So Much Sewing

I know it's been forever and a day since I last posted, and much of that period stemmed directly from the lack of sewing time. Between February and early May, I'm not sure if I sewed a stitch. Finishing a dissertation will do that to you. But the dissertation is done and defended, and I've enjoyed a nice chunk of relatively open-ended time. Thus May has been, err, was (it's June today, woah), a wonderfully sewing-filled month.

One of the first things I did was make a long-planned wedding gift for Joel and Sibyl. They got married in September which was a lot of months ago, but I had zero time to make things back then. I did have time to purchase fabric, however, and I picked out some fun fabric for cloth napkins that also formed the basis of the color scheme and aesthetic of a table runner. At one point, my mom wondered what I was going to make for them, since I had already given Joel a quilt.

Joel and I were roommates back in the day, including the days in which he began dating Sibyl, and we spent a lot of time enjoying good food (not to mention our stunning ability to polish off whle jars of pickles and olives in one setting). Quality napkins and a table runner for Joel's super awesome craftsman-style table (which he found at a yard sale and was already in the apartment when I arrived) fit the bill.
 

Handily, Joel was in Ann Arbor for work this week, which meant that I not only got to give his wedding present to him in person but we got to take some fantastic parking lot pictures. Who doesn't need a few cars in their crafty photos? As it turns out, one of the awesome things about making gifts for people with whom you lived is that it's pretty easy to nail their aesthetic -- a task made even easier when you have quite similar taste. So the table runner has two sides, the little bits and bobs side and the chunks of cool fabric side. Both are intended to work well in the neat green kitchen J+S have in Seattle.

Initially I was a little uncertain about how to quilt this, given those tiny bits and a lot of negative space. I opted for undulating free-hand echo curves which I love. I used several shades of gray, blue/aqua, and black. While I could pretend that this was a design decision, made to reflect nature and the Pacific Northwest, the truth of the matter is that I ran out of both the medium gray and aqua while quilting and thus needed to add in more and more colors. Happenstance for the win.

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Point the Way

This was a giant paper-piecing experiment designed around those little slivers of Marimekko fabric. I'd been hanging on to the delightfully silver neutral stripe print for a whole now, and never found fabrics I felt worked with it. In challenging myself to use it, I decided to focus on the colors it included: silver, cream, beige, purple. Without a lot of the fabric to use, I wanted a bold, minimalist design. So I made myself some paper templates (good way to use up 12" scrapbook paper that's lingered in my art supply collection for years) and got to work. The quilt consists of 8 pieced blocks and 4 solid blocks).

Paper-piecing produces pretty perfect points. I made some freezer paper templates of each of the 5 shapes -- the center (1) and edge triangles (2) as well as the slivers (2) to help with cut with minimal waste and avoid almost-but-not-quite-covering a piece of the template (which still happened...but only once...and in a very fixable way). When it came time to quilt, I got a little adventurous and used different thread and different quilting patterns for each fabric. The silver squiggle is my favorite.

For the first time in a while, I went for a super simple non-pieced back. I had just the right amount of this fun, squawking bird print (picked up at Ikea, a few years back), and it added some pattern-y goodness to the minimalist front. A sweet grey binding later, and the quilt was done.

Well, almost done. After I washed, dried, and took these pictures, I noticed that one of the purple seams had come partially undone. This was really weird, since it was a full 1/4" seam and I've never had that happen before (partial lie: it happened with imperfect 1/4" seams when I was a newbie quilter). A little steam-a-seam and a few repair stitches later, and the quilt flew off to Connecticut where it resides with young William (and Cynthia and Andy).

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A Midweek Peek

A Confession: as a somewhat lazy laundress, I often find that an imminent need to do laundry offers an incentive to finish a quilt. Otherwise, it might take a while for that quilt to get all soft and crumbly from the washer/dryer rumble.

The blocks above emerged from a desire to use the neutral striped Marimekko print, of which I had some but not a lot, and for which I was uncertain about coordinating colors. So it's a very neutral quilt. Not my usual color scheme, but a pleasant experiment with paper-piecing (of my own devising, though perhaps there are comparable blocks out there in pattern-land).

The quilt is ready to send off to its new owner. But I need to take pictures, and this -3 nonsense to which I awoke this morning (cozy under flannel sheets, several quilts, and a down comforter) has not exactly inspired a photo shoot. According to my weather app, it's 10 degrees warmer now, at a whopping 7, which might be sufficient enough for some whole-quilt shots outside.

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Into the Blue

A few weeks ago, about five days before I left Michigan for a conference in New York, I made plans with my friends Josh and Adam who, as it turned out, just returned to the city with their new son. Josh and I have been friends since high school and it's the sort of friendship sustained over irregular yearly-ish visits rather than regular emails and phone calls. Hence it was only when I announced I was flitting through town that I learned about Leo's arrival. At which point a flurry of fast sewing and quilting ensued.

I decided to continue the minimalist monochromatic series with a perennial color favorite: aqua. (Also, I knew I had enough solids or near-solids to make this design work, which is not something I can say for most colors. Aqua: it speaks to me and makes me buy it.) Working on a fast deadline meant that simplicity reigned, and a giant starbust seemed fun and (relatively) simply. I drafted 4 20" blocks on butcher paper and paper-pieced the quadrants. Keeping giant pieces of fabric in line was a tad tricky, but I only had to unpick and resew 2 seams, which I considered a victory.

Keeping with the simplicity theme, the back consists of two large pieces of fabric from Erin McMorris collections: a large red chunk from Weekends and a smaller saffron bit from LaDeeDa. I had been waiting for an opportunity to use the large red flowers, as chopping this particular large-scale print seemed counterproductive. I made this quilt a couple weeks after Rossie's thoughtful post about gender and quilting, and I was particularly pleased to use a giant floral print on a quilt for a boy because, seriously, flowers are awesome for everyone (in fact, it was a former male roommate who taught me that sometimes you should just buy flowers for yourself, because they're lovely and pleasing to look at and increase joy).

The quilting is "echo-plus," which is to say quilting lines offset about 1/8" from each seam, plus a line through the approximate center of each wedge. Enough to hold the quilt together but scant enough to keep it soft and drapey. When I arrived with the quilt, I learned that my color selection was prescient as Leo's room has a Tiffany blue accent wall.

Black and white chevron-striped binding? Yes, please. I adore this binding. I'm convinced it's brilliant, so don't tell me otherwise. The stark contrast between the soft aquas and the robust black thrills me. Also I got to sew it with black thread and I so rarely use black thread that I think the spool has been with me for at least 5 years. It was crying out to be used.

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Sunspots

I was not really prepared for the summer onslaught of babies. Lots of my friends had babies; few quilts were on their way or even gestating in my brain. But this quilt's concept, the fabric pull, and the mulling over of design started this winter, after I made this emerald quilt. I thought it would be cool to do a series of minimalist monochromatic quilts, all offset by a binding in a different color. And since I bound the emerald quilt with orange, I figured orange should be next in the sequence.

At one point I envisioned a giant asterisk quilt. But as June turned into July and I decided to make the orange quilt for the forthcoming bebe of my friends' Sarah and Danny (#2, actually), I was feeling less asterisk-y and more linear. I wanted to play the oranges off one another, and the slats of some blinds provided inspiration. Some Riley Blake circles helped finish off the quilt front when I ran out of the darker orange solid (measure before sewing, why bother?)

To contrast the linear nature of the design, I quilted a giant offset spiral, which is almost impossible to see, but I think conveys the idea of light streaming through an upstairs window. I am very pleased with the peppy aqua binding as well.

The primary backing fabric came all the way from Liberia. My roommate did some research there last summer and, knowing my love of fabric, brought me back a couple different pieces. The selvage on this one noted "veritable real wax super binta" on one side and "guaranteed real wax" on the other -- so definitely a legit batik print. Although I'm not a fabric pre-washer, there was a slightly waxy residue on the print and I wasn't sure how color-fast it was, so I did pre-wash it. After a washer-dryer cycle, it feels like old thick cotton sheets, and while there was a little bleeding of the navy dye, it was barely noticeable. Danny and Sarah departed Michigan for New Orleans in July, and I was pleased to be able to send Karl off to the land of beignets and jazz with his new quilt.

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