

2010-05-21T19:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome Bloggers Quilt Festival Visitors!

I made this quilt for my daughter's 8th grade graduation
and it follows the design she created in a 6th grade art class on
Frank Lloyd Wright's style.
Her painting shown below represents a
Frank Lloyd Wright style waterfall
which she intended as a quilt pattern.
This quilt encompasses both my love of nature in quilts, and
my interest in abstraction in them as well.
The tonal fabrics read as solids, which
seem to be my current mode of choice for fabrics.
I have a new quilt planned in this format in greens, called
Garden Gate - stay tuned!

ICE Breaker Challenge

2010-05-17T20:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the kick-off for the Chicago Modern Quilt Guild's
first ever challenge. The goal:

meet new folks, play with fabric, give a gift.

We picked 4 fat quarters from our stash
and made 1 block from part of them.
The block and remaining fabric went in a bag with
our name & contact info.

At the meeting all who brought a bag put a name in the hat, and then drew one.
We then took home the bag of the person's name we drew to create a small
Mini wall quilt for them.
My block is shown above - still working the "liberated" thing.
Next up: Michelle's block that I brought home!

Cactus Care

2010-05-11T15:28:00.000-07:00

My father had both Alzheimers & Parkinsons, and I was his caregiver.

In his honor this quilt reflects the Arizona desert he loved.

The cactus is an apt metaphore for many prickly moments as his condition progressed,

and the angles in the quilted sky reflect the unexpected directions our conversations took.
The years with Dad at our house, though, were also often bright & sunny
as these colors reflect.
There was much love sandwiched among the rocky times
which is reflected in the quilting at the base of the quilt.
This quilt was donated to the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative

Love you, Dad. I miss you

cactus quilting

2010-03-27T15:00:00.000-07:00

On one of my yummy AZ trips this winter

Bob & I had a wonderful day at the
Sonora Desert Museum. While at lunch,
I was struck by the beautiful geometry of
the organ pipe cactus.

Though often overlooked for it's more
popular cousin, the suaro with its iconic arms,
the pipe organ clearly displayed
what I had just learned about at
Taliesen West: Frank Lloyd Wright's
broken line of the desert.

Here it is in somewhat abstracted quilting terms:

Becomes:

And then:

Hopefully a finish to show tomorrow for AAQI - stay tuned!

Doors Done!

2010-03-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

Couldn't resist this picture which features
my assistants: daughter and our dog Blaze.
I think it also captures the contrast between
the bland gray of our Il March
and the bright colors I was craving to work with.

Some quilting:

during which I realized my Bernina is due for a tune up.

Though this quilt kind of "did in" my goals of a Finish it February
it was exactly the right thing for me to be doing.

Liberated Amish Love

2010-03-08T16:35:00.000-08:00

This quilt (or blocks on the design wall at least)
from Julie at Quiltdivajulie is
my current favorite on the
Liberated Amish Get Together.

In my list of Quilting Goals for 2010 one was to pick one new challenge to stretch my skills, and this is my choice. My love of Amish quilts and all things solid and/or abstract make this a natural inspiration for me, and using the techniques in Gwen Marston's Liberated Quiltmaking II will bring a new type of quiltmaking into my life. I'm excited to connect with my first group of online quilt folk on a project. The top is to be completed for the challenge by June -

stay tuned. . . .

Basted!

2010-02-22T19:23:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite things about my "studio"
(read - the portion of the basement I fixed up for the kids that they never used and now it's mine)
is using the top of the ping pong table for pin basting my quilts.
The binder clips keep the layers taught & the table even has mid-point lines painted on!

For some reason I really obsessed about the quilting pattern for this quilt,
so I copied an outline of the blocks a few times & tried out various patterns.
The winner is:

It felt a little like writing manuscript notation for music.
Hope I like it on the quilt as much as on the paper!

It's a Top!

2010-02-18T19:15:00.000-08:00

Put the last border on the comfort quilt today:

The happy colors are just what I wanted for Anna.

The pretty bluebird hanging at left is from one of my favorite stores,
our local 10,000 Villages and was
a bright offering from Haiti.
Good to be able to support the artisans of that country yet.

Another Kind of Love

2010-02-13T21:34:00.000-08:00

Early this week I learned of a 20 year old neighbor whose father died suddenly. The colors below are the start of a comfort quilt for her in much brighter colors that the the original design called Emerald Forest which I have in a Batiks Inspired by Bali book.

Mixing and matching got a little bit more messy:

And by the end of the day I was fitting in puzzle pieces on the design wall:

I'm calling this quilt "Doors"
in honor of the doors her father opened for her,
and the ones she'll open in the future.

Sunny Valentines

2010-02-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

For "Tuesday Teachings" this week I made a beach scene Accidental Landscape a la Karen Eckmeier's book.

This one's a bit too wide, but it was so I could do this:

And then to bring some wonderful Laura Wasilowski color into my white February, I tried her confetti collage technique from Fusing Fun and took these steps:

Backed in a bright yellow & a little binding with pretty thread and voila: a valentine bookmark.

The back has a small silver heart charm strung on the ribbon.
For next time: shorter! And coordinating ribbon would be nice, although it does go well
with the lucious sulky orange/yellow/pink blend thread I had in the bobbin!

Tenderness

2010-02-09T17:28:00.000-08:00

This journal is on its way to my son who loves the poem on the cover titled "Tenderness and Rot" by the U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. At stressful points during our packing of him off to college this year, he would spontaneously quote the final stanza:

"It is important
to stay sweet
and loving."

Missing him this Valentines Day

Harmony

2010-02-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

Another "Finish it February" success! This is "Harmony" - pattern (and material) by McKenna Ryan. It is off to the dorm already. I really like the look of these small wall quilts mounted on canvas - hope to try it with one of my own designs soon.

Peace

2010-02-04T14:22:00.000-08:00

This McKenna Ryan pattern piece was a gift for my daughter. It was the first time we ever both liked the same thing from a set - our aesthetics are dramatically different - so this, and a companion piece (Harmony) are late Christmas gifts. Her color pallet, nature for me.

I'm practicing "Finish it February" at my house - no new projects until a few of the UFOs are complete. This also provided some free motion practice which is on my list of "do's." The back before mounting on canvas:

Peace was a January finish, Harmony - hopefully - will be a February

Thangle Thursdays

2010-01-28T15:33:00.000-08:00

We've dropped the "third" - now it's just Thangle Thursdays, & our Amish Colors are increasing.

I've been doing more quilt reading lately, and in Masters: Art Quilts (which I Love) I learned that the 1971 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibit in New York that some cite as the beginning of the Art Quilt Movement actually featured an Amish Quilt Collection. (Admission: I just ordered the exhibition catalog on Amazon!) And I thought my love of Amish quilts was just due to my summers around them in the Ozarks growing up, go figure. . .

And Thee. . .

2010-01-26T14:14:00.000-08:00

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thee. . .

Now that Bob's sojourn in AZ has scaled back to every other week, we have a bit more time to explore this "empty nest with training wheels" thing. Last night that meant homemade bread from this book, wine and candlelight.

This morning my studio time was devoted to finishing up Christmas presents for us: new flannels. Funny how things always turn out better with unexpected problems - this time it was running out of flannel for the pillowcases and piecing as a result - much nicer!

The afternoon held a fun surprise. Since I'm the one (despite my California native status) who is more concerned about snow on the driveway, I went out to shovel our inch from last night. As I did, the patterns of Bob's tires where he drove out this morning remained, leaving a cool set of (I thought) abstract lines. Determined to capture them for a future quilt, I headed upstairs to the deck, and when I got there with the camera, here's what I captured:

An empty nest is full of love.

Plans & Magic

2010-01-23T19:05:00.000-08:00

"Make no little plans;
they have no magic to stir men's blood. . ."
-Daniel Burnham

Chicago's lakefront is a beautiful testament to this quotation from a Chicago legend. (This pic from about-bicycles.com is an example of a gorgeous landscape paired with a great city - no small plan.)

In honor of my adopted city and the magic of large scale plans,
here are my quilting goals for 2010:

1. Join a quilting community for support & education (guild, swap, etc.)
2. Quilt 2 hours weekday a.m.'s minimum.
3. Get to the county fair and see quilts this summer.
4. Start a blog to follow my quilting & keep records.
5. Re-organize my studio - aka - basement.(B-day present to self, 1 full day organizing in studio)
6. Pick 1 new quilting challenge to stretch & risk with.
7. Find & use 1 more venue to sell my work.
8. Read the business books I have & devise a real business plan.
9. Shoot for 1 charity quilt per quarter - start with AQI, then baby quilt.
10. Finish "Birches" quilt for me.

As I reach my goals, I'll change the text to green. Look - 2 down already!

Third Thursday Thangles

2010-01-21T20:24:00.000-08:00

Dear friend Cheryl & I are committing to actually creating
all the "Buck A Block" patterns we purchased in 2008 from
our LQS.
I'm not usually a traditional girl when quilts are involved,
but since we chose the "Amish" colorway
I can enjoy the abstract things that result
from those beautiful solids.

Hope - for Haiti & our Youth

2010-01-15T11:07:00.000-08:00

My daughter & her intercession classmates at IMSA used their class time in an Illinois History course yesterday to gain perspective on the disaster in Haiti. Then they put together the following info and sent it out to as many people as they could, hoping to make a difference. My heart is full of hope and love, for both the suffering people in Haiti, and for youth in our country who buck the apathetic trend and work to be involved. Please read their work below:

What We Owe Haiti

On January 12, 2010, at 21:53 UTC, Haiti was struck by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, the Caribbean’s most severe earthquake in over 200 years. The conditions were perfect for ultimate destruction. The fault line lies a mere 10 miles from the Haitian capital, Port-Au-Prince, and is extremely shallow, resulting in greater surface damage. Unlike the United States, Haiti lacks the necessary building codes to prevent its cities from collapsing in earthquakes. Along with these buildings, political order in Haiti has been destroyed. Even the main prison in Port-Au-Prince has been destroyed, meaning dangerous criminals are on the loose. With its infrastructure devastated, water sources contaminated medicine inaccessible and food scarce, Haitians are in danger of being murdered for the most basic necessities. The Haitian senator, Youri Latortue, has stated that the death toll could reach 500,000—greater than those of the 2004 Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and the 2005 Pakistani Earthquake combined.

The histories of Haiti and the Illinois are intertwined. The French settlement of Illinois and Louisiana was partially to provide foodstuffs for the sugar plantations of Haiti. In the 1750’s, the French built Fort de Chartres, south of modern Saint Louis, as part of a plan to use the Illinois Country to block English expansion into the Mississippi Valley, Mexico, and the French Caribbean. After the French and Indian War, an Afro-French Haitian, Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable built a trading post on the Chicago River, considered the founding of the city. Thus, the father of Chicago was actually a Haitian. At the end of the eighteenth century, Haiti fought a bloody yet successful war of independence to free itself from French rule. The Emperor Napoleon had planned to use the Louisiana Territory to feed the plantations of Haiti, but with its independence he sold Louisiana Territory to the United States essentially as a going out of business sale as it had no value to him. The I&M Canal, the Trans-Continental railroads, the Chicago Stockyards all came about because of the lands obtained from France. Clearly, we owe a great deal to Haiti.

After hurricane Katrina, people all over the world (including people from the Caribbean and Mexico) came to our assistance. Natural disasters are possible at any given place in the world. Even in the Midwest where they aren’t widely publicized, there is still danger. For example, the New Madrid Fault (in the Saint Louis area) will trigger a quake. In 1811, a quake along the fault line was so strong that the Mississippi River ran north for three days and places as far as Boston felt tremors violent enough to literally ring church bells. This earthquake was an 8.3 on the Richter scale. Just imagine, this quake had more than ten times the force of the recent disaster in Haiti. We could be in a similar predicament at any given time. Being a leading nation means that helping people is essential–especially countries that have shaped our history and who we are today. Already charities like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders are on the ground providing food, water, and medical assistance. Any and all donations are extremely important. Please donate using the links below and send this e-mail on!

The State Department has set up a cell phone donation link: Text "HAITI" to 90999 and you will be charged for a $10 donation to relief efforts.

Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (http://doctorswithoutborders.org/)

Red Cross (http://www.icrc.org/)

OXFAM America (http://www.oxfamamerica.org/)

AmeriCares (http://www.americares.org/)

United Nations World Food Program (http://www.wfp.org/)

To check the reputations of these charities or find more you can visit Charity Navigator. (http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=1004)

Thanks for all your support and remember to spread the word!

In Process. . .

2010-01-12T15:10:00.000-08:00

A New Year's goal was to organize my quilting books. (This is a treat of a resolution since I adore both books and quilting - it's like play time!) Since I tend to get lost "browsing" as I organize, I left this job until today, which in my newly alliterative quilting time schedule is "Teach Me Tuesday." Indeed, as I was stacking and browsing, I read all the way through the circle technique in this book. Now if I could just get myself to my machine. . . .

Frank Lloyd Wright Inpired Waterfall

2010-01-10T20:22:00.001-08:00

This quilt was headed back to the dorm today, so I nabbed a quick pic. The design was done by my daughter as a 6th grade art project to portray something in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. She is pictured with her painting of the quilt design below:

I made the quilt for her as her graduation present from that wonderful school, Quest Academy. I needed to finish it in a hurry (as always), so I tried to quilt as you go with a sew & flip technique, and it worked! I may publish a lazy ladies guide to quilting yet!

In my hurry, I put the seam in the backing wrong side out, but it was a mistake that worked, because I like the result when covered up with blue & a label:

I love the combination of geometric abstractions of nature and (almost) solids. Maybe I'll design my own next!

A Beautiful Start

2010-01-07T16:09:00.000-08:00

For my new year and new blog, new snow greeted me on my annual birthday pilgrimage to the Morton Arboretum to reflect on the past year and clarify goals for the one to come. Snowshoeing for the first time with Shelby was a special treat. Hope to capture the modern art quality of the snow on empty pine branches in the studio tomorrow.