Showing posts with label quilt art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quilt art. Show all posts

Sunday, December 13, 2020

The Owl's Tree


The Owl’s Tree
Quilt No. 132
October 2020

This quilt ended up with exactly zero of the pieces it started out with. It redefined the term “fall”, as pieces fell from favour and were eliminated from the quilt. 

I started out with the Time to Harvest Fall fabric panel.  I have a love/hate relationship with panels – their design often baffles me. My first beef:  why do fabric designers make panels with pictures of unequal sizes?  There is no easy way to cut them apart and sew them into a quilt.  So…the very thing they are intended for – simplicity – is thwarted.  Clearly this is a conspiracy to force us to get out our rulers and calculators and add bits and pieces (alias sashing) until we have a set of blocks that are all the same size and can now be assembled into a whole.  The unlike-sized units on the fabric panel are creatively flustering. Usually, things are deliberately made into standard sized units – charm squares, jellyrolls, bolts of fabric.  Even strips of bacon are all the same length, well, at least until you cook them.

I once had a snowman panel printed with pictures. No two pictures were the same size.  I cut the various snowman pictures out, trying numerous unsatisfactory configurations until my crowning achievement was a Ziploc bag of frayed snowmen parts.  The arranging and rearranging of these shards played out over many sessions and lasted for years. At the end of it I had a single postcard quilt and a bag of bits that continues to make me groan with despair every time I come across it.

 Fabric panels can have a further frustrating challenge.  They’re are often printed with barely half an inch between the individual pictures. It’s also common to have a different colour border printed around each picture.  Being fabric, a certain degree of wonkiness invariably creeps in during the printing process.  The squares are never quite square enough to cut out without a bit of compulsory weeping. That elusive one quarter inch that is needed to cut out and sew the pictures onto the mandatory sashing strips can be impossible to find. 

None of the picture fabric from the Harvest panel ended up in the quilt, despite my best efforts with sashing.  The pieces were ultimately torn out and sacrificed in a desperate attempt to throw a life line to the central owl/tree block. That block came from a pattern in the Piecemaker’s Quilt Calendar from 1997, proving yet again my father’s sage advice that if you keep something for twenty years, you will use it.  However, I would have to say that did not always ring true.  The giant stone millwheel he brought home from the dump exceeded the twenty-year-use-clause, but was ultimately just too big to cart back to the dump. At least it made a good conversation piece, propped against the house.  For the first five years.

To finish the owl quilt, I used another panel, the Autumn Dream Big Leaf Panel from Hoffman. 


This was an impulse buy (my husband’s impulse, not mine), and ended up being yet another panel that I had no idea how to use.  My fabric panel collection is one of my favourites. It must be, because it now occupies more than one box. I keep repeating the same mistake of being seduced by panels that look pretty but offer no obvious way to be used.  I have a friend who says that we are doomed to make the same mistake over and over until we learn the lesson.  She just didn’t tell me that I would accumulate a number of boxes during that lesson.

I cut the leaf panel to make a border for the owl block, using appliqued pieces to hide the seams and/or complete the leaves into whole shapes.  Everything matched up nicely, but the leaves dominated the piece and the tree block receded into visual obscurity.  It was just life real life, where I could never quite pick out the owl in the tree. I eventually hit on the idea of appliqueing the brown fabric into what looks like a border between the block and the leaves.  This tamed the beast enough that I could live with it.

The owl reappeared and settled into his tree and sighed, glad to be done with it all.

This piece was rescued from the original Harvest quilt panel.




Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Almost Midnight

Almost Midnight
Quilt No 20, April 2001
Update March 2020

Have you ever looked endlessly at one of your quilts and thought “I love/hate you?” It’s the same feeling I get with do-nuts.  While I was pleased with the sleepy winter village and the big moon and sky of Almost Midnight, my eye kept snagging on the poorly executed binding.  I wanted to replace the binding, but I had no matching fabric for this twenty-year-old quilt.  The drawer full of black fabric was a bust.  Time for Google.

This wasn’t the first time this quilt had me quizzing the internet.  I initially saw a version of this quilt hanging in a quilt shop in a city some two hundred miles from where I lived.  It was charming!  I asked to buy the pattern.  They would not sell it to me. What?! I had to take their workshop to get the pattern. I explained that I lived impossibly far away, expecting them to be sympathetic and accommodating.  They were not.   They even seemed a tad on the gleeful side, saying I was unlikely to even find the pattern elsewhere, since it was from a long out-of-print book.  I would have to say that this is the only time in my twenty-year quilting odyssey that I have encountered any quilt shop employee who was uncooperative.  It’s been my usual experience that quilt shop ladies are the absolute best, and I generally want to shower them with chocolates and praise.  They did grudgingly tell me that the pattern was in an unattainable book called Piece on Earth, and that the quilt title was “Santa Cloths”.  The original pattern had a Santa with a sleigh full of presents where you see the moon on my quilt..


I’m not sure if I turned to Google, since in the year 2000, Google was still a speck in the eye of the internet, and cyberspace was largely an unpopulated wild west.  However, as a librarian, I was pretty familiar with the blossoming digital world, and I persevered until I located a used copy in a book store in California. This type of purchase is boringly ordinary now, but it felt like a glorious victory at the time. When the book arrived I ripped open the package in anticipation.  There was the quilt…but the pull-out pattern had been, well, pulled out.  It was after all, a used book.  However, the vendor had failed to describe it as an abused book.
Photo of "Santa Cloths" quilt in pattern book.
The game was on.  I scanned in the photo
and enlarged it.  I wanted a non-holiday themed quilt, so I replaced the Santa with a moon.  I used up my various black and gold star fabrics that I’d been collecting, and practiced my curved piecing on the moon and the sky.  I hand quilted it with gold metallic thread and capped it off with a less than stellar binding.  In my defense, I’d have to say it looked okay to me at the time…

Here in 2020 I once again found myself consulting the internet on behalf of this quilt, trying to find some suitable black/gold star fabric for the binding - kind of tricky, since in the trendiness of the textile world, this type of fabric is on the outs. However, once again, my search was successful, thanks to Fabric.com.

Our guild holds Sew Days every month or two. Members can take a workshop, or just bring their own project to work on.  These are most definitely “don’t miss” events, as we get to spend a whole day together immersed in quilting and friendship.  A pizza lunch is the equivalent of the cherry on top. My plan was to take this quilt to the next Sew Day. Replacing the binding would be the perfect one-day project.  To prepare ahead, I removed the old binding and repaired a wonky seam so that I could square the quilt up properly.  I’d originally neglected that as well.  While I was at it, I added machine quilting to the buildings and fleece roving for the chimney smoke.  I pondered why two of the houses lacked chimneys, but left it that way, since it was accurate to the original pattern photo.  My guess it those two houses have electric heating.

After I repaired the wonky seam, I got out my long straight edge and tried to figure out where to cut.  This very quickly revealed that the inner border was waaaay off kilter, being much narrower at the bottom than the top.  My chronic eye-balling of the ugly binding had kept this a secret from me until now.  Ugh. No way was this fix going to be completed on a Sew Day!

Now what? There was only one option.  The inner and the outer borders had to go.  I gritted my teeth and removed them. I would have to replace them with new fabric.  But that would give me a three-layered quilt surrounded by an extended area of only one layer of border fabric.  Batting and backing would need to be added in, and at the end of it, there could be no raw seams on the back that would reveal the deed. Double ugh.  Fortunately, I had lots of extra fabric, since Fabric.com had generously sent me several extra inches, as this piece was the end of the bolt.  Or maybe they just knew…

I attached the inner and outer borders as you would normally do on a quilt top.  I then hand basted batting strips to the wrong side of the new borders.  After querying more than a few befuddled brain cells, I figured out that putting facings on the quilt, rather than a traditional binding, would address all the problems, including covering the newly added batting on the back of the quilt.  It worked!  In order to avoid rippling the quilt interior, I added only one machine quilted line around the outer border, to anchor all the layers. 

The straightforward re-binding plan was just like one of those situations where you purchase a new refrigerator.  It’s two inches too tall for its allotted space.  You then need new cabinets…oh  they show the worn-out floor…gee whiz the stove now looks dodgy…It starts out simple and very quickly get complicated, expensive, and guilt-inducing.  But in the end, the whole quilt got an much needed update, and it has now been restored to the “love it” category.


Monday, April 18, 2016

Killbear Pine: The Canadian Wilderness


Quilt No. 110
March 2016

This year the quilt guild I belong to decided that we were suffering from an embarrassment of riches. It was time to spend like drunken sailors, but instead of cases of rum our plunder would be quilting workshops.  And we wouldn’t go to the workshops, we would have them come to us.  Such is the power that can be wielded when the membership fees finally exceed the expenses.   

For part of our spree we brought in quilter/designer Joni Newman. Her simplified stained glass technique lends itself beautifully to the creation of quilts that capture the Canadian wilderness in a style that is reminiscent of The Group of Seven. 

I remember learning about The Group of Seven in high school art class.  Well…I sort of remember.  When I did a little neuronal fact checking, the bits at my disposal included that there were seven of them and they were artists.  Trees and rocks were involved - especially lonely singleton trees clamped onto rocky shorelines. Tom Thompson came to mind.  I was definitely a little fact impaired. 

Looking to round out my knowledge, I discovered that most of what I knew was incorrect.  While The Group of Seven started off with seven members, they actually ended up with more than seven.  No one thought to change the group name.  They were officially active from 1920-1933, and while Tom Thompson was a major stylistic influence, he was never a member, having passed away in 1917.  And yet we still associate his iconic painting, The Jack Pine, with the Group of Seven.  In essence, their most famous, representative painting was done by a non-member.  It doesn’t get any more Canadian than that.
The Jack Pine/Tom Thompson 1917

Believing that a distinct Canadian art could be developed through direct contact with nature, the Group was best known for their paintings of the Canadian landscape. Over eighty years later we still adore their paintings and I still yell “Group of Seven!” whenever I spot a lone gnarly pine tree against a backdrop of granite.

I was able to add my own touch to Joni’s Killbear Pine design by pillaging my stash and using some of the blue fabrics I’d previously dyed.  The particular design is based on the scenery of Killbear Provincial Park, located on the Georgian bay shoreline of Lake Huron, part of Ontario’s Great Lakes. 




Friday, May 24, 2013

Mars or Bust!


Quilt No. 93
April 2013

Quilters are invariably plagued with UFO’s.  To outsiders this seems inexplicable.  Why would aliens be especially interested in quilters? 

When you’re part of a group, you forget that your use of terminology becomes highly specialized.  Doctors get criticized for this all the time. Patients are baffled by their slap-happy use of medical terms.  You leave the doctor’s office and you have no idea what osteokerflugenglockenitis is but you’re pretty sure it’s not good.  It’s hard to believe that quilters could be guilty of the same offence, but they are. 

I was telling my sister, a non-quilter, about upcoming Project UFO at my quilt guild.  Participants would register and pay ten dollars.  Presentation of a finished UFO by the given deadline would result in the return of the ten dollars.  Failed completion would mean that the money would be donated to the guild.

She instantly became fascinated with the idea that we would all be willing to do “UFO” quilts.  I began describing the orangey fabric I was going to use for mine.  It was a piece of “rust dyed” fabric that I'd created by spraying a piece of white cotton with vinegar and then placing steel wool on it.  Amazing shades and trails of rust dyed the fabric orange.  Unfortunately, this piece had fallen into “UFO” status for quite a while after an unsuccessful attempt to turn it into a foggy lake with flamingos in silhouette. 

My sister thought my UFO should feature Mars.  Since the Mars Balloon Lander had such an intriguing shape, she envisioned this as a prominent feature of the quilt.  Just like the YouTube video, it would enter the scene with a giant bounce!  There would even be a “Welcome to Mars” sign to greet the Lander.

I wasn’t really grasping that her UFO concept wasn’t the one that quilter’s are familiar with, but was instead the more usual UFO designation of “Unidentified Flying Object”.  Not recognizing our disconnect we both went on yammering about our various ideas for this unusual background, with me championing flamingos, and my sister off on a tangent on a distant planet.  I finally backed the nomenclature truck up for her, explaining that in the quilt world, UFO means UnFinished Object.

And so what my sister ultimately dubbed “The Nincompoop Challenge” came into being.  This quilt is a mashup of the creative efforts of a quilter and a non-quilter. Occasionally this kind of collaboration leads to completely unexpected horizons.  Flamingos may find themselves lounging around on Mars. 

Quilt Notes

My sister did the original drawing for this quilt as well as the embroidery.  The moons Phobos and Deimos can be seen in the Martian sky, as can a single crystal representing the constellation Sagittarius. The rust dyeing technique left the fabric quite rough, so machine quilting was not an option.  I did a minimal amount of hand quilting, just enough to enhance the contours.  The flamingos were computer printed onto iron-on cotton, oh-so-carefully cut out, and fused onto the quilt.  They seem to be quite content in their new extraterrestrial habitat.

A hasty initial diagram. 

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Goin' Global


Quilt No. 88
January 2013

I always feel that a sort of collaboration has taken place when I take a quilt class or learn a new technique from another quilter. Any kind of inspiration that starts me off on a new quilt gives me that wondrous feeling.  Usually, the source of my inspiration is pretty elusive – I don’t get many calls from Fred Turner or Randy Bachman (Blue Collar) or Tommy James (Crystal Blue Persuasion). 

The “collaboration” that resulted in Goin’ Global was entirely different.  The Timmins Quilters’ Guild was lucky enough to host Kathy Wylie for one of her dynamic and interesting talks last fall.  Goin’ Gobal began in a workshop she taught at Lori’s Sewing Place

But first, let’s move back in time a little. I credit my unabated lust for quilting to my Grandmother.  When I was four or five years old she would sit me down with a jar of buttons, a piece of cotton, and a needle and thread. I would be spellbound for hours.  At times both the buttons and the cloth would be sewn to my pants or the sofa, but she pretended not to notice.  Shortly after I mastered button sewing, I graduated to embroidering my name on every tea towel that wasn't nailed down. I've loved needlework in any form since then.

It was the same with paper snowflakes.  I don’t remember the teacher who first taught me how to take those painfully blunt school scissors and cut out paper snowflakes. It’s something I still do now and then for the sheer joy of cutting paper and seeing what will be revealed. 

Kathy Wylie’s creative adaptation of the paper snowflake technique has resulted in her striking and award winning quilts.   For me, her “sewflake” technique has an irresistible pull.  It’s a wonderful example of what makes quilting not just good, but great – the willingness of quilters to share their knowledge.  When so many activities have been reduced to mere acts of competitiveness, quilting culture still fosters camaraderie with the sharing of “secrets” and discoveries.

And it’s no big secret that I have a fondness for penguins.  Who doesn't adore those stoic, waddling, black and white birds that have cast aside flight in favour of swimming?  So when Kathy encouraged us to choose favourite objects or shapes to launch our in-class creations, I chose penguins.  After a bit of happy trial and error, I ended up with twelve penguins holding wingtips and dancing in a circle .

My next task was to figure out what twelve penguins might encircle.  In the wild it would most likely be twelve other penguins, but one could easily end up with way too many penguins trapped on a quilt.  Maybe…a globe of the Earth?  A lovely idea, but one I’d used too many times already.  A snow globe?  It provided whimsy and magic with a quiet snowfall sifting down on a tiny village.  I printed out the village portion of a snow globe image I purchased on the internet, but used my own dyed background and foregrounds for the globe.  To create the illusion that it was snowing, I painted a piece of cotton with my beloved Setacolor dyes and sprinkled ground up oatmeal flakes on it while it was still wet.  Success in only two tries!
  
The penguins were hand appliquéd onto the background over the snow globe.  The white portions of their bodies were fused to the dark part and outlined with hand embroidery. It was definitely more fun than adding my name to a tea towel.  When the piece was finished I trapunto’d (stuffed) the snow globe to give it the nice rounded shape.  

I added some radiating dark “flame” shapes.  It was kind of dull looking until I found the intense blue swirly star fabric in my stash. The penguins seemed to approve of that.  The quilt began to look like Southern Lights or perhaps a giant splash-down.  I like to have a quilt that remains open to interpretation.  It allows others to come up with their own idea of what the quilt might have to say.  I was thrilled by interpretive comments from friends.  One, a poet, wrote to me that this quilt was “almost like a fresh dahlia growing and sending life into the universe. The circle village seems enveloped by comforting leaves of hope and life. Radiant stars encourage sparkling appreciation of living in today's world”.  For her, the penguins were “holding hands as they encircle the world with love and helping hands. ... If humankind did this - what an amazing healing world we could share.” I was humbled by her interpretation of the blue rays “of light suggesting that we need to keep our hearts and minds open to one another - to try to be non-judgmental - to share and improve what we can in a world of incredible beauty and yet so much suffering.”

Another friend viewed the quilt as an expression of environmental concern.  “I see this as a reminder from our vulnerable friends, that even though they are supposed to be living in a cool blue world, things are heating up everywhere, and although the "flames" have just recently manifested in their environment, and are still weak (blue), they will be progressing in our lifetime to hot yellows and reds. Then where will our little friends be?”

Yet again I am elated at the power of fabric to speak to us in so many unexpected ways.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

The Happy Nine Patch


Quilt No. 82
February 2012

In the fall of 2011 our quilt guild president announced this year’s challenge. We were to do a nine patch quilt. Apart from that, there were no limitations – it could big or small, conservative or wacky, or any variation of the nine patch we wanted – whatever suited our personal styles.

Challenge quilts are kept secret until we do our “reveal”. Our guild has a variety of quilters, who do every possible type of quilting imaginable. That’s the great thing about quilting – you could go on for a lifetime and never come to the end of the permutations of what can be done with a pile of fabric and a sewing machine, or a needle and thread. It’s like composing music – the possibilities will never be exhausted. I actually used to worry that this could happen when I was a kid – that musicians would finally come to the end of every conceivable combination of notes. I speculated that by the time I was ten years old, no new songs could ever be created again. I would have to listen to the Beatles singing about wanting to hold my hand in perpetuity - maybe not such a bad thing but there was the outside chance that it could get tiresome. Thankfully, creative pursuits are by their very nature unlimited.

Quilters are interesting creators because they can “think” in blocks. They can take shapes and break them down into clever components and come up with the pieces that will yield a perfect square representing anything from a flower to a compass to a cow. It’s something I have no talent for whatsoever. But I do like to take a concept, or an idea, and express it with fabric.

I decided my “nine patch” would be different. Traditionally a nine patch is a grid that is 3 blocks high and 3 blocks wide. The most common nine patch you’ll see is a tic-tac-toe game. Nine patch blocks can be re-arranged or re-cut to form an endless number of quilt variations. The previous summer I’d done a nine-patch quilt, and to save myself from embarrassment, let’s just say it was a less than happy experience. This time I wanted to have a happy nine patch experience - without the blocks. I just wanted the nines.

And so...the Happy Nine Patch was born – a group of cheery numeral nines cavorting on a lawn that is composed from a single silk neck tie. With a little creative piecing, I was able to make the borders from the same tie. The sky is a hand dyed piece, machine quilted to enhance the clouds. Additional machine quilting on the borders keeps the Happy Nines in their place.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Cloth Mountain



Quilt No. 84
March 2012

I was firmly embedded in my big leather chair reading a quilting magazine when I came across it -  a quilter describing how her fabric stash had become a “mountain of cloth”.  It hit me like a bolt of fabric: Cloth Mountain!  What better way to ransack my bloated fabric collection than by creating an actual “cloth mountain”?  I immediately began rummaging in boxes, dressers, bags, and my four sets of rolly plastic wheely drawers, admiring all the odd fabric bits I’d collected.  But how could I pull all of that loveliness together – and make it look like a mountain?  I’d need a whole lot of little pieces, but I didn’t I want to start randomly hacking tiny corners from a few hundred fabrics.  Perhaps this idea needed time to form on its own.

I resisted the adrenaline rush of first inspiration, and turned my attention back to other unfinished quilts.  I decided that when I had very small left over fabric pieces - below potentially usable “scrap” size - I would put them in a box and audition them later for Cloth Mountain.

After completing Julie’s Garden I noticed there were a lot of nice green pieces in the box.  A picture stared to emerge in my mind.  I would need white transitioning to grey, followed by darker grey, and then on through a range of greens.  And I already had most of the greens!  Now I was able to consult a much smaller number of boxes, bags, and fabric hiding places.  I cut a bunch of mini-scraps and into strips with the rotary cutter, and then sectioned these into irregular squarish pieces, dividing them up by colour and then each colour by value.  This technique is used in confetti quilting but with much smaller pieces.  It also requires a layer of tulle on top to hold everything in place. I wanted the mountain pieces to stay loose and shaggy, to resemble a cast off pile of random fabric bits so I had to do this without the tulle.

I found some stabilizer with grippy dots on it and drew a mountain on it. I began at the white peak of the mountain, and using monofilament thread and free motion quilting, loosely tacked one small section of pieces at a time onto the stabilizer, keeping the pieces loose looking.  It worked fairly well as long as I remembered not to fold the fabric during the quilting process.  If I did that the pieces would dump all over the place and have to be re-placed – again and again.  Eventually I got the mountain entirely covered.  It had almost as many pieces on it as the floor did.  The pieces migrated throughout the entire house and are still showing up in inexplicable places - like the drawer under the kitchen stove (which I swear contains pots and pans, not fabric).  I sewed the now “stablized” and assembled mountain onto the hand dyed background.

Now... what to put on the mountain?  My original rough drawing contains miniature skiers and snowmobilers, questing hikers, and a sewing machine perched at the summit.   All of this, when rendered in cloth, looked ridiculous – the scale was just too odd.  The design wall inside your head is far more forgiving that the one in front of your eyes!  I went back to thinking about what the concept was for this quilt.  It was a mountain of cloth.  And what had my personal mountain of cloth generated?  So far, 85 art quilts and related works!

I have digital photographs of all of these, but how to go from these to cloth, and how to keep the printed photos small enough?  Resizing 85 photos to less than half an inch across seemed likely to be a lifetime pursuit rather than a way to finish a quilt.  I noticed that the computer screen showing the quilt photos as icons looked like it might do the trick.  I did a screen capture of these icon pages and printed them out on iron-on printable  cotton.

When cut out into individual quilt photos the icons were the exact right size... if only I knew where to put them. Equally spaced around the border? The whole piece looked like a jumble. There was no place for your eyes to focus. On the mountain? They were completely lost to the eye.

The only empty area was the sky. But how would these 85 quilts get into the sky – what excuse would they use? A bird? A plane? Superman? A kite? That was it! I strung the icons spaced out along white strings behind the kite, but it still didn’t work. I sent a photo to my sister to get her input. She suggested that the quilt icons should not have spaces between, that they should touch one another. Brilliant – now they formed a continuous line that was pleasing to the eye. And so they came to be launched as the tails of a kite, stretching from the sky to the bottom of the quilt where a road sign announces “Cloth Mountain, Population 85” - celebrating of all my quilting projects so far.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Harvest

Quilt No. 79
September 2011

This quilt was made from a one-piece printed centre panel – hence none of my usual pain-staking bit-by-bit piecing was required. A fully printed quilt ("panel") is commonly known by quilters as a “cheater ” – but these can still be great fun to do.  The challenge is to make it your own unique creation. My husband spotted this one in a quilt shop in Elora, and since he liked it so much and he is such a perennial good sport, I bought it to make for him.

In theory, all I had to do was to add the borders and quilt it. On my first attempt, I began by hand quilting it. Meh. It looked like nothing. I ripped out the stitches, but left in all my gold hand stitching around each individual leaf.  It looked nice and had taken me just about forever to complete. Next, I tried machine quilting it, but I made a mess and had to rip it out. No matter what I did the quilt looked like it needed a long course of Prozac. It was dull, listless, no life to it at all. I ignored it for a long time as other quilts passed it by on the queue to completion.

One day I rediscovered it in the bottom of a box of UFOs (UnFinished Objects). I suddenly realized what it needed! All the windows were too dark. I cut each one out and replaced the dark brown window fabric with yellow fabric. The houses were now alive and occupied, as though each family had finally returned after a long absence. And, having replaced my semi-ancient sewing machine, I was now able to enhance it with gold and copper metallic threads. Of course none of these show up in the photo. Getting a good photo of a quilt is about as likely as having Nessie pop up in front of your camera lens.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Blue Collar


Quilt No. 77
September 2011

If nothing else, this quilt is a testimony to my tenacity. It spent just under two years “stalled” in one phase after another, passing through an almost infinite number of iterations – some good, some bad. Almost every piece was added on and then taken off - two, three or more times. I left the whole thing suggestively close to the garbage can more times than I’d like to count. And yet, finally, the end result did emerge.

The song Blue Collar, by Bachman-Turner Overdrive was the starting point for this quilt. While this song is much less well known than their iconic Takin’ Care of Business, it is my personal favourite from their repertoire. It’s an unusual rock-jazz fusion, or at least that’s my guess – I’m not exactly an expert on music genres. Perhaps it’s Fred Turner’s lyrics rather than the music that makes Blue Collar such an intriguing theme.

In the song, a blue collar worker on night shift implores daytime workers to withhold judgement of his world - a world they have never experienced. While the daytimers are snoozing, and maybe even looking down their noses at the blue collar workers who toil at night, they're missing out on the mysterious beauty of the city at “four in the morning.” To that end, I’ve tried to create a night time city scene that celebrates the world of this blue collar worker. He sits on a park bench with his lunch pail at his side. Fish frolic in the fountain, and flowers and trees are bathed in the lights of the fountain and surrounding city. A full moon in a “diamond sky” overlooks an array of tall buildings and trees.


Quilting Notes

The buildings have an odd, fanned-out perspective that differs from the perspective of the objects in the park. This was quite challenging and meant that I could not add in objects between the park and the buildings since these would have required yet another perspective. Much too crazy/impossible!

Two fabrics were used for the buildings. One was a silk tie patterned with blue oval shapes. When taken apart, a neck tie has a much larger quantity of fabric in it than you might imagine. It was kind of tricky to find a fabric for the solid coloured buildings, but I eventually settled on a placemat that Fabricland was selling for practically nothing – I could see they were desperate to get rid of it. I machine quilted the placemat buildings with blue thread to harmonize them with the tie fabric buildings.

The blue trees near the buildings also came from a single silk tie, yielding two shades of blue by using both the back and front of the fabric. This tie was a freebie from my Quilt Guild. It was intended to be used in a bow tie block . When I went to cut the tie for this block, I could tell that the material was too thin to use in a bed quilt – but, gee, didn’t it match the Blue Collar colour scheme perfectly. Happily, I was able to jettison all my previous unsuccessful tree attempts, including the ones I had to already sewn onto the quilt. So that no one at Quilt Guild would be any wiser, I substituted another tie to make my bow tie block. So far my husband hasn’t noticed...

The roadway started out made of denim fabric. My original concept called for an actual blue collar to be used in the quilt, but after a very long series of unhappy experiments, I concluded that collars are pretty ugly on anything other than clothing. Better to stick with a metaphorical collar than an ugly quilt.

Next came the park. Almost every object you could ever hope to find in a park was tried and/or considered. The bench was going to be the park’s focal point, but no matter what size I used, it looked, well, foolish. It needed something to go with it. I hesitated to attempt a fountain – it seemed like an impossible challenge. I spent about three months looking at pictures of fountains on the Internet. Nothing else seemed to be feasible. I went into my “what the hell” mode. Of course, fountain number one did not work out - after being thoroughly bonded onto the quilt. It had to be coaxed off when I decided to change the road and replace the grass with a different fabric. I found that I had barely enough of that one irreplaceable piece of specially dyed sparkly fountain fabric. It didn’t help that while Blue Collar was “stalled” I had used up most of that piece for the Lodestar quilt.

The whole time I was completing the quilt I was smug knowing that I would not have to struggle to figure out how to quilt the sky. Diamond skies? Are you kidding? A nice straight-forward cross hatch pattern would yield great diamonds. But... it made the sky look not like diamonds, but like the inside of a winter coat. This threw the quilt into yet another stall, and every new idea for quilting lines only made it look worse. Finally, in a frenzy of “less is more” I simply followed the perspective lines of the buildings and decided to go with machine quilting instead of hand quilting. I added Jolee’s Jewels (crystals) to the sky. Elsewhere in the quilt, glass beads and metallic threads in sliver and copper helped to further develop the sparkly night time look.

While I pretty much ground down most of my teeth into nubs trying to get through this quilt, I am, at very long last, satisfied with it. And I’m immensely grateful to BTO for this inspirational song. I hope I have done it justice.

View the Video: Blue Collar - Bachman-Turner Overdrive


Close Up of Fountain

Lyrics to Blue Collar - Bachman-Turner Overdrive (Fred Turner 1973)

Walk your street 
And I'll walk mine 
And should we meet 
Would you spare me some time 

'Cause you should see my world 
Meet my kind 
Before you judge our minds 

Blue collar 

Sleep your sleep 
I'm awake and alive 
I keep late hours 
You're nine to five 

So I would like you know I need the quiet hours 
To create in this world of mine 

Blue collar 
Blue collar 

I'd like you to know at four in the morning 
Things are coming to mind 
All I've seen, all I've done 
And those I hope to find 

I'd like to remind you at four in the morning 
My world is very still 
The air is fresh under diamond skies 
Makes me glad to be alive 

You keep that beat 
And I keep time 
Your restless face 
Is no longer mine 

I rest my feet 
While the world's in heat 
And I wish that you could do the same 

Blue collar 
Blue collar 

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Lodestar



Quilt No. 76

August 2011

Lodestar – this is a star that shows the way. We all know of at least one lodestar that’s been pretty influential in the history of humanity. This one is much less lofty – a simple shooting star on a winter’s night. A mouse, a rabbit, a dog, a cat, and a squirrel look up and contemplate in the silence of the night.

I arrived at work one morning last winter to find a manila envelope had been stuffed under my door. I instantly knew that my friend Lily was the source. I am often the beneficiary of beautiful poems or scenes or other items that she is kind enough to share with me. Each time I am amazed that she would take time out of her life to share these treasures. On that particular day it was a packet of some of her favourite Christmas cards that she and her husband had received this year. The night scene with the reverential animals immediately captured me. “ Why not?” I thought. I would take a break from torturing my way through my own quilt designs and do one based on this card. The original art work of Eva Melhuish certainly needed no improvements from me! I just hope that when Ms. Melhuish created this scene, it went a lot more straight forwardly for her than it did for me.

At first, things went along smoothly. Scaling up the card into a pattern was a breeze. I just happened to have a background that I’d painted ages ago lying around that worked perfectly. I had used my usual Setacolor paints and achieved nice snowflake shapes by scattering oatmeal flakes over the wet surface of the fabric. Animal-like fabrics were also surprisingly easy to find at Fabricland. I even found a furry piece that did a pretty good mock up for the tabby cat. What could possibly go wrong?

Then I came to the trees. Recreating them seemed beyond my grasp. I tried drawing them, finding usable pictures of them, and taking actual photos of trees. Nope. I tried going abstract and I dyed fabric for them at least threes times, cutting them out in tree shapes, blobby snow shapes, anything that vaguely might be construed as being tree-like. Nope. I looked at pictures of snowy trees and branches on Google until my eyes grew twigs. Nada.

When I encounter this type of impasse I invariably use the same helpful strategy. I quit. Quitting can be good. Quitting can be merciful. I set the project aside where I can't even look at it. This was pretty distressing because the “set aside” projects were starting to take up a lot of space. They were blooming like weeds on ripe manure.

After a few months I looked for tree pictures - again. I finally found one tree that would work, so I scaled it up and altered it to yield four trees. These I printed out on cotton, using the ink jet printer. I know, you think it can’t be done, but the printer doesn’t care one bit as long as you have the cotton attached to some sort of stabilizing paper. Oh yes, and ink jet ink is not waterproof so you want that cotton to be commercially prepped for printing. If you’re an annoying a do-it-yourselfer like me you can do the fabric prep with Raycafix or Bubblejet Set, all very tedious, but tedious is what quilters live for. The printed trees were too pale, so I re-painted them with Lumiere paints.

The other big stumbling block was the squirrel’s tail. I had been thinking about how I would do the tail for months. It would be so much fun! It turned out the materials I had set aside for tail try-outs were all useless, totally useless. I had three kinds of fake fur, two kinds of real fur, three kinds of fuzzy fabric, and a package of strips that could be made into chenille. None of the fur or fabric worked out for reasons too boring and distressing to describe. I was not worried, since I really wanted to use the chenille anyway. In the original artwork, the squirrel’s tail curls around in the most fetching way. I would make the chenille do the same thing! But the strip of “chenille” I had was just a piece of flat fabric. It requires some kind of special brush to turn it into actual chenille. Chenille is not an exotic entity, it’s merely some kind of psychotically frayed fabric. This I never even imagined all those years I lay under my super-special chenille bedspread when I was a kid. I thought it was some kind of wonder fabric that probably came from a secret, carefully guarded factory in the faraway Orient. Not China, or Japan, or Taiwan - a much more mystical and exotic Orient. But no, you just get some loosely woven chunk and fray the hell out of it. What a dream buster that is. And to further destroy my fantasy, it does not make the excellent squirrel tail I had dreamed of.

I made another trip to Fabricland and found just the right colour of fake fur, with just the right length of pile. Lucky me – I only had to buy a strip 60 inches wide and 4 inches long to make a three quarter inch tail. But it worked, even though it didn’t curl in a fetching way. This I was willing to overlook. What I could not overlook was that cut wisps of fake fur drifted all over the house, gracing rugs, tables, black pants, computer screens, the even the toilet seat. Who knew fake fur could be so ubiquitous?

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Wish You Were Here

Quilt No. 75
August 2011

This quilt accidentally grew out of the fabric salad that lives on my desk. The first thing to appear was the dyed square you see in the centre of the quilt. It hung around for months while I tried to figure out if this test piece could have any possible use. Next to appear were some delicious turquoise-blue fat quarters from my friend Ruth, who sent them to me for no particular reason at all (other than that she is a wonderfully creative and endlessly thoughtful person). These gravitated towards the dyed piece. Next I discovered a fabric with perfect palm trees, a treasure reclaimed from the never-ending sale of fabric bits hosted by the Hospital Auxiliary. That was also the source for the weird wool that frames the centre piece. I can’t remember where the green border fabric was found, but more than likely it came from same source. Eventually all these elements came together to form this scene. The dolphins? They just swam in there because it looked so inviting.

Quilt Notes

The central square section was dyed with my usual favourite Setacolor dyes. Elmer’s School Glue No-Run Gel (Blue) was used as a resist. It’s applied to the fabric and allowed to dry before the dye/paint is added. Glue covered areas remain free of dye.

The entire quilt was machine quilted, giving me the opportunity to use 3 or 4 of the possible 1000 stitches my sewing machine apparently knows. Now only 9,996 more to try...

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Posssum Block

June 2011

This appliquéd block features a mother possum and her three babies. The block is 18x18 inches, and is part of a larger quilt, Woodland Creatures, that is being completed by the Timmins Quilters Guild as a fund raiser. Possum boys, left to right: Freddie, Bennie, and Joey.


Donna this is for you.



Thursday, February 24, 2011

Gone Sailing

Quilt No. 74
February 2011

What do carnation pink, orange, and silver have in common?   Absolutely nothing. Pink and orange together remind me of that odd advice, "blue and green should never be seen, except inside the washing machine."  I never agreed with that, but it makes for a better poem than you could squeeze out of the words "pink" and "orange".  This is because orange is basically a cranky colour - friendly with brown, tolerable with yellow, complimentary with blue.  It has only a few friends. But.. orange with pink? And silver?

This colour combination was what I ended up with in the guild's "Crayon Challenge".  We dumped a box of 64 crayons into a bag. Each person pulled out three random crayons.  All crayons went back into the bag between picks, so I wasn't the only one to get the endearing carnation pink crayon. The crayons picked dictated the fabric colours to be used by that person to make a quilt.  Quilters were allowed to add two additional colours of fabric to make their quilts.  The only common factor was that everyone picked unsettling colour combinations.

Sailfish. What evolutionary or divine engineer could ever have come up with such a creature? The long beak, the ribbed sail, the inevitable jumping pose?

My fascination with these fish began when I was a six-year-old with a sore throat. Back then if you were sick you stayed in bed. If enough time went by before you rallied and demanded to return to your outdoor world of skipping ropes and can-kicking, the doctor was called. You didn’t go to his office - he came to your house, accompanied by his mysterious black bag. A stethoscope and thermometer would be pulled out. Other stainless steel medical equipment would slyly feign innocence in the bottom of the bag. Hushed words and tiny pills in flat pink boxes would be dispensed. Eventually you would get better. As the years went by the practice of medicine changed, and the doctor’s time became more and more precious. Forces beyond his control tethered him to the office or the hospital. House calls vanished. A sore throat came to mean a trip to his office.

Our doctor had a mahogany desk littered with papers and inexplicable medical paraphernalia. There were no toys and few magazines. A foray into the medical world was a serious thing. You were to sit and contemplate your lot in the waiting room, not guffaw over the jokes in The Readers Digest. There was, however, one frivolity that escaped all this desperation. An enormous sailfish - a trophy from a fishing trip - had been stuffed and mounted on the wall directly behind the doctor's desk. I can still remember all of its splendid and dusty details. It gleamed with a greenish varnish-like finish, and if you stared at it long enough, it would wink at you.


All fabric used in this quilt has been hand dyed. The sailfish was inspired by a  pin I bought at an antique store in St. Jacobs. I put it in the scanner and used this file to create the scaled-up version of the sailfish you see here. 



Thursday, August 5, 2010

Half Nelson


All wrestling puns aside, this is indeed a half Nelson, since he is currently an “in process” quilt. This is Nelson’s front section, and when I unite it with his back section, plus a cozy stack of medical books upon which to sleep, he will become a full Nelson. So don’t worry about those pesky frayed edges – they will disappear in the seam allowances when Nelson is finished. Chances are he won’t even wake up.

Nelson is destined to become a Library Cat, and will take up residence in the window beside the door of the staff library at Timmins & District Hospital. He will take his place in history with all the cats that dwell in libraries around the world. Most of them are real living, breathing cats, but as you can see, Nelson is special, since he is flannelette. He won’t ever cause librarians to fret over the changing of his litter box. Nelson has adopted his very fine name from one of the most common and beloved medical library texts, the Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics.

You can meet lots of other Library Cats all over the world by going to
http://www.ironfrog.com/catsmap.html


But you won’t find Nelson there. At least, not yet.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Summer Vacation

Quilt No. 71
March 2010

I did a brief session at the guild on how to dye fabric with Setacolor dyes. I was worried about taking dye into a room where we would be showing finished quilts, so I kept my demonstration very small, using a 10x14 inch piece of fabric placed on a cookie sheet. We left the fabric to complete its dying/bleeding process on the top shelf of our library cupboard.

During our next guild meeting I pulled out the fabric, and we all admired it. Then came the inevitable question, “So what are you going to do with it?” Do? I had thought my commitment was fulfilled with the passing around of the dyed fabric. Suddenly it had the feel of an unfinished recipe. Sure the ingredients were there – but where was the completed dish?

It seemed to me that there were all ready far too many in-progress quilts floating around my quilting table. I would let myself turn the dyed piece into a quilt only if I could do it quickly. I decided to machine quilt it, since the sun was begging for the addition of flames. But what to add to this weird sunset? I thought about silhouettes, working my way through and discarding the most obvious ones, such as crows, gulls, herons, humans, palm trees, and horses. That left space ships. And so here you see a space ship bearing a friendly alien - an alien who is relaxing on his summer vacation.

Quilt Notes

The piece was sandwiched with Fusible Warm Fleece. It made the machine quilting with rayon thread surprisingly easy. A silk tie rescued from Value Village was used for the space ship and the binding.

Monday, March 8, 2010

My Mother's Prayer

Quilt No. 70
March 2010
Quilters are often plagued by UFO’s. They lurk around and slop buckets of guilt on us. But unlike the usual kind of UFO’s, which are Unidentified, Fly around, and probably house aliens with questionable intentions, the UFO’s that dog quilters are more benign. They consist of all those projects that got launched but haven’t yet reached the Nirvana of completion. They are UnFinished Objects. And they are mostly alien free.

My Mother’s Prayer is a UFO of a sort. Sometime around 1948 or 1949 my mother completed a cross stitch of the prayer, Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep. She was a young, busy mother at the time, and somehow this piece of embroidery never made it into any sort of frame that would allow it to be displayed. As Mom went on with other endeavors, other crafts, and other children, the piece got buried deeper and deeper, and was largely forgotten. Every few years she would come across it as it languished in a dresser drawer or a cedar chest. It followed her wherever she lived. I can’t even say exactly when it passed into my hands. I followed suit and stashed it in a drawer.

Recently, at quilt guild, a friend loaned me a book about making existing linens and embroidered pieces into quilted wall hangings. Eventually I connected the dots and realized that I could finally release my mother’s prayer from decades of seclusion and end its “UFO” status.
Quilt Notes

I found an off-white cotton that matched the embroidered piece reasonably well and added borders to make it larger. The outline and details of each embroidered child has been hand quilted. Likewise, the outline of each letter of every word has also been hand quilted. My initial vision for this quilt was one that included extensive quilting on the border. I spent a massive amount of timing trying to achieve that goal. When I finished it, I could see that this did not compliment the detailed embroidery - it ended up competing with it! I stared at it for weeks, trying to convince myself that it looked great. Or acceptable. Or vaguely okay. I finally gave in to reality. The quilting on the border had to be removed. Eventually I settled on an un-quilted border with a scalloped edge.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Private Idaho


Quilt No. 69
November 2009
What would it be like to live underground “like a wild potato”? This question popped into my head when I heard the B-52’s song Private Idaho (see lyrics on right hand side bar). The song suggests that someone who is gripped by fear of the ordinary - patios, pools, “signs that say hidden driveway”- might be hiding in a lifestyle that mimics a potato tucked safely underground. What might this safe harbor look like? I couldn’t help but put my own spin on both the above and below ground life of such a marvelous sheltering potato plant.

This quilt features a hand-dyed sky. Each leaf of the potato plant was created individually and then sewn onto the quilt. A hummingbird visits the blooms at the top.

I drew each potato room on paper and then scanned it into a file. The files were then adjusted to create the high-contrast sepia tones. The potato rooms were printed out on cotton and appliquéd onto the quilt. All potatoes are connected by satin roots and are outlined in gold metallic thread. This piece is hand quilted.

Lyrics to Private Idaho
Written by The B-52’s: Catherine Pierson, Fred Schneider, Keith Strickland, Cindy Wilson, Ricky Wilson

You're living in your own Private Idaho
Living in your own Private Idaho
Underground like a wild potato.
Don't go on the patio.
Beware of the pool,
blue bottomless pool.
It leads you straight
right through the gate
that opens on the pool.

You're living in your own Private Idaho.
You're living in your own Private Idaho.

Keep off the path, beware the gate,
watch out for signs that say "hidden driveways".
Don't let the chlorine in your eyes
blind you to the awful surprise
that's waitin' for you at
the bottom of the bottomless blue blue blue pool.

You're livin’ in your own Private Idaho. Idaho.
You're out of control, the rivers that roll,
you fell into the water and down to Idaho.
Get out of that state,
get out of that state you're in.
You better beware.

You're living in your own Private Idaho.
You're living in your own Private Idaho.

Keep off the patio,
keep off the path.
The lawn may be green
but you better not be seen
walkin' through the gate that leads you down,
down to a pool fraught with danger
is a pool full of strangers.

You're living in your own Private Idaho,
where do I go from here to a better state than this.
Well, don't be blind to the big surprise
swimming round and round like the deadly hand
of a radium clock, at the bottom, of the pool.

I-I-I-daho
I-I-I-daho
Woah oh oh woah oh oh woah oh oh
Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah
Get out of that state
Get out of that state
You're living in your own Private Idaho,
livin’ in your own Private.... Idaho

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Crystal Blue Persuasion

Quilt No. 68
August 2009
It was 1969 when my best friend Jane and I first heard the song. We were sun tanning at the cottage, accompanied by the ever-present A.M. radio. Since that day I’ve always loved Crystal Blue Persuasion by Tommy James and the Shondells. It’s not only a great tune, it has a wonderful message of hope – perhaps there is still a chance for “peace and good brotherhood” among nations. My dear friend Jane is no longer with us, but when I hear the song I am transported back to those sunny days.
This song is one of those exceptional pieces of music that has the power to create superb visual images. The first image that emerges is, of course, that of blue crystals. I looked at pictures of crystals until I thought my eyes would turn to quartz. I drew gawky clumps of crystals for several weeks before I came up with a configuration that pleased me. These were then used as patterns. The fabric was dyed with Setacolor fabric dyes, including Shimmer Pearl, which added sparkle. The crystals were hand appliquéd onto the quilt, and the facets were outlined with embroidery in metallic thread.

But the crystals needed to look worldly. When discussing this feature with my friend Ruth, she suggested adding a globe of the Earth. I thought of adding a series of different phases of the Earth on to the crystals, but this proved too challenging. The crystals looked liked they’d lost in a marble swallowing contest. Eventually I decided that a map of the world spread over the crystals would give the effect I wanted. To add this feature, I traced a map onto the crystals. One at a time, I painted the continents with Elmer’s School Glue (Blue No Run Gel). This glue penetrates fabric and is very precise – it doesn’t wander into areas beyond where it’s been painted. I sprinkled Trichem Downyfleece (it looks like loose powdered fleece) over the glue and let it dry for several hours, then dumped off the excess. The fleece adheres only to the glue-painted areas and forms a very durable bond with a clean edge. Where did I find this product? Ironically, I’ve had it in my craft stash for over 25 years – ever since I got it from my friend Jane.

The words “crystal blue persuasion” always suggest great expanses of blue water to me – or maybe that’s just latent heatstroke from listening to the song in the hot sun. I wanted a visual element of the Earth as a globe, so ocean seemed the natural choice. Dolphins, killer whales, and other marine life were added to take advantage of the crystal blue water.

The lyrics called for “children of every nation.” This seemed like a pretty tall order, especially the “every” part, so I settled for only a few representative children. I drew the figures, transferred the drawings onto cotton, and embroidered them by hand in satin stitch. Each child took a few hours to complete. Each figure was then fused to another layer of fabric, and then fused onto the quilt.

The waves and the quilt binding were dyed in various blues to finish off the quilt. Small music symbols are featured on the binding fabric. The song lyrics are reprinted as part of the label on the back of the quilt. As a final touch, clear beads were added to the stars on the background. A new day is dawning – but not quite yet.

I think Jane would have liked this quilt.
To read the lyrics to Crystal Blue Persuasion, check the sidebar on the right hand side of the page.

Lyrics to Crystal Blue Persuasion
Composed by Eddie Gray, Tommy James, and Mike Vale

Look over yonder
What do you see?
The sun is a'risin'
Most definitely.

A new day is comin'
People are changing
Ain't it beautiful?
Crystal blue persuasion.

Better get ready
To see the light
Love, love is the answer
And that's all right.

So don't you give up now
So easy to find
Just look to your soul
And open your mind.

Maybe tomorrow
When He looks down
On every green field
And every town

All of this children
Every nation
There'll be peace and good
Brotherhood

Crystal blue persuasion.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Quilt Show At Timmins and District Hospital

Eleven Concept Quilts created by Julie Domenico are currently on display in the Artist's Promenade at Timmins & District Hospital, July 13 - August 21, 2009. These quilts, collected together here as Our Beautiful and Terrifying World, illustrate the contrasts in our world that we take for granted. Wildlife and landscape quilts are featured along with quilts representing themes based on war.




Saturday, May 2, 2009

Origins of Life

Quilt No. 66
April 2009

The black velvet acacia tree featured on this quilt serves as a back drop for jewelry owned by my mother, my mother-in-law, or me. Several layers of gold or orange organza stretched over a layer of pale orange cotton were used for the background. Chains from necklaces outline all outer parts of the tree as well as the boundaries in the background. The jewelry ranges in age from one to fifty or more years, and includes a rhinestone necklace from the 50’s or 60’s, charms, pins, earrings, and bracelets. A Ten Commandments bracelet that was given to me around 1960 can be viewed on the mid- to lower-right of the tree.


Quilting Notes



All jewelry items were sewn onto the tree using ”invisible” thread (MonoPoly from Superior Threads). Only a minimal amount of hand quilting was added to avoid “wrinkling” the organza.