Quilting Stuff

Hey!

2007-06-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

I'm quilting again! But, kind of only because I signed up for a course. This bad boy was whipped up over the last three days, and hoo boy am I tired. I'd like to try to get it entirely pieced and then sandwiched and basted before my next course, which will tackle free-motion quilting.

It's a kind of sampler thing, and it's quite busy-looking (as so much of my output tends to be, quilt-wise), but it'll be good to practice free-motion quilting on, and I feel like one could really stare at it for a while. Is that a measure of good design? I don't know.

Confluence!

2006-11-26T17:10:00.000-08:00

I subscribe to Quilting Arts Magazine, and four times a year get something in the mail to look closely at, think about, and feel completely intimidated by. I mean, yow. This stuff is so good. It's so sophisticated and complex and beautiful and completely out of my league. It's inspiring in an abstract way (create! create! create!) and depressing in a concrete way (how the hell am I supposed to do that?).

Well, I realized yesterday that maybe the fact that I steadfastly refuse to paint, soddering-iron/burn, use silks (or rather search out silks because the stores I go to only sell "commercial" fabrics), use fuseable backing, machine quilt, dye, or stamp has something to do with it.

Indeed I may be on to something here. I've been hedging on the whole machine-quilting thing for several months now, mostly because I would need to buy a new foot for my machine, but I will do that soon. The other stuff, especially painting, dyeing, and burning, I'm still not keen on at all.

I've found two new things that I'm going to try out. The first is needle felting, which is perfect because 1) it's kind of oddball - not a lot of people in the knitting or quilting world seem to do it, so there might be room for innovation, and 2) it offers a whole new way for me to injure myself painfully.

The second thing is Translucent Liquid Sculpey. This could potentially solve the problems with a series of quilts I started designing a couple years ago, but then put aside for lack of confidence in my ability to create the effect I'm looking for. NOW, though. Soon's I get my hands on a toaster oven to dedicate to cooking up polymers, watch out.

I keep saying to myself that as soon as I have x number of finished quilts, I'll go around town and see if I can display them in places. The number keeps going up, and I recently decided that I'd do it once Tree Quilt is finished (hahahaha), but maybe one of these days I will stick to a realistic proclamation.

Also, so you know, I have indeed been quilting. It's just that I've been quilting on Huhu wela loa a ula, which is symmetrical, and hand-quilting is still very slow-going for me and so I would be showing you the same thing over and over again, and probably in poor light at that.

Shapes.

2006-11-03T19:13:00.000-08:00

This is not a great picture. Most of my pictures suck, because they are taken well after the natural light has left.

But you get the idea. I vascillate from being very pleased to displeased with this one. I like looking at it, though, which I guess could be the deciding factor.

Serious posting problems, please don't flog me

2006-10-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

Hi! I can't publish right now on the main page, so I'm trying to publish here, in case you intrepid readers check by. So, I've e-mailed support about it and am praying not to be disqualified from NaBloPoMo at 12:00am on November 2. Wish me luck, or send me healthy ftp-vibes!

Sketch Quilt #3

2006-09-18T19:23:00.000-07:00

Full quilt:

Detail:

WIP: Stitchface, Sketch Quilt #2

2006-09-10T07:01:00.000-07:00

Nothing says "archival quality" like a dip in orange juice.

This is Sketch Quilt #2.

On stitchface, the beading around the tree is done and I'm not really sure where to go next. I'm happy not to have run out of beads. Usually I'm terribly careful about them, searching until I find whatever I've dropped and not dropping too much. But this time, every time I turned around I was knocking the tube over, beads taking flight. It must have something to do with the scale of this thing -- it's huge, relative to everything else i've done. I can't even imagine how people make queen-sized bed quilts.

WIP: Stitchface

2006-08-30T16:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, wow. I have a lot to report. Because much of it involves backtracking and pictures, I've been dreading writing this post, but we are moving forward again. So.

Despite the basting session that crippled me, the layers shifted as I was beading the edges of the quilt (hi-ya!):

So I de-beaded most of what I'd done and am re-doing. The key seems to be folding the edges in like a fan, NOT like a cinnamon roll. Beading without my hand right next to the row of beads is out of the question, so like a fan it will have to be. It seems to be working a bit better:

During the low period between realizing I'd need to (to borrow a knitting term because I like the violence of it even though it's technically inaccurate) rip the beads and actually ripping the beads, I did this:

In one hour. I think I'll end up doing more of these sketch quilts.

WIP: Stitchface loses its moniker.

2006-08-21T15:43:00.000-07:00

So. Scratch the Burden stitch. I just liked how it looked better without the yellow over top of it, so off it came.

I got the borders of Guatemalan fabric sewn on and cleaned the kitchen floor yesterday so I could get the thing basted. I've been pretty anti-basting in the past, and yesterday's 3+ hour session sucked pretty hard. I've seen a "basting gun" advertised - it's like one of those guns that clothing retailers use to put tags into garments. That would be better than the whole pin and then thread baste method I'm stuck with, but I'd really much rather have a Basting Elf, who would tell me jokes while she worked.

At any rate, that's done and I'm not planning any big projects anytime soon. These little quilts let you get away with a safety pin in each corner.

WIP: formerly The Tree Quilt, now known as Stitchface.

2006-08-12T20:31:00.000-07:00

On I go with the Burden stitch on the beams. The 'beams. It's fiddly and repetitive and I'm enjoying it.

I'm using a rayon thread for the base stitches, overlaid with alternating four shades of yellow. You can't really see the difference between the shades without looking very closely. This is what I'm going for - like how, with episodes of Arrested Development, each time you watch them you catch another joke or allusion, it just gets more and more complex. I want to make stuff that you can look deeper into.

The burden stitch through the applique and base fabric is giving the whole thing an interesting texture -- it appears to be very woven, which couldn't have worked out better with the Guatemalan fabrics. If I had actually planned that, I'd be a genius. It's also causing the orange fabric strips in the applique to appear much less distinct from one another, which is another effect that worked out well.

WIP: Tree Quilt

2006-07-18T16:46:00.000-07:00

My instructor, who likes things to be the colors that they are, suggested that perhaps suns aren't orange. They are yellow.

So I've got the sun appliqued down, and am now embroidering over it in the color that the sun is. (Which, really, while we're on the subject is actually white, which I know because I've looked at it. It is white, and there is a blue shadow along the left and top side, and a red shadow along the bottom and right side.)

In my awesome embroidery stitch dictionary, I found "Burden Stitch," which changes the look of the 'beam to a much stronger yellow.

The bottom thread is rayon, which I tend to try to avoid because it's generally gotten from trees in non-sustainable ways. But it was on sale, and that either makes logical sense or I'm totally rationalizing. It's very shiny, and I like how it looks. If blogger will let me upload this picture, you will see that this first attempt is not so great - the long stitches are too far apart, and because of the properties of the rayon (it's kind of stiff), they curve. Which means, if I choose to do all of this embroidery on the beams, that I will need to do each long stitch individually, and that is a LOT of knots.

But, I didn't get into quilting so that I could get things done quickly. If I'm going to pride myself on insane patience in the face of tedium, I can't back down from a challenge like that.

Okay. Blogger's rejecting the photo. So... none of this makes any sense to you because you can't see it. I'm going to go eat a bagel.

WIP: As yet unnamed

2006-07-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

I am very much a "Ta-da!" kind of person, by which I mean that I like to see something - movies, art - all at once, rather than bit by bit. I hate previews, and have a husband who is kind enough to haul me along to movies that I know nothing about but that he thinks I'll like. (We have discovered together the "no movies wherein a person gets shot in the face" rule, and live by it happily.)

So, doing this type of blog like everyone else does, where I show you things as I go along is, I'm finding out, contrary to my nature. I loved ceramics, because I loved the moment where you pull whatever it is out of the kiln, and all of your work, in that one moment of revelation, becomes something else. (Sometimes, it becomes something kickass.) Quilting and knitting are not so much like this, but I have mounds of fabric and yarn, and no clay or kiln, so I can learn to work with it.

Plus, I have questions.

But first:

This is the Quilt that Justified the Stash. For that reason alone I will always love it, despite the fact that it is also the Quilt that Taught Me that I Kind of Hate Strip Piecing.

The course supply list said something like 20 fat eights or large scraps of fabric. I interpreted that to mean "bring your whole stash!" which luckily fits into a small-ish rubbermaid container. How would I know which fabrics I'd want to use? And bringing the stash - and owning the stash - totally paid off.

I've read that people tend not to stash light fabrics, and thus that when you find light ones you're drawn to, you should pay attention to them. So I've dilligently stashed a few light fabrics here and there -- turns out, though, that I've completely neglected brown. Which wouldn't be an issue except that I really like to make images of trees. So. My instructor delicately suggested that perhaps my tree should be brown, and I pooh-poohed, not because I didn't agree, but because I'd just strip-pieced (ack) a purple and green tree trunk together and wasn't about to go purchase, wash, and iron a whole bunch of brown fabric to make a tree that actually looks like a tree. Anyhow, my point is: yay stashing stuff you like. But don't forget brown.

Now the questions.

At what point do you stop designing? I feel like this quilt needs more to it somehow, and I have a metric ton of potentially appropriate beads and yarns. But I'm also feeling like, because I wasn't envisioning that stuff in the beginning, to put it in now would look kind of silly. This is a real problem I have with embellishing -- I never feel like it looks like part of the design, it just looks like a bunch of crap I've decided to glue on. Integrating the 3-d with the 2-d is the problem, I guess.

I'm happy with the blanket-stitching around the leaves. Although the sunbeams are looking kind of catywampus (this is a word that quilters use!), it's only because I pinned it back on uncarefully, after I took out the original pin that was holding it down with my poor, poor arm skin.

Work in Progress: Huhu wela loa a ula

2006-07-04T18:42:00.000-07:00

I'm hand quilting this baby right now. The applique took a millionty-billion years, and the hand quilting part is going to take a billionty-trillion. I'm really enjoying the hand quilting part, though - it's like knitting in its repetitiveness, in the muscles learning how to do it. My muscles like it.

Right now this one is (of course) in its quilt sandwich, and the top is white and the batting is white and the backing is an unbleached cotton muslin, so the edges of the sandwich look like the skirt of some kind of 1980s punk-rock girl. The image is a lovely contrast to what the quilt actually looks like.

Redwork Abstract

2006-06-25T19:10:00.000-07:00

This means something.

Reasons Why Knitting is Better

2006-06-25T19:05:00.000-07:00

Finding a dropped knitting needle rarely involves magnetized scissors, a flashlight, and airlifting the napping dog to safety.

Embellished Ohio Star

2006-06-25T18:21:00.000-07:00

This is one of my first attempts to mix a traditional pieced block with something art-quilty, namely embellishment. It leaves me underwhelmed, but I don't dislike it.

Wedding Ring Quilt

2006-06-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

This quilt (hey, I can type with a thimble on!) was made for my friends' marriage. The design is based on the engagement ring they designed together, which has two sapphires (I think), one blue and one a topaz-y orange color inside silver circles. I wanted to make something based on the wedding ring pattern, and the design of the engagement ring meshed nicely with that idea.

I also came up with this neat yarn-around-beads thing that I hope to use again:

Quilting Stuff Lives!

2006-06-25T10:09:00.000-07:00

Oh, the stuff I have to show you.