Our quilt guild’s annual challenge quilts were revealed last week. You may remember the challenge this year was Little Girls. Members were asked to turn back their inner clocks to days of their childhood and make a quilt representing some memory from those carefree days.
While I was working on my entry, I hoped everyone was having as much fun with their creation as I was. Every idea that came across my mind prompted memories I had long forgotten and the actual construction of my entry made me giggle like a little girl.
As the quilts were revealed, it seemed that others experienced some of the same thrills I did.
As the Challenge leader this year, I made the ribbons. I had loads of fun painting these little girls on fabric, appliquéing their dresses, and attaching streamers from my stash of fabric and rickrack.
Our procedure is to bring our entries in plain brown paper bags with nothing that will reveal the maker’s identity. This year, contestants were asked to write a sentence or two telling the story behind the quilt. Volunteers hang the quilts and assign numbers to them. Members vote on their favorite and play “Guess the Maker” – using knowledge of individual styles of quiltmaking to assist in identifying the creator of each quilt hanging.
Votes are tabulated as the business meeting is conducted, then ribbons are awarded. Every maker then shares the story behind the quilt she entered while participants check their guesses of makers’ identities.
Quilts in this Little Girl Challenge were especially precious.
Carol shared that her two daughters had input into her creation…one said you have to include sequins..another insisted she include a very decorated birthday cake. Looks like I’m not the only one whose daughter has input.Susan was able to attach meaning to the fabrics in a piece she made using English Paper Piecing techniques from a designer she recently discovered…aren’t those unending connections priceless?Helen’s piece, With Love 2 Grandmothers, included photos of her grandmothers and won the 3rd place ribbon. Helen even had a historical backing on hers – a collage of doilies and laces she collected at a flea market.Gladys, our gal from Texas, couldn’t resist including a state map though she knew it would give her identity away – and on her tag she wrote of sandwiches from fresh tomatoes on the farm.Marie may have embraced the little girl inside more enthusiastically than most…she made three entries. One, Windows to the World, used photographs printed on fabric and pieced in a landscape variation of a log cabin block. Assembled, they reminded her of window panes in her childhood home. This quilt was the second place winner.In another entry, Marie’s Starlit Cabin was a tribute to the memory of a quilt pieced by her grandmother and quilted by her mother. Marie carried the quilt and the love it held when she left home for college.And Marie’s third entry was Lily Learns to Sew. Last summer, Marie spent time teaching a young girl in the neighborhood who wanted to learn to sew. Marie painted sewing notions on fabric using watercolor; then used rail fence blocks (the same block she and Lily included in Lily’s first quilt) to surround it. And what little girl doesn’t love red polka dots?Another quilter named Carol depicted memories of hopscotch with her friends. She used a coloring book as a basis for her appliquéd little girl.Shirley’s entry depicts the love she and her mother share of growing flowers in the yard and of beautiful embroidery.Sally’s Grandmother’s Flower Garden block is a tribute to her maternalgrandmother. Sally even connected the background quilting to her lattices in her grandmother’s rose garden.
My piece, Playhouse in the Chicken Yard, was the lucky winner of the blue ribbon. I’ll share details of its story and its construction in the next blog post.
Even members who didn’t get their quilt finished for one reason or another had stories to share. Becky told of hanging blackout curtains over their windows during WWII and of coloring on the papers that their dry cleaning came in.
Marsha had memories of milk bottles being delivered to her house and hopes to make a quilt depicting that yet. Life got in the way of her putting those milk bottles on a textile piece in time for the challenge.
Carol won the “Guess The Maker” competition. Her reward is a fabric covered Little Girls Journal where she can record memories of making this quilt or more memories from her life as a little girl.
Glorious fall days are made for exploration and photography.
One day last week we took a ride to George L. Smith State Park, loading the car with cameras, quilts, and picnic paraphernalia. The cypress trees here are gorgeous any time of year, but now their leaves are golden and red. And the tannin in the water enhances their reflections, so the beauty is doubled.
Above is an image of a cypress “knee”, a structure thought to be a buttress to the tapering trunk in soft muddy soil. Cypress trees growing outside of a swampy area do not form these knees.
I loved photographing the natural beauty and the covered bridge is a great background for a few quilts.
We photographed quilts inside and outside the bridge and perched them on other spots in the park, too.
Dots and Vines is a graphic quilt you’ve seen in other posts. It may be my most photogenic quilt – I grab it most every time I head out the door. I love its bold colors in contrast with the weathered wood.
Likewise, Heaven in a Wildflower has posed in other settings, too. Like Dots and Vines, the blocks of solid color are especially vivid in natural surroundings. Note to self: make more quilts from solids.
The quilt above is not one I made, but one I was given. My dear friend Mary Ellen is a most prolific quilter and sent this star beauty on blue to me. She’s the inspiration for all these quilts-on-location shots. She and her photographer husband Bruce live in Minnestota and they set the bar for photographing quilts in rustic locations. I’ve written about her photo journey before here.
We weren’t the only ones enjoying this serene spot on this glorious day; I caught this flash of color out the window of the bridge.
And it was picture day for a some four-year-olds from a nearby preschool. Here they wait in line to head to the playground.
This has been a busy week. I took more quilts on this trip so there will be more posts to follow sharing those. And, my guild had our Little Girls Challenge this week – so that’s coming, too.
More details on the Dots and Vines quilt can be found here.
More details about Heaven in A Wildflower are here.
And, we’ve visited other covered bridges with quilts here and here.
One of the things I do in the fall is collect acorns. Every year I find myself coming home with a few perfect specimens after every day’s walk. I add them to this bowl…eventually it is filled and I admire it through the winter. In the spring, I throw them out. In the fall, I begin again.
I don’t know exactly what the fascination is with acorns. I grew up with pecan trees. I gathered plenty of those in my childhood. That was the source of my Christmas money every year. Oaks and acorns came later in my life….
I’m still collecting acorns this year…but my latest fascination is with walnuts.
A few years ago, I attended a Folk Life Festival at a historic site in Tifton, GA. Among the many delights there was a woman using walnut and indigo dyes to make the most beautiful yarn. I was captivated. From her I learned that walnut doesn’t need a mordant; that you collect the walnuts while in the green hulls; that they must ferment first, then be boiled before you can dye with them.
I followed those instructions and dipped a few things, but it was a lot of trouble.
I’ve experimented with brown commercial dyes before (that post is here) but the walnut gives a more pleasing color to me. I love the surprise of the varying richness based on the fabrics I use and the time it soaks.
This year, I gathered some black walnuts in their husks, put them in a bucket of water, covered it, and began the fermenting process. After a couple of days, I thought, “I wonder what would happen if I dipped a piece of fabric in there as they fermented.” A friend had brought me a pretty white cotton napkin and I submerged it among the walnuts. In a few days, I had a nice bit of brown fabric.
I found another napkin, damask this time, and some laces…added those to the bucket for a few days. Look at how gorgeous these are!
I had a few pieces of vintage linen that I wanted to see what happened. So I cut a few pieces of those, added a worn white cotton tea towel, and a skein of white embroidery floss. I left these just a couple of days…not wanting to completely obscure the checked pattern in the linens. Oh, my, I’m loving this!
The images above are before and after of dipped fabrics.
And of course you aren’t surprised that I photographed some of the browns with some blues. Earlier confessions of my love for this color combination are here and here. And, if that’s not enough, type “brown” in the search bar…there are more!
Now in the pot are a few more treasures. I don’t remember exactly what I put in there, but do know that some old pink rickrack is getting new life. Stay tuned.
And there are a lot of hickory nuts around here, too. Hmmmm….
As I wrote this and revisited the photos from the Folk Life Festival, I guess that’s what encouraged me to play with indigo dyes, too. There’s a whole category in the sidebar for that!
A friend called to remind me that I had not yet written about my journal quilt from my time at home during Covid. She’s right – so here it is.
I’ve kept a daily journal for years. And I’ve always loved to start an entry with “home all day”. But with dashing here and there running errands, going to meetings, and just out and about, those at-home days were sometimes hard to find.
In the Spring of 2020, things changed. Every day was “home all day”.
Soon I decided a visual record of these days should be part of a Covid journal quilt. It was easy to review my journal entries and tabulate things. The legend is included on the quilt…a yellow (his favorite color) backslash for Jim, blue forward slash for me…to clarify our days at home. I included January and February of 2020 for comparison of our normal days before the pandemic.
My beginning plan was to document the days we were spending at home. An old linen calendar provided the perfect stitching background. ( I just happened to have a calendar from 1986 – a year in which the days of the week and dates were the same as 2020 – in my stash. And later, a 1971 tea towel provided the right day/date combination for 2021.)
As time went on, I continued to think of other things to include in this journal quilt. Our time spent working in the yard, playing chess, binge watching tv…all were candidates that made it into the quilt.
I made the blocks not knowing how I would put them together. I ended up attaching them to a bit of a vintage quilt remnant 10 ½” wide and rolling it up on a stick. It measures 64” long when stretched out.
The title came from our daughter’s remark when I told her we didn’t mind being at home. I was feeling guilty that we were actually enjoying the solitude while so many people were frantic that their schedules were disrupted. She replied “not everyone can be quarantined in Eden.”
I included our days at home through April 2021…past our vaccinations and including many days of “out and about” again. Since then, the Delta variant has added more days at home. Maybe I need to find more calendar tea towels…
This was a block made in the process of creating Dots and Vines (story is here). It seemed appropriate to have an image of the virus that started all this.
As I unrolled the quilt to make photos, I found this vintage fabric remnant tucked inside. I planned to add some of these motifs to the quilt. As usual, it’s never really finished. (This remnant is from a little girl’s dress I found in a thrift store.)
Ya’ll know I love brown. My grandmother’s tea leaf pattern china with its brown and white scheme, all kinds of treenware (usually a shade of brown), and vintage linens (often with a bit of brown stain somewhere) bring brown into view everyday. Oh, and my brown cows stroll around in the breakfast room.
I like brown plants, too. I see beauty in the fading stage of a flower’s life as well as in the emerging beauty seen in spring. So this time of year brings even more brown into my camera lens.
Some recent photos celebrate the fading stage. Enjoy some brown!
This hummingbird doesn’t mind that its perch is drooping and brown. He can still rest quite comfortably here.
This withering zinnia is the same color combination as Granny’s china and my creamer cows.
A Pearl Crescent finds something to like on this even more withered zinnia.
This praying mantis caught a ride on the “trash can to the street journey” one day and I brought him home to the porch.
Pink is never my favorite color, but the withering pink here captured my attention.
This red zinnia is aging (aren’t we all?) but look at the color scheme revealed! I see French General red fabrics with their companion browns and grays.
My sewing basket has a brown collection in it, too. A long-term project at hand right now is one with brown irregular hexagons. I’m hand piecing them with a modified English Paper Piecing process…I remove the paper before stitching them together.
Some plants in my yard are confused. As I write this and share the glories of withering plants, I have three fresh-from-the-earth Queen Anne’s Lace plants scattered in the garden. One is blooming delightfully now; others are ready to bloom. It’s like they are reminding me that “green is beautiful, too.” Yes, it is!
I’ve written about the beauty of brown before. Type “brown” in the search box in the sidebar and you’ll find more.
Keeping a journal gives meaning to life. Reading old journals makes one pause to examine the life. Making a journal in cloth creates a quilt with a story.
2017 was a busy year for travel…we first spent three weeks driving to Arizona and back, made this pilgrimage to Paducah, then traveled to Florida to photograph nesting birds in their season. West, north, south…a lot of miles for two people who love to stay at home. I didn’t document all those trips in cloth, but on the trip to Paducah I had such a plan in mind.
Jim and I have been to the spring quilt show hosted by the American Quilters’ Society several times. We enjoy the spectacle of the quilts, the people, the food, the music shops, the antique stores, the riverfront, the Land Between the Lakes and other picturesque environs.
The background of this quilt is mostly linen. Included in the quilt is a bit of every piece of fabric I bought on that trip. (For quilters reading this who haven’t been to a big show like this one, it’s a shopper’s paradise. Every major quilt vendor is there: designers, pattern makers, fabric companies, sewing machine makers, thread companies, merchants of accessory tools, and many quilt shops are represented.)
On the far right, the melons beneath the star are Indiana Homestead hand-dyed cottons, the hexagons to the left of them are Japanese woven fabrics. In the left border, the colorful triangles are my beloved Cherrywood hand-dyed cottons. Other purchases show up in the schoolhouse, the stars, and in the square-within-a-square blocks throughout the quilt. Shot cotton fabrics are used in the dark areas of the border.
There were crows everywhere we went on this trip, so they got a block.
I love the blue barns in Kentucky, the chapel at Patti’s 1880’s Settlement, the vintage indigo clothing in Bell Buckle. I found a way to include all of them in the quilt.
On our way north, we spent a night in Mentone, Alabama and took a side trip to Bell Buckle, Tennessee. Our route home included a night in Berea, Kentucky. We fell in love with this place in 1990 on a trip to Ohio and wanted to revisit it. We then traveled through gorgeous countryside toward Waynesville, NC for our next night’s stay. We had lunch in one of the most beautiful small towns in America, Bardstown, Ky, and had to agree with that evaluation. Buttons on the map designate overnight stays.
Most of the quilt was free-motion quilted on my Juki. But quilting linen is a different experience from quilting cotton fabrics. The overdyed linen I used for the skies in the barn and chapel blocks was lightweight and would have wanted to pucker, I feared. So I quilted those blocks by hand. I added color to the ocean areas of the maps with watercolor and painted the date and initials with a fabric ink. So I pieced, appliquéd, painted, embroidered, assembled and quilted by hand and by machine…like 52 Tuesdays, I tried everything!
The label is a vintage doily attached with many vintage buttons.
The finished quilt measures 49″ x 54″. I used wool batting and 50 wt cotton thread for quilting.
Patricia Hampl, writer and memoirist, says “to write about one’s life is to live it twice.” True. But to make a quilt about a memory if to live it again and again…every time I see an image in a journal quilt, I remember the experience behind it.
Earlier related posts include these….just click on blue underlined word to go to that blogpost.
On our most recent ride about, we found ourselves in Pitts, Ga with cameras in hand to photograph sunflowers and old buildings. We did that…and bought goodies from Oliver Farm, too. Sunflower oil, okra flour, brown rice grits were among our purchases.
The sunflowers didn’t disappoint…and the old buildings served as great backdrops for the quilts that went for the ride.
But it was the dirt that thrilled me. I got right out in the field with the sunflowers. The blooms were as high as my head and about the size of my head, too. But the dirt …oh, the dirt! We were in a county neighboring the one where I grew up. And the dirt in the coastal plain region is very different from that of the piedmont where we now live. This is the dirt that I used to make mud pies and gopher houses and embed in my skinned knees.
I didn’t have to take off my shoes to know exactly how that dirt would feel between my toes. Those little rocks of limonite mixed with the sand speak home to me. Hopscotch, skidding bicycle tires, carving a trail with a stick…all those memories are tied to this dirt.
We succeeded in photographing sunflowers and old buildings, but found other treasures, too.
In a cypress habitat, we found some other interesting vegetation to shoot, but it was the road that entranced me. That dirt again…oh, and the beehives!
Jim has always said he can feel his blood pressure drop when we visit Turner County. Well, there’s that; life is slower. But these dirt roads just feel like Sunday afternoon drives and going to visit relatives.
My Daddy farmed before I came along…so he walked behind a mule in dirt like this. Barefooted. Yes. He plowed without shoes. I can understand why. I wanted to take my shoes off and walk out in a field. I didn’t. But maybe next time….
Oliver Farm has self guided tours where you can read about the old buildings in Pitts, Ga, and find your way to fields of sunflowers in all stages, a cypress habitat, and lots of fresh air.
One of my favorite types of story quilts is to print a vintage photo on fabric and enhance it with stitch and color. I’m frequently asked to describe the printing process I use. Here it is – I use an inkjet printer, by the way.
Commercially prepared fabric is available for purchase and I’ve used several of them. In the photo above, you can see that I wrote the names of some projects where I used each type. That reminds me of how that product worked and if I want to use it again. Some proved to be difficult to stitch though by hand, so I reserve those for machine stitching only.
If I plan to transfer a color photo and do all stitching by machine, I love to use the prepared silk fabric. It produces clear images with brilliant colors, and quilts up beautifully.
When I am transferring a vintage photo like the one in Four Brothers, above, I like the vintage look of an old piece of cotton or linen, so I prepare my own fabric.
A good source of linen is a vintage tablecloth (stained and ragged is okay) or napkins. This photo shows what a bargain such napkins can be. For $5, I bought six linen napkins, each larger than an 8 ½” x 11” sheet of paper. This is less expensive than the packages of prepared fabric.
First, I press the fabric (here I used a piece of a linen bedsheet – gray, so you can see the paper against it), then cut a piece about 9’ x 12” ( a bit larger is okay).
There are many brands of freezer paper sheets available, I have used many and have no preference – this is just what I have on hand today. I know I can cut my own sheets of freezer paper to 8 ½” x 11” from a roll; I find the precut sheets to be easier to handle.
I iron the freezer paper (shiny side down) to the fabric.
Using a ruler and rotary cutter, I trim the fabric exactly along the edge of the paper. A sharp blade helps prevent ragged edges – I don’t want loose threads to get caught in my printer.
I load the fabric on the freezer paper “carrier” sheet into my printer, taking care to be sure that the fabric side will be receiving the ink. I often print black and white images (even if the original photo is color) to give a vintage feel – then highlight some feature by painting it.
Here is a “man in overalls” fresh from the printer tray.
I sometimes put more than one photo on a page, depending on the desired finished size of my photo.
I paint the selected portion of the photo while the fabric is still adhered to the freezer paper. This adds stability and seems to help prevent bleeding. I use some of the surround space to test my paint or markers, as you see above.
I use the same process to print words on fabric. Yes, that’s printing on linen that’s been overdyed with indigo.
In my next post(s), I’ll discuss my painting and quilting processes for these art quilts.
The story of the quilt pictured at the top of the post, the man with the bicycle, is here.
I’ve written about my quilting sister, Tess, many times. She is our guild’s Challenge Queen, Ribbon Queen, and Creative Genius of Quilting. She has motivated all of us to be better at what we are doing, to try new things, and to enjoy the act of quiltmaking.
After coming up with twenty-five glorious ideas for our guild’s challenges, she has decided to retire from that role. Her shoes are unfillable – not that her feet are big – but her store of ideas and her sense of humor that has led to such interesting titles for our challenges will be a hard act to follow.
Not only have her titles and descriptions been interesting, the ribbons she makes for the winners are always perfect. Take for example, the ones above for our most recent Something Feathered challenge. And here are a couple of others:
For the “Let’s Strip” Challenge, we had to use strips of fabric in some way in the quilt. Tess made the ribbons from strips, too.
In The “Charmed, I’m Sure” Challenge, Tess required that each fabric in the quilt be unique (a traditional quilt pattern with that requirement was called a “charm” quilt. So her ribbons were comprised of fabrics each used only once.
At the conclusion of most recent meeting, our president presented Queen Tess with a quilt made by guild members to show her our appreciation for all her hard work. The quilt has 25 blocks, one representing each of the challenges led by Tess. As she viewed the quilt, Tess could immediately recognize some of the challenges and she was heard to exclaim, “oh, that’s the Brown Bag challenge”, and “I remember baskets, and log cabins, and oh, there’s the fans!”
The label on the back memorializes her status as Queen Tess. I didn’t get a photo, but the label is in the shape of a crown.
I’m not sure what that next act will be…our guild is yet to decide. Will we continue the annual challenge? Will we have one leader? Will we rotate the leadership about the guild? Will a committee determine the challenge each year? Will the winner of one year decide on the challenge for the next?
In the aftermath of the meeting, Tess was already wrapped in the love of her quilting sisters.
In the absence of a volunteer in the immediate future (at a time when the guild wasn’t meeting because of Covid), I agreed to plan the challenge for 2021. That doesn’t mean I’m locked into it forever…all the aforementioned possibilities need to be considered. But doing it once shows me how challenging it is to think of everything to plan a challenge…to get the details right, to communicate it to all, and to inspire people to participate. Really, it’s more fun to participate in making a quilt following Tess’s guidelines. But, I do understand that she’s ready to sit back and watch…and make the quilt that takes home the blue ribbon – without having had to make the ribbons.
Earlier this week, we found ourselves roaming around some of the mountains in north Georgia. We ended up having a picnic lunch beside a creek at Smithgall Woods State Park. The parking area was bounded by these fabulous trees – some species of pine, I think – so I was glad I happened to have some quits in the car.
This tree quilt is one of several I made many years ago, adapting a pattern by Caryl Bryer Fallert. The tree is appliquéd to a batik background fabric which still pleases me. The quilting is minimal stippling with an invisible thread (the early part of my quilting life, remember?) and I never gave it a name or attached a label. I actually made a couple of these as gifts; this one is still hanging around. I think seeing it perched on a fence under those trees is worth the years of storage. It measures 40” square.
I had another quilt in the car; one I’ve written about before. But it is a showy quilt and wanted to nestle in the branches of one of these trees. So we tossed Remember Me up on a limb and snapped some photos. Details of the story behind and construction of this quilt are in an earlier post here.
My loyal companion helping with placement and photography. Life is oh-so-wonderful with him!
We weren’t the only ones enjoying a bite of lunch in this bucolic setting.
