Month: October 2021

108

In the last couple of years, I’ve been obsessed with circles. 

One of my explorations dealt with blue and white circles appliquéd to a brown linen tablecloth.  For all these projects, I didn’t count the circles…just made them until I thought I had enough.  I laid the blue circles on the brown linen until I liked their distribution, pinned them in place, and started appliqueing them.  

I wanted to hand quilt this larger piece using the seed stitch.  I love the texture that stitch gives.  I’ve used it on smaller pieces a lot, but wanted to see it on a big piece.  I used Aurifil #12 thread, stitched a double seed stitch overall though only the top and batting.  Then I added a backing layer (a piece of an indigo overdyed linen sheet) and stitched through all three layers with the same thread around the circles. 

I never had a title in mind for this as I worked – I presumed one would come to me.  My working title was “blue circles on brown”.  That could have worked for a final title.  But as I neared the end of the stitching, I decided to count the circles.  107.  That could work..it’s a prime number and I like those.  But, I needed a label on the back.  If that label was a circle, I’d have a total of 108.  108 has meaning in my life and I love for the quilt title to have meaning.  

I grew up in Turner County.  During the years I was learning to drive, our county’s number was 108.  So, the title of this quilt was born.  

Between 1957 and 1970, county codes were used as part of an auto’s car tag.  The first numbers on the tag were based on the respective population of the county.  Out of 159 counties in Georgia, my home was 108th in population those years.

Notice that on the label, I used some of the trims I’ve recently dyed with black walnuts.  It’s tempting to “save” those precious bits we made or altered, but I’m in the business of using them.  Here the tatting that took the dye so well borders the 108th circle.  Oh, and the fabric circle is cut from the center of the napkin with the embellished corner.

I made Dots and Vines, which you’ve already seen, stitched some circles on a bit of linen for a scarf, and made these blue circles and appliquéd them to a remnant of a brown linen tablecloth. I have lots of prepared circles waiting to become part of another quilt, too. The post on Dots and Vines is here.

I guess this little brown linen pillow with buttons attached fits the circle category, too.

I’ve referenced my love of the blue and brown connection before. One post describing a rolled up quilt exploration is here. And a sweet little case I found that’s blue and brown and toile and bows is here.

This finished quilt measures 40″ x 60″, a lap quilt for reading or watching tv. And, yes, for napping.

Going Nuts

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!

Quarantined in Eden

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.)

The Orange Season

This is the time of year for orange.  It’s not always my favorite color, but it complements the hue that is at the top of my list.  

The quilt behind this pumpkin is one made by my dear friend, Mary Ellen. It’s wonderful all times of the year, but it is perfect with this orange pumpkin!
This quilt is Heaven in a Wildflower, a challenge quilt.. A post about it is here.

I have quilts about with orange in them that come out to play this time of year.  And I can’t resist buying a few pumpkins.

On a recent trip to Butterflies in Bloom at the Briar Patch, orange was the color of the day.  Some of these shots look like they want to play on a quilt.

And you might not be surprised to learn that I have some orange fabrics scattered about in my playroom, oops…I mean my sewing room these days.  It just seems right.

This is a block from the Bird Dance quilt by Sue Spargo…no, I haven’t written about this one yet. I will.

As I thought about gathering these orange images, I looked around and saw that I’ve sewn on orange a lot..and not just pumpkins.

Withered and Brown

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.

Paducah Journal Quilt

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.

The trip out West that preceded this junket north.

The stop in Bell Buckle, TN and fascination with vintage indigo textiles.

The 2017 quilt show in Paducah with photos of winning quilts and vendors.

Work on the Paducah Journal Quit in progress.