Controversial Quilts

Mark Lipinski has got himself into trouble! Didn't you just know it was going happen? I guess he reproduced pictures of some quilts with images on them that a few people found objectionable and a Jo-Ann Fabrics in Hudson, Ohio pulled his magazine, Quilter's Home, from the shelves. I don't subscribe to or buy it regularly. When I do I enjoy it, but it sort of has the feel of a "woman's magazine" and I've never been a regular reader of that kind publication. However I applaud his courage for publishing things related to quilting that I know he thought might be controversial. I'd certainly buy it if I thought there were any copies left!

21st Century Comfort

On a Friday evening, feeling just a bit worn after a long and incredibly hectic work week it is comforting to sit with a cup of tea and my lap top and find beautiful things to look at on line. Here is one: A Field Journal: Natural Historie Notebook: Drawings I love contrast between the symetrical composition and the delicate illustrations. It is a delightful blog.

Update December 28, 2020:  It's been 11 years and A Field Journal is no longer.  This photographer is now on Instagram: still taking pretty pictures though. 

Best of Show: Saffron Spring

The quilt is breathtaking and it has a perfect name: Saffron Spring. When I read it I actually sniffed the air a bit! I had a moment of expecting to smell a blend of daffodils and saffron.
It was created by Barbara E. Lies. She describes it as a traditional medallion-style whole cloth quilt and, strictly speaking, it is. However, the pierced, nested square borders and the amazing machine quilting move it into a category beyond traditional.

The detail shows off the trapunto and the soft yellow couched cording that accents the center design. The fabric itself looks to be a randomly mottled yellow. The flowers may be stuffed with tinted batting? The center motif is also accented with embroidery.

Simple Squares

I love these simple squares of color by Mary E. Stoudt. This one is 50 x 34. It is just irregularly-sized pieces of color layered on khaki. It is dominated by the primaries: red. electric blue and a warmer, duller yellow. Grayed tones are mixed in also. The squares are of multiple sizes, raw-edged and appear to by just stitched down with some edges left loose adding dimension.

The second, by the same artist, is a bit smaller at 41 x 32. It is also composed of squares, roughly the same overall size and laid more regularly. Some of them seem to be behind the ground fabric with a square cut out over them, almost like reverse applique. These are great color studies. The emphasis is on the color. They also have really interesting texture.

The Obama Quilts

One of my favorite pattern names is Burgoyne Surrounded. Quilting has always been influenced by current events and that, in my opinion, was the unofficial theme for this show. Two quilts documenting and commemorating the election and all the hope and change that went with it.
The artists are Sherry Shine and Olga Butora. The Quilt is hand painted, drawn with charcoal and embroidered. It is machine quilted.
Sylvia Hernadez is the artist of the second work to reference Obama. The quilt patterns are from a book about Underground Railroad quilt patterns. The text is from Martin Luther King Jr's I have a Dream speech. I believe the face is hand embroidered.
This detail shows the face more clearly.

Quilt Fest of New Jersey V

Today I drove to Somerset for the New Jersey Quilt Fest. The show itself is a bit smaller than the PA one but it comes at a good time - not that there is a bad time for a quilt show!

I thought the quilts were especially wonderful this year. This particular event doesn't seem to have funded prizes associated with it. The Mid-Atlantic winners from a few weeks ago were featured and there were several really interesting challenges. As usual I took lots of pictures. My goal was to focus on technique and ideas today but of course sheer beauty will always catch my eye!

I literally saw quilt from a distance, not quite on the other side of the Convention Center floor. The color is brilliant. It looks like hand-dyed fabric. It is machine quilted with orange thread, maybe variegated. The design is original, an intricate log cabin-type geometric. Combined with the twisting and ray-ed quilting, it's like an op art painting. The artist is Kay Preston.

Dying for Color

This weekend, between snow storms, I drove to the suburbs to take a short class in dying wool with acids. I love to dye cottons and the idea of coloring protein-based fibers with acid dyes was always a bit intimidating to me. It sounded more complex and a bit dangerous!
It was so much fun. The instructor brought packets of Kool Aid and easter egg tint. Vinegar acted as the acid and in the end it was much easier, and neater, than dying cotton! The wool batting and wool yarns "eat up" the color in the water until it is clear again and the colors are far more intense than I thought they would be -- plus the wool smells like Black Cherry and Tropical Punch. I can't wait to do it again.

Pink and Red

I don't know why but I've become a bit obsessed with the color combination of pink and red. I look around for examples of them together. Neither are favorite colors of mine. Could it be a hold-over from Valentine's day? I'm just so interested in how they sort of vibrate off each other. Separately they've always seemed to me to inhabit two different realities. True pink manages to be both fluffy and shiny. Red is THE aggressive color. But together, at least right now, they are so interesting. Like loud but intricate music, a big orchestra of color all by themselves.

Jane Sassaman

I am besotted by Jane Sassaman's quilts and fabric. Of course I experienced the quilts first. They are a unique combination of botanical accuracy, or maybe botanical sensibility, and pop art color.



Later she began designing fabric, and while I loved it, I couldn't imagine what I would do with it. Then came the Prarie Gothic line and I decided I really didn't care if I could come up with a use or not. I just had to have it.



Her blog Does have several suggestions... and bunches of Prarie Gothic fabric is coming to my house next week!

Library Quilters

The Library Quilters started meeting again in January. Before the holidays I had started a Ruth McDowell daisy-patterned quilt. It is on my lists of quilts I want to make and I started out, picked up speed and put together about half of the blocks I need -- and then I lost steam.
It is a paper-pieced project and paper piecing feels halting to me. I love the uniformity that it creates but I get bored with the "fiddly-ness" of it. I've been thinking about making templates and converting it to a classic piecing project and trying to chain sew it. I used to really dislike using templates but I seem to have found a new patience with the process.
This brings me to a struggle I have in general with making quilts. I know one of the reason I, and likely many people, find quilts so compelling is their sheer size. Bed-sized quilts are a great big canvas for color and design, but that much size in means a lot of piecing and a lot of time and I have a lot of quilts on that list.

Getting Back to My Life

and this blog! It has been a hectic and challenging few months. First Christmas:
Then my Mother's move to an apartment. It is only down the street but moving in January in the middle of a snow storm has its own set of challenges.


Now it is time for the first of 2009's Amaryllis on my windowsill!

Have I had time to quilt or be creative? Not so much...

Going Down the Last Candy Cane Lane

Every year I plan to not get pulled under by the holiday undertow and every year I pretty much fail. I made towels for my mother and sister because last year they said "you have an embroidery machine, we expected to get towels.." and I do want to give them things I've made. And because I gave them scrap books last year I didn't have time to make cookies so this year I had to make up for that because I couldn't go two years without making any cookies, right?

Anyway, I just got the Art Quilt Workbook from the library and I'm looking forward to some sort of on-going art quilt project in the new year.

Experiment Part 2

I put the experimental blocks away and decided to try the same technique, keeping the fabrics that worked and replacing the ones that didn't. I liked the resulting blocks so much better that I went ahead and made sashing or connecting blocks for the two new blocks. Of course I had to try the new blocks with the original, unloved ones. They actually blended pretty well. I now had the core of a quilt that was pretty interesting to me.

I've now made more blocks, staying with the on point setting. I love the abstract, very colorful look. I became a little obsessed with it last weekend. It is a really neat technique developed by Sandi Cummings

Yes We Did!

Marsala Honey Pears with Gorgonzola

I guess it is that time of year again when I want to cook. This recipe was taken from Nigella Lawson's book Nigella Express and I heard about it on The Chef's Table on WHYY a couple of Saturday's ago.

Serves 2

Ingredients

• 2 Tablespoons Olive Oil (one was enough)
  
• 2 Pears, peel left on and cored
  
• 3 Tablespoons Marsala
  
• 2 Tablespoons Honey
  
• 50g Walnut Halves
  
• 500g Gorgonzola
  (honestly, I don't know what a gram of anything is. I just put some in. Enough that it looked right)

Directions
Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Cut the pears into eighths, leaving the skin but cored.
Fry the pears for 3–4 minutes on each side, or until softened.
Meanwhile, whisk the Marsala and honey together in a cup or small bowl.
Add the Marsala mixture to the pears and allow to bubble and become syrupy.
Transfer the pears to a large serving plate, reserving the syrupy mixture in the pan.
Add the walnuts to the same pan and stir fry them for about a minute, or until they are slightly darkened and sticky all over.
To serve, transfer the walnuts to the serving plate along with any remaining pan juices and place the gorgonzola onto the plate.

This was excellent. we had it with a salad and chicken breast.

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.