Finish It Friday ~ Birds & Blooms Quilt Top

This quilt top began with the leftovers of a set of fabric in the Alegria lin from Cloud 9 by designer Geninne Zlatkis that I bought about eight years ago and used to made a little spring/summer bunting. I had planned to make the rest into a table runner, but when I sat down to make a list of things to finish this year (this year being my year of finishing all the things), the idea just didn't excite me. Did I really need another table runner? And wouldn't it just get all stained and dirty from the sloppy people I live with? 

Instead I would make a quilt--a quilt for my own bed, which I've never made before. It would be both pretty and practical. C and I use a down comforter most of the year, but there are a few weeks in the summer where it's too warm for goose feathers. But even on those hot nights, when I lie down beneath a sheet and thin blanket an C sprawl on top of the blanket with a fan blasting him (which I turn off, because I can't stand to sleep with a fan blowing), he ends up getting up in the night and rummaging in the closet to find additional blankets, which inevitably don't fit my aesthetic--scratchy red wool things. I've been meaning to make a summer quilt to solve this problem for a long while.

I was able to find a couple of pieces from the Alegria line online, enough to make borders (albeit in two different colorways), but I had to find other fabrics to fill out a whole quilt. I went with another Cloud 9 line, Birds & Branches, as well as fabrics from Cotton & Steel and Rifle & Paper, all selected from tiny pictures on the internet, with great hopes that they would all work together, since the quilt stores around me are still closed. I added in some fabric from my stash, including a couple of Kaffe Fasset prints (there always has to be Kaffe Fasset) and then arranged them in 4-patch blocks, because I was afraid just random arrangement of all this disparate fabrics would be too much, even for me.

 

Since I chose a pattern of 4 and 8-inch squares, it came together quickly, and I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out, even though it's more pastel than bright, which is my general go-to color zone. 

Finish it Friday ~ Wavy Charms Quilt

This quilt began as a package of vaguely S-shaped charms my mom sent me several years ago as part of a de-stashing effort. I never got around to finishing it because: a) I didn't have enough charms for a whole quilt; b) I didn't have the original pattern piece to make new ones out of (nor nearly enough stash); and c) I had no idea how to sew wavy lines and get the resulting fabric to lie flat.

I decided to just let all that go and dive in. I made a pattern from one of the pieces my mom sent--this is a good way to introduce error, and indeed the new pieces I cut ended up longer than the others, but like the guys of the buildings and grounds crew where I worked the summer after I graduated from college used to say whenever someone started to get uptight about the imperfection of a small project, "It's not a f-ing piano." I'm not sure if I sewed the curved edges "properly," but I just kind of stretched and molded one piece to fit another and, when the two pieces were being recalcitrant, by using the occasional pin.

For the backing, I went with a romantic rose print, which I thought fit with the calicos on the front. I didn't like it at first and wished I'd gone with something more simple and monochromatic, since the front is so busy, but it's growing on me. Like the 70s quilt, I used fluffy batting and tied the corners, old-school style.

Even though almost no two of these prints would go together in any rational way, they kind of work as a big kaleidoscope of color.

Finish it Friday ~ That 70s Quilt

The first quilt top from this post, the one my mom started way-back-when and then passed on to me still not-quite-as-way-back-but-still-pretty-far is done! And don't you love the way the alternating rectangles and triangles make that cool diagonal pattern?

Since my mom got the original pattern idea from a movie about poverty and tragedy (she still doesn't remember which, but I still think it was along the lines of Coal Miner's Daughter or The Dollmaker), it wouldn't have been right to pay a hundred bucks to have it professionally quilted. And besides, tying is more appropriate to the 70s aesthetic. So is puffy polyester batting, which is all my quilt lady had in stock when I finally made it to her shop--she's moved way out to the boondocks (boondocks that are far away from the boondocks where I live), and she's downsized, becoming more of a longarm quilting service than a fabric store, which makes me no end of sad. But she did give me the idea of turning the quilt, which saved me the hassle of making and sewing on binding.

The purple part of the backing is a length of fabric I bought at our local department store--Reny's--way back when they still carried fabric, with this project in mind. I thought it had a groovy 70s vibe. Unfortunately I didn't buy enough for the whole quilt back. At the quilt shop, I picked up some plain muslin to finish it off with, but that seemed far too dull for this particular blanket. So I dug through my stash and came up with this orange that has an almost imperceptible leaf print. I had just enough to make two strips along two edges of the purple. I spent several TV-watching sessions threading embroidery floss through each corner and the center of each block, and voila! A bright, cheerful, totally cozy, ecstatically retro throw for those chilly evenings in front of the TV (yeah, a lot of TV happening these days).

Finish it Friday ~ Two Quilt Tops

Over the past year, thanks to the pandemic, I’ve dealt with a lot of deferred maintenance, big (like repainting the exterior trim on our house) and small (like repairing my favorite bracelet). It felt good to get these nagging tasks off my list, so I decided to make my word, and theme, for 2021 “finish,” and I wrote a list of 21 things that I’ve either started and left hanging or have been meaning to get around to doing—from writing projects to reading lists to crafts. Enter these two throw quilts, both of which started with my mom and have been sitting in my to-do pile a very long time.

The first is this retro number that my mom must have started in the very early 80s, and passed on to me, partially assembled at least 20 years ago. I finished putting it together way back then—mostly. I was short a couple of rectangles and had assembled on block backwards. It was the work of less than an hour to take apart the bad block, cut a few rectangles, and finish it already.

Many of the fabrics in the quilt I recognize from dresses my mom made me when I was little.

Others predate me, but are seriously groovy.

The alternating blocks of rectangles and triangles makes a neat diagonal pattern overall. I recall my mOm telling me got the pattern idea from a quilt in a movie—something tragic like Coal Miner’s Daughter or The Dollmaker.

The second quilt project also came from my mom—she cut out a zillion “wavy charms” during a destashing episode a number of years ago and sent them to various quilters in the family. Two things stymied me on this one—there weren’t enough pieces for a whole quilt, and I wasn’t sure how to sew together the wavy edges of the charms. I solved the first problem by letting a lot of years and my own stash build up, and the second by just diving in with sewing.

A little stretching here and a pin or two there, and it worked out fine. This quilt was a walk down memory lane, too, with fabrics that go back at least to my first communion dress (tiny strawberries on a white background). In putting these very disparate prints together, I mainly focused on alternating light and dark, warm and cool, floral and geometric, older and newer, since there was otherwise no rhyme or reason to them. And though you’d never choose any of these fabrics to “go” together, I like the overall effect. 

Finish It Friday ~ Saucy Table Runner

I feel better when I create something tangible with my hands—something that doesn't need to be made again (and again and again), like dinner. I've known this about myself for a long time, but I don't always remember it when I need to. Fortunately, sometimes my unconscious mind steps in, as it did earlier this week, when I sat down to make some face masks and instead put on my own oxygen mask and picked up a stack of fabric that had been waiting in the queue for me to get around to making it into a table runner.

Now I don't need another table runner. Nobody needs a table runner.  But making something pretty, that is something I needed. And I'd had this idea of putting some scraps of red, blue, yellow, and turquoise together with a half-yard printed with talavera plate designs to go with a Mexican pottery dish I bought at the thrift store in the Before Times. (The talavera fabric I'd bought a few years ago, intending to replace the valance in my kitchen but was vetoed by my friends who like the dish towel curtain just fine.) So I cut strips and sewed them together and cut those into strips, which I tacked together to make longer strips (hoping to save myself a little bit of the tedium of assembling tiny squares individually). Then I sewed it all together directly onto the batting and backing, so I wouldn't have to quilt it later.

It came out a little wonky, the corners not exaclty square, but it would have come out that way even if I'd cut out indifidual squares. I'm just a wonky quilter. I ran out of blue thread most of the way through and switched to white, then I whip-stitched the binding on with teal. I always wondered how much thread Ma Ingalls brought along in the wagon in Little House on the Prairie. It must have been miles and miles, because what would she do if she ran out, there in Kansas Territory with no stores anywhere and every stitch of clothing needing to be made by her own hand? I wish that when everyone was out panic buying toilet paper I'd panic bought a few spools of thread. By the time this is all over, I'll have used it all up, right down to the lavender.

There it is, just a table runner, one which will be made dirty by my husband and children, then  unceremonously shoved aside when they need the table space for something else. It hasn't changed the world, nor will it. But it made a gray day a little brighter, and that's something.

Finish It Friday ~ Valentine's Edition

Some time ago (years, perhaps?), I picked up a couple of little packs of fabric charms for Enlish paper piecing. However, after my first foray into the craft, I wasn't eager to do it again. It is a little, shall we say, fussy? And I'm a little, shall we say, ramshackly?

But while tidying up in my room a few weeks ago, I ran across the charms, and was inspired by a batch of vintage-looking prints in mostly pinks and reds to make a little Valentine's Day…I don't know what you'd call it. Table mat? Doily? Fiddle-faddle?



So over the course of the next few weeks, I stitched together tiny hexagons during our evening family television time, and last weekend I kind of improvised putting on a backing while trying to maintain the zig-zags of the hexagons. The corners didn't come out as sharp as I would have liked (ramshackly), but otherwise it looks pretty sweet, and it goes well with my lemongrass Fiesta heart bowl (displayed here with some cherry-date-almond-chocolate "truffles").

While I had the sewing machine cleared off, I whipped up a gift bag out of this lovely fabric to wrap a wedding present in, using my fat quarter gift bag method. Now I need to think of something else to make out of this fabric so I can go back to the store and buy a fat quarter for myself.

 

Dreaming in Squares

When Kaffe Fasset's Glorious Patchwork came out in 1997, I knew immediately I wanted to make the quilt on the front cover, Jewel Squares.



C bought me a copy that year for Christmas, but the pattern was too intimidating—157 squares, each made of 3/4" or narrower strips sewn painstakingly onto paper squares. Over the years, I made some other patterns from the book—M's baby quilt (in the second photo), both E's quilt and Z's quilt, a couple of pillow covers and, when those fell apart, another one. Over the years, I picked up fat quarters of fabric here and there, with this quilt in mind, but I held off on making it, partly out of a sense of duty to make quilts (both baby and big) for my children, and partly because it looked like so damn much work.  Then, last winter, shortly after Christmas, inspiration hit, I made a rare Saturday trip to town to photocopy the paper pieces, and voila, I was on the move.



It did take a long time, but usually while I find the piecing part of making a quilt tedious, after the planning part, this quilt was planned one square at a time and I found choosing the fabrics and putting together each one like composing a little picture, which kept it interesting, even when I got to the 68 2" squares. So interesting, in fact, that I finished the top in less than a year, dropping it off at the quilter in November (this is about 1/3 to 1/7 the time in which I normally finish a quilt).



The book proposes this quilt pattern as a window blind, because it looks so gorgeously stained-glass-like backlit by natural light. But, it would fade and fall apart in less time than it took to make left to the devices of ultraviolet rays, so I added a border to make it big enough for a throw and had it backed and quilted with a pattern of interlocking circles, which you can't really see in these photos.

Despite having had precise-sized paper squres onto which I sewed the strips, it still came out a little wonky in a few spots. Still, I'm very happy with the result. The wonky bits give it character.

I think it was worth the 21-year wait.

In Other Quilting News

I got E's quilt back from the long-arm quilter and put on the binding last weekend. He picked out a circles-and-swirls quilting pattern that looks like bubbles and ripples of water; fitting for a frog quilt.


For the back, E and I chose a soft lime green flannel (he really wanted turquoise velour, but I talked him out of it…and after I made him a pillow from said fabric, I knew I made the right choice—it was horrible to work with and even just sewing a binding on it would have made me crazy).



Now all three kids are covered—literally.

I can turn my attention to myself. Here's a sneak peek at my next project. Usually when I make a quilt, I do all the planning at the beginning and from there it's all tedious cutting and piecing, but this one is planned square by square and I find it positively thrilling to come up with combinations of fabric and then see how they turn out once they're put together. I've almost exhausted my supply of red fabric, in terms of using each only once (they will get repeated later when I start making smaller blocks) and I'm waiting on a shipment of reinforcements from my mom.

I worry a lot about creative energy and whether expending it in one area (e.g., quilting, knitting, painting, etc.) drains the well so there's not enough left over for the main activity (i.e., writing). I don't know the answer to this, but I do know that while this project is distracting, it is also energizing and it makes for a beautiful kind of escapism that's preferable to a television or social media binge.

A Farm Quilt

I've had the idea of making a farmyard quilt/play mat for a long time. Many babies of our acquaintance have been born and outgrown the play-on-the-floor-with-tractors stage during that time and I just hadn't pulled it off.

And then the sweet young couple who own the farm where M works had a baby in December and I knew it was exactly the right time to finally make the quilt. 

M and I used to pick strawberries at the farm and shop at the farm store when he was little. It was under different ownership then, and he named the farmer and little girl in his Playmobil tractor set after the farmer and his daughter.

As a tot who loved tractors ("tack-tah" was his second word), I think M would have dug driving all his toy farm vehicles around on a farm quilt, and hopefully the little guy who will be driving around toy (and probably real) tractors way sooner than his parents can possibly imagine, will dig it too.

 I modeled the barn after the one where M sits in the summer, handing out quart containers and ringing up pick-your-own strawberry purchases (though I accidentally tilted the asymmetrical roof the wrong way—oops). And I hid a little cowboy behind the openable barn door, for a fun surprise.



I don't know how to do the quilting part of quilting (I usually take mine to be done at the quilt store) and I lack a proper walking foot (though I learned later that for freehand quilting, the thing to do is use a darning foot and put your feed dogs down). So I just kind of winged it on this one. It ended up a little rumpled and puckered, but I figure the more imperfect it is, the easier it will be to throw it on the floor or grass and let the littlest farmer have at it.

A Quilt (Top) for E

Ever since I finished Z's quilt (top) back in February, the squares for E's quilt have been sitting forlornly on my sewing table, gathering dust and waiting for someone to come and do something with them. Around mid-October, I finally got the inspiration to put them together (probably fueled by something else I wasn't inspired to do, like clean the house or write a book), and so I cleared and dusted my sewing area, threaded my machine, and put a few squares together.



Then the late October mega-windstorm came, wiping out both our internet and the daily solitude that's a prerequisite to writing (did I mention the kids got a whole week off school with that one?), and I got cracking, putting together most of the squares. The momentum continued, and in less than a month, I had the whole top assembled, which is something of a record, even if you include the years since I started cutting pieces.



The original motif was to have been frogs, and I started with some fabrics from my stash and some my mom sent me. Over time the theme expanded to include salamanders, lizards, turtles, alligators, butterflies, crickets, beetles, fish, and parrots. I guess we can call it "Non-Mammal Vertebrates Plus Insects." I suppose it would have been more age-appropriate had I finished it back in 2014, but who doesn't love frogs, really? They're timeless. And he doesn't have to take it to college with him if he doesn't want to.

 In the meantime, I got Z's quilt back from the long-arm quilter months ago.



We chose a quilting pattern called "West Wind," which is highly appropriate, and not only for the nature theme of the quilt. For the backing, my quilter recommended this tan and brown flannel with a pattern like tree rings and to my surprise, I liked it. The front is so busy, that a neutral backing made sense. After much hemming and hawing, I've decided to use the same fabric for the binding, not only because I have a lot of it (nice and long so I won't have to do much piecing), but also because I thought it would be lovely to have a soft flannel edge to one's quilt.



I was hoping to give both to the boys for Christmas, but I finished E's to late to get it quilted. I'll have to wrap up the top for him with a promise of finishing it in the new year—a family tradition I carry on from when my mom used to wrap up fabric and a pattern or yarn and needles, the promise of a gift later on.

Z's Quilt Top ~ The Naturalist

And just like that, we have a quilt top. Well, not really JUST like that. It did take a couple of years, but not NEARLY as long as M's quilt took, so it felt really fast. And the actual hands-on time was quite small…there just happened to be a lot of in-between time in between the hands-on time.



I'm calling this quilt "The Naturalist," because Z's very interested in wildlife and plants and things of that nature (well, when he's not interested in his iPad, which sucks of more and more of his time every day, I'm afraid). I already had some wildlife and nature-type prints and decided to pair them (plus a few additional purchases) with mini plaids, of which I had a ton leftover from M's baby quilt:



(Can you believe I made that thing when I was pregnant…so many fussy little pieces, all paper-pieced together. I don't even want to think about how much I spent on fabric, to make it look like a scrap quilt!! And I didn't even finish it until he was two and pretty much too big for it.)

My dilemma with Z's quilt: how to make a quilt using wildlife and nature prints and plaid and have it not end up looking like a huntin' camp quilt? My solution: use prints of non-edible wildlife (owls and eagles and frogs and bugs) and other natural objects (rocks and leaves and clouds and blueberries and feathers) plus some very non-huntin' camp colors (sky blue, purple, salmon, gold, bright green).

I think I succeeded; it doesn't look very huntin' camp to me. It is a little busy, though. Okay, it's extremely busy, but I think I like it that way. It may not be conducive to quiet dreams, but it provides a lot of fodder for daydreams and imagination.

I still need to get batting and backing and take it in to be quilted, which is outside my skill set for anything bigger than a baby quilt. Not sure when I'll get to that. That's one thing I do miss about my old 9-5 life, not having to think twice about spending money on something like finishing off a quilt. And now it's time to start on a quilt for E—I already have the pieces cut out (frogs and lizards and turtles and jungle birds), which is a bummer, because last night, when he saw Z's finished quilt, he said, "can you make me one with kitties and bunnies?" Hate to say "no" to a request like that from an 11-year-old boy, but I'm not starting again from scratch!

Weekend Things ~ The Morning After

Back when I was working for The Man, I hated Mondays. I'd wake up Sunday morning, thinking "Ugh, I have to go to work tomorrow." I was destined to be one of those people that die of a heart attack on Sunday night after a lifetime of back-to-work stress. Now that I work for me, Monday is my favorite day. I look forward to reclaiming the peace of a silent house, a reprieve from the "get off your screen" wars. I'm more convinced than ever that the 40-hour work week is inhumane. I'm willing to concede that some people enjoy their jobs and like to work, but even so Mon-Fri, 9-5 is too much. Bring on the national minimum income, I say. This Monday morning, after everyone left for school and the peaceful lull descended, I looked around my house and noticed the signs of a weekend well-spent, though it was a weekend in which the camera didn't come out very much.


The kitchen table: I swear I spent the whole weekend eating: a belated Lunar New Year celebration Saturday with friends (egg rolls, stir fry, tofu, a vaguely Southeast Asian dessert of tropical fruit and coconut milk) and then on Sunday I went on The Table Tour (a walk—not enough snow for skiing or snow-shoeing—around the Arboretum, from table of food to table of food). After two days of eating to repletion I needed to start the day with a bit of a cleanse.



Also on the table: The boys were recently gifted a collection of foreign money, and they spent some time sorting through all the coins Sunday after dinner.

The boys' room: I spent Saturday morning helping the boys deep-clean their room—vacuuming under beds, dusting behind dressers, washing windows. I helped M finish cleaning his closet. He's been working on it for a couple of months. It's been like an archaeology dig, uncovering the layers of M past (I feel like there's an essay in there somewhere). But he'd come to a standstill with one-and-a-half shelves of mementos, bric-a-brac, and dust waiting to be resolved. I held up each item and he decided whether it was to trash, keep, pass on, or store. 

The other side of the closet, however, is a bit of a disaster (despite E's and my efforts on that front a couple of months ago), but I ran out of energy on cleaning before I could tackle that.

My room: Draped over a chair is the result of a little Sunday afternoon sewing—finally making progress on a quilt for Z (thanks to my reading deprivation, I'm forced to find other ways to spend my time).

A shelf in the kitchen: We have a problem in our house which came into sharp relief with the cleaning out M's closet—of a ton of science kits and craft and art kits and kids that spend too much time on screen, not doing projects. So Sunday afternoon, I dragged E and Z off their screens and put them to work making crystals.

My desk: And then E and I started making paper boomerangs. He ran out of time to finish his, but here's where mine landed after a fling around the room.

The living room floor: In another attempt to keep boys off of screens, we've been trying to play more board games around here. When I was a kid, my sister and I played cards and games all the time, but not so these guys, unless there's an adult around directing the activities. We played Pictionary with our friends Saturday night and Taboo—E's favorite—Sunday evening.



The kitchen counter: M has been very into baking lately. He's reached the stage of baking confidence that I don't need to help out except with the occasional bit of advice and making sure we have all the necessary ingredients on hand. One weekend he made chocolate chip cookies three different times. Last week he made chocolate cake and brownies. And Sunday evening he mixed up a batch of banana- chocolate chip muffins.



The sofa: I usually write my morning pages in bed, but when C leaves early for work, like this morning, I get up to help motivate the twins to get out the door, and then curl up in a blanket on the couch to write my Morning Pages. After I finished my breakfast, I came back to this nice scene of morning productivity.