Shopping Small

I have never been to a mall on the day after Thanksgiving. I’ve just never understood the need to battle for a sale item.  I detest crowds.  So the concept of Shop Small suits my kind of thinking. In our household, we try to support local business owners every day of the year.
church-with-chimneyOn this Black Friday we wanted to drive backroads with the camera and maybe find an antique shop or two.  One goal of photography was some country Christmas scenes.  The treasure of the day was a church decorated with Christmas wreaths on every window.  And, this church has a chimney.  I’ve never seen a church with a chimney.  An old cemetery surrounded by a white picket fence is well maintained by a local boy scout troop.

Following a spontaneous zigzag route from one small town to another, we drove though rolling hills we’d never seen.  Beautiful farmland, horses enjoying the glorious fall day, a friendly gentleman in an otherwise sleepy town, made it seem like a bit of time travel.

We made one stop in a feed & seed / quilt shop near Covington.  Though the business lost a bit of its charm when it moved out of the downtown location, their old time merchandise is still appealing.  As I paid for a fat quarter and spool of thread, the clerk recognized the bank name on my credit card and shared pleasant experiences she had there. Somehow I don’t think I would have had that sort of exchange in a mall shopping experience on Friday.

monroe-safeWe had lunch at our favorite locally owned restaurant in Monroe, GA, across the street from this pocket park.  The focus of this park is an old bank vault (left when the downburst of ’93 destroyed the building).  Two treasures here: the safe itself  and the fact that the town preserved it and made a park there.

 

 

 

shop-small-findsVisits to a few antique stores generated minimal purchases.  The highlight for me was  packages of old bias tape and rickrack, all cotton, all unopened, bearing original $.19 price tags.  I could imagine the vendor thinking, “nobody will want this old stuff.”  And, I’m thinking, “WOW.  What fun is this!”  The wicker item had a tag saying “lampshade,” but I thought “bee skep”.

sunset-in-monroeYes, we did some shopping on Black Friday.  But we didn’t elbow anyone out of the way, never stood in line, didn’t get frustrated, and had no traffic snarls to navigate.  Back roads and small businesses, that’s the way to do it.

All photography (except bias tape) by Jim Gilreath.

Country Boy in Overalls

Marie’s birthday was looming and I had heard her say she loved my Man in Overalls.  I knew there was a photo of her brother John wearing overalls, so my gift-giving plans were in motion.

jones-scan-189John loved riding his tractor and wearing his overalls.  A country boy at heart for all of his 64 years, he represents what men in overalls convey to me: honesty, integrity, and a strong work ethic.  Add a dog and the country boy takes on a loving and playful nature.

The photo I used for the art quilt was taken by his brother Kemp, and features John with his three-legged dog, Precious.

country-boy-backThe photo is printed on cotton fabric, free motion machine quilted with cotton thread and wool batting.  The brown layer is linen and all is hand stitched to a vintage quilt remnant as its base. The label is written on a scrap of vintage linen that was made blue when Marie and I played in the indigo dye vat one hot summer day.  The finished piece measures 12” x 16”.

jones-scan-054aOne earlier photo shows young John and Kemp on the farm.  Another shows Marie flanked by her loving brothers and includes their dog Skippy.

Meeting the Challenge

My local quilting sisters and I just saw each other’s secret projects at our annual guild challenge.  The photo above is a closeup of Alice’s entry.  She won a ribbon with this beauty in which she combined our rules with a project in a Craftsy class online.  The online class was free motion machine quilting with Judi Madsen.

Earlier I wrote about my resulting entry here.  I didn’t write about all the ideas I had but abandoned along the way.  As guild members shared their entries, many reported starting and abandoning, or adapting, or rethinking their process.  All reported learning something, and having fun in the process.

Here are photos and snippets of stories of all 16 quilt entries at our meeting this year.

c16-ethel-alice-kelly-janetEthel teasingly dubbed herself the complainer, said she called Queen Tess 65 times.  She doesn’t like square quilts, doesn’t like the fan block, and doesn’t like yellow.  But Ethel is not a quitter, she’s a quilter, and her resulting piece is one of my favorites (the blue in the center is to dye for).

Janet exercised her EQ design features by resizing a fan block to make a manageable project. Kelly’s Sunbonnet Sue quilt contained numerous fans. A sun, a cooling fan, and some blades of grass were also blades of a fan.

c16-angie-susi-mary-lindaLinda combined this guild’s challenge with a project she was entering in a Windows and Doors exhibit at the Ashe Arts Center in West Jefferson, NC.  Working from a photo she had taken in Nimes, France, Linda pieced the doorway panel.  She added asymmetrical borders to bring the project to the 36” requirement for our guild, including pieced fans as butterfly wings and some yellow flowers blooming on the vine.

Angie expressed some frustration, but stuck with her traditional block to make a 36” square for now.  She shared plans for further embellishment to add some zing to her entry.  (Tess often reminds us that the rules do not say the challenge has to be finished to enter.)

Mary had other priorities, so stuck with a simple design, but got it finished in time for the challenge, and now has a functional table topper with pleasing fabrics.

c16-susan-sharon-deann-wandaSharon made, not one, but two quilts.  One was made with fabric she bought in Japan while visiting her son and his family.  The other, Ocho, RibBonz, and Shadow–3 FANtastic Cats, was inspired by several quilts on Pinterest.  She has two cats name Ocho and  RibBonz..  Since she needed three fans, she had to make three cats, and Shadow is the name she gave to her imaginary cat.  She was asked to explain about one cat’s tail.  He’s scared, she said.

Susan looked for an easy pattern, crediting me with inspiring her to look for fun techniques.  I’m known to remind quilters that, “it’s supposed to be FUN.”  I love her ferris wheel blocks and would like to try this myself.

Deann hand pieces and hand quilts everything.  Her work is always amazing, but she shared that her biggest challenge was the curved part. Wanda’s entry was her first foray into our challenge world.

c16-marie-carol-sharon-sandyMarie machine pieced and hand quilted a beauty including linen and cotton fabrics.  Her title was Did you mean these fans?  An M&M’s button on the label depicted her reference to the popular tv commercial.  Dewey confessed that this commercial was his inspiration, too.  His quilt exists only in his mind as he’s been busy building a new quilting studio.

Carol explored paper foundation piecing and got enough practice on her piece that she is now an expert.

challenge-16-winnerSusi’s first place winner, Fantastic Frolicking Felines, brought smiles to all of us.  Look how much fun these dancing cats are having.  I think Dewey had fun, too, quilting this beauty.  He added the thread-painted musical notes as he quilted the entry for Susi on his longarm machine. Susi adapted a pattern from Amy Bradley for this crowd pleaser.

Before leaving for the day, Sharon shared more stories about her cats and their names.  Her quilt was visually appealing, but as with most quilts, the story gives it more life.  Here are details you will remember:

“We adopted the two identical black kittens from our grandchildren’s other grandmother’s cat’s litter.  The grandchildren were squealing excitedly when we brought them to the house and one kitten escaped by running up a tall tree. The more we called or tried climbing higher to get the kitten, the higher it went. After some time, it fell asleep about 40-60 feet  up, then tumbled down through the branches to the ground.  To identify them, we put a couple of ribbons on the untraumatized cat so we could closely watch the one who had obviously used up “one of the cat’s nine lives.”  Not knowing if they were males or females, we named the uninjured kitty ‘Ribbons’ and the one with 8 lives remaining became ‘Ocho’. When we found out that they were both boy cats, we changed the spelling of Ribbons to a more masculine name ‘RibBonz’! We don’t have a third cat, but I thought a third cat needed to be on my quilt since three fans were required for the challenge. The surprised arched-back third cat became Shadow because our outdoor cats love to stalk chipmunks, lizards, moles, etc. from the shadow of bushes and other hiding places.”

 

Walker’s Pasture

Version 2In 2010, my photographer husband Jim captured a magical moment at sunrise with cows in the mist.  I was captivated by the photo from the moment I saw it and immediately framed and hung an 8” x 10” print in our house.

Later, when I wanted to experiment with the online service Spoonflower, a business that prints photos on fabric, this image was one of the first I chose to upload.  The print on cotton fabric measures 14” x 19”.  This has been on my design wall for several months waiting for me to be inspired as to what I wanted to do with it.

Our guild’s challenge for 2016 in our guild was “fans”, not my favorite traditional block.  The completed quilt had to be 36” square, contain at least 3 fan blocks, and have yellow in it somewhere.

While researching fan blocks online, I saw a modern interpretation that looked a lot like a windmill to me.  Oh, a windmill.   I just happened to have a pasture waiting for a windmill.

walkers-pasture-toy-windmillI pieced four fan blocks (paper foundation piecing because they are tiny – 2” blocks) to create the windmill.  To create the base, I photographed a toy windmill I have as part of my decor (complete with cows on my hutch in the breakfast room) and printed it in various sizes to test the scale.  Using that photo as a pattern, I painted the windmill base using India ink, appliquéd the fan unit (the windmill) and had my quilt.

But, not quite.  The finished quilt had to be larger.  So I pulled a Cherrywood hand dyed fabric that closely matched the sky in my photo, added hourglass blocks to extend the pasture area, and framed the entire scene with a darker blue in Cherrywood fabrics to meet the size requirement.

walkers-pasture-quilt

walkers-pasture-cow-closeupThen I remembered “yellow” requirement.  Yellow, like the sun.  Got it.  The photo was taken at sunrise.  So, a rising sun was appliquéd, then the quilting came into play.  Green grass, blue wind, and continuous curves in the outer border all were quilted with 100 weight silk thread.  Now I’m a fan of fans.

Goats

Pa, he bought him a great big billy goat

Ma, she washed most every day

Hung her clothes out on the line

And that old goat, he’d come that way.

My Daddy didn’t sing a lot, but this song was one of his favorites.  I can hear his gravelly voice belting it out now, often at my request or a plea from any of his grandchildren.  I don’t recall my mother or my sister requesting it – it wasn’t refined enough for them.  Especially the part when the goat belched up that red flannel shirt and he flagged down that durned old freight.

The musical interlude might be followed by the story of Daddy’s experience with goat farming, or rather the decision to end that venture.  Something about a goat and a pond and repeated disciplinary action leaving the goat wet and calmer while Daddy was exhausted.

So fond memories might explain why I like to see goats in a pasture, have taken lots of photos of goats, and why they end up in quilts.

goat-challengeThe guild’s quilt challenge for 2013 required us to use small bits of fabric from Tess’s stash.  The Challenge Queen does this occasionally; requiring the use of what some might think of as uglies.  That certainly was the case for my envelope.  Yuck.  A red and black color combination was given to me, a calico and something else, 2” squares of each.  I tried several things that didn’t make my heart sing, but at some point  I remembered a pattern from Country Threads featuring pieced goats.

I found an assortment of farm and goat looking fabric, pieced three blocks, added a title, and used the ugly fabric as a couple of their kerchiefs.  The piece finishes at 24″ x 18″ and was freemotion quilted using cotton batting and cotton threads.

goat-showA well-dressed goat appears in 52 Tuesdays, too.  One of our visits to the Georgia National Fair in 2015 included attending a goat show.  I was intrigued by the goats awaiting their competition.  After being bathed, blown dry, and powdered, they were often wearing jackets so they stayed clean and sawdust free until their competition.  One wearing a leopard skin coat caught my eye and became the image for that week in the journal quilt.

And, once a goat appeared on the label of one of my quilts, Hartwell Commons.

The photo of the live goat, not in cloth (yet) was taken at the Jimmy Carter Boyhood Home national historic site near Plains, Ga.

A Tree Grows in Gondor

I’m still working on my guild’s quilt challenge for 2016.  It’s almost done, and there is nearly a week to spare!  I mentioned it here.

Working on this project has me thinking about how much I’ve learned from the guild’s challenge over the years.  It seems like a good time to document some of those design processes. I’ve shared some challenge quilts earlier, but here’s another.

In 2008, the challenge was “trees”.  The quilt had to contain at least one tree, pieced or appliquéd, and a bit of orange somewhere.  A few years prior, I had been enchanted by the white tree against a blue sky prominent in the Lord of the Rings movie Return of the King.  I’m sure the tree in the movie was a Sycamore, and that must have added to my determination to create this image in cloth.

I chose a brilliant blue hand-dyed fabric from Cherrywood as the background, inserting a narrow inner border of another hand-dyed fabric which included many colors, including orange.  Wanting to include a little interest on the “bark” of the white tree,  I researched quotes about trees and facts about trees.

tree-in-gondor-design-wallThis photo shows the background pinned to the design wall with my paper pattern drawn.  That pattern was transferred to white Kona fabric, then the handwriting began.  Sandpaper underneath the fabric helps to keep the fabric from slipping.  I used Sharpies and Pigma Micron pens.

tree-in-gondor-stitchingOnce the words were pressed to make them permanent, I used needleturn appliqué to fix the tree to the background.  In the areas of white where the blue background fabric showed through, I added a lining layer of white fabric.

tree-in-gondor-closeupCotton batting was used and all quilting was hand-guided, freemotion stitching.  Only the griffins on either side of the trunk were marked, all other quilting was spontaneous.  Most used a matching blue cotton thread (50 weight, 2 ply), but some variegated thread was added in a few places for interest.

The quilt finishes at 40” x 62”.

Information on the label is sunprinted.tree-in-gondor-label