Spring Bounty

>> Tuesday, August 12, 2014

I made and distributed quite a few quilts this spring. I even remembered to take pictures of most of them, but I completely failed on the blogging front. I'm going to try to remedy this backlog for the rest of the month....

First up, what I like to think of as Spring Bounty. Lots of color, lots of favorite fabric tidbits. It's a baby quilt that I made using Jenna's Arizona Quilt tutorial.

The center squares for the quarter log-cabins are an array of neutrals, ranging from white to cream to taupe (or is it beige? I'm not really sure sure what the difference between taupe and beige is except I asked my new landlord if the walls were beige as I recalled them to be from pictures and he responded that they are light taupe. Anyways....) The brights are all from the stash and mostly from my scrap bins. It was fun to pluck out fabrics I really like, since I didn't necessarily need much to make the blocks (hence some logs are on the skinner side, just depended what I had, which was perfect for the patter).

Can you see the quilting? Maybe, maybe not. It's an organic, slightly unevenly spaced and occasionally wavy-lined grid. I like easy quilting and eyeballing it without too much concern for precision (ummm, or none at all) was pretty perfect. I think I borrowed this quilting idea from Latifah. Indeed, I did: from her marvelous Big O quilt.

The back is pieced and brings together an assortment of bright, fun prints that coordinate with the front. The middle multi-color print is one of those fabrics that hung around in my stash for so so long waiting to be used, and I'm glad I finally found the right fit for it.

Spring Bounty now lives with Talia in Maryland, though Napoleon may be using it just as much.

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So Much Sewing

>> Sunday, June 1, 2014

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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Rocketship

>> Thursday, February 20, 2014


This one is a longtime time coming. It started as a honeybun and became a rocketship over many many months. At first I thought I would make a huge chevron sort of thing or maybe some dramatic diagonals. I didn't really have a plan, just a desire to make a baby quilt and use this Hello Betty honeybun that, frankly, was shedding the edges of its 1.5" strips all over my other fabric.

That Y-seam provided an unexpected learning opportunity. Which is to say, I had never sewn such a seam before and thought it quite intimidating. (This is, of course, the result of not planning out the quilt ahead of time, because that Y-seam is actually quite avoidable, but I digress). Luckily, the Ann Arbor Modern Quilt Guild is full of really smart sewers and kind teachers; Ginia very patiently helped me figure this out. Because when you're going to sew a Y-seam for the first time, it's not actually advisable to do one with huge pieces of fabric and lots of bias edges. But challenges: I like them? I like them.

I started quilting with the 1/4" echo quilting. It was great for stabilizing the quilt. However, if I'm being honest, it also became tedious and tiresome rather fast. After 4 hours, I needed a new plan, because I did want to finish this quilt. Hence the stippling which, as home quilting goes, is usually quick (relatively) and manageable. In hindsight, I think some flame quilting in the negative space (Kona natural) would have been cool but since I just thought of that now, it was not meant to be.

Bound with more Kona natural and sent to California: rocketship is out and about.

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Point the Way

>> Thursday, February 13, 2014


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

>> Wednesday, January 22, 2014


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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The Baby at the Bachelor Party

>> Thursday, January 16, 2014

{I'm taking this opportunity to do a little #latergram style blogging. This post is brought to you by August 2013...}

Apparently not everyone has gender-inclusive bachelor parties, complete with the attendance of a baby (neither mine nor the bachelor's, for the record). At least, that's what Jenny and I gleaned when we served as chief participants in Joel's bachelor weekend. We got a lot of odd looks when we told people what we were doing. Which mostly involved gallivanting in a park, eating really good food, imbibing delicious drinks, going to a spa, attending live theatre, eating amazing cookies, and hanging out.

Did I mention the cookies? They're amazing.

I took this opportunity to multi-task and give Elody her baby quilt. Improvisationally-pieced with (mostly) Modern Meadow prints plus a little magenta and yellow for pizazz, this quilt came together quickly over a couple days. Lots of vertical movement and negative space, just how I like my quilts.

And Elody seemed pretty content as well, even as we wrapped her and unwrapped her for our high-class on-the-couch photo shoot. The back has 2 prints, both with lots of blues and purples. It's all straight-line quilting, at random intervals. I can't really remember why I chose to quilt it like that, but I like it.

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Lurching forward

>> Friday, January 10, 2014

I had forgotten how slippery a ruler could be, how hard I needed to press down to keep it locked into place as I cut fabric. The rotary cutter glided against the edge, and all the sudden, it wasn’t even. It wasn’t that perfect 2 and a quarter inch I sought, I needed, to finish a quilt that had languished for weeks and even months. The quilt, the many pieces of fabric sewn together, just so, says a lot about the past 6 months. Or, rather, its construction does. Or, really, the fits and starts in which it was put together, sewn together, the long slow crawl in which it was constructed, made, shaped into being.

It started in the summer, a new project for a friend’s baby. It started, like most of my projects, with a glimpse of an idea, a passing thought about shapes and color. It started with strips of fabric, hastily thrown together one warm summer night when I needed to sew, when my mind moved faster than my hands. And then it sat, as these things sometimes do, while I took care of the rest of my life. I prepared to teach my own class, I scurried to meet a bevy of early fall deadlines, I marched through a suite of Jewish fall holidays, I prepped materials for the looming job market that inched closer and closer. All the while, a large block sat on my futon, and ideas about what to do with it flitted through my head.

Finally, some breathing room, some space between other obligations, arrived, and I returned to the quilt. I attended several sewing events at Pink Castle Fabrics, used the huge design wall to figure out the real plan for this quilt, learned how to sew a Y-seam to make the ideas I had work, and finally, the quilt top was done. A month later, I pieced together the back, splicing and sewing yardage that coordinated with the front. It came together in an evening and, with more deadlines met, I worked again, basting and quilting and watching as a glimmer of a thought materialized as a quilt. I was almost done. The quilt almost finished. The gift nearly ready to be sent.

And then my world crashed down around me. Not softly, but harshly.

My dad died. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. Without warning. It was the Sunday before Thanksgiving and I was close by, in the metro area for a conference. He was supposed to meet me for lunch and he never made it.

The details of that day aren’t fuzzy. Some elements are impressionistic, but they’re still sharp and painful.

Days marched on, time moved ahead, and we lurched forward, incrementally, taking small and tentative steps into a new world, one whose contours are still unfamiliar and whose boundaries are not yet charted.

It had been 7 weeks since I last touched the quilt, forty-nine days of trying to gather new bearings. I knew I would sew again. Some of the obstacles were merely practical: for long chunks of the past few months, I was away from my stash, from my rulers and cutting mat, from my sewing machine. I glanced at blog posts here and there, I thought about shapes and let ideas percolate. I thought about closing the blog, knowing that my posts had waned long before November 24 and not really sure when I would want to return, if ever. I mentioned this in passing to my brother last week. And he told me to keep it. My brother who may or may not have ever read a blog post told me to keep it. So I did.

Last night I finished the quilt. I’ll wash it soon and mail it and maybe post about it. More likely, truth be told, it will show up on Instagram (you can find me there as two_hippos) and that might be it. Or I may squeeze out time from dissertation-writing-winter and post about it here. I'm not yet sure, but I'll figure it out.

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