Hidden Threads

I’ve spent part of the weekend in the closet pulling out quilt tops to finish. As the weather gets blessedly cooler, the idea of keeping a quilt on my lap long enough to bind it doesn’t seem so nasty.

One thing I’ve noticed is flaws in my previous work - you know, the quilts with wobbly seams and those on-point quilts that look a bit on the wavy, distorted side. I guess that all quilters can look back on their previous work and find flaws. One quilt was so nasty that I unsewed the border on the spot and started looking for an alternate fabric and matching thread.

What about you? Do you have controls for this type of perfectionist behavior? Actually, I’d like myself better if I just loved the quilts for their appearance and my enjoyment in making them, whatever my level of skill at the time. But some nasty little voice in my head keeps saying, “Fix it now!” Truthfully, I’d rather be making a new, better quilt and let the old ones hide in the back of the closet, but that seems like such a waste.

I’ve been considering keeping a quilting journal.  You know, one of those little books with handwritten notes, drawings and clippings.   When I envision a good journal, it has lots of drawings and mixed media, and the prospect of creating all of that is a little intimidating, I suppose.

I think I’d be very interested in reviewing a journal of the beginning of my quilting journey.  I think a few sketched appliqué images, some ideas about color choices, swatches of fabrics or lists of quilts I wanted to make would be very interesting reading to me now - not an embarrassment or waste of time.

Fall seems a great time to start something like that.  At the end of summer, I’m always enthusiastic about getting back to my quilt projects.  I think this year I’m going to give a quilt journal a try.  How about you?

Ideas for Quilting Journal Entries:

List of quilts I want to make - with color suggestions and maybe a few fabric snippets.

Inspiring quilts - photos printed from the Internet, taken at shows or exchanged with friends .

Quilting inspiration in the form of quotes from quilters and artists.

Lists of charitable works with ideas about how I can contribute more.

Goals for the year - both for making quilts and learning new skills.

An equipment and tool wish lists for holidays.  My husband always needs hints.

A quilt inventory with a breakout of quilts in progress, what needs to be done and a tentative completion date.  Maybe even some advanced fabric choices for backings and binding.

A fabric stash review with notes on what I’m short of and what I tend to overdue. Love those batiks.

Maybe a ledger sheet on how much I’m spending . . . if it’s not too depressing.

After a much needed summer holiday, it’s back in the saddle, or sewing chair as the case may be.  It’s fall, or close to it, and I’m itching to get into those great amber, russet and brown fabrics.  Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting magazine always does an entertaining fall issue, and this year is no exception.  Check it out.

On the finishing front, I’ve made a pact with myself to quilt and bind my fall quilts from last year and hang them.  Quilt tops are my favorite part of the quilting process, so the finishing off . . .quilt sandwich, free motion quilting, and binding are always when-you-have-time projects for me.  I like to do everything myself and sometimes my ambition exceeds my available time, so piles of tops sit until I find a way to shame myself into finishing them.  This is my year to decorate the walls with quilts, so wish me luck.

In Quilting and Patchwork today (the B5Media blog) Mary Emma Allen talks about special quilt projects commemorating the upcoming Olympics. She asks us to share any projects we have planned.

I found this so interesting. I’ve always thought of quilting as an individual or community venture, offering little slices of immortality by marking weddings or anniversaries, personal triumphs, in fabric.

I never really put it together until now, the thought of quilts as time capsules or quilts as cultural records. In my sense of it, quilts did those things, but not intentionally. I always saw them as unconcerned with the wider world and focused on the universal experience of their times through the personal experience of families.

This seems different somehow, a quilt to commemorate the Olympics in China. Now that the idea has taken hold of my imagination, I see that the AIDS Memorial Quilt is like that and probably many others too that I just never quite saw for what they were. Thank you Quilting and Patchwork for opening my eyes.

Ever wondered where your quilts will be in 80 years? Every time I finish a quilt, I wonder if what I’m really doing is placing a note in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. I’ve even considered printing something on a piece of muslin and including it under the quilt top, a philosophical comment that I’d hesitate placing on the back on in a presentation card. It doesn’t matter that no one will ever see it. I’ll know that it’s there.

I’ve noticed that the heirloom quilts that appear on the quilt shows, the quilts that get comments and give rise to speculation about their owners, are often the odd ones, the quirky ones. You know, the people who were quilting with blacks and whites when everyone else was using bubble gum pinks; the oddballs and oddities that would have inspired sighs and raised eyebrows in their own time.

Oh yeah, there are always the magnificent quilts on display at museums or traveling exhibits that make the quilt programs and get their 20 seconds of awed air time, but somehow I think that my only shot at immortality will be for an oddball, not one of the best quilts of the century.

I think it makes me look at fabric differently, and strategize differently. It’s not that I want to be famous, but I’m not blind to the artistic side of the effort of putting fabric together into a pleasing pattern. After all, I’m an oddball. I could have my shot one day.

Maybe it will be for a homespun collage shaped like a fish flying over a night sky? Who knows? That’s one of the beauties of the process, for me anyway.  The unlimited possibilities for anyone with a needle and some scraps fabric.

I’m trying to slowly amass a reference resource for quilting information as well as offer up some funny stories . . .hopefully funny, anyway. It’s great to have access to sites with hundreds of block patterns, but eventually you are going to need to cut some fabric, and after you sew the blocks together, you’re going to have to assemble them.

In keeping with this theme of providing fast and helpful information, I’ve included  a short table of what you can expect to get from a fat quarter of fabric. This information was part of a hand written slip of paper that fell out of a used book that I bought years ago. A forum posting I saw recently reminded me of it.

I hope this comes in handy.

Do you have a really great quilting area to work in? Is your home graced with a studio where you can work undisturbed? For most of us, the answer to both questions is no. We work on the dining room table, or anywhere we can balance a pile of fabric and some spools of thread.

I’m always interested in the sewing rooms of other quilters. If I had the chance, I’d snoop in their closets to see how they organize their fabric scraps, peek in their drawers to discover if their threads get as tangled as mine do, and look at their rulers to see if they organize them or just let them spread out, cheek-by-jowl, across whatever level surface they’re sewing on.

The following links will take you to some sites where you can see where others are calling home when it comes to their needlecraft. Some of them will show you how the other half lives, while others are glimpses of just plain folks and their beloved quilting clutter.

My Ducks are in a Row

Sewing Rooms

More Sewing Rooms

Quilt Room

After I started quilting, I began to notice quilts . . . everywhere. There was one in the reading room of my local library, in the showroom of the local bedding store, in my favorite episode of Friends, and there is a quilt in at least one of every five movies I watch. Sometimes they are hanging on walls, or draped over the backs of couches. Sometimes they are tablecloths, or parts of decorative window treatments.

After the revelation that the old adage is true: Once you recognize something or learn a new word, you’ll discover it all over the place, I started to pay closer attention. These placements aren’t random. The quilts are creating a homey atmosphere, a kind of shorthand for, “Welcome home” or “This is a nice place to sit a spell”. Quilts are part of our collective consciousness, I guess, and they stand for something pretty nice, warm and solid. I feel proud to be a part of this traditional American art form and what it represents – home, hearth, care giving, making due, prevailing over adversity.

I have a couple of thimbles and some old needles in a little leather pouch that belonged to my grandmother.  I have very few things that belonged to her, so they are important me. It gives me a little frisson of wonder to think of us both, separated by so many years, sharing and enjoying the same pastime, putting needle to fabric.

My productivity drops quite a bit during the summer months. I’d like to say it’s because of all the barbecues and cross-country trips, but I think it’s actually because of the heat and humidity. Here in the Midwest, I have a hard time thinking about quilt assembly when the humidity is hovering at 80 percent and the temperature is hot enough to make it hurt to walk on the deck barefooted.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking about quilts. Oh no, my mind is busily at work plotting my quilting strategies. Just as soon as there’s that first scent of autumn in the air and a drop in temperature, out comes the fabric. Until then, I’ll just have to be happy fondling the occasional fat quarter and writing in my blog.

Need some quick calculations for corner-setting triangles?  The table below should help you sort it out.  If it doesn’t list your block size, use this formula to calculate the size square you should cut. Divide the finished block size by 1.414 and then add .875.

Remember, you will be making one cut, separating the square into two triangle pieces.  The outer two sides won’t be on the bias, but the seam you will be sewing is, so be careful.  I like to starch my fabric first.  This is just a suggestion, of course.

The first time I worked with corner-setting triangles, I used a plaid homespun.  I would not suggest a plaid or stripe for a beginner.

My poor plaid distorted, creating a  wave effect.  It’s funny now, but it wasn’t then.