After the Fire

Quilt No. 124
August 2018

Ah, summer.  Hot weather, such hot weather.  We’re supposed to enjoy a pleasurable wallow in this sweaty scenario, but it can’t all be Popsicles and gallon jugs of sunscreen.  While summer does lend itself to many appealing options for activities, quilting is not always one of them. Often it's just too hot. Of course, you can always take your quilting stuff outside, but it’s usually even hotter out there than it is indoors.  On the plus side, the light is usually better out there, so at least you don’t need to drag your OttLite with you. Forget about the ritual slathering of the sunscreen.  A few dabs of that on a quilt and it will easily collect enough dirt to take first place in the County Mud Pie Contest.

Short of indulging in madness, it’s pretty hard to deny that we are in the grip of climate change.  Each year the extreme weather events notch up a little higher on the scale.  In this summer of 2018, hundreds of forest fires in British Columbia Canada have given that pristine area the worst air quality in the world.  It’s so smoky that tourists can’t even find the mountains.  People are forced to hunker down indoors hugging their air filters.  Two thousand kilometers away in the middle of Canada, Manitoba is sharing that bad air quality thanks to the prevailing winds.  Here in Northern Ontario numerous fires threaten remote communities. Pleas have gone out to forest fire fighters trained in previous seasons to rejoin the effort.  All these brave souls here and in other countries will put their safety on the line to protect communities and populated rural areas.  But not everything can be saved. For decades to come, people will be shocked when driving through these burned over areas, the war zones of climate change.  And while fires have always been a natural part of the life cycle of the forest, it’s still a bitter pill to swallow when we see an area completely spoiled with blackened trunks and exposed rocks. 

I wasn’t actually thinking about how any of this related to quilting when I started the quilt that became After the Fire.  By late June it seemed that every quilt I had started had become too large/hot/sweaty/complicated as I gave in to my usual battle with heat induced Summer Funk. The only way for me to power through this annual take down was to sweep all current projects under the bed and start a new one. At least they could keep the dust bunnies company under there. The enthusiasm of a new project can sometimes bring a full halt to Summer Funk.  But on the down side, pulling together a new bunch of fabric requires soooo many, many watts of heat-releasing brain power. 

To avoid having to sift through drawers and boxes of fabric, I turned to my scrap bag.  My beloved scrap bag has burgeoned into a bloated whale that would scare Captain Ahab out of his socks and into a diaper.  It even has a companion bag that holds all the scraps with fusible ironed on the back. Mixing ready to fuse fabrics with plain fabrics is guaranteed to ruin your iron, your ironing board cover, and your good nature.  Like church and state, the only chance for sanity rests in keeping these things strictly apart.

With no particular idea in mind I pulled out scraps, favouring the blue ones.  Hmm, didn’t these resemble sky and water when laid horizontally in rows.  Next, my eye fell on the wood grain fabrics.  There were only a few narrow strips left, since I’d used these in several other quilts, most notably LM + BD.  What wonderful bare tree trunks these fragments would make…

 

Preliminary fabric layout.

I had also recently acquired several fabrics from a friend’s collection. Her sand coloured fabric was the perfect sand/rock fabric I needed!  I also liked the piece of lace she had saved, and wanted to include it as part of the quilt.  And so…another Scrap Bag Challenge quilt was born.  As it took shape I could see how much it resembled the look of a forest after it had been swept by fire.  When this happens there is a long pause after the trauma of burning and before the green begins to shyly creep back.  Bit by bit life reclaims its territory.  It’s a humbling and patience-inducing experience to watch this process of forest renewal.   

Like real tree trunks, the ones on the quilt have a variety of colours, due to different dyeing sessions for previous quilts.  Here they ended up looking like different tree species.   I used Derwent Inktense Pencils to darken shadows on the left-hand side of the trees, and to enhance the shadows on the ground.  Machine quilting with silver metallic thread added light to the right-hand side of the trunks.  The lace? Well, such a serious topic needed some sort of whimsical element. Lace, like life, will always find a way.

Deep in the Scrappy Forest

Quilt No 109

January 2016

A frog pops his head up from behind a rock.  He surveys all that he sees.  It’s definitely frog-worthy.  He's met the challenge - he’s deep in a scrappy forest.

I’m beginning to suspect that maybe, just maybe, having limits placed on you might make you a better quilter.  Oddly, this same philosophy applies to child rearing as well.  Too many loosey­-goosey parameters and the quilt or child becomes a wild and unruly beast, an annoyance to everyone in its sphere of influence.  But...add a few limitations and you get just enough latitude to nudge it along to become all that it can be.

This year’s annual guild challenge was to make a “scrappy quilt”.  This means to take all the leftovers from other quilts and make a new quilt out of those. To accommodate quilters at all levels challenges are kept straight forward.  They never involve wild ideas, impossible to achieve technicalities, or the spending of giant sums of money.  Decisions about size or colour or complexity are left up to each quilter.  The fewer the restrictions, the greater the yield of quilts.  The challenge is not so much about following the rules as it is about making the theme your own.

When the scrappy quilt challenge was announced everyone turned to look at their seat mate and nodded their heads approvingly.  Yep.  Everyone had at least a refrigerator-sized pile of fabric scraps they could plunge into.  Ultimately, some people dove into their pile so many times that they made three or four quilts.  In a few cases, previously undiscovered nieces and nephews got new quilts from an aunt they’d never heard of.  

I couldn’t wait to make the challenge my own.

Two weekends after the announcement of the challenge I was at the cottage.  This is a place that is on a lake in the bush (we don’t use the word “forest” in Northern Ontario).  I go there with my sewing machine and a large box of fabric every weekend.  I also cart along a lot of other things of lesser importance, like food and water.  I’ve forgotten various components of these over the years but I’ve never forgotten my sewing machine.  I’ve never even forgotten my sewing machine cord – a common rookie error among quilting workshop attendees.  One memorable weekend I forgot the quilt I was working on.  I just started on another one with what I found in the box, and came up with the tiny quilt, Looking for Atlantis.  I decided to do a repeat performance for the scrappy quilt. 

My plan evolved.  I would make my scrap fabric quilt exclusively out of the fabrics I found in the box.  Generally, I have a couple of quilts on the go.  For every fabric I use in a quilt, a dozen different fabrics may be “auditioned” before I select the final piece, so there’s always a wide variety of fabric battling for space in the box.  Fortunately, I only need small pieces for my quilts, so I can make do with a single largish box.

I had tried to tame the bits and pieces in the box using two bags for scraps.  One had ordinary scraps and the other had scraps that had some sort of fusible material already ironed onto the back.  Fusibles allow you to iron pieces of fabric directly onto the quilt top.  All of the scraps were relatively small and irregular in shape, mere shards left from one quilt or another.  Only the tail ends of quilt binding strips had any straight edges.  I narrowed my challenge even further and vowed to make my scrappy quilt top using only the scraps in those two bags.  There!  I’d made the challenge my own. 

Here are a few items from the scrap bags.

 As much as possible I let the scraps dictate the composition.  Leftover appliqué trees that didn’t make it into a previous quilt were used. The longer horizontal strips near the top of the quilt suggested the curvy lines of forested hills, so I used those just the way I found them.  When I began working on the border I found I was short of fabric. I ultimately had to stray outside of the two bags from the cottage box and add in some pieces from another box of scraps at home.  It wasn’t really cheating, since they were still scraps.  And when you set the limits yourself, you’re allowed to alter them.  I came up with that rule myself.  It’s the spirit of the limits that count.

When all the scraps had coalesced their cosmic dust into the universe of a new quilt, the stars from Lost on the Ocean had found a new home.  The trees from Reach for the Stars were rediscovered, and the flowers from Horse with No Name had moved out of the desert/ocean and taken root near a swamp. The frog near the rocks had recovered from being passed over for a previous post card quilt. 

Surprisingly, the multiple layers of fused fabric I used in this quilt kept it nice and flat, suggesting that I had previously been under utilizing stabilizers.  Who knew?  By doing most of the decorative and raw edge appliqué stitching only on the quilt top everything stayed smooth.  No dreaded ripples took hold after I added the batting and backing and did the machine quilting.  And, best of all, the abandoned quilt scraps settled down happily into their new life deep in their own forest.  They would never be mere scraps again.