Duffels
Sometimes I am afraid that some people don’t much like home made things, and you never know who is going to be a person who likes them and who is going to be a person who doesn’t. I made a glorious quilt, a prize winning quilt, and the person I gave it to used it to stabilize a rock table. (00)
My Uptown New York niece, when I hesitantly asked her if she ever wanted a quilt, already knew what she wanted, and picked out the fabrics for it from my stash, and wrote commentary – which I returned to her years later – on what the colors meant to her. Surprise surprise!
I hesitate to give these duffels, just more home made stuff, but most of my friends seem to love them. I had made a Hawaii Quilt for my oldest friend from university, and she loved it, so I made her a duffel with the leftover fabric. She loves it!
I have some wonderful friends, they are also long long time friends, and they love to fish. At Christmas, I made a fishing apron for him, and for this summer, I made them a matching bag for gear to take on their boat. (They loved it!)
My sweet niece just had a baby girl, and while I was giving her a bunch of girly-girl clothes, I gave her big brother a big-boy bag for books and toys, with his name hidden (in quilting) on the bag. He loved it!
This one I haven’t given yet – and I am hoping my sweet daughter-in-law doesn’t know about this blog or doesn’t care about this blog and won’t see it before I give it to her next week, full of baby clothes. She taught English in France for a year:
Because I am slow, and because the lady who taught me how to make these is painstaking, and taught us how to line them completely so no seams show, and how to make nice stuffed straps that don’t hurt your shoulders – they take about a day each to make, but they are so wonderful in these days of bring-your-own-bags.
Barbie Gets An Edge
It’s not really starting a new quilt if you are using up fabrics and pieces you’ve already cut, is it? It’s like using stuff up, not going out and buying something new?
I went to my box of scraps and thought it would be fun to do a quick pink quilt, you always need a girlie quilt when a new baby girl comes along and I had a lot of pink 2 1/2 inch squares to use up. I thought it would be fun to put some 1 inch borders around each one, just to liven things up a little bit.
It isn’t a quick quilt. The four patches were a piece of cake, but putting the borders on is WORK. And I know I am making it harder on myself, but it matters where the colors go, like different colors have to be touching, and they have to sort of drift into one another . . . don’t they? It’s taking a lot longer to put together this top than I intended. At the same time, I find myself enjoying the process, and isn’t that the point, too? I am not doing this like a factory, it’s supposed to be FUN, not work!
Here is where I started:
This is where I am:
I still have six more rows to go:
Here’s where I am having fun – you know how Barbie is all sweet and that sweet pink, mostly like Pepto-Bismo Pink, some innocent and light pinks, sometimes hot pink, but very very pink, right? But I am thinking about Barbie grows up, Barbie faces real life with all it’s thrills and disappointments, the good times and the betrayals, and Barbie shifts into some raging reds, some violent violets and some outrageous oranges – all full of pink, but verging on out-there. I’m having a lot of fun with it. It makes me grin. It’s not a baby quilt. It’s not even a little girl quilt. A girl has to grow into this quilt!
Al Fardan Quilt Room
When I was living in Kuwait, I had a wonderful view from my quilt room – I looked out over the Gulf. Directly below was a busy street – always something interesting going on – and across the street, a family park. It was a fascinating microcosm, and a wonderful aerie for a quilting eagle. 
Now I am back in Qatar, in Doha, and in the same exact villa where I lived when we came to Doha in 2003. No view, but more space and great light.
I got everything unpacked except my quilting room, and then I got really sick. My friend in Kuwait felt sorry for me and flew down from Kuwait and unpacked and put away everything in my quilt room. Before she left, she scolded me, and told me before I start anything new, I have to get working on my stack of unfinished quilts. Yes, she stacked them up for me, and then said “just start at the top and work your way down to the bottom.” She said it in English, but it might as well have been in Arabic – it just isn’t language I understand.
She also sorted all my threads by color and application, and bought special transparent storage boxes so I could see exactly what I have. I felt both very wonderfully taken care of – and also deeply ashamed, that she should see all my flaws. I thank God she loves me anyway.
When she said “What is this box?” and I said “shiny fabrics” she just grinned and said “I have a box called shiny fabrics, too!” Whew!
I told her you really have to trust someone to allow them to come in and unpack your quilt room, it is like someone in your underwear drawer. It’s personal! She just laughed and said she knew things were not the way I would have put them, but it would be easy, a little bit at a time, to get things organized my way. “Like one week you can organize the whites” she said. . . . Ummm. Maybe she better come back – the whites are still not organized, LLOOLLLLL!
Moving away from Doha, and coming back, I changed a few thingsin the quilt room, but not much. What I really love is that I have great light, all day long, coming in over my left shoulder and from behind.
This is the books, teaching materials and reference books. Oh, umm . . . err . . . and the stack of unfinished quilts that I must work on in the background.
This is fabric storage (behind the purple and green curtain), ironing station and business station:
Even room for a drying rack when my visiting Kuwait quilting buddies bring me more of the fabulous batiks we love to use in our brighter quilts:
The hand quilting station, although we all love this chair, and it is where I sit to read the paper, work on my computer, draw out plans for a new quilt, or where my husband or cat sometimes sits:
My work table:
There’s even a bed that someone COULD sleep in, except that most of the time it gets heaped with projects I am working on.
I also need to show you the Quilting Assistant Station:
I love this room!
KTAA Annual Exhibition
There were some totally fabulous entries, and the grand winner – who could argue! Shyamala Rao just knocked the socks off everyone with her fabulous quilt.
Mine were much more modest.
Ursa Major was the most fun. I don’t normally like mysteries, but this one gave me a lot of control. Every step had suggestions, and measurements, but you had a lot of latitude within the instructions. Mine shows the great North Star in the center of the quilt, and the Big Bear, endlessly circling the North Star.
Kathi Ewan’s instructions were just fun! I felt so free! I knew the fabrics I wanted to use, and the quilt kind of made itself. Normally, I start out knowing where a quilt is going, but this one, with each step, I rested and reflected before making the next round, and I got more and more excited about the quilt with each step, ending with the silvery little salmon circling on the penultimate border – a bear’s gotta eat!
At one point in the quilt, I tried some low-contrast piecing, the star has two kinds of white. I wasn’t happy, and was going to change to higher contrast when LeAnn Aldulrahim said no, to go with the white on white and try the quilting technique Paramjeet taught us two years ago with the zig-zag stitch. “Hmmm,” I thought, and went home and did it in silver, and oh – what fun. The bear tracks circling the quilt, the 45°angled borders around the center medallion and again at the last border – just fun. I had a great time with this quilt. It’s icing on the cake that it won the Children’s Choice award. I made it for the child within!
Another joyful, childish quilt – The Stars that Dance in Southern France (in their underpants) was started to use up some of the provincial French fabrics I gathered so lovingly for so many years, but found myself thinking I was turning into Gollum with his precious, if all I did was look at them now and then and say “someday . . . “
My husband added the part about the underpants, and I just let it stand. I thought it was a hoot.
It took third in the Traditional Pieced category. It makes me smile when I look at it.
Last but not least, KaleidoStars is a baby quilt for a new baby on the way, sex unknown, but I loved these Indian batik fabrics we found down in the souks, and couldn’t wait to get my hands going on something that would show them off and let the lines and dots sing and move around the quilt. It’s all about the motion:
They’re all packed away now, except for KaleidoStars, which I need to mail soon, very soon. We are moving back to Qatar at the end of the month, and just today I finished packing up (AAARRGHHH!) the quilt room.
Iceburg Experiment
My friend Paramjeet showed a new piece at our Quilt Guild meeting on Monday. She is working on half square triangles for a quilt, and with the trimmings she had left over from trimming down the half squares so they would be perfect, she made a small wall hanging of little irises in a field. It was beautiful. I looked at it and thought “I could never do that.”
Except that today, as I was finishing the quilting on the Lenten Cross, my mind kept turning to all my scraps from my own half square triangles, from the mystery quilt I am working on, and how they are all right here, right in the waste basket and hmmm. . . . I dug them out.
Paramjeet used flannel . . . so I go digging for flannel, only two, one orange with orang-er stripes, no that won’t do, and one purple . . . well it will have to do. I cut a square about 14 inches to play with.
I did just what she said she had done, well, maybe not exactly because I had a pile of scraps and I couldn’t remember how she made them all lie still while she stitched, I think she said they just stuck to the flannel but mine are not so well behaved, so I have to innovate a little . . .
And just as I am thinking what a total failure I am having, I make myself keep going, make myself finish, clip away the excess tulle, pin it on the wall, walk away, turn around and see if it looks anything like an iceburg on an icy sea . . . and . . . it does! Magic! Thank you, Paramjeet!
Update: Well, my little bubble has burst. A friend said she really likes my “praying hands” even though the attachment was labled “iceburg.” Sigh. Back to the drawing board.
Lenten Cross
I’ve been thinking our church needed a new hanging for Lent. We meet in the basement of a church that is not our own, and we don’t have a lot of things to make it our own. Lent this year is particularly somber, and as I am experimenting with low contrast (because I really love high contrast and I need to challenge myself) I envisioned a lighter purple with texture on a darker purple.
I went straight home from church, pulled out the fabrics and started cutting. After I got the main parts assembled, I needed to let it hang a little bit so I could percolate how I was going to finish it.
The lighter purple is an Italian textured silk I just love. The center is cut from quilter’s plastic, covered with the darker purple and then with the silver fishnet, an effect I just love and reflects Kuwait’s fishing and pearling history.
The priest blessed the cross today, and it can be hung tomorrow.
African Pathways Quilt
I know it looks like I haven’t been producing for a while and to some extent, it is true. I am working on a mystery quilt, I am working on a serious hand applique border to a pineapple quilt, and I have finished a few little projects but I forgot to photograph them, and once they are gone, they are gone, sometimes I don’t even remember I did them!
This one I just finished, and it was a labor of love.
In June of last year, a dream came true – we were able to take our son and our daughter-in-law on safari with us in Zambia. We stayed in the Robin Pope Camps – Tena Tena, Nsefu and Nkwali – and a second dream came true – at Nkwali, we stayed in the famed Robin’s House, which was pure heaven for a party of four who would then be going in separate direction. A third dream came true – they loved the trip as we hoped they would.
I had intended to make this quilt all along – for our son and his wife – and I started it, and had a lot of fun with it. I’ve been collecting fabrics forever with an African theme, and then a good friend had spent several years in Africa and I begged for some scraps from her, which she gladly and generously gave me.
Then my husband had a trip scheduled to the states unexpectedly, and I have an opportunity to get the quilt sent back with him. It hurried the process a little. I had it all put together and machine quilted, but I wanted to quilt some animal tracks on the paths. More on that later.
I don’t have a way to hang the quilt properly to get a good full scale photo – the quilt finished size is 84″ x 84″ – so I put it on the floor, climbed a ladder, shot the quilt and then tried to shop out all the background, so that is why it all looks so funky.
My husband says he loves this one almost as much as I Left My Heart in Africa.
I started with the Elephant tracks:
The elephant tracks took a lot longer than I had thought they would. I had done them on the entire path. Time is growing short. I did one set of lion prints:
And then, nearby, I did one set of impala tracks:
That is going to have to do. I told my husband, whose tracking book I had used to do the animal prints, that the hungry lion was waiting in the bush and ate the impala, and that is why there are so few lion and impala prints. :-0
Here is the label on the back (you can see the backing fabrics on the entry for March 2, 2009)
The rest of this entry is purely for people who love fabrics. You have been warned.
There is one fabric in this quilt that is almost thirty years old. It is the remainder of three meters of fabric I bought when we lived in Tunisia, lo, these many many many years ago. I loved it then, and I love it now. It has been in all three of the Africa quilts, in many other quilts made for family members and close friends, and now I am down to mere scraps, fortunately, enough to include in this quilt, because Tunisia, although North African, is truly also Africa. The pattern featured Bedouin jewelry patterns, the hand of Fatima, crescents, special pins to hold the sefsari together at the shoulders – and it is in turquoise and purple (be still my heart!) with black and white accentuation. Here it is featured in the center, and the second scrap is in the upper right quadrant of the quilt:
I was really really lucky to have a good friend who had also lived in Africa – she shared some scraps with me. There are people who might think some of them are ugly – an artist friend of mine told me once long ago “there are no ugly fabrics, only people lacking in imagination.” She also told me “the eye will blend!” two mantras I repeat to myself when I start obsessing over just the right fabric or just the right placement. She was right. You can cut chunks out of fabrics, any fabric, and make it work. There are some really really fun fabrics in this quilt:
Don’t you just love it? This one was from a big orange, very orange celebration of Gabon’s independence!
This fabric was from Senegal; don’t you love the digitalized palm tree?
I will admit, it was a challenge for me working in browns and yellows, not my favorite palette at all, but I find when I force myself out of my comfort zone, I grow, and learn to see thing in new ways. Some of the colors here I really did not like, but my artist friend was right – the eye will blend. Africa is a country of enormous diversity, and the quilt incorporates some wildly disparate colors, prints and values.
African Pathways is made with two simple blocks – a hatchet block, sometimes also called an anvil, and a 4 patch. In this quilt, all blocks were 4″ finished. The hatchet block is made by stitching a 2 1/2 incl square diagonally across opposite corners (diagonally) and cutting off the excess, leaving a 1/4 inch seam, flipping the top down and ironing, and a four patch is made up of 4 smaller blocks, cut 2.5 inches.
I have a friend who is a beginning quilter. When I showed her how the quilt was made, she said “Oh! I could do that!” It was an Obama moment – “Yes. You can!” This quilt pattern is a real confidence builder, and a great teaching quilt.
There are many, many ways these flexible blocks can be put together. Other quilts using these blocks are here:
Hugs and Kisses
Reciprocals
Black and White and Blood all Over
Quick Quilts for Charity (Instructions for making two hatchet block quilts)
Here is my computer plan for the quilt; having the grid all mapped out helped me to plan the pathways and to know how many of each fabric to cut for pathways, how many 2 1/2 inch squares to cut for the 4-patches, and how to place them. The quilt is built in quadrants and then sewn together.
Happy Anniversary, lovebirds.
He Loves My Backsides ;-)
“I really love this fabric,” said my husband, fingering a piece of faded fabric with giraffes striding across the plains. He had just finished telling me about a man he had met and they discovered they were both quilter’s husbands, so they had a lot to talk about, including “har har har” how their wifes said they could quilt when they retired.
“Good reason to keep working,” they concluded.
“Why is it so faded?” he asked, and I reminded him that we live in a bright sunny country, and I keep this quilt wrong side up on the bed so the front part doesn’t fade. I make my quilts to be used, not kept in some dark closet, preserved for the ages. I want my quilts to be worn out. We aren’t going to live forever. I don’t care about a legacy – I want people to enjoy using the quilts I give them. My husband says he wants to be buried in this one.
Sometimes when you are working on a quilt, there are fabrics you love, but they just don’t work in the quilt you are making. That’s what happened with these. I managed to use small scraps of them, but the scale of the giraffe and the guinea fowl was so large that they wouldn’t fit in the pattern I was using. Since this is the first Africa quilt, and I had no idea I would ever make another, I wanted to use up all the Africa / Africa theme fabrics.
“Show me the backing on the newest Africa Quilt” he demanded, so I showed him and he loved those fabrics, too.
He was with me when I bought this one in the airport in Lusaka:
These were pieces I added to complete the back. I am glad I am married to a man who can appreciate fabrics!
A Workshop on Dyeing
“It’ll be fun!” my friend said, telling me about a class being taught through the Kuwait Textile Arts Association.
“Ummm. I don’t think so. I don’t like getting all messy,” I said, hating myself even as I said it for sounding so prissy.
“You know how much fabric we buy that she (the instructor) makes – we might as well learn how to do it ourselves,” she went on, encouraging me. She knows I will give in; sometimes my first response is just negative.
So there we were, in a sun-drenched location, on one of the prettiest days in Kuwait, four of us in our raggedy clothes because yes, it was going to get a little messy. The instructor made it all so easy – charts with exact measurements, equipment labled with how much to add of what . . . it was fun, and mostly, it was easy. We are all totally into color, and we got to do a little experimentation.
First, we chose one color and did gradations, six fabrics from very light to very dark. I asked if I could use two colors, blue-violet and a little black, because I wanted to end up with a very Dark Iris color, and I wanted cold icy blues to dark cold purples. The results exceeded my every expectation:
I wish you could see the entire pieces – they have so much flow, motion and texture. Perfect for a cold, wintery quilt with sparks of green, blue and even turquoise in the icy purple. I could see snow capped mountains, icy streams, distant mountains, rising mists . . . these are perfect Alaskan colors.
We worked in teams, and as we worked on my partner’s colors, a spoon flipped, and the cup full of dye spun out of her hand, spiralling the spatter on me, the wall, the table, the floor – it was everywhere, a brilliant sapphire blue. I was wearing my oldest jean skirt (I could barely zip it) so honestly, it just didn’t matter. It took us forever to clean it all up. My poor friend kept saying “Sorry. Sorry. I’m so sorry,” and finally, as we were both down on our hands and knees sopping up sapphire blue I started laughing and said “Friend, I am down here on my knees just thanking God it was YOU that did it and not me!” If we hadn’t been laughing so hard, we probably could have cleaned up faster, but even the spill was a lot of fun. I had blue toes when I got home! I looked like something out of Braveheart!
The next exercise we did had to do with color families, using two dyes, six fabrics, and varying the proportions from one end of the spectrum to the other. I chose yellow to fushia. The results totally wowed me:
And then – the grand finale – direct application dye. We had squirt bottles, and could apply the dye wherever and however we wanted. We could mix, we could scrunch, we could try anything. It was, it was like being a kid again. My result is like something out of the 1970’s – I totally love it!
I seem to do a lot of quilts with seas in them, and my hands are itching to get busy on another one. These fabrics are inspiration for both sea and sand . . . love those orangey sand colors, too.
If you have a chance to take this class, grab it and run! It is SO much fun!
Mystery Quilt Mayhem (Part 1)
I admit it. I am a control freak. I did a couple mystery quilts early on in my quilting life and found myself looking at those quilts critically ever after, wishing I had used a darker color here, a lighter color there, etc. I am choosy. I like making choices, and I like enough contrast in just the right places to make a quilt work.
So when our Q8 Quilters announced a mystery quilt, for me it was all like “Ho Hum” until she started telling us about it.
Our first month, we have to make a 20 inch block (20 1/2 inches unfinished) that can be turned on point. We will need about 4 yards of one fabric for the background. We choose our own colors, our own theme – Hey! This sounds interesting, and as challenging as we want it to be. In spite of myself, I was already planning my 20″ block.
I did all the math. I drew it out on my squared paper. I gathered my fabrics and carefully decided where I wanted them to fall in the pattern. I chose a Lone Star Center, because I have all these beautiful snowflake patterns in blue and silver, and I am dying to use them in a very wintery quilt.
It went together fine, and then I placed the insets by machine. Hmmm. Not so good. I did a Lone Star as my second ever quilt (I know, I know, fools rush in) which was in Seminole Colors as a graduation quilt for my son and I remember piecing and repiecing to get all the diamonds to line up. I did all the inset squares and triangles by hand. Now I remember why.
When I finish, my heart sinks. No matter how careful I was, no matter how I planned and measured – the square is more like 24 inches than 20. I don’t know how that happened.
As I am looking at it, and it looks all wonky, I see that I scorched a section as I was ironing. I quickly call my friend who knows everything about home things, and she gave me several suggestions. I tried the baking soda suggestion, and then, as I was rinsing the baking powder out, further disaster struck – my focus fabric, an Alaska-at-midnight blue with silver stars ran all over the crystal pristine white and silver that was to work as a snowflake. Horrors!
It was late in the day. I know there is too much wrong here to salvage, and, thankfully, I have a lot of the fabric; I can do it again.
The next day I started again, using a half inche less in every diamond measurement. I changed a couple fabrics, and I think I like the result. I also set in the setting triangles and squares by hand. Piece of cake.
I had to add a frame to bring it to 20 inches, but I was pleased to come as close as I did, working with so many seams, diagonals and a fixed block size. If anyone knows where there is a chart to tell you what size diamonds to use to get size X Lone Star block, please let me know.
Here are the results:
The one on the top is the one I will use as the Mystery Quilt center. The one on the bottom . . . it needs a little work. I don’t think I will trash it, but I need to think about it for a while.
