Quilt Planning

I am having a bit if fun planning the next quilt for my husband's next great grandson. His sister has given him a name, we're not sure it has parental approval! I won't publish it here.

I'd assembled some fabrics, including at least two from his sisters quilt, and two from their cousin's; I like to feel they have that link, even if the various parents never notice, it pleases me. 

So, blocks chosen, a design on graph paper, just the outlines, scanned into the computer

Copy and paste fills in the gaps for a printable graphic

which can then be coloured in, to plan where each fabric will be used

It's a story about a mouse on an island in a lake surrounded by woods where bears are camping. Tractors are working on the autumn harvest, and there are autumn woodlands to explore

This mockup was done by scanning in my fabrics and using the image of each to fill the shapes of each block. It gives me a better idea of how the colours will work together. Of course the real thing will be much more lively as the various fabrics respond to each other.

And here is the mouse, friend of fox, owl, rabbit and hedgehog on the other two quilts. Perhaps they will all play with each other again one day.

Absent but busy

 It really has been rather a long time since I posted, but I am still here, just been rather busy.

A dear aunt of mine, the last of my paternal aunts, died in April and, as one of two executors, but the one closest to her both geographically and emotionally, I have been dealing with her estate, which is taking some considerable time. I have still been stitching, just not had the energy to post here about what I was doing. I did have a break from this in June when I went with Stitchtopia to Indonesia for two weeks; a fascinating tour, rather spoilt by going down with Covid as soon as I got back. I am still contemplating what I thought of the trip, but will try and post in the other place once my ruminations are done.

My priorities have been twofold; first getting the stitching finished for my part in the lovely book we made to celebrate the life of Christine Chester. This was entered into the Quilt Creations Gallery at FOQ this year, where it garnered much enthusiasm and comment, including from the delightful John J Cole-Morgan of IQuilt Studio who featured it in his live feed on Facebook, calling it “one of the most stunning pieces at Festival”. Liz did us proud in talking about it, having been caught completely on the hop! You'll see a couple of brief glimpses of my finished piece, Moonflowers, as they flick through the book, but also so many of the other lovely artworks which our Studio11+ group created in Christine's memory. I also had the honour of stewarding at Christine’s retrospective gallery. It was such a pleasure to talk to folk about her work, and see how many visitors were deeply touched by the message behind her pieces. One of my favourites is this beautiful sheer image of her Dad using English Paper Piecing and fabrics she created herself using voile and paper lamination (here demonstrated by Claire Benn from whom I suspect Christine learnt the technique she made her own). Don't you just love those echoing shadows on the wall?

My second priority has been making a small floor quilt to welcome the latest great grandchild in my husband’s family. He was born on June 1st and I have just completed the finishing touches. Summer suns and little creatures to greet a summer baby, a couple drawn from his cousin's quilt to create a family link, along with a rabbit and fox to talk to, some mad cats dancing with the birds, and lions and tigers contemplating the fluttering butterflies. It will be given to his parents in late September when we are all meeting up during our annual pilgrimage to the Lakes. 

By then I will hopefully have a third quilt almost finished for his next cousin, who is due in October. What fun "senior cousin" will have with two boys to boss about; she will be just three when her brother is born. This will be the fourth in the series which started back in 2019 with a little girl who is now about to start school! How time flies.

I hope your summer has been productive too

Uzbekistan crafty update

I don't seem to have talked about the lovely English Paper Piecing project that Karin Hellaby designed for us to work while on our holiday in Uzbekistan last year, which is rather remiss of me. She brought with her a kit for each of us with fabric from the wonderful Oakshott Fabrics. Their shot cottons are a delight to work with, I have two collections sitting in my sewing room waiting for me to feel confident enough to turn them into "something". Karin's design was inspired by the lovely colours and star motifs that we saw in tilework, woodwork and ceilings all across the country.

We had several stitch sessions with her where she talked us through how to cut and piece the individual elements, then applique our star onto the background fabric. These took place in this delightful room in the hotel we stayed at in Bukhara. This was also where we had breakfast each day we were there.

Most of us hadn't finished the project by the time we came home, but several members of the group got theirs done some time ago. Mine was almost there, but had joined the ever increasing collection of "things I really should finish soon". Then I was delighted to find my work featured in a post on the Oakshott Fabrics' Instagram about Karin's travels so thought I'd better finish it.

I had done all the piecing and applique,

worked some embroidery in Bokhara couching; the green triangles echoing the central green hexagon; and some small chain stitch motifs, based on design elements we had seen there. I added a scattering of beads and sequins 

I have at last assembled it into a cushion which sits extremely comfortably in Ganna's wickerback chair in my study

I am so pleased with this: each time I pass my study door, which sits open, I catch sight of it and am briefly transported back to the beautiful things I saw in Uzbekistan.

another new arrival

The second of the next generation of children in my husband's family has arrived recently. Another earlier than expected event, she entered the world on his birthday. Very fortuitous, since she is his first great grandchild. He was, as you might imagine, overwhelmed with delight. 

I had been working on a quilt for her, and took my trusty old Bernina and other necessaries on our Lakes pilgrimage at the end of September. We knew she was a she, and we knew she was an autumn baby so I thought autumn stars would be appropriate and, on the advice of a quilting friend, chose a square format, making a floor quilt for her to roll about on. The quilt is backed with a lovely soft brushed cotton which I have brought to the front using the self binding method.

There are a selection of little animals for her to tell herself stories about; a deer and her fawn in the autumn woods, some butterflies, a hedgehog and friend, and a pair of lovebirds which also appeared on "Flopsy's" quilt. 

Then there are a mother fox and her cub snuggled in their den and a very vibrant cat

Another pair of cats (we do have two after all) and a wise old owl

And a proud dog fox with his mates. We had five youngsters in the garden this year!

This was the block which started it all, one I made pre lockdown when I was doing a second patchwork course with Naomi (remember that hand made one from 2018?). For the rest I assembled some autumnal fabrics and was given a very valuable lesson by Christine on which ones of the great selection to choose, and how to check whether I had enough of each colour to make the blocks. There is a huge amount of calculating and counting when doing this, so I was deeply grateful for her wise advice. The majority of creatures are from great grandad's garden. We are a little too urban for deer though and, with badgers, there are never going to be any hedgehogs here, but I couldn't find any suitable badger fabric.

Great grandad is travelling up to Yorkshire to meet his great granddaughter at the beginning of December, so has volunteered to be the quilt courier. I do hope that her parents like it and that, in time, it will be a source of pleasure to her and will feed her imagination. I have so enjoyed making it.

With apologies for my long absence, I am still here, honest!

A week of finishing

I have been busy this week getting up to date with a couple of projects. First a quilt I have been making as part of the online Studio11 workshops which Christine is running, having been rather scuppered by Covid. I blogged earlier about the project with Coronavirus as a theme; that is still ongoing as I've been doing too much thinking and not enough doing, which is often a failing of mine. However her "Potato Chip Quilt" project was straightforward, and took much less thinking about to achieve. There seem to be several variants with this name: one is a series of blocks with a square at the centre and a different coloured border on each square; another, similar to the one we made, consists of strips joined with a diagonal seam. The one Christine teaches comprises a pile of fabric strips of a consistent width but differing lengths and a pile of squares the same dimension as the width of strips. You make a long, long, looooooooong strip by alternately stitching strip, square, strip, square at random. The strip is then seamed and trimmed several times until you have a rectangle. Sounds very simple, but you have to get the maths right in order to know how big your quilt will be, and to make one that has sensible dimensions. 

It is all finished, 

quilted with a design I based on some of the fabric, 

 

with some hand dyed fabric as backing

 

I am really pleased with it, and have enough strips left (my poor maths!!) to make another of a similar size, though perhaps with less random and more deliberation.

Then there was my Noro jacket, started back in 2018. It too is finished, though currently awaiting a decision on buttons. 

 

You will see that I ignored the Noro "just make it random" philosophy (be "charmed by the non-uniformity, unevenness, & coarseness of nature"), I prefer to mirror the colour changes. This did involve quite a bit of reeling off from the start of the ball to get a match, but I used those bits in the back to vary the changes where no matching was needed. The yarn feels lovely knitted up and this jacket will get a lot of wear I hope, but I'll probably steer clear of any future Noro temptations. Beautiful as they are, with such a high price I don't like feeling that they are using a bit of marketing BS to cover flaws in both the yarn (which did sometimes fall apart in my hands as I was knitting) and the multiple knots and joins per ball (presumably because the yarn fell apart as it was being spun).

And yes, I am decidedly less sylphlike than the model in the pattern, but hey ho, I am somewhat older than her as well, and did once have my sylphlike moments!! The cat chaps don't mind, so long as they provide biscuits their humans can be any size they like!

Ambushed by events

I have had a small project on the go - a cot quilt for the first child of the next generation to be born in my husband's family. He nicknamed her Flopsy when she was on the way, so Flopsy she has become to us. She was due to be born on the 20th November, but snuck in two weeks early. Her quilt (Flopsy's quilt) had been designed, planned, all parts cut out and ready to go, but not quite assembled. So now I am hurrying to catch up with events.

The quilt is just about finished - with Mrs Rabbit and, of course, Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter being tucked into their winter coats to go out and play. There are lovebirds to chat to along the way

And trees in the surrounding gardens and woods to run in and out and roundabout; they might frolic in fields of blue and yellow flowers and have busy chats with the bees.

Layered together with wadding and a snuggly brushed cotton backing, there is some hand quilting, but mostly machine. The binding is one where the backing is brought forward to the front, so the soft brushed cotton folds round the edges for little fingers to grasp.

There is just a little bit of hand quilting left to do (Flopsy must be highlighted of course), then the finished article can be tucked into a squishy parcel, along with a lovely soft blanket which darling daughter has crocheted for her, and a book from her great great uncle to amuse her as she grows. We hope she enjoys both snuggles and book for many years to come.

She does, of course, have her own name - in fact three of them and very lovely names they are too, but I won't be so indiscreet as to launch them into the ungoverned spaces of the internet.

In between times I have been doing other things too. I'm not sure you saw the finished "One Over the Eight" quilt that I have been making in our monthly patchwork class. We have, since then, moved on to several other things, all of which need finishing, some of which are not yet started

We had a lovely crewel work workshop at the Embroiderer's Guild with Fay Maxwell, a delightful and patient teacher - you can hear her talk about her crewel work in the linked video. She adds an extra element to the traditional crewel work by cutting out felt shapes for the basic design elements, which are tacked onto the backing cloth and then embroidered.  Freehand cutting of felt shapes was quite a challenge, especially as I was basing my design on fabric that once covered some cushions of my grandmother's; fabric that echoed crewel work designs itself. I think I managed OK. Now to finish the embroidery!

and finally, from last weekend, this little fox is gradually appearing, poking his nose through the bluebells, He was designed by one of our branch members for us to try out some bead embroidery during a half day workshop

So, quite a bit has been happening, just not in Mesopotamia!!

Honouring work done

It's been a while since I've mentioned this wonderful treasure that came my way earlier in the year. Since you last saw it I have been working away at "consolidating". Getting all the unfinished edges finished, sewing lots of little while hexagons to add to the edges to get to a clean starting point, taking our endless paper hexagons so I have templates to paper piece around, sewing lots of colourful flowers so I have a stock to begin adding in my own contributions. You can see them making rainbow in the box below

So, having got the point where there is a boundary of white around what has been done so far, I was advised that it is usual to have some way of marking where one maker ceased and another began. This struck me as an excellent idea; the piecing that has been done so far is so fine and I am trying to achieve the same quality, but my aesthetic with colour is bound to differ from hers. So, without doing something too obvious that would intrude on the rhythm of the overall design (assuming I do actually finish it), I have decided to run a single line of stem stitch around the white edges to show where her flowers end and mine begin. You can see it below, skirting round the purple and blue and green, marking the transition that spans 13 years and a whole generation; the originator of this was my Mum's generation. It makes me think of edges and boundaries and maps, I don't quite know why.

I am still stitching every day, amongst all the other projects on the go. A quiet task that can be inventive, when choosing, cutting and stitching the fabrics for the flowers, or quietly undemanding, when stitching white on white; hexagons around paper, hexagons to other hexagons, or rhythmic stem stich to mark the place one stopped and another started. Honouring her work as I move forward with my own.

Focus

Yes, focus, I could really do with more!

I have been absent from here for some time, just being busy really. I have several projects on the go - never giving quite enough time to any of them, but hoping to get more than one thing finished by giving each at least some time. So there is the Mona Lisa project with my Embroiderers' Guild group. We have chopped her up into 25 rectangles and have each taken one to work on with whichever technique we feel suitable. I have her forehead. Just about to start cutting out organza shapes to get the colour of her skin before stitching that and finishing her hair.

Then there is my Mesopotamia project at Studio 11 - very slow stitch, but I am thinking about it all the time; how to express what catches my interest about the subject, how to be creative with ideas as well as images in stitch and cloth. The two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates are gradually flowing down the hanging I'm working on at the moment.

and towns are popping up along the way - in this case, Dur Sharrukin, Nineveh and Nimrud

Also, there is my patchwork - that monthly class which a little group of us are attending where we are learning all the basic skills in a nine patch quilt with borders. Just the borders and quilting to do now!! Only a little bit behind!!!

And recently I acquired,  or perhaps took over responsibility for the most wonderful piece of English Paper Piecing, a Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt, part finished, left to a friend by her godmother. The friend feels she can't finish it so it has been sitting on the top of her wardrobe making her "feel guilty" for the past 13 years.  It is double bed size, and I have fallen in love with it.

There are odd edges that need finishing before I can get to grips with how to proceed. There are also lots more hexies to be cut and stitched round the templates, template papers to be removed from the completed bits of piecing, flowers to be pieced and decisions to be made.

Such inventive fussy cutting.

I have no idea how long finishing will take, but it's a daily bit of quiet stitching that does my soul good.

On top of all that, I am now part way through a ten week course on the history of Mesopotamia - part way through and falling behind! Falling behind because we have been away for three long weekends in the past seven weeks, doing very enjoyable family things with my dear heart's family. This last weekend we were in Kassel for a very joyful wedding. The weather was toasty, the sun shone, the corn poppies were blooming

and the church roof threw back the light to the sky

Then this post popped into my side bar of places I enjoy.

How to have more focused hours in your day

Wonderful advice, but will I take it?

Life is full.

Seven down

We had our monthly patchwork meeting today, and I'm glad to say I was all caught up with myself. We have completed seven of our nine blocks now, so are romping towards the finish line. I am really happy with where I am with these blocks. I have enjoyed each one - all different in terms of techniques, all challenging in their own way, but terrific fun nonetheless.

Here they are all laid out on the sewing room floor - the wonderful stripes in the middle are the handstitched rug that sits in there, created by a 90 year old lady who knew Cecil "in the dim distant past" to use one of her favourite sayings. 

The blocks seems to be balancing well in terms of colour and design (the design all being Naomi's of course, as she is the one teaching us) and I'm hoping the final two blocks will fit in, once they are made.

The bottom line includes the most recent block, my version of the drunkard's path block.

So what was on offer today? Well the usual delightful teaching by Naomi - who is always so good at explaining how we should construct the current block, and who always brings both interesting books,  relevant to the technique and delicious home baked biscuits for us to nibble with our mid morning coffee. And the block we are to do this month? Snail Trail, a block which seems to have several differing construction techniques. We will be foundation piecing, which means using a base fabric and stitching each scrap down onto this. Each bit of fabric overlaps the previous one, and is placed right sides together across it and stitched before being folded flat so that the seam you have stitched covers up the raw edge of the previous piece. I am looking forward to using up some scraps and probably creating more!

If only all learning was this much fun!

A patchwork education

There are rather a lot of textiley things I could update you on, I've been busy with all sorts; my stitching in Studio 11 time is coming on slowly, as it often does; we had a lovely talk recently at the Embroiderers Guild from Emily Jo Gibbs, which included a brief tutorial at the end to show us the techniques she uses to create her beautiful stitched portraits; I've also been learning to use a small rigid heddle loom, having been inspired by the weaving I saw in Bhutan. I already have a much deeper appreciation of the skill that goes into weaving their beautiful textiles. But today it's patchwork that I'm sharing with you. One of our Guild members is also a very good patchworker, and she offered us a course to teach us the basics. We started in May with an introduction to patchwork and quilting, both the technical aspects and some history. Over the year we are to make nine blocks, each in a different technique, all hand pieced, quilting as we go. These will all come together to make a nine patch quilt.

So, below is my most recent block, Rocky Road to Kansas.

Each of the four arms of the star are pieced using the crazy patchwork technique; delightfully fiddly, each little scrap is stitched down onto a foundation fabric, with lots of puzzling and careful folding and stitching to get the bits to fit together. Crazy patchwork is a way of using up all sorts of scraps, and is often further embellished by decorative surface stitching. I cannot imagine making a whole quilt using this technique, but one block was terrific fun.

The pictures below show the block in context. Naomi's idea was for us to use just three different fabrics to keep things simple, a light, medium and dark, but because I have a bit if a stash already I thought I'd use a series of related fabrics, mostly fat quarters, and try to balance them across the quilt. 

I've enjoyed selecting fabrics that work together, and have been adding in different fabrics to bring variety to the blocks, along with ones I've used previously, so that none of the blocks is out of kilter with the rest. So far it seems to be working. The Rocky Road block hasn't been backed and quilted yet. Once I've done that it will be joined to the top row and then on to the next block, one with needle turned appliqué. I'll update you as I go :-)

A little indigo a little Japan a little Jude

I was deeply moved by the quilts of Shizuko Kuroha at FOQ in Birmingham last weekend. A lovely weekend spent with my daughter meandering up from and back to the South Coast.

This was my second time at the show, and again Christine was there exhibiting; this time with unFOLD, a textile group she belongs to. All the works were themed around Lynn Knight's fascinating book book "The Button Box". Here you can see Christine with her "Just Got To Finish the Mending", in the background and below, mending being metioned in the book as an informal contraceptive of sorts - read the book and you'll find out. Christine's piece, which we have watched develop during our Studio 11 days, is densely stitched over a deconstructed shirt, with the darning stitch so often used to mend, and mend, and mend in those days when we still did that sort of thing. It was marvellous to see it hung in the gallery space along with so many other thought provoking textiles.

If you look closely there's just a hint of a daughter in the background as well!

While there we also really enjoyed Ruth Singer's textile meditations on the lives of women prisoners. Again, such an inspiration to see how textile artists express their thoughts about life and ideas using the medium of cloth and stitch. A thing I aspire to, but haven't quite worked out the how yet!

But back to Kuroha and her beautiful indigo quilts, impeccably pieced and hand quilted, each one a symphony of movement and subtle colour. They really are works of art. She was there in her gallery space, signing books for eager middle aged ladies, amongst whom I include myself (though not in this picture); her smile so sweet as she inscribed the book with my name and her signature. 

I was touched to the core, both by her and her art.

On my return home I had a week off work, but am preparing for two momentous things: first, at the end of the month, after forty years of fulfilling work in my local library service, I am taking early retirement - a big step, but one I am longing for. The ability to just go to bed in the afternoon and sleep for a couple of hours will be transformative! Oh, and get on with my stitching, and weaving, and dyeing, and gardening, and perhaps a little piano playing, and a thousand other things that have been waiting for "when I have time".

Then in September, I am off to Bhutan. How easily that types itself out, what an amazing thing to be doing. One of Colouricious' textile trips, I will be beside myself when it happens. Will try and post a couple of updates while I'm there.

So, Indigo, Japan, Jude? What's the link you are asking yourself?

Well, I need to take a sketchbook to Bhutan, obviously. I loved the simplicity of the indigo quilts, and all sketchbooks should have a cover. Especially one made from a couple of pairs of jeans I haven't worn since my slim early twenties, but have always kept because "I'll do something with these one day".

And Jude? Well this is a sort of Jude house, patched and darned and quietly stitched.