Adventures in e-marketing

 I decided to devote this afternoon to adding a few things to the museum's EBay listings. A donation box from a few months ago included an amazing stash of vintage women's handkerchiefs, items that were both kind of nifty and totally useless. I mean, one or two colorful floral ladies' hankies might be neat to have around for if we ever dress a mannequin as June Cleaver (or her equivalent) so she could have it tucked in a pocket or sticking out of the end of a sweater sleeve, but there's no way the museum needs to keep a stash of 30 or 40 of them.

When the handkerchiefs first emerged from the box my first thought was to figure out a fair price and buy them myself. Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away I saw a remarkably nice quilt made from ladies' hankies. I believe the original pattern was in a women's magazine in the 1960s. It involved folding the hankies to form butterfly wings, appliqueing them to a backing, and then adding details like antennae with embroidery. It was nice. I saw the hankies stash, had flashbacks to the quilt Betty flaunted several decades ago, and briefly fantasized about chasing down the pattern and doing something similar.

Thanks to the wonders of Google, I did find the pattern. There are actually multiple options for turning cheap handkerchiefs into quilt tops. Then sanity prevailed. I have a remarkably high stack of UFOs now. Did I really need to add another Unfinished Object to that pile? 

No. 

So I took a lot of photos of handkerchiefs, measured them, and then kind of shoved the stack to one side. Recent adventures in cataloging made me realized something had to be done with the hankies. They needed to stop taking up space on the table in the office. They either needed to go into PastPerfect and then a drawer somewhere or they needed to get listed for sale. The latter seemed like the better option, considering that the museum really, really needs to build up enough money to have the building re-roofed. Besides, how long could it take to list a few dozen handkerchiefs on EBay, especially when they'd be listed in lots and not individually?

As one might anticipate, it ate up the entire afternoon. 

The good news is that one lot sold within an hour of getting listed so it wasn't a totally wasted day.

If I ever do decide to make a quilt like this, I have learned brand new ladies' handkerchiefs are available on-line in packs of 30. Are they being used for crafts or are there still people out there who haven't figured out that Kleenex exists?

An Exercise in Humility

 Or, I used to think I knew how to sew.

As faithful readers (all two of you) know, I quilt. Over the years I’ve mentioned various quilting projects – machine pieced, machine appliqued, hand applique, whatever – made from typical quilting cotton, denim, and flannel. Projects have ranged in size from hot pads to king size. I thought I did a fairly decent job.

I’ve also mentioned more than once that after the S.O. and I invested in a motorhome we began volunteering as campground hosts. We’ve been hosts at both state and national parks, with my favorite being the first place we volunteered: Montauk State Park in Missouri. Montauk is possibly the most popular park in the state system and is well-known for its trout fishing. The Current River is born at Montauk where the waters from Montauk Spring and a small stream meet. I love Montauk. It’s a great park.

A couple months ago the two things – quilting and Montauk – collided. The Missouri DNR has a centennial quilt project in progress. A friend who is the current assistant park supervisor asked if I was still a quilter. I said yes. She then asked if I’d make a block for the park for the centennial quilt. Of course I said yes to that too. I quilt. So she sent me the requirements: using only 100 percent cotton fabric, create an 8-inch square block with a theme that represented the park. It could be pieced, appliqued, embroidered, or a photo transfer. In retrospect, the last listed would have been the smart thing to do – hindsight is always 20/20.

In any case, I said yes. No sweat. One 8-inch block? Piece of cake. No problem. All I had to do was come up with an appropriate theme. My first thought was to do something with the Montauk Mill. It’s a nifty historic structure, and it would likely be different from what the other fish parks would do (Missouri has four or five parks that highlight fishing – Roaring River, Bennett Spring, and a couple others that I can never remember). If you’re know for fishing, you’re going to do a fish quilt block. Or so I reasoned until I happened across a really nifty design for a paper pieced rainbow trout. Holy wah. It was a neat block. Granted, it was a design for a 10-inch block, but, hey, what’s a photo copier for if not to produce reduced copies. I’d reduce it down to 80% of original size and that would be that.

For the uninitiated, paper piecing is perfect for doing piecing that needs to line up perfectly. It helps ensure all your points are actually points, and is used a lot for doing hexagons (the classic Grandma’s Flower Garden pattern) because hexies are tricky to align neatly. Do a paper pieced trout and it would be like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with fabric. No misaligned pieces, no weirdness. 

Point of information: that trout pattern has 41 pieces in an 8-inch block. Some of the pieces are less than 1/4 inch wide, which meant the part that was supposed to show was skinnier than the seam allowances for it. It was. . . interesting.

Three or four or possibly five rejected trout and several weeks of my life later, I threw in the towel. The trout kept coming out looking more like an oddly colored orca. Even worse, the beast was assembled in modules (A through G) and when it got to the point where the modules were sewn into the final two units, they refused to align. According to the pattern, all the seams were perfect. According to the deformed not-exactly-square disaster on the ironing board, the block was a hot mess.

On to the original thought, the Montauk mill. Nothing but nice straight lines, no curves like a trout rising has, so the pieces would be nothing but rectangles and triangles (the building has gable roofs). All I needed was a decent photo of the mill to use as a guide. Got the photo, created a pattern, did paper piecing again, and managed after another several days of my life and three botched preliminary attempts to produce something that wasn’t a total embarrassment. Only 13 pieces instead of 41, although that first floor roof was also super thin and a a total pain to get looking even remotely like a roof. 

Made the mistake of trying to embroider Montauk in cursive above the mill, which is when I learned my embroidery skills (which used to be amazing) have definitely weakened with age. It was supposed to curve around and end in a fish hook. Now it just looks like someone misspelled Montauk. Still, despite my qualms about the embroidery, the block got shoved into an envelope and is now probably jammed in a USPS automated sorting machine somewhere multiple states away from here. Never again.

Maybe. Although the moral of the story appears to be Never Volunteer (or maybe never over-estimate your own ability to do stuff), I am going to try again with the trout, except this time I’m scaling the bastard UP, not down. I invested a fair amount of actual money in fat quarters specifically to build the trout. It wasn’t easy finding a good pink to use for the stripe down the side, and it will go into a fish worth keeping. I’ve got a Rolling Stone quilt in progress that’s going to include some miscellaneous blocks commemorating our travels with the late, lamented Guppy, and the fish will go into it, as will one of the prototype blocks for the mill.

The S.O., incidentally, came close to suffering bodily injury when he looked at the Mill block and said “what about the windows?” After struggling to align pieces the size of fingernails for the building, there was no way in hell I was going to screw it up by trying to embroider windows. The silhouette is right; people can use their imaginations to put in the windows and the handrails for the steps. I'm trying to take comfort in the fact that when it's set in a quilt with a gazillion other blocks and then quilted it's not going to look as crude as it does when seen in isolation. I'm in a bunch of quilting groups on Facebook; I've seen lots of stuff that looks worse but people still manage to brag about instead of cringing. 

Procrastination

I should be cleaning my home office area before the piles of unsorted stuff climb to life-threatening levels, but as usual I'm procrastinating. The stacks of stuff don't put me into the same class as the Collyer brothers yet, but my typewriter has disappeared. There's a definite limit as to how much I can stack on top of it before there's spillage to the sides.

And, yes, I still have a typewriter. Legacy technology. I even use it occasionally. I have days that fall between going truly retro (hand writing a letter) and using the computer. The typewriter fits that middle ground. Typing can be nice. It slows a person down a little, makes one stop and think a bit before committing words to paper. Writing out a whole sentence is not fun. Even worse is crumpling a whole page and starting over.

Plus, of course, typing on a manual typewriter, an old office-size Royal, requires more physical effort than typing on a keyboard. I'm burning double the calories and maintaining finger strength. When I see the doctor for the annual wellness exam I can say with a straight face I do exercise occasionally. He doesn't need to know the exercise basically stops at the wrists.

Besides the general desire to clean up the clutter, there's also the need to find all the museum-related stuff I've hauled home to work on while it's been too cold in the museum itself. I've been scanning and cataloging documents and photographs here at home because I figured out I wasn't real good at doing those tasks while wearing mittens. I even brought the museum computer home (it's a desktop but one without a tower; it's an all-in-one and thus remarkably portable despite having a large display screen and a standard keyboard) because it's where the PastPerfect database lives and it was easier to do updates here than in a walk-in refrigerator. With the snowbank in front of the building steadily shrinking -- as of Saturday the snow was maybe barely 2 feet deep and there must have been a whole four feet of sidewalk exposed on the parking lot side -- fairly soon I'll be able to carry it back and get the museum office restored to what passes for normalcy there.

It just struck me, though, that the sun is shining and temperatures are not horrible. If I'm going to avoid cleaning for awhile, there are better ways to procrastinate than wandering around the Intertubes or doodling with words on a blogpost. I do believe the Woman Cave is calling my name. Time to go cut some quilt pieces.

Cold weather projects

Summer is winding down so I'm getting back into a sewing mood. Started a jeans quilt recently, one that's going to be a really simple pattern, and have found a mending project that should eat up a fair number of hours in front of the television this winter.

The jeans quilt will be approximately full-size. At this point I'm thinking I'll do a thin border using a bright corduroy around the brickwork and then will do an outer border using denim squares. I figured out it's going to take 28 rows of the rectangles; I've got 7 completed so far. Once it's done, it'll get ticked with embroidery floss. It will, of course, include at least one pocket. I'm probably going to give it to someone with kids, and little kids love having pockets they can hide stuff in.

The mending project is a fairly small square quilt I finished in the early 1980's. Not sure where I found the pinwheel pattern, but do recall it took forever to cut the pieces. Then I hauled them around in an ice cream pail for a couple years (from Michigan to unincorporated Snohomish County in Washington to Panorama City (California) to Tucson (Arizona) and finally to Reno before I finally started piecing it. I think we were still living in Reno when I finished it.

It's held up remarkably well overall, but exposure to light combined with normal wear and tear (when I make quilts, they're meant to be used and not hung on a wall as a decorative item) caused one specific fabric to dry rot. Depending on the dyes used, some fabrics break down remarkably fast. (I learned the hard way that black cotton blends are never a good choice for use in a quilt. They either fade to a truly ugly green or dry rot almost instantly.) Mending it will entail cutting pieces to fit the spaces where the original piece is now in shreds and then hand sewing the new pieces in place. Not sure just how long the process will take, but I know it's going to be fairly time consuming.

My first quilt

To the best of my recollection, this is the first quilt I ever made. It was the early '70s, no one I knew was doing actual quilting, i.e., piecing traditional patterns like Burgoyne Surrounded or Dresden Plate. The Lutheran ladies "quilted" for World Relief, but what they did involved using large pieces of material, squares or strips that were sewn together quickly and then tied as comforters, even though everyone called them quilts. I bought a McCall's magazine with traditional (or close to traditional) quilt patterns in it and proceeded to teach myself, more or less, how to quilt. The pattern for my first quilt was, I think, called Night and Noon; 45 years ago the color contrasts for the smaller pieces were a lot more vivid than they are now. When I look at it now, of course, I can see the gazillion mistakes I made, the weird puckering with the border, the mismatched points, and various other problems. On the other hand. . .

I gave the quilt to my mother, and it's spent most of the past four decades on her bed. I guess somewhere along the line I should have given her a couple more so she could rotate them so this one wouldn't have gotten so thoroughly worn out, but for some reason I never did. I did knit her several afghans, but that's not quite the same thing.

Not surprisingly,  the quilt has gotten more than a tad faded. It's also worn threadbare in places. One particular fabric seems to have been particularly prone to sun bleaching and dry rot. It was bright red in a bandanna paisley pattern back in 1972; now it's threadbare and so faded it's hard to believe it was once red. It's a lot more faded in real life than it looks like in the photo. I took the quilt when my sister and I cleaned out our mother's apartment. I'll be spending the next several days patching the torn pieces and doing repairs as best I can. The batting has gotten flattened to the point of virtual nonexistence over the past 40+ years but there isn't much I can do about that with just a week or two to work in. We're going back up to Grand Junction later this month, and I'll bring the repaired quilt with me. If we're all lucky, my mother will get a few more years use out of it.

Speaking of weirdness

I've been indulging in two hobbies -- quilting and pen palling -- for decades now. Pen pals since I was in the 8th grade (long, long ago in a galaxy far away) and quilting. Quilting is slightly more recent. I got into it in the early 1970s. Occasionally the two hobbies overlap.

In a post a number of years ago I mentioned that one of the ways pen pals used to (and still do) find new pals was through the exchange of friendship books, aka fbs. Most people call them eff bees; I tend to refer to them as fibs, possibly because Pen Pal Land has always had its fair share of fantasists. Long before the Internet came along to provide people with a platform for fictionalizing their lives, people did it in Pen Pal Land. But that's normal human behavior and definitely not what I'm thinking about today.

Shady Lady hand applique quilt block

In addition to the fbs, people swap exchange slips, i.e., short form chain letters. Instead of going through the whole rigamarole of "Send $1 to the first name on the list, cross it off, add yours to the bottom, make six copies and pass them on" an exchange slip will just say "2 Viewcards Exchange - 6 copies" (often abbreviated as 2 VC - 6 c) or "Sheet of Seals Exchange - 6 copies." Name an item and somewhere out there exchange slips probably circulate for it, like tea towels or dishcloths.

Tumblers

Or quilt blocks or fabric swatches. I used to do 12-1/2 inch square friendship block exchanges (pieced or applique), tumbler exchanges (a tumbler being a polygon shaped sort of like a drinking glass) done to a standard template, and a few others. At one point I had quite a few blocks other people had sent me. There was no standard pattern for generic friendship blocks, although there were a few exchanges for specific themes (Sunbonnet Sue, pinwheels) or holidays (Christmas). I must have really been into the whole blocks/swatches/whatever exchange thing for awhile. I made two Christmas wall hangings using Christmas blocks people sent me -- my standard Christmas block was one that mimicked a wrapped package -- as well as one full-size quilt top. I do still note in fbs that I'll "swap f/s blocks, 12-1/2 inches sq., pieced or applique" but no one's offered to swap in years. I think all the old ladies I used to get quilt blocks from have died off and no one's replaced them.

Christmas pinwheel, 12-1/2 inch square

Anyway, I'm at that point in the Woman Cave where one quilt just got finished and I have no idea what to do next. I have some vague ideas, but nothing solid. So I've been going through the stash: the multiple Sterlite bins and Rubbermaid totes and the dresser drawers. I'm pulling out odds and ends and kind of inventorying what I have. Do I want to do a quilt that is done from just one or two fabrics or do I want to do another scrap quilt? Maybe I want to take some of the odds and ends of extra blocks and parts of blocks and just sort of start in the middle and work out and see what happens? Not exactly a framed medallion, but the same general idea.

Grandmother's Flower Garden segments

In the process of inventorying, I discovered I still have quite a stash of stuff obtained through exchanges: ordinary blocks, some Christmas-themed blocks, some sets of hexagons for a Grandmother's Flower Garden (I didn't even remember ever getting into swapping those), some humongous butterflies ready to be appliqued on to something. Tumblers, lots of tumblers, enough tumblers sewn together to qualify as an extremely colorful table runner if I felt like putting a backing on it. Most of the finished blocks were quite good; one of the appliqued blocks, a Shady Lady (shown at the top of this post), is so nice that I don't want to put it into a quilt. I want to put it in a frame and hang it on a wall.

Cow pie? Lily pad? Or just plain weird?

And then there's the cow pie. Or perhaps it's supposed to be a lily pad. A kidney bean? Just what was the point? The blob is hand-appliqued so whoever sent it took her time assembling it. But, wow, it's weird.The fabric isn't bad. . . but the execution is definitely strange.

My standard f/s block pattern, for what it's worth, was Rolling Stone. We moved so often that it felt appropriate.

 You know, maybe that's what I should do next -- cut enough pieces to do an entire Rolling Stone quilt. It would be an especially apt project to work on this winter when we're on the road in the Guppy. Definitely something to think about.

So how long is it going to take me?

Every so often I get asked how long it takes to hand quilt a quilt. I'm never able to come up with a good answer because it's not like I sit down, start quilting, and just work straight through as though it was an ordinary job with a set schedule. I quilt while watching television, which means it's for an hour or two at a time during the evening -- but not every evening. Out of curiousity, I decided this time that I'd keep track. I'll record the hours each day on a calendar. And then sometime later this year I'll have an answer.

Or maybe I should say hopefully sometime this year. . . the bit you see in the photo took about 5 hours to do. The problem with quilting while watching television is, of course, that if the action on the screen is particularly interesting, the needle in my hand stops moving. I've mentioned before I quilt using a hoop, which makes the work portable, sort of. This particular quilt tends to be a bit awkward to work with as it's about 110-inches square with a pattern running on a diagonal. Usually I start in the middle and work out toward the edges. This time I started in the middle but think I'll go all the way to the ends of the stripe I'm on before moving over to the next stripe. Maybe.

On the positive side, this is one quilt where I don't have to worry about the marking from the quilting template showing up. Even the print fabric is light enough that I'll be able to see the pattern.

I may have mentioned before that hand quilting on a large scale seems to have gone out of fashion. The only time I've seen it in recent years was on the micro-quilts, the little tiny wall hangings or placemats. Almost no one does it on big quilts anymore. Quilting catalogs still carry the pre-stamped "white on white" quilt tops but I always wonder just how many they're managing to sell. The idea behind a white-on-white was to show off your hand-quilting skills, but the last time I met anyone who had actually done one the lady was in her 80s -- and that was almost 30 years ago. She may have been the last person alive to bother. I do know that at the last quilt show I attended, every single large quilt had been machine quilted in a stipple pattern, which was weirdly disturbing. Not even the people who machine quilt are bothering to get creative. There are continuous line quilting patterns that allow a person who's machine quilting to loop around doing stars and hearts and flowers, but, nope, they're all stippling. It's fast, it's easy, and it's remarkably forgiving if you screw up.

The purple floral print fabric is from the Thelma stash. I'm not sure why my aunt Thelma bought it but she must have liked it a lot. There had to have been at least 20 yards of it. I've used multiple yards of it for quilt backs, Tammi recovered the seats on her dining room chairs with it, it's been used in smaller pieces in other projects. . .  I was beginning to think we'd never see the end of it.

Now that I've started quilting this particular project, I need to get serious about figuring out what to do next. I'm not real picky about the pattern, but it has to be one without points. I've never been very good at setting triangles neatly.

Retro garment for one of the grandkids

I managed to shake off the blahs enough to wander up to the Woman Cave and do some sewing this afternoon. I finished a project that used some of the fabric from the Thelma Stash, a flannel print that would cause most adults to recoil in horror but can manage to look cute (sort of) when used for an old-fashioned nightgown for a 4-year-old.

I still haven't figured out a pattern for the next quilt. I keep feeling the urge to start cutting pieces, but cutting pieces is hard to do when I have no idea yet as to what size, shape, or how many I'll need.  It'll come to me -- right now I'm thinking vaguely of doing something involving chevrons.

News from the Woman Cave

Once again I'm flipping through pattern books and trying to decide on what to do for the next quilt. A few days I finished piecing the most recent project. I still have to put the quilt top together with a batting and a backing before spending evenings for the next several months hand quilting, but that doesn't count. I always have multiple quilts in progress. Or at least I used to: one being cut, one being pieced, one being quilted, and usually one being made from upcycled denim. Right now all I have is the one that I'll start quilting soon. Nothing being cut, nothing being pieced. Back in the 1970s I bought a quilting magazine (McCall's All American Quilts, IIRC) and rather recklessly said that eventually I was going to make each of the quilts shown. The quilt shown came from that magazine; I think I've done 3 or 4 others over the past 40 years. Maybe it's time to consult the magazine again.

The quilt pictured to the right will be a slightly bigger than queen-size when it's done. At this point, it's a little over 100-inches square. Whenever I work on a big quilt, I can't help but wonder how people did back in the days when houses were smaller and held a lot more people. In order to spread it out so I could square it up properly, I had to bring it down to the museum and use the empty space where our Politics and Elections exhibit is going to go. That's where I'll lay it out to do the sandwich (top, batting, back), too. Our current living quarters simply don't have any spaces big enough for me to spread things out to the point where I can see the entire quilt easily. If there didn't happen to be that open space at the museum, I'm not sure what I would have done -- wait for a calm day and spread a tarp on the ground? Tried to clear enough clutter out of the way in the hay loft to use that space and hope I managed to avoid getting bird crap on it? I've seen some amazing quilts in museums that were pieced and quilted by women living in sod houses on the prairie in Nebraska -- how on earth did they do it, especially when most of them did the quilting using a frame. I use a hoop, which solves the space issue, although it does raise questions of how to keep it clean when most of it is wrapped around me and at risk of trailing on the cat-hair covered floor.

I need to keep track of just how many hours I put into the hand quilting. I get asked occasionally how long it takes and I always guess at it -- an hour or two a night four or five nights a week for X number of months. . . I've finished some quilts pretty quickly and others have taken over a year. It would be nice to finish this one before the 2016 county fair, though, as I haven't entered a quilt in the fair in many, many years.

More stuff accomplished

The pattern is called Blizzard, at least according to last year's Quilt a Day calendar. It is a a fairly rare type of quilt for me to make -- it's not a scrap quilt. Thanks to the Thelma stash, I had enough yard goods in a dark blue print to make a full-size quilt It is a large quilt because every quilt I make is intended to go on a bed. My sewing is utilitarian, not artistic. I machine pieced and hand quilted, as described in a previous post.

Until I went looking for the link to that previous post, I did not realize I've been slowly hand-quilting that sucker for almost ten months. Holy crap. No wonder I'm now looking at this particular quilt and thinking I'll keep it for us instead of giving it to someone at Christmas. Ten months! Granted, it's not like it was continuous. I didn't drag it along if we went somewhere, and I didn't work on it every evening we were home, but, still, ten months. If you figure two hours each evening 5 or 6 evenings a week when we were home, that's more hours than I care to think about. I could have written The Great American Novel in that amount of time, assuming I had any talent for writing fiction, of course.

I had actually been thinking that I'd finished this one a little faster than usual for me. Time is indeed relative.

And now I have to figure out what to do next. I'm currently in the unusual position of having no quilts in progress, either denim or more traditional. Maybe I'll focus on making a Christmas wall hanging or two instead -- I do have some Christmas prints, and a wall hanging would be small enough that I could machine quilt it if I wanted to. If I'm even semi-ambitious I could actually finish one in time to give it someone this year.

Or maybe not -- we're going off to play campground hosts soon, the departure date is now less than a week away, and I'm not planning to drag a sewing machine along on this trip. Maybe I would if I had a specific project in mind, but I don't. I may knit by the campfire, but I won't be quilting in the Guppy.

Feeling a tad unmoored . . . adrift . . . at loose ends

I'm not sure just what the most apt phrase would be. I'm finding myself in between projects, more or less, and am wondering just what to tackle next.

I speak of indoor projects, of course. There's always a zillion things to do outside in the summer, from the boring but necessary (weeding the garden) to the mildly creative (the long-delayed water feature). If nothing else, if it's not raining, there's always firing up the lawn mower and creating more mulch for the garden.

Indoor projects, on the other hand, the kind that a person retreats to when it's raining or the bugs are really bad, are in short supply at the moment. I've finished two quilts this summer, although neither one is a quilt in the purest sense of the word. One is technically a comforter because it's tied instead of quilted; the other is more of a duvet cover. The "duvet" stuffed into the latter is an ancient comforter we inherited eons ago. I don't know if it's something the S.O. had in his stash of priceless heirlooms or if my parents handed it to us back in the '70s. I'm also not sure what it's filled with, but it's definitely not feathers. If you have small children, it's one of those comforters that eliminates the need for a babysitter. It's sufficiently heavy that if you toss it over a toddler, for sure that little barracuda isn't going anywhere for awhile. I have a vague memory of sleeping under comforters of similar weight way back when I was young. My grandmother made them. I think they were stuffed with horsehair and bricks. It's a minor miracle that my sister and I didn't end up flattened like pressed flowers in a Victorian album.

Maybe that's the story I should be telling young people instead of the hiking to school through waist-deep snow uphill both ways narrative. "You guys don't know how good you have it. You don't have to bench press your bedding the way we did back in the day. . ."

In any case, I made a duvet cover, a giant pillowcase to slip over the ancient comforter. We're going to put it into the guest cabin, the ratty trailer we bought last year that is slowly becoming less ratty. Whether or not anyone will ever be desperate enough to sleep under it is debatable, but it will make a reasonably durable surface to sprawl on top of while watching tv or reading on rainy days. The cover itself looks like this:

One thing making that duvet cover did was use up most of my stash of old jeans. About all I've got left now is a pile of pockets. Maybe I should do a comforter where that's what every block is: a functional pocket. Then I'll give it to one of my nieces who has preschoolers so she can get to play "where's that odd smell coming from?" when she steps into the kids' bedroom.

Evil smile.

I think I just found my next sewing project.

And the quilting continues

Back of the quilt

 Sometimes I can be a slow learner. I've been quilting for many years now. With most quilts I machine piece the top and then hand quilt after putting the top together with the backing and the fill. I've quilted using both a regular quilt frame and a hoop; over 20 years ago I decided I prefer the hoop. It's less awkward. Plus, of course, it means that I get to wrap myself in the quilt as I work on it, which makes finishing a quilt the perfect winter activity.

Well, with every single quilt I quilted (with maybe one or two rare exceptions, usually when I decided to do something geometric with lots of straight lines I could mark with masking tape) I would bitch about how hard it was to mark the quilting pattern so I could see it. I tried everything: the pencils that supposedly wash out, markers with the fade-away ink, chalk (both in a pounce and tailor's chalk), even dressmaker's carbon. Didn't matter. There was always some fabric where the marking simply did not want to show up. I did a lot of muttering.

Finally, this winter, I had a flash of insight. Why not reverse quilt it? The quilting shows on both sides. It has to. The backing on my current project is plain muslin: no way would it be hard to see the marking pen on it. So that's what I'm doing. End result? As far as I can tell, you can't tell the difference between the front and back quilting stitches on the parts that are done. Even better, I think I'm setting some sort of a speed record for me on quilting this particular project, which is good because it's a queen-size. I may actually finish it before the snow is gone.

Front of the quilt

The quilt itself is a pattern called "Blizzard" on the quilting calendar I found it on so I'm using the quilting stencil I had that came closest to looking like a snowflake. Because snowflakes are random when they fall, so is my quilting pattern placement. I started in the middle and have been working out sort of concentrically from there. I suppose if I were really ambitious (a true artist?) I'd have made a snowflake stencil but I didn't think my drawing talents were quite that good. I was never particularly good at making simple snowflakes when I was a kid; I doubt if I've improved with time.

Doodle pattern

A small digression: the last time I went to a quilt show, there wasn't a single hand-quilted quilt there. Apparently hand quilting is becoming a lost art. There was a time when the typical quilt show would include at least one white-on-white quilt, i.e., a quilt done simply so the quilter could show off the quality of his or her hand quilting skills. Those days are gone. No one seems too inclined to put in the 100+ hours a typical hand-quilted large quilt requires. Every single quilt at the most recent show was labeled as "pieced [or designed] by X, quilted by Y" and the quilting was machine quilting, usually in what I think of as the doodle pattern.

I've used that pattern myself, but usually just as fill between other motifs. I think I'm becoming a quilting snob -- when I see an otherwise lovely quilt finished with squiggles, I tend to think the quilter was lazy. Surely there are machine patterns that could be used that would actually complement the pieced design instead of just functioning to hold the whole thing together. But maybe thinking that way is the quilter's equivalent of "You kids get off my lawn." I'm getting old. . . more and more often I find myself muttering that no one today has the patience for "real" craftsmanship.

Latest quilting project

A week or so ago Yellowdog Granny mentioned she would really like to make sure some nursing home residents had a decent Christmas. They had been living at West Rest Haven in West, Texas, and had their lives thoroughly disrupted when the fertilizer plant there blew up in April of this year. The nursing home was destroyed: windows blown out, ceilings collapsed. Amazingly, no one at Rest Haven was killed.

My first thought was to take the easy route: the next time we went to Marquette we'd stop at the Tourist Trap in Ishpeming and pick up something uniquely Yooper to send. But that seemed too easy, too facile. I've been to West, it's a nice little city, and shopping seemed a little too mindless. These old people went through an unbelievably traumatic experience, and it seemed like if I was going to do anything for them I should put a little effort into it. Then it hit me: the fabric stash. I've worked in nursing homes. I know one thing that residents can always use: lap robes. Making lap robes is like making crib quilts -- they're even the same size.

I've mentioned the fabric stash before. Thanks to my aunt Thelma's love of fabric sales, I'm never going to run out of yard goods. The stash includes everything from what appears to be an entire bolt of some fabrics to remnants of a yard or less. The one thing most of the fabrics have in common is they're prints that would have been popular in the 1950s, '60s, and maybe early '70s. There was also some odd stuff, like a stack of upholstery fabric samples. It's always kind of a challenge figuring out just what to do with some of it.

Well, the upholstery samples went into this one. I had been trying for a long time to figure out what to do with them (I'm too much of a fabric hoarder to ever throw anything away) because there weren't enough for anything big, but they weren't appropriate for the typical small quilts I make, which are almost always crib quilts. Combined with the corduroy sashing, the end result is a nicely masculine lap robe.

This little project barely made a dent in the fabric stash, so maybe over the winter I'll make a few more lap robes to donate locally. After all, they do say charity begins at home.

If anyone's interested in the technical details, the lap quilts consist of the usual front, back, and a batting. They were machine pieced and assembled without a binding: front and back were placed right sides together, the batting laid on top, and the quilt sandwich sewn on three sides and then turned right side out. They were ticked using crewel yarn and then the remaining open end was sewn shut. Here's what they look like on the flip side:

And, yes, we really do have that much snow (about six inches) on the ground now. I don't think it's going anywhere until maybe next May.

Trips down memory lane

I started working on a new quilt recently -- it's a scrap pattern ("Summer Breeze," aka the month of June in the 2010 Better Homes and Gardens Quilting Calendar; I'm using brighter prints and a darker solid than the ones shown in the photo from the pattern book) and takes a zillion* 2-inch squares in a variety of colors. What ties it together, obviously, are the solid blue blocks (each of the big ones is actually 4 pieces). I've been going through my fabric stash, which consists of scraps left from past projects as well as yard goods and  remnants that either I or my aunt Thelma purchased. (My aunt Thelma was a great one for hitting the sales tables in fabric stores; I have her to thank for my shopping bags), and various articles of clothing that I saved because I thought the material could be recycled into something else at some point in the future. (That's where the union label came from last week, from what was left of a polka dot cotton mini dress circa 1970.)

I do not have a super huge fabric stash -- only 15 or so 32-qt. Sterlite containers, so it all fits in one closet (I know people who need rather large rooms to accommodate their yard goods stash) -- and I try not to add to it. I also tend to do "scrap patterns" for many projects in the apparently vain hope of reducing its size (the levels in the containers never seem to drop very much). So why am I still finding pieces of fabric that I know are getting close to (if they were people) being eligible for membership in AARP? The dress I could halfway understand -- there was some tiny irrational part of my brain that didn't want to cut into it because who knows, maybe a miracle would occur and I'd wake up some morning to discover I was the same size I'd been back during the Nixon administration. Every woman has a garment of some sort that she refuses to give up -- a dress, a favorite pair of jeans, a swimsuit -- because, as God is her witness, someday she's going to fit into it again. But scraps from dresses that were made for my now 41-year-old daughter when she was in kindergarten? Just how many scrap quilts does a person have to make before every last piece of usable scrap material is gone from the stash? It's a mystery. . .

[*In this case, a zillion equals 936 2-inch print squares, 100 2-1/2 inch print squares for the border, and a couple hundred pieces of unbleached muslin in various shapes and sizes.]

Quilts: I actually finished another one

I started it in Omaha. The piecing was fast and easy; the hand quilting took what began to feel like forever. It's a queen-size, I finished it around the end of May, and gave it to the older grandson a couple weeks ago.

Quilting and recycling

Nerf was nice enough to send me a photo of the jeans quilt I made for her birthday last month. I've been making quilts using recycled jeans for many years now, but this is the most complex pattern to date. Wasn't able to get a decent photo myself due to lack of floor and/or wall space. The quilt is approximately queen-size.