Experiment

Instructions in this months AQS magazine. I had time on Sunday to give it a try.

The blocks are sliced up quite a bit but the background fabric still dominated and the peach was my least favorite. It was picked to go the what I thought would act as the focus print. It became the focus instead, leaving the other fabrics sort of stranded and not speaking to each other. So I colored it with some paintsticks. It helped some. The one below isn't colored.

What I liked:
The recombining of the piece, I liked the process and I liked the almost but not quite lined up look
The circle shape
The distorted nine-patch

What I didn't like:
The colors

I want to try again with different fabrics.

Pumpkins Gone Wild

This year on Columbus Day we drove up to Bucks County to bring home pumpkins. I love pumpkins. Round, orange, good-tasting and you can carve them and make them LIGHT UP! I love things that light up.

I couldn't resist the pumpkin-ness or the name of the panel. It is unquilted but I think it is small enough for me to do it on the sewing machine some evening when I'm in an intensely obsessive-compulsive space.

A Weekend in the Sewing Studio

I was entirely on my own this weekend. I could have gone to a class - but I didn't. I had great Joann coupons but they went unused. On Saturday my first stop out of bed was my sewing machine and I turned it on before I had my tea.
I worked on a plaid daisy quilt that has a vaguely green theme so far. I started it last week as this Fall's Library Quilters quilt. It has been on my list of things I want to make for a long time so it is good to start it. It is a Ruth McDowell flower pattern. I saw an example made with chickens around the daisys as a border but I'm just not a chicken kind of girl. I'm thinking bees or butterflys -- maybe both and a
bee hive or two? I've been wanting to do something with bees since they started disappearing. I don't know that this will completely satisfy me but it is a possibility.

Several weeks ago I spotted silk chiffon on sale for cheap on Fourth Street. I didn't buy it the day I saw it and it has haunted me since so last week I took an afternoon and bought some in every color! My idea is to make needle felted scarves. Roving looks so cool and organic felted into sheer silk and I have never tried it. I am fairly pleased with the (as yet not completely finished) results.


I also finished the white linen drapes for the bed room. Not as exciting but they SO needed to be finished.


Interspersed with this flurry of creative activity I spent a bit of time cleaning up the space (mostly putting new fabric away) and musing over ways to use some of the large prints I've accumulated in the past year or so.

I am particularly in love with the beautiful collaged-looking prints of Jason Yenter. I can't seem to get enough of them! He creates a new line and I need to have it -- but what to do with it? The prints are either large or intricate or both and after I get them home I am overcome with an attack of the "can't-use-its." The manufacturer (Free Spirit) always has suggested quiting patterns on their web site but the designs tend to be some variation on traditional quilting patterns. I do love and will piece traditional patterns but these prints seems to call for something different so I have been on a mission to find or make a new approach for these and other large prints.

In Memory of Helen Kelley

I went the the Quilter's Newsletter magazine web site to renew my subscription and to my dismay I saw the announcement that Helen Kelley had passed away September 1st. I always read and enjoyed her column. Her positive outlook and measured perspective did feel like my grandmother and her sisters. They were also needle women. Their idea of amusing a 4 year old girl was a needle and thread, a box of assorted buttons and a length of fabric. I have to say that it worked. Those very things still amuse me nearly 50 years later.

I think about the future of women and what my grandmother called "hand work." I know my greats and grands thought about it and from her writings I think Helen Kelley thought about it too because to quilt and to show your work, to quilt and to write about it is to advocate for your craft in a way. To want to pass it on.

I'll miss Helen.

Mother's Meditation

My Mother was telling me about her latest projects the other evening on the phone. She isn't piecing quilts much these days. She isn't feeling like sewing on the machine. She is working on embroidering crazy quilted items. She tells me that she enjoys the hand work.

I know just what she means. Hand work is repetitive yet progressive, limited but accumulative, mindless but meditative. When I do it, nearly always binding a quilt, it sometimes actually feels joyful in a quiet way. Part of that may be finishing the quilt (!) but I also think that hand sewing is a kind of meditation.

So picture it, generations of women, my grandmothers, their mothers and back further and further. In their little print aprons, in their dark poplin dresses with their high, black leather shoes, in their corsets, in their bonnets, in their petticoats and crinolines: a long line of women stretching back focused on their needle and thread, meditating. As surely as if they were sitting cross-legged on the floor in saris or white cotton robes.