Showing posts with label Concepts Quilts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Concepts Quilts. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Light and Dark in the City

Quilt No. 108
December 2015

Every so often a challenge will come your way.  Sometimes you duck it, sometimes you plunge head long into it, throwing caution and your underwear into the wind.  Light and Dark in the City was kind of like that.  And it all started with a paper bag.

A couple of weeks before Christmas a “paper bag challenge” was announced at quilt guild.  It works like this.  Fabric, notions and sometimes other non-cloth fibre items are put into a small paper bag.  Batting is included, and the quilter who receives the bag must make a small quilt with only the items found in the bag. She can use her own thread and tools, but she may not add any fabric to it.  Sounds pretty simple.  Until you open the bag.

Some of the items in the paper bag.
I’ve never gotten to do one of these before.  Generally, there are only two paper bags, for two lucky quilters.  People who want to give this a shot put their names in a draw.  This particular time not too many people entered.  Everyone was eyeball deep in Christmas preparations at home and the project had to be completed by the next meeting, a measly two weeks away.  My odds of winning one of the bags were considerably better than usual with fewer names in the draw.  And I was pretty darn pleased when my name was announced. 

The bag contained about twenty pieces of fabric in solid colours, or “solids” in quilt world jargon.  The colours were completely random, not necessarily colours you would intuitively partner up together.  There was one print – a black fabric with small white dots.  All these pieces were fairly small and varied in size.  Also included was a placemat sized piece of batting, and two larger pieces of black cotton.  And...a tiny baggie with  red, green, and black woolish pieces in it.  I heard someone behind me say, “Oh, there’s roving too.”  I pretended to know what that meant.  Someone else said, sagely, “Ah, for felting.”  Roving? Felting?  Was it too late to re-raffle the paper bag?  I was supposed to create a quilt and learn how to felt in two weeks?  All while Christmasing-up my house? Gulp.

I brought the paper bag home and placed the pieces on my quilting table.  There were a lot of longish strips – immediately the idea of doing skyscrapers came to me.  I am quite fond of quilting cities (Before, Blue collar).  There wasn’t a lot of time to ruminate about it.  Sometimes I can spend way more than two weeks just thinking about a quilt before I start designing.  This was not going to be one of those times. 

 "Before" a city quilt I made after 9/11.
To get myself started I consulted my favourite coffee table book, Skyscrapers.  This book profiles several famous buildings and gets your mind past the idea that all buildings are tall boxes that are stubbornly rectangular.  It launched my project with a few buildings that were varied in shape, allowing me to comfortably default back to my own building creations...all of which were rectangular boxes. 

I wanted to create a harbour skyline, a long one.  However, this was limited by the size of the batting, which was cut to the dimensions of a placemat.  Ha!  Limiting factor or not, I could at least alter the batting into a long and narrow shape by cutting and piecing it, two activities that basically define quilting.  This generated a new limiting factor – I now had a maximum of 8 ½ inches for those tall skyscrapers.  Not much room left for the water – and no city skyline looks quite right unless it’s on water.  Night time city skylines also have those grand reflections in the harbour water – I wanted to capture those too.  There was just enough room to squeeze in some light reflections using my favourite shiny rayon thread.

To use up the roving - whatever it is - I machine quilted over it to create clouds.  Learning to felt would have to wait for another day.  Or another challenge. 

I finished the piecing and the quilting and turned to my carefully conserved strips of black that I’d saved for the binding.  I was four inches short.  I had three other pieces left that were big enough to help me out – white, hot pink, and the black/white dot piece.  I decided to use the hot pink. To make it look like I’d planned it that way all along, I ran the pink fabric through the printer and printed out the name of the quilt on it.  After many test pieces I was able to sew it on so that the words lined up centered in the quarter inch wide piece of pink on the binding.  Alas, the pink was then too dominant and distracting.  I fused in some strips of black to de-emphasize it as much as I could.  It would have to do – painting black over the pink would have sent me straight to the cheater’s list.

Julie and Linda with their tale of two cities.
I willed myself not to email Linda, the quilter who was doing the same challenge, to see if she would divulge what subject she had chosen for her paper bag project.  When it came time to reveal the quilts at the meeting, we were flabbergasted to find that both of us had created cities.  The cities were radically different with mine horizontal and narrow and distant, and hers an intimate close-up of a warm urban place with an actual felted tree and a felted roof. 

I would have to say that I truly learned a lot from this challenge.  But, nope, I didn't learn how to do felting. I'm saving that for another day.


Friday, April 10, 2015

Fred and Marty


Quilt No. 104
April 2015

There has never been a time in my life when I didn't have at least one creative pursuit as my constant companion.  One of my very earliest memories is that of threading wool on a blunt plastic needle through pre-punched holes around a dog printed on a piece of cardboard.  There were other cards that came with the dog – maybe a duck and a horse, but really I didn't care a fig about the animals.  For me it was all about the needle and that single strand of wool. 

As the years went by I exchanged my over sized plastic needle for shinier and sharper metal needles. This started me down the long path that eventually took me to quilting. The route was long and circuitous.  By the age of six or seven I was already a jaded crafter who had wandered through knitting and button sewing and embroidery. I had become a serial crafter, living for my next needle.  In my endless quest for more, I made the discovery that a motorized version of the needle existed. It was called a sewing machine!  This opened up whole new creative vistas for me as I created a kickass Barbie doll wardrobe that would have made Pierre Cardin scream into his knickers and take up baseball. 

Peep and Squeak in original crewel work.

In the 1980’s my needle mania took me deep into crewel embroidery territory.  I embroidered fruit and birds and wishing wells.  Eventually I came to the Dimensions embroidery kit entitled “Peep and Squeak” designed by Linda K. Powell.  In it, a bird and a mouse sit atop a fence post, completely lost in the bliss of a routine day of easy companionship.  There are a few flowers around the base of the post, but the background is completely empty.  This framed piece hung on a wall for a number of years, eventually losing favour for no discernible reason.  The delightful bird and mouse silently took up residence at the back of a closet.  Every so often I would find them in there.  I would feel guilty.  I would close the closet door and turn my attention to something else.  They never seemed to mind.

After some experimentation with fabric paints one summer, I came up with an interesting piece of fabric that had a blue sky hovering over white leaves.  These were outlined in green, courtesy of the light-sensitive Setacolor dyes.  I had painted the dyes onto white cotton and topped it with mountain ash and other leaves and ferns from the surrounding forest at the cottage.  Next, I let nature takes its course (otherwise known as reading cheap novels on the dock).   The fabric turned out pleasing and vibrant, giving the impression of wind blown foliage.  It figured it would work well as a background fabric if I could find something that wouldn't get lost in the leaves.  


A few years went by before the dyed piece accidentally crossed paths with Peep and Squeak, proving yet again that you should never keep your creative stash too tidy.  Too much organization can be a creative buzz kill.  A stray piece of fabric thrown on a an old piece of embroidery could be the perfect surprise  marriage.   The mouse and bird had enough visual oomph to tame the background.  And since they were reinvented with a whole new look, I decided it was time to give them new names.  They became Fred and Marty.  Names like “Peep” and “Squeak” hardly seemed lofty enough after all that they had been through.

Quilt Notes

Step one was to pry the embroidery out of its frame, and tame the dust monster by hand washing the piece. Crewel work washes surprisingly well if you give it the same respect as a 100% wool sweater, and it comes out completely refreshed.  I then ironed fusible cotton onto the back of the sections prior to cutting out the individual pieces.  A large dose of audacity was required to take the scissors to a piece of embroidery that had once taken me several months to complete! 

 I left about a ¼ inch seam allowance and hand appliquéd the bird/mouse/post piece and the clover pieces onto the background.  This required a lot of attention to detail in order to keep the heavy pieces of embroidery flat against the background. A lot of work had to be done to make the embroidered pieces appear complete again.  I added in crewel stitching where the background showed through, or where the wool strands had separated.  Most of the crewel work was outlined with new stitches in wool.  Finding matching wool was tricky even though I had kept much of the leftover wool from multiple projects my mother or I had completed decades ago.  The wool from the original Peep and Squeak kit was nowhere to be found.  Of course.

I then began free motion machine quilting the background using rayon thread, mostly following the outline of the leaves and then adding in quilted leaf shapes above those.  Gradually I began quilting lines in the sky that would suggest a blustery day.  I used smoke coloured polyester thread to quilt through all layers of wool and fabric to enhance the details in the characters, the post, and the flowers.  The stems for the clover were added on last of all.  The Fred and Marty relocation was complete.



Saturday, June 21, 2014

True North


Quilt No. 96
January 2014

I've always believed that just about the only constant in life is change.  This appeals to the science nerd in me, while satisfying the philosopher as well.  Quilting ties in with this rather nicely.  A baby comes along, we make a quilt.  A wedding, a graduation, same thing.  First “big bed”?  Off to university?  A new home? Quilts all around. Life is unpredictable, full of ups and downs, and we all must inevitably endure changes that are often not of our own choosing.  Sometimes it’s just a skirmish and other times it’s all an all out campaign for survival. Quilts still contribute. Quite often, they’re made for cancer patients. Surely the love with which these are constructed has therapeutic value. And while there are no randomized controlled trials to verify the healing power of quilts, I know that it happens.

Life is long, but never long enough.  We must travel through the gains and losses of the years.  This “I Spy” quilt was made for my dear friend Lily after the loss of her husband.  Lily is a poetic woman with more spirituality in her little finger than most of us possess in our entire cell mass!  She and her husband shared a legendary love of nature and, in particular, the nature of Northern Ontario.  Eventually, circumstances dictated that Lily must leave the North for another part of the province. With the loss of her husband as well, it seemed to me the most daunting of challenges.  And so I sought, from a distance, to give her back a little piece of her beloved North. 

Each 3 inch square is a picture of something you would find in Northern Ontario – loons, a fox, a wolf, a bear, various wild flowers, blueberries, trees – so many trees – and of course a penguin.  While in nature these are strictly found in the Southern Hemisphere, the penguin is still valid, since it represents, well, me. Snow, barns, canoes, ferns, cabins – they’re all part of the fabric of our area. Books are also included, since winters here are long, and at times the comfort of an indoor retreat is compulsory. A fairy is waving around her sewing needle (guilty, yes, me again), butterflies are flitting, snowmen are cheering up wintery days.  Fish, ducks, moose, the kind of thing you might encounter in your own back yard up here, they’re all posing in True North.

This quilt captured the imagination of several quilters in my guild and I was thrilled that they too made “I Spy” quilts.  Someone recently asked me why they’re called  “I Spy” quilts.  The only answer I could come up with was that I had taken the idea from a calendar featuring quilts, and that was the name they had used.  I’m not sure if this is a traditional quilt format in the way that “double wedding ring quilt” or “Dresden plate quilt” are, but it is fitting.
 
My Dad was fond of playing the game of “I Spy” with us when we were kids, and the whole family, adults and children, would get in on the fun.  We never tire of recounting the story of the time he said “I spy with my little eye, something that starts with ‘N’”.  My cousin immediately yelled out the correct answer. “Knob!”

Making an I Spy quilt is great fun, especially if, like me, you have a vast collection of what we call “picture” fabrics.  The calendar where I found the idea called them “conversation” fabrics, which I like even better.  I could talk about my fabrics at length, and I appreciate those of you who are too polite to roll your eyes when I do so.  Hopefully I've given you a quilt to make up for it.  I collect these fabrics wherever I go, but I have to sheepishly admit that it is sometimes difficult to figure just how I will use them.  What do you do with Charlie Brown, twelve kinds of frog fabric, dogs, birds, cats, Kirk and Spock, garden gnomes, spools, horses, leopards, Darth Vader, and grapes? If the scale of the photos is right, you can make endless combinations of I Spy quilts.  Other than that, until inspiration strikes, you can simply admire them.  That’s mostly what fabric is for.

If you should ever decide to take on the adventure of I Spy quilting, here are a few tips.  Cut out more 3 1/2 inch squares than you will need so you have plenty to swap around when you lay them out.  This will help you see what looks best.  You can even cut a few of these as you buy new fabrics so you always have a big selection – a worthy idea, but one I've never had the discipline to execute! 

Sticking with a few basic colours can make these quilts a little more restful on the eyes – but maybe that’s not the look you want.  The spy’s the limit on these.

Never hesitate to use your Christmas fabrics in these quilts!  This resolves several dilemmas.  You get to “keep Christmas with you all through the year” (never easy) and you get to use up those Christmas fabrics that you bought fifteen years ago with no particular project in mind. 

The layout of the squares in these quilts is really best done according to value, that is, how light or dark in overall tone they are.  Tone trumps colour in these quilts. If some squares really stick out  -  perhaps the red ones - clump them together into a shape such as a heart or a square in the centre, or maybe around the edge, or in each corner.  Like wild horses, they need to be corralled for their own safety and your viewing pleasure.

Lay out the squares and leave them there for a couple of days before you start sewing them together.  That way you will start to notice the odd square here and there that might need to be moved to a different spot in the quilt.  You can also take photos of your layout.  “Sore thumb” squares show up instantly in the photo.  Adjusting your photo to black and white will make these ones even more obvious.

For the border, using solid colour fabric or a transition fabric (one that changes through a range of harmonious colours) helps unify it and pull all the colours together. It also gives a calming effect to the overall look of the piece.

 Also, I really like these quilt squares to puff up, so I use polyester batting, and quilt by machine in the ditch between the squares, with no additional quilting in the squares themselves.  An all over pattern will just obscure the pictures. 

Just as I hoped, Lily loves her True North quilt.  It’s part of her healing journey, one that I know she will complete in her own way, one step at a time.  To me, she is an inspiration, and a role model, and I am honoured to be a part of her life.