I've stitched my way through life. Early skills in utilitarian and decorative sewing have merged with art in the world of quiltmaking. My love of journaling has now crossed into the cloth world, too. I love old songs, old souls, old words; my collections attest to my fascination with memories.
What better way to spend rainy afternoons than playing with fabric?
We had a lot of rain last week, so I was inside the house more than usual in the summertime.
After weeks and months of working on big projects with other peoples’ styles and color choices in mind, I took a break to play.
I pulled out some pieces I had overdyed in walnut or indigo and combined them with others lying around.
Bits of vintage fabric in browns and blues, some fun improvisational embroidery, and I had a little pillow. I used simple straight stitches, seed stitches, and a few fly stitches to embellish the pieces in the log cabin block.
A quick little project is always rewarding and the stitching is soul soothing. I love my little chairs – now they all need pillows. I’ve assembled some smaller blocks for pincushions, too.
Note: Since this post was published, I’ve been asked about the quilt in the background. Here is a photo of the full quilt. And an earlier blog post here described its construction. This earlier post was when I only posted one photo per blog – but more on this is coming soon.
People often ask, “how long does it take to make a quilt?” There’s usually no way to answer that…but this one was 20 years in the making. I pieced the blocks long ago, pulled them out in February and presented the quilt as a gift early in May.
I learned a lot about quilting at the turn of the century watching the then HGTV series, Simply Quilts. On that show, a line of fabric designed by Susan Branch was featured with this pieced combination of Lemoyne Stars and half-Lemoyne stars. I was entranced. Entranced by Susan Branch’s art work, by the fabric, by the star pattern.
I bought the line of fabric in fat quarters, downloaded the show’s pattern, and began piecing stars by hand. They were lovely. I enjoyed many hours of piecing the stars while visiting with family and friends.
Then they sat in a box for years. Many years. I had memories of laying out the blocks on the design wall, labeling their position in a spreadsheet array, and putting them aside. I thought it was a failed project because the white background fabric was so thin that it wouldn’t work to assemble them.
I opened the box earlier this year to learn that I was wrong. I had put them away because the solid white blocks were the wrong size to connect with the stars. Whether I read the directions incorrectly, pieced incorrectly, or whether there was an error in the instructions, I don’t know. Fortunately the solid blocks were too big, not too small. All the stars were consistently the same size, so I just trimmed the solid blocks to fit and stitched them together. They went together perfectly. Well, there are a few less than perfect points…but let’s chalk that up to an inexperienced piecer stitching them by hand.
Twenty years of experience gave me the knowledge I needed to make the blocks work.
As I thought about a quilting design, the obvious was to quilt feathered wreaths in the open spaces. That seemed too pretentious to me for these fun fabrics. I wanted a curvy design to contrast with the pointy stars. So I stitched an overall vine in green thread, then echoed it in a fine white thread. I like the result.
I called this one Celebration. It was given to a family member who had reason to celebrate…but I was celebrating the completion of a big UFO! I considered calling it WooHoo, but went with the more discreet name.
The quilt measures 80” square. I’m pleased with the green vines on back and front, echoed with a finer thread in white. The green is a 30wt cotton thread. The white is a 100 wt silk.
The on-location photos were taken at a rescued country store, Mildred’s, in Houston County.
I made lots of new friends at our recent guild quilt show. Two of them, Flo and Jan, invited me to visit their Prayers and Squares group at one of their meetings. I went this past Sunday and was touched by the love they are stitching together.
I had heard of Prayers and Squares before; I have a friend who is a cancer survivor. Faye had received a loving gift of a quilt from a group during her time of healing. I didnt realize there was an international organization involved.
Prayers & Squares is an interfaith outreach organization thatcombines the gift of prayer with the gift of a hand-tied quilt. That statement is from their website, here. Begun in 1992 in California, their website now lists thousands of chapters worldwide. I visited with the one at Hopewell United Methodist Church near Milledgeville, chapter #1241.
This group of eleven women meets monthly. On the day I visited, they were celebrating their fifth anniversary as a Prayers and Squares chapter, and they were putting finishing touches on their quilt #170.
The emphasis is on the prayers, not the squares. Each of the quilts is tied, not stitched, to secure the layers of love. Each knot represents a prayer.
Not all of the members are quilters outside of this group. Flo, who learned of the organization and started this chapter, says that some people said, Id like to help, but I dont know how to sew. Her reply was, can you pin, can you cut, can you tie a knot? All skills are welcomed.
Especially welcomed in this group was the talent for organization possessed by Patty. A retired helicopter pilot, Patty used her military-like precision to ensure efficient work habits. Every quilt has a design sheet specifying each step of the project. Projects are carefully labeled with whats to be done next. Zippered bags hold projects at every stage of development – so when the group meets to work, each person just picks up a packet and proceeds to the next step. Patty has since moved away, but her presence is felt with every quilt this group makes.
I wrote earlier about a quilt I made for a friend, Every Stitch a Prayer. That experience ties me to these women who meet to sew and pray for someone in need every month.
If you want to know more about this organization, perhaps joining a chapter near you, or even starting another group, check out the website at prayerquilt.org.
I love Queen Annes Lace. Every year I get excited to see it emerging in our yard. Im always intrigued to see where it decides to show up.
I scatter some seeds and sometimes they actually germinate and I have blooms where I intended. But there are many more along the edges of the flower beds, in the cracks in the driveway and between brick pavers.
This year, there are more clumps than ever, and several of those are growing along the picket fence in the back.
I decided to pose the quilt Annie Maes Lace with this years blooms. It was a dreary day yesterday, but I snapped a few photos anyway.
I wrote about Annie Mae’s Lace back in 2016. I was only posting one photo per blogpost back then, but the details of the making of the quilt are fully explained. Click here to read that post.
I’ve written about Queen Anne’s Lace before – a story about it during quarantine is here.
Another quilt with a sunprinted image of Queen Anne’s Lace is GBI Blues. That quilt and its story is here.
More sunprinted images (including some Queen Anne’s Lace) are assembled on my design wall right now. And, there are more in a box waiting to become something…
Remember the really pretty tatting I dipped in the walnut dye? I wanted it darker, began doing some research and learned about iron water. We have plenty of rusty nails around here, so soaking them in a jar with vinegar and water was not a complicated process.
I had attempted some rust dyeing in the past with less than spectacular results. But I hadnt mixed iron water with the walnut dyed fabric.
Below are images from baths in the iron water only, and some things dyed in walnut dye, then iron water.
I am very pleased with the results of this combo soaking in the walnut dye, then dipping in the iron water. Lesson learned: make more iron water. I had experimented with a small quantity, so only small pieces resulted from this trial. But more, more, more, to come .
The recent blog post on walnut dyeing is here…if you missed it or want to refresh your memory on the before and after images from only a walnut bath.
I love pottery. To think that people dig clay out of the ground, manipulate it and decorate it, and make something functional and beautiful just boggles the mind.
We went to a local exhibit of pottery this week. An annual exhibit and sale, Fired Works features the work of 150 artists and is always a treat.
We dont need any pottery; our collection is certainly adequate but we love to go to this event every year, so off we went. And, yes, we did buy some.
Most of our collection is of the Southern folk art genre, but the whimsical pieces delight me, too.
As we examined the beautiful pots on display in this beautiful facility, I was constantly seeing images that related to quilt making. The captions on each photo explain some of my thinking.
In the past week, three friends have given me fabric and linens. Ive received wool, barkcloth, commercial linens, and handmade lace. Am I excited? Oh, yes! As I dig deeper in the boxes, I discover more and more treasures.
Some of these treasures have been swimming in the walnut bucket. I even strained the old walnuts out to make a cleaner bath for them.
These are the same walnuts I collected in the fall. I put them in a bucket of water, let them ferment a while, then dipped some treasures. I wrote about the first ones here.
That mixture sat through the winter months. Yesterday, Jim helped me pour the mixture through a bit of cheesecloth to see what months of stewing would do to the dye. I photographed the results in pairs…before and after.
I had hoped to dye some of the tatting black. I love this coffee shade I got, but the next step is to dip some in an iron water bath to make it darker. I have nails sitting in water now.
In December, our friend Paul was visiting and told me he had bought some hats to wear to work. But they were white. VERY white. He wondered if there was some way he could get them darker. I said, I happen to have some walnuts in a bucket of water outside if you want to try that. He was willing to let me dip his hat. Here are the results. Paul was happy.
I guess you noticed most all these brown beauties were posing on an indigo dyed linen tablecloth….I can’t wait to stitch some of this blue and brown together!
I just spent three days with my quilting sisters. We hosted our guilds quilt show and had a blast! Normally held biennially, it had been four years since our big weekend party. Covid had forced us to cancel our show in 2020, so we were ready to get back to business sharing our love of quilting with others.
We host the show to share our passion and educate others about the history of quilting, the art of quilting, and the availability of resources available locally. The truth is that members of the guild are also inspired by this display. Weve seen most of these quilts before in meetings at our show and tell sessions. But having them hang together for three days gives us a chance to visit, to examine things up close, to ask questions of each other, and to learn.
Its a lot of work to put on a show. Planning has been going on for months. Members submit entry forms for quilts, members share the tasks of organizing that information, preparing booklets, labels, ballots, ribbons, and a floor layout. On Thursday, all that comes into play as we “hang the show”.
On Thursday night, members and our guests meet to bask in the beauty with each other. We examine the quilts and cast our votes in several categories. Quilters Choice ribbons are awarded by our ribbon queen Tess at our members reception.
During the show, we love visiting with our guests. Some visitors are not quilters, but friends of quilters, or folks who are interested in every art form they can find. Answering their questions gives us a new perspective on what we do seeing our work through the eyes of those who might not be quilters puts a new spin on things. Other visitors are quilters from other guilds in the area, and I love to chat with them and learn about their quilting and their stitching groups. In fact, I wrangled invitations to visit a couple of groups soon. Youll hear about them in the future.
At the end of the show, more ribbons are awarded (viewers’ choices) along with the winners of our silent auction quilts and our raffle quilt. More details of some quilts and their makers are in the captions of photos that follow.
Is This the Party To Whom I am Speaking? (above) is a bold graphic quilt…but the title comes from the fact that Kathy’s mother is a retired telephone operator. Kathy collected fabrics with images of phones to include in her quilt. The detailed shot at the left shows some of those.
I had several quilts in the show, won’t bore you with all….but a few with links to their stories are here.
I dont visit quilt shops much anymore. I have plenty of fabric on hand and I really love using the vintage fabric more than commercially produced quilt fabric. But the new lines of fabric are sometimes irresistible and I have a new quilt to prove that.
On a visit to a local quilt shop in search of border fabric for a project, a glorious panel of fabric caught my eye. Flowers in a jar .my favorite kind of arrangement. Simple. Pure. Country Life. I bought it along with a couple of yards of coordinating fabric for the back. My thoughts were, Ill just baste this with batting, sit down and quilt it and have a quick lovely quilt.” Right.
I came home and looked up the fabric online (Adel in Autumn by Sandy Gervais) just to see what others had done with it. I stumbled on a blogpost by piccolo studio.com and saw her quilt. Oh, my! I had to do my version of that.
I love raw edges in my art pieces, but not so much in traditional quilts. And, I am not a fan of fusible appliqué. But that seemed the only way to go with this.
After days of laborious cutting, I was ready to attach it to my background (pieced with an inner border of the coordinating fabric), and quilt.
I did free motion machine appliqué on the flowers and vase first, to secure all layers. I planned to echo the design all the way to the edges, but filling all that negative space was going to result in nearly straight lines near the edge. So I added more stems and leaves and berries in the center to echo around, giving more bumps and curves for detail in the quilting.
I used some 30 wt threads both on the appliqué and in the added stems. Echo quilting is done with 100 wt silk thread. In this photo, you see that even with the added stems for echo quilting, I resorted to my irregular freemotion grid to complete the quilting to the edges.
When it came time to add a label, it was obvious. I had this sweet multicolored dotted fabric that looked like the contents of a canning jar. I used watercolor crayons to paint the lid and add some shading on the sides of the jar (more about painting on fabric here).
This quilt went with us on a recent outing to nearby state parks. It was quite showy in the fresh air just like the flowers depicted on it.
The quilt is a large wall hanging, or lap quilt. It measures 48″ x 53″.
Today is the last day of February, time to report on my heart project.
I did not stitch just one heart per day .nearly fifty are on this piece now. One stage of the process is complete now the appliqué. Well, its complete until I decide to add something.
I do plan to add some buttons and to quilt it at some point. But for now, its a linen tablecloth with some hearts appliquéd on it.
I did stitch a heart on the backside of the ragged spot and stitched around it on the front. It may be left this way. Or not.
Ive been asked about the size of the piece. It is now 33″ x 47. The original tablecloth measured 33 x 84, a runner for a French farmhouse. I removed one end and reattached it to make it a size that works for me.
I will let this project incubate for a while as I work on other projects. At some point, it will be quilted. I enjoyed the stitching on linen so much that I may decide to hand quilt this one. Time will tell.