World in Stitches

The Quiltathon held March 24th at the Dar Al Cid was a huge success! Actually running from 8 in the morning to 9 at night, more than 50 women dropped in, some staying the entire day, some working in the morning, some working in the afternoon, some in the evening - and the group made - ta da! - either 33 quilts or 35 quilts, depending on who you talk to.

Not all the quilts are finished, there is still work to do - but hey, we definitely accomplished our goal! Wooo Hoooooo q8Quilters!

And we got good press, too!

Kuwait Times:

Arab Times:

Don’t you just love people who, instead of talking about “wouldn’t it be nice if somebody . . . ”  say instead “I can make a difference?” 

I want to introduce you to  Alanna’s Orphans and to Alanna. Alanna is a Canadian member of our Q8Quilters (how cool is that? I have lived in TWO countries that start with a “Q” counting Q8!) whose husband came back from a trip into Northern Iraq just full of stories about an orphanage he had visited here, and how moved he was, and how badly he wanted to help.

I want you to go to her site. Just click on the blue type above, and go read her story.

Our Quilting Guild (the Q8Quilters, remember?), sponsored by our parent organization, the Kuwait Textile Arts Association, have committed to donate at least 20 quilts, around 55″ x 75″ for the orphans, ages between 5 and 15. It makes my heart sing to be involved in such a wonderful project.

We are doing it in March! Quiltmakers month! March 24 we will gather from 9 am to 9 pm to cut, sew, sandwich, quilt, and bind a minimum of 20 quilts. The truth is . . . it’s going to be a lot of fun. When quilters get together, there is SO much laughter! And (ahem) there is always food, really good food, there is always CHOCOLATE!

I am going to create a separate page with instructions for some of the very simple quilts we are going to create for this project, so that if you ever need simple quilts, you can use these very elementary instructions. I will also try to post some of the quilts we come up with for the orphanage.

But hurry now! Go read Alanna’s blog!

This isn’t utterly original. I found a camel in a coloring book and copied it. I love the batik fabric, with it’s mottled variations, and I love the background fabric, which was probably an upholstery fabric (I found it in Qatar and loved it’s desert coloring).

As I stitched it, I found myself thinking how very much I love hand applique.

The friend I made it for has a soul for adventure. I travelled with her once, and learned to admire her steadfast calm, her utter sang froid, and her ability to manage people without ever once appearing bossy. We will all miss her presence, and her invaluable role-model.

I’ve made three map quilts - one seems to lead to another. The first is I Left My Heart in Africa, and I will put a photo up as soon as I can get one taken. The quilt is so huge that photographing it will require hanging it off a balcony - and it will take at least two people. It’s a big quilt.

When I asked my niece if she would ever like a quilt, she immediately said she knew just what she wanted, a Morocco quilt. She will photograph it next time she is home - it’s another photo that got lost in the last move, which is why I am putting all this online.

A local friend asked if I would do a map of Turkey for her, and I was happy to do it; she is a dear woman and . . . I like Turkey, too.

Thinking about a map quilt takes longer than actually doing it.

The very first thing is that you get an Atlas and some graph paper and do a basic outline of the country you are going to do - or continent, as in the case of Africa. Before you make the map, you need to know about how big you want the squares to be - for example, I needed 3 1/2 inch blocks for the Africa quilt to use some of the giraffe fabric I wanted to use, and that was the minimum I could make work.

Once you have drawn the country, you know how many squares you are going to need. I use only squares and half squares for the outline, and on Morocco, I made mountains using a stitch and flip technique.

You will need a project wall to put the rows up on as you sew them. Every two rows sew together, and sew every two the the group above.

You need a lot of fabrics. Where there is sea, you need to have a variety of very lights, to go around the coastline, and a lot more mediums, and a good variety of darks. Tell your friends you will accept any and all scraps that can be used as water, from the very lightest colors to the very darkest.

(With the Africa quilt, friends came up with all kinds of great scraps, including some Egyptian scraps and African symbol scraps. Very cool.)

Where there is land, I use yellow/sand/beige, and, like the water, I have the lightest colors closest to the land mass. Countries surrounding the country you are highlighting get nothing but blah colors, so that the featured color stands out.

Around the edges of the country or continent, I use the darkest colors; the contrast between the dark and light makes the country pop out.

You’ll need to count the number of half square triangles that are land and sea, and the number of half square triangles that are land/land and prepare the half square triangles before you actually start assembling the quilt top.

I also count the land, half triangles and sea/other land squares and put the number in each row. Saves time.

If there are particular motifs you want to include, you have to make them first, unless you intend to applique them later. For the Turkey quilt, my friend wanted a single engine plane and a sailboat, which I made into a dhow. I added the protection against the evil eye and the hand of Fatima. Block them in on the graph.

I usually divide the graph into quarters, and I plan a dominant color for each sector. You will also want transition fabrics to get you from one color to the next.

If you have a large block of land or sea and you want to put something in it, you need to plan that ahead of time, too. In my neices Morocco quilt, there was a large desert area that I couldn’t do anything about (in a rectangular quilt) so I used slightly lighter squares and made a great big camel. I also quilted around it. I told her there was a camel in the quilt, but it was months before she found it - you had to be standing far enough away, and it would pop into view! So - have some fun with this.

Start cutting your squares. You aren’t going to cut the exact number you need, because you need to have lots and lots to choose from, so you cut and cut and cut so that you have masses of squares.

When you sit down to put together the quilt, figure out what dominant color group you will be starting with, and have those closest to you.

As you finish each row, cross it off. As you start the next row, make sure there are no two identical squares next to each other, or above or below.

NE Corner

NW Corner

SW Corner

SW Corner

Sea shading from light to dark

Land shading into Syria

The quilting is easy - you stitch in the ditch on the landmass, and you can stitch waves or stipple or free motion in the sea and land.

Finished project:

I had a dear friend at church who kept insisting I was a quilter.

“No!” I would disagree, thinking quilters were old women who wore glasses and didn’t have a life outside of quilting. And I was busy, taking classes in teaching English as a Foreign Language, and who had the time?

She talked me into taking one class . . .an introduction to hand piecing and hand quilting, six lessons at the local quilt shop.

I was a goner.

I have always loved fabrics, and putting fabrics together. Now, when I teach and people say “but how do you choose your colors?” I tell them the same thing the teacher told me:

“find a piece of fabric - it can be anything, even upholstery fabric - that thrills your soul. Look for photos whose colors you love, look at ads. That which you are drawn to are the colors you will want to use, because you love those colors.”

And that is just what I do. From time to time I make a quilt for someone, and they tell me what I need to use, and I might hate the colors, but I consider it an opportunity to grow a little.

The fabric I loved became the main fabric. I have never again worked with turquoise, pink and yellow, I have never made another pastel quilt, but I still love this quilt, and treasure the hours I spent working - and re-working - the blocks, hand quilting, putting on the binding - which, because I didn’t know anything, is just the back brought forward and folded over the front.

I tried to put it together in Saudi Arabia and discovered that the blocks bled right into the posts and sashes, so I had to run out to find cotton fabric and then had to make a small amount of fabric go a long way, so made this garden path setting . . .somehow, to me, it all worked.

I started this quilt in 1997. I didn’t finish it until 1999m but there were two moves involved, one to Saudi Arabia and another to Germany, and getting a house ready to rent out and getting a son settled in law school . . . The others came more quickly.

That friend who had told me I was meant to be a quilter was right. She gave me two quilting books, no longer published, which were in the boxes of quilting books that got lost somewhere between Doha and Kuwait. Thousands of dollars worth of books, irreplacable - and my quilt journal, with records of all my projects. Thus, this online record.

My second quilt was a graduation quilt for my son, and his school colors were garnet and gold. I don’t really love working with either red or yellow, but when I put them with another color I never in a milliion years thought I would ever use - black - WOW. The quilt totally worked. I ended up loving it.

It doesn’t happen all that often - I have such good self discipline, I work away at my works in progress. . . but I saw the border fabric and fell totally in love. You know the feeling, your heart is beating faster and your breath is shallow and comes in short gasps. . . I ordered the fabric the very night I first saw it, and the coordinating fabric, which you see in the center blocks.

I love Irish chain, I love the motion and I love the way it frames a beautiful fabric, and I love purple and green together, so for me, this all worked.

I had never done a triple Irish chain before, but I found an easy description of how to do it - and did it!

And I mitred the corners of that beautiful striped lilac border fabric:

And then, having just taken a “Master Class” with a lovely woman who tried to teach us so much more than my poor little brain could absorb - but I remembered a couple important things. She said you could do feathers in free motion, it just took a little practice. And she said you had to TRY things, even if you thought you couldn’t do them.

The woman is a total inspiration to me. She is modest, it is just her nature, and sweet, and very funny, too. Her quilts win big prizes every year at the annual quilt show. And she shares, she gives it away, and she encourages people to aspire to do more and to do it better. So . . . with those perfect lilac blocks, I decided to do feather circles.

They aren’t perfect. I used a sandwich plate and a Hera marker (has a sharp edge to mark fabric with a crease, but doesn’t leave any lasting lines) to get perfect circles, and proceeded to make imperfect but passable feather wreaths.

On the front, of course, you can barely even tell they are there. I did them for me, because I needed to know I could do it, not to be perfect. And to me, they are good enough. Here is one from the back, where you CAN see them:

And, because I love the fabric so much and wanted to use ALL of it, or as much as I could, in this quilt, I also made a BIG label for the quilt, with a lilac border frame:

I blocked out my name. Some of you will know me by the quilts, but I am not eager to put my name out on the ‘net. This is just another attempt at documenting my quilts in a way that doesn’t disappear with every move. Sigh!

We did this as a guild project in Germany, with the Rheinland Pfalz Quilt Guild. Each person created their own center block, then the piece was passed to other participants in the Round Robin, each of whom added a border or embellishments. So the center is mine and the outermost setting blocks are mine, as well as the sandwiching and quilting, but friends did the rest.

This was another Kimberly Einmo Mystery Quilt when we were all in the Rheinland Pfalz Quilt Guild. We gathered on a cold cold night, probably in January, and cut and stitched in the gathering room at the Ramstein North Chapel. Not only did we make great quilts, but we also had a potluck supper, great food. One of my earliest quilts.

Sometimes friends are leaving, sometimes it is just right to say thank you. Members of the Q8Quilters each made a block or two in earth colors and in sea colors, and we put the blocks together in quilts to remind Shyamala and Penny of our WARM friendships.

This quilt began in a Mystery Night at Ramstein AFB, taught in 2002 (?) by Kimberly Einmo before her first book was published. Oh! We had so much fun, but making zillions of half square triangles was a chore.

The top went together quickly, but I had a photograph of a tombstone from when we visited Ireland, and I wanted to use it as a quilting motif in the white centers. I also found a Celtic border I liked, but it was very small, and I had to enlarge it over and over to get it to the proper size for my border.

The hand quilting took forever, partially because the white fabric was sort of rubbery, and hand quilting through it was tough. Aaarrgh! I didn’t finish hand quilting until I was back in the Kaiserslautern area for an emergency surgery, and had nothing to do by wait for my return flight to Doha and quilt!