Posts tagged ‘Civil War’
Finished! Spumoni Spring
I WANT TO TOUCH ALL YOUR FABRIC
Five quilts down, one to go:
“Spumoni Spring” 2012, 72″ x 72″
I have submitted my entry forms for the guild quilt show, now only a month away, and I am entering six quilts: Welcome Ronan, AKA Ronan’s Quilt; The Very Hungry Caterpillar; Dragons Galore, AKA Minkee Dragons; Halloween Buzz Saw; Spumoni Spring, AKA Pink and Brown; and the shop hop sampler quilt. That final one is still on the sewing table, still being quilted. BUT! It’s mostly complete, I know what I’m doing with the rest of it, and I already have the binding made. AND! The other five are completely finished, including hanging sleeves. I think that’s a personal best; I’m usually sewing on hanging sleeves into the wee hours of Wednesday morning before the show, when we have to bring our quilts to the fairgrounds.
So, back to Spumoni Spring. The title presented itself once I added that green:
Block detail, “Spumoni Spring”
The blocks are quilted in a Pam Clarke-inspired design, for which I used her Basic 8 stencil and a blue chalk pounce to just give me some temporary guidelines to work with. This was a really satisfying technique: no blue marker to wash out, but definitely more consistent results than I can achieve by just eyeballing it. The blue chalk was highly visible on all my fabrics, but it brushes off very quickly, so I couldn’t mark more than one block at a time. I was also trying to use as few thread starts and stops as possible. Therefore, as I prepared to enter each block, I had to use my big 16 1/2″ square plexiglass ruler as a table to slide under the quilt and give me a surface on which to mark my blue chalk asterisk. Not the most graceful technique in the world, but I’m not arguing with the finished product.
Border quilting detail, Spumoni Spring
The two center vertical strippy borders were such a busy print that I knew nothing would show up, so I just echoed the print to create the appropriate quilting density. The two outer vertical strippy borders were not quite as busy, but with that large floral, I still didn’t want to exert myself particularly; if I’m going to do something fancy, I want to be able to see it! Therefore, I selected a design I’d been meaning to try: Onions and Garlic from Megan Best’s “Spinal Twist” book. It’s simple but creates a beautiful texture, which (like many of my favorite freehand designs) benefits from being somewhat imprecise. This is one I will definitely use again.
The outermost pinwheel border was the area I selected to get the least dense quilting design. I’ve mentioned before how I like Sue Patten‘s principle that a quilt should have three densities of quilting to create depth and contrast, the same way the top should have three values of fabric. Since this is definitely a lap/cuddle quilt, rather than a wall quilt, I thought having a nice soft poofy border where your face would go might work out well. We’ll see, because currently I feel like it needs something more. Oh well, it’s a learning experience! I just did a looping continuous curve variation, following the seam lines as if they were hourglass blocks:
Feather quilting detail, Spumoni Spring
In contrast, the densest quilting was in the green border, where I did one of Patsy Thompson‘s feather wave borders. I broke down and mail-ordered the 40″ flexible curve ruler, which made marking the spine VERY easy. I used a variegated pink thread from Fil-Tec that behaved beautifully; I will definitely be exploring more of their threads.
Label detail, Spumoni Spring
The binding seemed to need to be green as well, and I used a spare pinwheel block as the label. And after five years in the UFO box, it’s finished! It feels so good to be racking up a list of these. Of course, the next “Finished!” post will be about a new (though small) project that I’m taking to Show & Tell at guild tonight, and I’m already mentally making my challenge quilt for next fall, so the UFO completion rate will probably slip a bit in the near future. But at the same time, the confidence I’ve built over the last several projects is really encouraging me to take a deep breath and quilt Ruby Wedding. Now THAT would alleviate some quilt guilt and free up some brainspace!
This quilt’s happy dance really couldn’t be to any other song, and Gerard Darmon’s version of it for this video made me smile:
Meet Another UFO: Pink and Brown
"Sometimes Mommy quilts till the cows come home!"
I haven’t been blogging lately, but I have been quilting! I have two quilts that are within heartbeats of being finished, and I’ll discuss the first one here. It’s a return to my original purpose for this blog, to motivate me to finish my unfinished projects and to document the process.
This is a weird UFO because to many eyes, it’s a finished top that just needs to be quilted. In fact, that’s exactly what it is; I’m just being difficult.
In the nine years I worked at my former practice, we had three employees retire, and I made a quilt for each of them. The most recent retiree, in April 2007, was a woman who decorates in a refined country style and loves pink, so I thought pinks and browns, heavy on the Civil War reproductions would suit her well.
Our guild had hosted a workshop on the Square in a Square ruler technique. I had been unable to attend the workshop (stupid full-time job!) but had seen the great quilts that emanated from it, so I bought the ruler and a book and chose a nice Churn Dash variation block. I’d been collecting pink and brown fabrics for a while (remember how you couldn’t avoid them a few years ago?) and paired them with shirting fabrics. I made thirty blocks, making two each of fifteen fabric combinations, so that I could have a quilt to keep as well as one to give away.
I wound up loving the blocks but was less than impressed with the Square in a Square technique. Sure, it’s accurate, but it does weird things with grain lines, leaving biases in places I don’t want them and creating some wacky effects with directional prints (look at the top block in the rightmost column to see a particularly egregious example). Plus, I found it to be very wasteful of fabric; I brought my scrap bag to retreat after making this quilt, and one of my friends managed to make an entire pieced tablecloth just out of the offcuts. So I donated the Square in a Square ruler and books to the Guild Boutique. I may not be Sally Collins, but I am a decently precise piecer, so I don’t think I need this technique to be happy with both the process and the results of my piecing.
My thought for finishing this quilt was to make it both larger than it was and to make it just a little bit different than the first one. I have yet to make any completely identical quilts, and I’m in no hurry to start. With the large vertical strippy borders, I didn’t want to simply add solid circumferential borders, so I decided on pieced borders. And since I absolutely love pinwheel blocks, which would echo the half-square triangles in the corners of the central blocks, I settled on a plan. And then… stopped. For five years.
Continuing my snowball method of trying to pick out the UFOs with the least amount of necessary finishing work, and being in more of a piecing mood than a quilting mood at the moment, I pulled this top out of its box after finishing my retreat tote. Putting it back up on the design wall, I realized that it definitely needed a solid spacer border both to give the eye a place to rest and to make the math work for the pinwheel blocks. But what to use? A bold print would get lost, and using either pink or brown would mean that half of the pinwheel blocks would blend into it. I briefly considered using a neutral, but finally decided there was no way I could go but green.
The Judie Rothermel print I had used for the inner two vertical strip borders had touches of green, as did the stems and leaves of the floral in the outer two, but it was kind of an odd green that I was sure I’d have to shop for. Surprise, I had yards of an otherwise unremarkable tone-on-tone in exactly the right green. I must have bought it at an extreme discount, because it’s rather boring and I can’t imagine why I would otherwise have been inspired to buy so much of a fabric I didn’t love. But it was perfect for this project, so serendipity works!
To cut the pinwheels, I used the Easy Angle Ruler. Bonnie Hunter references this ruler all the time, so I had bought one (JoAnn’s coupon!) ages ago but hadn’t tried it. Basically, it allows you to make half-square triangle squares without the +7/8″ that leads to cutting weird-sized strips. I was making 3″ squares for a 6″ finished size pinwheel block, so by using the ruler I could cut my pieces from 3 1/2″ strips. I was very happy with this technique, as it gave me good precision, eliminated one set of dogears from the finished square, and left more usable scrap sizes than the traditional technique. I completely understand why Bonnie has embraced it, as it allows far more efficient usage of common strip sizes from her Scrap User’s System; it would also be great for jelly rolls or Bali Pops.
I had the typical fun laying out the border blocks: for a quilt containing so many fabrics, it seemed way too easy to duplicate fabrics in close proximity to one another. But I finally came up with a layout that satisfied me, and sewed everything together.
This was the moment that for me, put the final nail in the Square in a Square technique. That was the weirdest, wonkiest quilt top I have EVER produced. Biases were fighting each other everywhere! I guess I hadn’t noticed it as much when I made my coworker’s quilt because I didn’t try to put a border on it; I was also at an earlier point in my machine quilting learning curve, when I wasn’t as cognizant of trying to keep straight lines straight, or quilts square and flat. It is very possible that that earlier quilt is actually trapezoidal or rhomboid and I just didn’t notice. (I hope my coworker didn’t, either!)
I’m hoping that it will all quilt out; I was able to get things more or less stabilized when I spray basted, so hopefully the finished product will be a square, flat quilt with occasionally straight lines. But even if it’s not, I’ll be able to say two good things about it: that it’s DONE, and that the back is fabulous:
Now that’s a fabric that I know the reason I bought four yards of it.
Talking about that top reminded me of The Singing Quilter, Cathy Miller, and her song, “You Can Quilt That Out.” I was happy to find this video for the song, made by professional longarm quilter Mavis Rosbach of Quiltbird Studio:
UFOs Part III: Civil War Vintage/Repro
In light of my post about Gyleen Fitzgerald’s vintage block project, I should probably talk about my own. Although, where hers ends with gorgeous quilts and an equally gorgeous book, mine ends with a bunch of scraps in a cardboard box and some wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Back before the recession ripped the beating heart out of the antique trade, my friend Kathy and I made annual pilgrimages to Atlantique City. Held in the Atlantic City Convention Center, it was a mind-numbingly, foot-numbingly huge antique show. While many of the vendors were extremely high end ($55K Pairpoint lamp, anyone?) it was also a great place to find some unusual little items at reasonable prices. One vendor I always had to frequent sold beautiful antique quilts in amazingly good condition for equally amazingly high prices, but also had bins of antique and vintage blocks and tops. Since the focus of this show was collectors, not quilters, their prices for these unfinished pieces were always significantly lower than those I’d seen at quilt shows.
I bought a set of blocks, handpieced, whose fabrics appeared to be 1860s. Unfortunately, as was common for that era, one or more of the fabrics used had disintegrated, most likely due to the mordant used in the dyeing process. Of an original set of fifteen blocks, there were only nine that remained intact:
Civil War era vintage blocks
Suffice to say, they have some problems. You know that rule we’ve all been taught, not to have bias edges on the outside of the block? Yeah, that’s apparently a new rule. The blocks ranged in size dramatically, necessitating some trimming. And before anyone gasps and clutches their pearls in horror, before anyone requires their smelling salts, these blocks were junk. Not to me, obviously, or to the dealer, but to the vast majority of people, these blocks were rags. Yes, they’re old. Yes, they’re handpieced. But we’re not talking about heirloom quality here. They were indifferently pieced: unmatched intersections, wonky angles, ripply edges. And let’s face it, if they had been that important to the original quiltmaker, she probably wouldn’t have left them as a UFO. I think the most respectful thing I can do with these blocks is to turn them into something useful and enjoyable, rather than letting them continue to be a stack of rags in a storage bin. And if that process necessitates a little trimming, even of 150-year-old fabric, so be it.
So: I repaired some damaged stitching, trimmed the blocks where I needed to, eased in fullness where I could, and stitched the nine blocks together in a square, so the diagonal rows of Flying Geese-like half square triangles could flow together. (According to Barbara Brackman’s Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns, the block is called Pennsylvania Pineapple, which I find hilarious and endearing.) I then put some borders around it, using reproduction Civil War prints and muslin to make and add a Flying Geese border. And then I was stuck.
When in doubt, add borders!
Actually, when in doubt, ask quilters. I brought the top as it stood to my guild retreat in April 2005 and threw myself on the mercy of the court. A very skilled and very missed guild member, Nancy, who unfortunately and untimely passed away the following winter, made a great suggestion: why not turn it on point and do some applique? And so I did:
One-quarter of the proposed applique
And here’s where the obstacles come into play. The first one, that derailed me from continuing at that point, is that size matters. It took me a long time to do just one of the four corners, and it became overwhelming and discouraging. This was a very ambitious project for someone who hadn’t done much applique, let alone relatively complex, layered applique.
Which leads to the problem of the learning curve. The applique here was done using Beth Ferrier’s Hand Applique by Machine technique, just like on “Blue Butterfly Day.” Except — this was three years earlier, and I wasn’t very good at it. It’s a little ugly close up, which kept me from wanting to pick it back up once I really learned what I was doing. There’s a strong temptation to let my inner perfectionist out and redo that entire section before proceeding with the rest, which just bungees me back emotionally to the “overwhelming and discouraging” part. There’s some quilt guilt associated with this as well, since a) I took on a 19th century UFO and turned it into a 21st century UFO, and b) after my guild friend Nancy died, I really wanted to finish this quilt with her suggestion in tribute to how much she influenced and inspired me, and I have failed to.
So what do I need to do to finish this quilt? I thought about just quilting and binding it as is, but beyond wanting to use Nancy’s suggestion in her memory, I also think it’s a really good suggestion. I need to take a second look at that applique section and reassess just how bad it truly is. After all, this is never going to be a show quilt due to the vintage blocks, and it’s never going to be a heavily used quilt for the same reason, so neither the perfection nor the structural integrity of the applique is as important as it might otherwise be. If necessary, I could always go back over the “invisible” blind hem stitching with machine blanket stitch or satin stitch. Despite my newfound love of hand applique, I don’t think this is the project for that. I should complete the applique sections with whatever machine applique technique seems most appropriate, put a poison green border around the whole thing, and then quilt the living daylights out of it so neither the hand piecing nor the less-than-stellar applique comes apart.
I can only imagine the original quiltmaker would be pleased.
