I’ve got two girl babies coming who will need (expect) quilts, and I also need to have some little bags, so that was my work for this week:
It’s harder to work with silks and slippery shiny fabrics, but at the same time, it’s fun because the results are so lovely:
Also made tablier style Christmas aprons for two buddies:
The problem with a very important quilt is that you can over think. I know what I want a baby quilt to be – I want it to be colorful. I want it to be lovable. I want it to be big enough to go to pre-school and kindergarten for nap time. I want it to end up a beloved rag, dragged here and there, washed innumerable times, all used up.
I’ve probably made a hundred baby quilts. But when it came to a quilt for my first grandchild, I dithered. Nothing I could come up with was good enough. Finally, I had to give myself a good talking to, “JUST GET STARTED!” I yelled at myself in a figurative way. Just do it.
It’s an OK quilt. Not the best effort I have ever put forth, but I came to the conclusion – it’s not the quilt that is important, but the recipient. God willing, he will love it because it came from me, and because I am a safe place, a place he can count on for unconditional love.
So – it’s just a quilt. For a very important Quentin! 🙂
Here is what it looks like now – all ready for houseguests:
Momcat and Hayfa – here is YOUR room, just waiting for you. 🙂
Hayfa, come in early January. I will plan to need your help! Or come Dec 30th; I am teaching a class on the Sloppy Stars; you can help, LOL!
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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. 🙂
World in Stitches 