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. 



Sunday, September 5, 2010

Nelson


Quilt No. 73
September 2010

Meet Nelson - the Library Cat. Since he is displayed in a library window where both his front and back can be viewed, so he was constructed as a double-sided quilt.

To create Nelson’s sleeping place, I photographed a stack of medical books and recreated them in fabric. Fonts and their colours were selected in Microsoft Word to closely resemble those on the actual books. The letters were printed out on printable iron-on fabric. Each letter was cut out individually, a testimony to what a super sharp pair of tiny scissors can do. The lettering for the Merck Manual was printed out as whole.

Nelson’s welcoming backside features the page edge view of the back of his stack of books. His cat toy doubles as the quilt label.

To read more of Nelson's story and to find other Library Cats see Half Nelson.




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.