Posts tagged ‘lost momentum’
Back to the Studio!
Where have I been? I’ve been asking myself the same question!
It’s been a busy summer, especially as I’m still getting used to how much having a baby in my life changes things. Ronan is an absolute joy: his sunny personality just blows sugar through my soul every time I look at him. He’s crawling now, babbling nonstop, giggling and dancing and chasing the cats, and I’m cherishing every moment. I can’t lose myself in the studio for hours on end the way I could Before Baby — which is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff — but that’s the way my OCD personality works best for creative endeavors. I’m starting to acclimate to life in this warm messy new country called Motherhood, and am digging in some hand- and toeholds to find my way toward quilting again, albeit in the brief scrambled bursts I can occasionally scrape together. And hopefully, I’ll also figure out how to find time to blog about it as well!
It hasn’t been a total dry spell, though. I finished something!
Double Pinwheel Table Runner, with inevitable cats
Diane, Rhonda, Kathy, and Rhonda’s cousin Cathy (that was confusing!) came for a mini-retreat at my house in mid-July. Dan acted as the primary with Ronan so we could all get some concentrated sewing in. Diane had given me a charm pack (Lollipop by Sandy Gervais for Moda) with my birthday present, so I decided to use it for some relatively brainless piecing. For whatever reason, in my life, “easy” doesn’t usually turn out that way.
I planned to make some simple double pinwheel blocks using the Angler tool. Easy piecing, no marking. Well, first, the Angler just wasn’t working for me. I know quilters who swear by it, but I was finding myself more prone to swear at it. My seam allowances looked like my history with Weight Watchers: straight and faithful at the beginning, but veering off the longer I went and, let’s face it, getting wider. Since ripping out and resewing was the absolute antithesis of what I wanted to be doing, the Angler came off the machine bed and I started marking my diagonals on the backs of the squares.
I made 2 identical half-square triangle squares from 2 contrasting charm squares, then sewed each of them along both sides of the diagonal to another charm square to make 4 pinwheel units. So far, so good. But those 4 units, put back together, didn’t make a pinwheel! Oops…
As someone who works in a mirror all day, I’m ashamed I didn’t see that one coming. (It works if you cut the charm squares into quarter- and half-square triangle squares and then sew them all together, but not if you use the “quick” no-triangle method..at least not the way I did it.) If I’d been working from fat quarters, I would have simply cut more squares and continued to make my blocks containing only 4 fabrics each. But since I just had the charm pack, with only one square of each fabric, I had to either abandon the project entirely, or find a way to make it work. And let’s face it, one of the central tenets of Sarah Loves Fabric is that more fabric is better! So I ended up with five sets of identical-but-mirror-image blocks containing EIGHT different fabrics each, for a total of ten blocks with only two charm squares left over from the original pack of 42.
As it turned out, I’m glad my original plan fell through, and I’m glad I felt obligated to work with what I had rather than just cutting (or worse, buying!) more fabric. I think the blocks are more interesting with eight fabrics than they would have been with four, but I don’t believe I would have been brave enough to plan them that way. As I mentioned before, when it comes to fabric I definitely believe more is more; I get bored making a two- or three-fabric quilt, or one where all the blocks contain the exact same fabric combination. But until now, I hadn’t taken the plunge into making blocks that each contained quite this many different fabrics. I have to consider this a very successful experiment, and one that I intend to repeat — just so long as I don’t manage to manipulate it into an excuse to buy more charm packs!
Detail, Double Pinwheel Table Runner
I quilted the table runner using minimal-mark designs from Pam Clarke’s “Quilting Inside the Lines” with Lagoon Brytes by Superior Threads. These blocks turned out fairly lumpy in the centers, even after twirling the seam allowances when pressing, so I wanted to choose a design that allowed me to avoid those areas unobtrusively. Also, as I’ll be taking a class from Pam at Quilting with Machines in October, it seemed like a good mental warmup. I used a piece of Pellon Legacy wool batting (yum) left over from another project, and managed to find backing and binding fabrics from my stash that coordinated with the charm pack, rather than giving in and buying more of the Moda fabrics. I am appropriately proud of myself. I even hand-sewed the binding, and finished it in time for show and tell at Guild last week! It’s like I’ve turned over a new leaf.
For the happy dance for this one, how about two late greats of American comedy, Dom DeLuise and Gilda Radner, in the one bright spot in an otherwise dreadful movie:
Finished! Matt and Alyssa’s Wedding Quilt
The baby’s asleep — I can get a post up here!
You know what they say about good intentions… and what they’re used to pave…
When my friend Alyssa asked me, roughly a month before her November 2009 wedding, if I knew anyone who’d be willing to make a wedding signature quilt for hire, I jumped at the opportunity: ”Let me do this as my wedding present to you.” I was very sincere in this. Despite having already planned for 2010 to be my Year of the UFO, I thought this project would make a worthy exception. I love signature/album quilts; they’re such a wonderful tradition, and speak to me so volubly of Why We Quilt — they are literally a way for the recipients to wrap themselves in the good wishes of people who care about them. Besides, it was going to be a simple quilt: big blocks, straight-line piecing, nothing fancy. This wouldn’t take much time.
Ha. Ha. Ha. Because this became Murphy’s Quilt.
Everything started well: I prepared a basketful of precut 4 1/2″ squares of the JoAnn Fabrics Kona cotton in a nice cream, prewashed and ironed onto freezer paper, with a 1/2″ seam allowance premarked with blue washout marker. (I figured, mostly correctly, that a marked 1/2″ seam allowance would probably yield a useably empty 1/4″ seam allowance.) As their wedding colors were dark blue and chocolate brown, I brought along fine-tip Sharpies in navy and brown, which I had pretested for colorfastness. Dan made a nice sign for the table at the reception, explaining the project, and the guests did a nice job leaving signatures, notes, wishes, and even some artwork on the squares.
I had planned the quilt to encompass 25 Air Castle blocks, measuring 12″ each, as I wanted it to be big enough for them to share as a couch/cuddle quilt. I chose the Air Castle block because it’s simple, attractive, and contains 5 solid squares; thus the quilt could accommodate up to 125 signed squares. Projected attendance was roughly 100, and I made sure I had plenty of extra squares available to allow for mistakes, but as most couples and families signed just one square to represent them all, and some guests didn’t sign at all, I ended up with only 39 signed squares. This was fine; it meant that I could put a signed square in the center of each block, with a second one in the lower right hand corner of slightly more than half the blocks. It also gave me room to make an additional square to place in the center of the quilt with their names, wedding date, and details.
I had warned Alyssa when I offered to take this project on that it wouldn’t be finished anytime soon; there was no way I could start it before the new year, and she was fine with that. I was able to pull all the necessary brown fabrics from the leftovers from Window on Whimsey, but the not-quite-navy of the bridesmaids’ dresses wasn’t really represented in my stash, so it gave me something to look for on the Shop Hop last year. I then bundled up the fabrics, the sketch, my copy of Marsha McCloskey’s Block Party book, and set them aside. And then my life got complicated. I started this blog; I found out I was pregnant; three weeks later, I found out I was losing my job; and two months after that, I lost said job. Then I started traveling so I could work for the military dental contractor, and next thing I knew, it was the middle of summer and I hadn’t yet started this quilt. (Hello, quilt guilt!) I had taken the supplies to the April guild retreat, but didn’t actually work on it. In fact, I didn’t start the quilt until the weekend before my mini home retreat with Rhonda and Diane; I had started the cutting at my parents’ house during a quilting day with my mom, thinking I’d be able to knock out the whole top the following weekend.
Again: Ha. Ha. Ha.
As regular readers may recall, that was when I mistakenly cut a large portion of my fabric into the wrong size triangles, having forgotten in the criminally long interval between planning and starting that I had changed the block size from the 9″ in the book to 12″. And I couldn’t just change my mind and make either more blocks or a smaller quilt, because the signed squares were 4 1/2″ and could not be cut down. All I could do was get over myself and recut the pieces. Fortunately, I had enough of the brown and blue fabrics, and the cream was a standard solid from JoAnn’s, easy to procure more of, right? Right???
The first time I looked for more of the solid cream fabric was when my mom and I were in Pittsburgh to hear Bonnie Hunter speak, and we stopped into a local JoAnn’s to kill time before the meeting. I couldn’t find anything that looked like what I’d been working with, but I didn’t have a swatch with me for comparison so I didn’t worry. I started to worry, however, when I did take a swatch to my local JoAnn’s and still couldn’t find anything that matched. I remembered having bought Kona cotton, but I started to second-guess myself and looked at all their solids. Still nothing. Could they have discontinued an entire line of solids between November and July? Could there be a missing off-white that no one was stocking? I was really puzzled. I finally bought a yard each of the two closest matches, the Kona cotton and the Egyptian cotton, hoping that one or the other would look significantly different once it was washed.
And surprise, it did! Turns out, both fabrics apparently have so much sizing and finishing additives on them that they radically changed in appearance once they were washed and dried, and the Kona cotton was indeed the winner as I had remembered. Washed, it looked lighter in color, much more matte, and with nearly a seersucker texture even after pressing. If I needed a reminder of the importance of prewashing, this was it. Another obstacle surmounted.
I finished the top and also pieced the back. I’d found on last year’s shop hop not only a beautiful blue and brown large-scale Oriental floral perfect for this purpose on the bargain rack, but also a piece of Gail Kessler‘s life-size piano keyboard fabric, which I thought would be very appropriate to incorporate into a pianist’s quilt. It made the construction of the back somewhat more challenging, but I think it was worth it:
I then basted the quilt and started quilting. And that’s when the final round of Murphyness raised its ugly head. As previously discussed here, I had unprecedented problems with skipped stitches and frayed threads, especially every time I crossed a heavy intersection of seam allowances. In a pieced quilt, there are a lot of these, and it made me nervous about my prospects for quilting both Ruby Wedding and Taupe Winding Ways. Manipulating tension and needle choice solved most of the problem, but I still had to periodically stop, rip out, and restitch throughout the project, which really ruined my momentum and greatly prolonged the process. I was happy with my choice of quilting design, though: a virtually no-mark, Pam Clarke-inspired combination of continuous curve quilting in the blue and brown triangles and in the signature squares, with additional loop and curl embellishments in the solid cream squares and triangles. The light blue thread created enough contrast for visibility without distracting from the primary focus of the top. I finished the quilt with a scrappy binding of all the blues, once again using the Sew Precise, Sew Fast machine binding technique.
If this were a fictional story, this whole tale of woe would culminate with my putting the finished quilt in the washing machine to remove the washout blue marker and the water-soluble thread, and having all the Sharpie signatures inexplicably vanish off the fabric, thus ruining the entire project. Fortunately, this is real life, and I really had tested the markers first, so there was no final tragedy. I was able to give them their quilt on their first wedding anniversary, and they loved it. Despite all the roadblocks I encountered, I am happy I made this quilt for them, and it certainly was a learning experience! Therefore, I’ll leave this happy dance in the capable hands and feet of Mr. Gene Kelly, who danced happier than anyone:
A Tale of Two Purses
You know how sometimes, when you need to call or write a friend you’ve been out of touch with for a while, you catch yourself putting it off because there’s so much to say? Yet the longer you put it off, the more there is to cover, and you dig yourself a little deeper.
That’s where I’ve been with this blog. I’ve been back from Arkansas for almost a month, my guild show has come and gone, and each time I think about posting to the blog I think, Oh, but I still haven’t posted about the quilt shop in Arkansas, or the lecture and exhibit I went to at the Allentown Art Museum, or winning my first-ever blue ribbon, or going to New York City…
You see where I’m going with this. I’ve been doing the same thing with the blog lately that I’ve been doing with my UFOs, allowing the accumulated psychological weight of my perceived to-do list to paralyze me into inactivity. So perhaps I need to take a more measured approach to the blog, the way I’ve been attempting to do with the UFOs. Rather than trying to get all caught up, I’ll start with what I’m doing now. If I can manage to go “back in time” and catch up, great; if not, at least I’m not digging myself in deeper. Again.
So! What have I been working on lately? Purses! It most likely started here:
As I’ve doubtless mentioned before, I am totally in thrall to the Japanese quilters. I’m amazed by the idea that a culture with no history of quilting (technically, sashiko isn’t quilting, it’s embroidery to decorate and reinforce a single layer of fabric) and certainly no history of decorative patchwork, a culture which was only exposed to American quilting post-WWII, has managed to produce in just the last 60 years a community of quilters of unparalleled creativity and workmanship. I subscribe to two Japanese quilting magazines, Quilts Japan and Patchwork Quilt Tsushin, and am always happy for opportunities to see Japanese quilts in person. I love the design esthetic: the frequently muted colors (especially taupes!), the artful assymetries, the use of fabric printed with English or French text as purely a textural element much in the same way we use Chinese or Japanese logographic characters for decoration. Here we see the quintessential American craft, that is ours the same way jazz and rock and roll are, reinterpreted through a foreign lens in a breathtakingly beautiful fashion.
So every time I’m in or near New York City, I stop at Kinokuniya bookstore, located right across the street from Bryant Park, where they put on the Fashion Week shows (Hi, Tim Gunn!) and Sanseido bookstore, located in the Mitsuwa marketplace in Edgewater, NJ. There I spend some very happy hours browsing through quilt books that I can’t read, but the photographs are stunning and the directions have very helpful diagrams. Both the books and magazines are for me primarily sources of inspiration, rather than patterns I plan to follow faithfully, but I think I’d do OK once I converted all the measurements from metric to English, if I decided I had to make something exactly the way it appeared. I didn’t plan to just buy purse books, but these were the items that attracted me the most.
Then, hard on the heels of my NYC trip were several family birthdays. One of my sisters, when I asked her what she wanted for her birthday, said, “Oh please, don’t buy me anything.” I decided to honor the letter of the law, rather than the spirit, and made her a purse. Technically, the only thing I bought were the zippers and interfacing. She apparently forgives me this transgression, because she loved the purse:
I am inordinately proud of this zipper.
She and her family are big Star Wars fans, even having attended the Star Wars Celebration in Orlando, so I couldn’t think of a worthier recipient for something made from some of my precious vintage Star Wars fabric. My friend Joan was generous enough to share this with me last month, after I had quite openly coveted it at our guild retreat in December. She had bought the fabric when it was in the stores after Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, held onto it all these years, then made this quilt for her grown son’s “man cave”:
Joan's Star Wars quilt
I wound up quite unexpectedly being asked to hold an impromptu “Introduction to Star Wars” lecture at the retreat, explaining the story to those retreat-goers not familiar with it, based on the images in the quilt. (Fortunately, the regulars were all fully cognizant of what a big giant nerd I am, so I wasn’t outing myself.) It felt pretty much exactly like this:
(I couldn’t find a version of this scene without the added comedy title and subtitles, but you get the idea.)
So the purse is the Huntington Hobo by Pink Sand Beach Designs, and the directions were wonderful. Even the zippers were easy to do with her photos and instructions. The only drawback is that I wish I’d had a better quality zipper for the top opening; the big metal one from JoAnn’s hangs up too much. Hopefully as my sister uses the bag and possibly waxes the zipper, it will work more easily, but overall I have to call this one a great success. Which is good, since another of my sisters has already informed me that I’m permitted to make one, sans Star Wars, for her birthday in November.
Then this past weekend, we attended a birthday party for my 12-year-old niece. I got her a DVD she wanted (Up, probably my favorite Pixar movie yet, which is saying a lot) and some fingernail glitter, but I thought it would be fun to make her a purse as well:
This is Geisha Girl by Purse Strings, and the directions were great right up until it came time to put in the zipper. I’ll definitely make this purse again, and I’ll have to play with the zipper instructions then, but they just weren’t speaking to me this time, so I left the zipper out. But it turned out SOOOO CUTE! She was very happy with it. I wish I could have taken it to show and tell, but I missed my guild meeting last week due to an upset stomach — much as I wanted to share the purse, I didn’t want to risk sharing a nasty GI bug! Fortunately it was of short duration.
The skull fabric is called Skullfinity, by (you guessed it) Alexander Henry. I found this at JoAnn Fabrics of all places a couple years ago and bought 6 1/2 yards out of sheer love. (Yay coupons!) I have a Halloween UFO that this should be the back to.
I spent much of Sunday making the bias binding for Ruby Wedding. My parents’ 41st wedding anniversary was yesterday, and while I’m getting no pressure from them, thank goodness, I’m feeling the guilt considering the quilt is now a full year late. I haven’t basted it yet, but knowing the binding is there waiting for me somehow makes it easier to embark on the huge intimidating project that quilting this quilt represents. That’s what’s next…
Helloooo, Cleveland!
I’m writing this at the Cleveland airport, waiting for the flight that will take me to Memphis. I’m going deeply South for the next three weeks for a contract job that I will talk about later. But first I had to get this out of my system:
OK. Obligatory Spinal Tap reference made. Carry on.
I hadn’t intended to let the blog lie fallow for so long. I’ve had some life stuff going on which I will discuss in a later post (ooh, SUSPENSE!) and the longer I put off talking about that, the harder it seemed to get started. Not only have I not felt particularly verbally creative lately, but the quilting fell by the wayside somewhat while I regrouped, reassessed, and got adjusted to The New Normal.
But not only have I renewed my commitment to Accentuating the Positive, Eliminating the Negative, Latching On to the Affirmative, and Avoiding Any and All Messing With Mr. In-Between, I have also had a really good quilting weekend. My birthday was Friday, and I couldn’t have given myself a better gift than three days of quilts and friends. Since I found out Wednesday that I’ll be spending the next three weeks (!) in Arkansas (!!) without a sewing machine (!!!), I addressed my quilting day with Rhonda on Friday to the sole purpose of getting a hand-applique project ready to take with me. It doesn’t look like much now, but it’ll get there. Then Diane arrived Friday night with some drop-dead, knock-out show and tells:
Batik Disappearing Nine-Patch
Batik Ohio Star
The Ohio Star blocks are the beginnings of the quilt she’s been buying all those gorgeous blue, teal, and purple batiks for. I feel a palpable ache to see the finished quilt.
Rhonda, Diane, and I took a shop hop to Lebanon, Lancaster, and Berks Counties on Saturday, stopping at Martin’s Fabric Barn in Lebanon; Burkholder’s and Sauder’s in Denver; Wooden Bridge Drygoods in Kutztown; and Ladyfingers Sewing Studio in Oley. I didn’t buy any full price fabric, but I still did more damage than I would have ideally liked, especially since we were going to a quilt show the next day. However, I was able to pick up Marsha McCloskey‘s new Feathered Star book, which I have been semi-breathlessly awaiting since the first volume came out in 2003, so that could not be helped. It was a beautiful day for a drive out in the country, and a good day with friends. When we got home, Dan made burgers and served birthday cake. Doesn’t get much better than that.
Sunday we drove to Chantilly, VA for the Quilters Unlimited show. QU has something like 1200 members, and the show is not judged, so they get a huge turnout of quilts. It’s nice to see such a wide variety of difficulty and skill levels displayed, as the format encourages guild members to submit quilts that probably wouldn’t appear in a smaller, judged show. In my critical hat, however, I started to feel like a broken record on two topics:
1) Value Judgments: If you don’t have much value contrast between your fabrics, your piecing or applique is not going to show up. While this can occasionally be useful, even desirable, I don’t think many of the worst offenders at this show recognized the problem before the top was finished. If all your fabrics are medium, there’s nothing to move the viewer’s eye around the top. And apparently, the quilters of northern Virginia l-o-o-o-v-e them some Kaffee Fassett. Gorgeous fabrics, but tricky. I’m a believer in “showing my work” like in math class: if I made the effort to do it, I darn well want you to see it. And if your entire quilt is light peach and light green (or dark purple and dark teal, or whatever), that work doesn’t show. You might as well have just quilted a big piece of one fabric.
2)Caught With Your Pantographs Down: Just because I haven’t yet sent out a top to a professional longarm quilter does not mean that I have anything against the practice; far from it. I would much rather see someone who likes to make tops but doesn’t like to quilt them enjoying finished quilts (and supporting a usually-female entrepreneur in the process) than feeling guilt over a closetful of unquilted tops any day of the week. And I’ll never say never: I may very well be patronizing a longarmer myself one of these days. BUT– (and it’s a big but, tee hee) there is a time and a place for pantographs. A busy pieced quilt with the focus on the bold print fabrics, where custom quilting wouldn’t show up no matter what you did, is the perfect application for a nice pantograph. But a medallion quilt with big open spaces around the piecing? An applique quilt? A quilt where the value difference between the pieced stars and the background isn’t particularly strong? Bad, BAD pantograph! An all-over design pushes the foreground into the background and blends everything together. That’s sometimes an asset, but for some of these quilts it was definitely an deficit. I know pantos are normally cheaper, but there’s a time to be cheap, and your quilts aren’t it.
/soapbox stowed.
The quilts were lovely, the guild members rightly proud, and the vendors numerous. We grew sore from walking on the unforgiving concrete floors, but it was well worth it. However, fantasy had to cede to reality, and my fabulous quilt weekend had to give way to a long day in airports. Such is life.
I’d better get to my gate; I have high hopes for Elvis-inspired ridiculousness at the Memphis airport. If I am not disappointed, I promise to share.
There’s a Hole in my Heart…
…or at least in my sewing table.
No sewing machine!
I sat down yesterday to do some serious diagnostics on my sewing machine, trying to determine why I got the shredded thread on top and giant thread knots on the back when I tried to quilt Convergence Birds. I put in a new #80 titanium topstitch needle as recommended by the Thread Reference Guide for Home Sewing Machines on the Superior Threads website. I cleaned everything out really well, made sure the bobbin casing was seated correctly, and made up a new practice quilt sandwich.
That’s when I noticed that my free motion foot was actually pressing down on the fabric. When I tried to lighten the pressure on the presser foot, it didn’t move. In fact, the lever to lift the presser foot was acting up as well. I took the side panel off to inspect the mechanism, but there wasn’t any lint or any obvious impediment to its motion, so I closed it back up.
Here’s the part where I get annoyed with modern sewing machines. I love my computerized Janome MC6500; I bought it almost six years ago and we have made some beautiful quilts together. I love having needle down capability (I can’t imagine doing all the curved piecing on Taupe Winding Ways and Ruby Wedding without it) and being able to do buttonhole applique. I don’t use the programmable functions often, but it’s nice to know they’re there.
BUT: If this were a purely mechanical machine, I could do all the maintenance myself. I can field-strip my Featherweight, oil it, and reassemble it blindfolded (OK, I’m exaggerating, but isn’t that a cool mental image?) However, once they started introducing circuit boards, it got complicated. I’m not even supposed to oil my machine, according to the manual and the dealer; it has an internal oil reservoir and wicking system, and I’m just supposed to bring it in for scheduled tuneups, like a high-performance European sportscar.
So, defeated, I called the dealer. I bought the machine before we moved, but I still get it serviced 45 min. away because they certainly know the brand, and I’ve had excellent service from them ever since the purchase. My machine was due for maintenance anyway; I used to bring it in during summer when we were traveling, but ever since I had a feed-dog emergency in January 2008, I’ve been on an altered schedule. I confirmed their hours, made sure I knew what the technician wanted me to bring, and asked, just in passing, when I might expect to get it back?
A WEEK AND A HALF?!??!!???!!!
Oh, those best-laid plans. I do still have the Featherweight, of course, which pieces like a dream — better than the Janome, when it comes right down to it, as long as I don’t have to sew curves or anything too huge to fit under its little arm. But right now I need to quilt: Convergence Birds, Window on Whimsy, and Ruby Wedding. I guess I can officially give up my dream of having Ruby Wedding done for the quilt show in June. It was a long shot anyway.
The ever-reliable Featherweight
It could be worse; I have a retreat to attend the last weekend in April, and it would have been far more tragic if my machine had chosen to jump the tracks right beforehand. But I have that magical combination of motivation and some free time right now, and to see that run up against the brick wall of mechanical failure is very frustrating.
Oh well. Keep calm and carry on. Let’s see what I can find to do in the meantime.
Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth
I really thought that I was going to get a whole lot of quilting in this weekend. Apparently though, it was fortuitous that I recently read “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” by Michael Chabon, so I could be reminded of the Yiddish proverb, “Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht.”
In English: man plans, God laughs.
Since the office was closed Friday, and my husband was at a miniature wargaming convention all weekend, I thought I was going to have two solid days of quilting Friday and Saturday. I had plans Sunday with Rhonda and Wendy for a mini stitch-in, so the grandiose part of my brain that churns out the unrealistic expectations had me visualizing completing the quilting on Convergence Birds in time to be hand-sewing the binding by Sunday afternoon.
But when my mom found out I was going to be a gaming widow all weekend, she invited me to their house on Friday. We had a delightful visit (and homemade vegetable pizza with pretzel dough crust!) and both my brother and my youngest sister were there, which was a very pleasant surprise. However, between the late start I got in the morning, bad traffic, and then my reluctance to cut such a pleasant family gathering short, I got home at about 10:00 pm. No quilting Friday.
Saturday, I had a short list of household chores and food prep to accomplish before I could mentally release myself to quilt. I had also planned to run a couple of errands and go to the gym. However, we had a (second) full day of soaking rain with terrible wind gusts that made me really not want to leave the house. So rather than either gritting my teeth and going out in unpleasant conditions, or making a command decision to scrap the errand-running altogether, I dithered. I made my various plans contingent on one another, and ended up as just a big entropic mess. So while I did eventually clean and cut vegetables, prep the pulled pork barbecue, bake banana muffins, clean the bathroom, and put away the snowman decorations, it was very late in the day by the time I did.
I got some quilting in, while listening to the director’s commentary on “The Lost Boys” (RIP Corey Haim!) While I was originally just going to quilt the center Convergence area in an all-over design, as Ricky Tims recommends in the book, I realized upon looking at it on the design wall that my seams were more straight-ish than straight. Whether this happened as a result of carelessness when appliqueing the bird border or if there had always been issues, I’m not sure.
It may not be obvious in miniature, but those seams were waving like a flag!
So I took a page from longarm quilters and did some ruler-guided ditch quilting. I used the blind hem foot, which has a modest rudder coming out of the middle (less dramatic than the one on the edge-joining foot), set the needle to stitch right next to the rudder, and guided the foot with a 3″ x 12″ Omnigrip ruler, adjusting the quilt top to keep the seams straight. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than it was. I used MonoPoly by Superior Threads so the ditch quilting wouldn’t contribute to the visual design.
I sang with choir Sunday morning and then had a lovely lunch and visit with Rhonda and Wendy, during which I sewed twisted cord onto two more cross-stitched nativity figures (3 down, 6 to go.) We really need to make it a priority to do stuff like that more often; I always feel so motivated and renewed afterward. After they left, I gamely trooped back up to the studio. While there were only a scant few hours of weekend remaining, I was confident that I could complete the quilting of the bird border. After all, at this point, I was feeling rather accomplished. I had chosen a fern-feather no-mark overall design and had experimented to find the best color of Bottom Line to use as my quilting thread:
The fuchsia in the upper left didn't show up, but the light green was visible without being obnoxious.
I had quilted for about twenty minutes, completing three big ferny feathers with echo quilting and little spirals, when my thread broke. Odd, I quilt with Bottom Line all the time and never have problems with it. Hmmm. I turned the quilt over to the back and found…
AAAAGH!! Giant knots of thread!!!
One advantage to using a different color in the bobbin than in the top is that it’s easier to see where the problems are. In this case, the giant thread knots are made of light green top thread, rather than fuchsia bobbin thread, but the tension looks pretty good otherwise. So I have to do some experimentation to find out if it’s a) the tension; b) the needle; c) a bad spool of thread (hey, it could happen); or d) an unknown unknown. But I have done nothing so far, except to spend TWO AND A HALF HOURS ripping out the bad quilting. I got it all ripped out Sunday night, went to bed, and I haven’t been back in the studio since.
I hope to have a chance to rectify that tomorrow. However, if I can’t seem to face Bird Convergence, if it seems too much of an impasse, I can always pull out Lemoyne Stars. I talked to Diane last night, and she gave me a great idea on how to sew the pieced border on before cutting the Bad Border, so I don’t have to worry about getting the measurements or the math wrong. After all, why work on a problematic project when there’s another, less frustrating one waiting in the wings? And I wonder how I ended up with so many UFOs…
And now, in tribute, one of the best scenes from “Lost Boys.” Michael and David didn’t sparkle one bit.
UFOs Part II: Convergence
In July 2006, I helped the guests at my niece’s birthday party to tie-dye T-shirts. This represented my first foray into working with Procion dyes; more on that in later posts. Naturally, it seemed a waste to only dye shirts; I had to dye some fabric as well. One piece looked like a good candidate with which to try Ricky Tims’ convergence technique:
Tie-dye Convergence
The technique starts with an oversized four-patch, either from one extremely varied fabric, or from two, three, or four different ones. The four-patch is then sliced, diced, resewn, resliced, and ultimately transformed, as you see. To two squares of my tie-dyed fabric I added a purple mottled print and a yellow batik that picked up the fuchsia/purple and yellow accents in the predominantly green-dyed fabric. Unfortunately, I didn’t buy much of either one. Generally, I see it as a good thing that I very rarely buy any more than a half yard of a given fabric, unless I know I’m using it for a border. However, in this case, my fabric-buying sobriety backfired. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This project really was more about the process than it was about the end product; I had bought Ricky’s Convergence Quilts book, ate up the pictures and the description of the technique, but wanted to try it for myself, and this tie-dyed fabric offered the perfect opportunity. If it hadn’t worked, I would have just put it aside. But it did work. In fact, my husband, who is normally very supportive of, but pleasantly detached from, my quiltmaking, was quite taken with this one while it was in pieces on the design wall.
But here’s where we get into the obstacles again. The first obstacle was just logistical, a fabric emergency: I wanted to put a border on it, and as I didn’t have enough of the fabrics I had converged, I needed to choose something else. In general, I see that as more of an opportunity than a roadblock; to quote Paula Nadelstern again, “when it comes to fabric, ‘more is more.’” In this situation, though, I had an extremely difficult-to-match fuchsia/purple color AND an extremely difficult-to-match green. Suffice to say, I am unlikely to find a batik or a large-scale print that contains both. I did drag the top to a couple of quilt shows, but I never found anything I particularly liked, and by that point I had lost momentum.
Lost momentum is a majorly recurring theme in my UFOs. I definitely have some personality traits of obsessive-compulsive disorder, albeit fortunately not ones that negatively impact my life in any significant way (although I have been known to put the toilet paper roll on the holder the right way in bathrooms not my own.) In many ways these personality traits have been assets: I can become extremely focused on a task until it’s complete, I am a scrupulously thorough researcher with a Boy Scout-like conviction to be prepared, and I always have clean hands. The downside is that once a particular obsession has run its course, it’s difficult to kindle up enthusiasm for it again. I can eat, sleep, and breathe a project for a while, but if I get distracted (ooh, shiny!) or derailed (no border fabric!) the project loses its Most Favored status, and if there’s no deadline for it, off to the UFO cabinet it goes.
This project also reeks of Quilt Guilt. I’d had pretensions of finishing this quilt to take to the Ricky Tims Super Seminar last May to have Ricky himself autograph the label. Didn’t happen. I even feel guilty about the fact that this was one of the few quilt projects my husband really took an unsolicited interest in the mechanics of, and I didn’t get it finished so he could enjoy it. This is something I need to work through and just get over; once again, this seems like a “Hoarders” impulse, attaching unwarranted emotional weight to an object. It’s not the quilt’s fault I didn’t get it finished; I shouldn’t wrap all those negative emotions up in it.
I just read a New Yorker article about a form of nightmare therapy in which sufferers of recurrent nightmares are encouraged to spend daytime hours visualizing the upsetting scenes from their nightmares and reimagining them to be less upsetting; one example given was of a woman reimagining the sharks circling above her as she tried to swim to the surface of the ocean to breathe, as a circle of friendly dolphins. Perhaps I can visualize making all the negatives, all the “should-haves”, into tangible, squishy objects. I can visualize myself placing them into the Convergence quilt top center, then gathering up the corners like a hobo sack. I can visualize myself carrying that sack full of gelatinous, drippy, toxic emotions down the upstairs hall to the back bedroom and out the door to the balcony. It’s a bright sunny day, and I can just let the edges of the Convergence quilt top fly, waving like a beautiful, colorful flag in the breeze while those lumpen blobs of guilt tumble forth — and are gone.
I’ll report back when I get that border on.
