Category: Journaling

thoughts on writing and recording life

Loving Hearts

So the obsession for blue hearts outgrew the bowl. Bowls, actually; several are full.

It seemed the natural thing to do was to make more of those hearts to put in a quilt. I continued using bits of vintage linens, remnants of old clothing filled with memories, and remnants of overdyed linens.

I cut free-form hearts and stitched them to bits of background fabric and placed them on the design wall. Then a couple of days of trimming and filling in blank spaces with other beloved blue fabrics, and a quilt top was born.

Now it’s pin basted together, ready to quilt.

One of the old remnants I used included dozens of hearts like these and at least 40 of these birds. I found this gorgeous tablecloth last summer when I wrote about tattered treasures here. I didn’t appreciate the work some woman had done until I cut it up and stitched through the fabric myself.

It is a heavy cotton fabric, densely woven; what my mother would describe as “tough as pig iron” to stitch through. I realize now that the phrase makes no sense regarding stitching, but that’s what she said.

The woman who stitched all these crosses must have had sore fingers. Maybe she was a friend of Margene‘s, devoted to needlework, determined to finish.

The tablecloth was used, though. I know because of the stains and holes I found in it. That’s a good thing. I love stains and holes because I feel less guilty about cutting the piece apart and reusing the decorative stitching. And, I like knowing that the piece has stories embedded in the threads.

There are other stories in this collection of threads, as well. I bought some indigo and white homespun fabric at Elco Antique Market more than 30 years ago. My mother used it to make a dress for me. Now parts of it are in this quilt. Some of Jim’s shirts and some of mine have found their way here too.

And, those of you who make quilts are wondering about those blue dots and straight pins. I’m trying something new here, pin basting without having to close and then reopen safety pins. I like the pinning part. I’ll report on the removal process once the quilting is done.

A later post has been added with photos of the finished quilt and my verdict on the pinning dilemma. It’s here.

Hearts and Ribbons

This is the month to see hearts everywhere, and I LOVE it!

Hearts have long been one of my favorite motifs and they often show up in my quilts.  My quilt guild, (Heart of Georgia is its name – coincidence you think?) has themes for some of our Show and Tell sessions this year.  

We always bring new quilts we’ve recently finished, but the themes let us revisit favorite old quilts that we haven’t shared in a while.  Show and Tell is always inspiring and this variation allows new members to our group to see some past works they missed.

So I’ve been thinking about hearts in older quilts of mine, looking around the house at older pieces.  

One I found was this one Hearts and Ribbons– a project I made in the first appliqué class I took. Anita Shackelford was the teacher.   An excellent designer and teacher, she guided me through the intricacies of needle turn appliqué.   Though some of my work is more casual these days, I owe her all the credit for my beginning stitches in this technique.  

This piece features hearts that were made and stuffed, then hand quilted.  Later, they were attached to the background including other appliquéd elements.

The stuffed berries and delicate embroidery just add to the rich details of the piece.

This was one of my first efforts at free motion machine quilting, too.  I think I used an invisible thread and cotton batting.  

I don’t suppose anyone is surprised that the featured color here is blue.

Ollie Jane Goes for a Ride

I don’t always color coordinate my “ride along” quilts with our destination, but today I did.  I love these old greenish blue doors we discovered in a little out-of-the-way town on one of our rambles.  Today we were headed in that direction, the sun was shining, and quilts were going along for the ride.

Ollie Jane’s Flower Garden usually stays home.  Her permanent place in the world is hanging in our stairwell of our house and moving her is no minor event.  But, she’s been resting on a bed since Christmas, having given that spot of honor to a more wintry quilt, Miss Nellie’s Country Garden, for a few months.

I knew our travel plans would take us near the town with the green doors, and Ollie Jane needed to be photographed outdoors, so this seemed perfect.  Some of the hexagons in that quilt would coordinate with the color of the doors – so fabulous, aren’t they?

So, it happened!  The sun was not in a photographer’s favorite position as we passed through the little community when going or coming.  But since the desirable face of this building would not see direct sunlight for a few more months, we made the best of the opportunity at hand.

As we headed out the door, I grabbed another couple of quilts that I thought would look good in front of these turquoise doors, Sea Squared, and Annie Mae’s Lace.  I have written about these quilts before, but they haven’t been on a photo shoot.

Each of these quilts was very cooperative, as was OJ.  And, the gray doors and shuttered windows were rather showy themselves, giving the doors some competition as backgrounds.

Details of the construction of these quilts and other stories about them can be found by clicking on the links within the story above, or following them here:

Ollie Jane’s Flower Garden is here.

Annie Mae’s Lace is here.

Sea Squared is here.

I’ve already realized that Fairhope Feedsacks and another couple of quilts have fabrics that would coordinate with these doors. We will visit them again!

Dirt Roads

“But all of us have stories.  Who doesn’t drive past an old homestead, an old store, a bridge no longer in use, and say, “I remember…”.  That memory can live on only if we share it.  Write it down, make a voice recording, or at the very least, tell it to one person who will remember it.”

I found this quote in my notes for future blog posts.  I’m always telling people to “write it down,” when I hear stories told.  Like photographs that are no longer printed, stories from our past and present experiences may get lost.  

My friend Marie has recently published her memoirs, Dirt Roads Lead Home: A Memoir About Connections to a Place.  It’s currently available at amazon.  Details are here.

I was privileged to be an early reader of Marie’s stories and found them delightful.  I love reading memoirs of all types, but Marie and I share common roots in small town, rural Georgia landscapes.  Although our growing up experiences were in many ways not alike, her memories of buses and clotheslines and kitchen routines brought similar, yet different, personal flashbacks to mind.

Marie included maps for her family members to relate to places in the past.  Drawing maps led to the thought of drawing other things, so the volume is illustrated by Marie’s delightful sketches.

If you are a country girl from the South, or if you aren’t, check out Marie’s book to trigger memories of your childhood.  Then write them down!  Or sketch the place.  Or make a quilt.  Or do all the above!

Note:  After a month of no blogging and not much sewing; just in a different routine, it’s good to be back at it all.  I’ve been stitching by hand on the past few evenings, and it does feel great!  Today the sewing machine is humming, too.  The festive life is good: cooking, visiting, entertaining are all fun, but I’m glad to be back in a familiar groove.

Christmas Quilts on the Farm

We left home on a recent glorious fall day with a camera and some quilts in the car.  We ended up with boxes of notecards showing Jim’s photos of quilts in unexpected places.

The most stunning image to me is this one of Miss Lily’s Baskets on a hayrake.  It was a sunny day, but the magician’s hand in the digital darkroom transformed it into something ethereal.

The same little quilt posed on the mantel in a rustic living room,

and on a chair at an outdoor banquet table.

Another seasonal quilt, Pomegranates and Poinsettias, lounged on a chair in front of poinsettias and a Christmas tree.  A fire in the fireplace was welcome on this cool day.

Small Tree Farm became part of a vignette of tools on the side of a building.  

I love the contradictions in texture:  soft quilted textiles against hard rusty tools.

I love the contradictions in value:  brilliant colors of fabric against old wood faded to gray.


In case you missed them, earlier posts give details of these quilts.  Miss Lily’s Baskets is here.

Pomegranates and Poinsettias is here, and Small Tree Farm hasn’t really been described except on the page of patterns I’ve designed.  Another post about it and its larger companion piece will be forthcoming.

Last year’s post about Christmas quilts is here.  Details of some of these same quilts are included in that post, with photos in different surroundings.  If you are wondering, Mistletoe and Holly, mentioned in last year’s post, isn’t finished, but I’m working on it now – repeating my love of stitching on red and green during this season.

While browsing my photo files for Christmas quilts, I found this image of a commissioned piece I did a few years ago.  I think its colors are well suited for this season, too.

Miss Nellie’s Country Garden

On a recent Saturday ride-about, we took a big wool quilt in case we saw a spot for photos.  We found a spot at Starr’s Mill, and gave Miss Nellie’s Country Garden some places to pose.

The quilt is my version of a pattern from Lisa Bongean of Primitive Gatherings.  The wool appliqué is stitched by hand onto cotton background fabrics.  The piecing together of the blocks and the quilting are done by machine.  

As I worked on all aspects of this quilt, I thought of my Aunt Nellie.  The wool appliqué – informal and free – and the garden theme led me to know the quilt had to be named for her.

She was known as Miss Nellie to most everyone in the community.  I was lucky enough to know her as Aunt Nellie.  She was a teacher, and so there are some people who knew her as Miss Hobby, too.  She lived next door for my entire childhood, and serves to inspire me every day of my life. 

She lived to the age of 91, and only in her 91st year was she unable to tend her garden.  She grew vegetables to eat, to share, to can, and to freeze.  She grew flowers for the joy of the bloom.

Aunt Nellie’s vegetable garden was neat and orderly, but her flowers were a riot of stems and leaves and blooms.  Weeds were kept at bay in both places, but the separation she maintained in her butterbeans and squash was not valued in her flowerbeds.  The snapdragons and pansies, the petunias and lilies and gladiolas all mingled about, with her snipping a cutting here and poking it in an empty spot there to take root and fill a space.  And, take root they did.  Her green thumb was legendary, possibly due in part by the load of fresh cow manure a local farmer delivered to her every spring.

She grew geraniums in pots, dahlias in a  separate bed all their own.  She had a bit of yard art, too.  I remember a whimsical bird bath, tiers of porcelain basins given to her by a friend.  Once it developed leaks, it was repurposed as a planter for succulents.


So the whimsical nature of some of these quilt blocks is a perfect tribute to a woman from the country.  The label is a block I had made because Miss Jump, one of Linda Brannock’s creations, reminds me of Aunt Nellie.

More quilt details:  The quilt finished at 60” x 75”.  I used a whipstitch to secure the wool to the cotton, usually with perle cotton thread, but sometimes with embroidery floss or even fine sewing thread.  The quilting is all hand-guided freemotion stitching on my home machine.  I used Dream Cotton Request batting and a cotton fabric for the background.  And it was all fun!  Just as Aunt Nellie would have wanted it to be.

Oh, and another detail.  Because the wool is so visually heavy, I made a wider binding than I usually do.  The “standard” 1/4” binding seems so wimpy on a large wool quilt, so I cut the binding 3 1/2”, then folded in half and stitched it to the front of the quilt with a hearty 3/8” seam allowance (or scant 1/2”).  The binding then finishes (with these fabrics) at 1/2”. I used a woven plaid (easy to stitch down by hand) and cut it on the bias.

More about Aunt Nellie:  I’ve written a lot about Aunt Nellie already, if you type “Nellie” in the search box, you’ll find several references to her.  But, she is the older of the two “Spinster Sisters” in this post, where I shared more details of her: https://sandygilreath.com/spinster-sisters/

SlowExposures

When we leave home for one of our Saturday “ride abouts”, we don’t always know where we’ll end up.  Our most recent experience was at a county-wide photography exhibit.  We stopped at one of our favorite bookstores, A Novel Experience, in Zebulon, only to discover it was on this day headquarters for glory.  

Well, glory our way.  SlowExposures, A Juried Exhibition Celebrating Photography of the Rural South, was in full swing in Pike County.  Walking and driving to at least seven sites, we met interesting people, saw interesting photography and other art forms, and came away inspired.

Every person we met was friendly and informative and urged us to visit other artists as well.  So we moved through the day on those recommendations, going from one “pop-up” venue to the next, only to be greeted by more fabulous photography, more unique ideas in presentation, more friendly people.

The photos were images made all over the South.  The photographers were from as far away as Maine, and the exhibit was the 16th of its kind.  How did we not know of this?  Well, we know now!

There was a competitive collection of single images, and there were “pop-ups” all over the county.  A pop-up exhibit was a collection of work from a single photographer or from groups with some common theme.  Subject matter, or technique, or presentation could unite them for this exhibit.

If you think a picture is worth a thousand words, you can’t image the volumes spoken by some of these displays.

A collection documenting the memorabilia left behind by a soldier who ended his own life in 1959 was sobering  The images mounted on black wood, in black frames, finished without a glass barrier, are stark and convey the mood of the project beautifully. (You can see photos of this here. Neither Jim nor I took snapshots of this work, it seemed disrespectful somehow – the display was the powerful.)

A former architect displayed part of an ongoing project to photograph all the azaleas in his home town.  He lives in Nachez, MS, so that’s a lot of azalea blooms.

The settings for the exhibit were likewise intriguing.  The main gallery was housed in an old store building in a small town six miles away from the county seat.  Pop-ups were in commercial and government buildings as well as unique buildings in the community repurposed for this weekend’s treasures.

One artist had the fortune to have his work displayed in a stable.  To take advantage of this  venue, he created amazing large-scale displays to share his Forest re-Framed.  There were dimensional elements, large scale prints with plates of glass in front to vary the distance from the viewer.  There were huge prints on canvas with natural light illuminating the photos.

There were a couple of artists housed in a sharecropper’s cabin.  The exposed structure of the building, painted white, was a perfect backdrop for their works.

Maybe I’m saving the best for the last.  Or maybe just after such a day the anticipation builds so the last thing is the best.  But our final visit was to the Hive, a small building (renamed for these two days) containing four artists who incorporate beeswax into their photo displays.  Each of the four uses different subject matter and processes to make their encaustic work unique, but all were fascinating to this Beekeeper’s Daughter.

I felt a special kinship with Kevin.  Kevin finds vintage photos at flea markets, collages the photos with other objects, and makes up a story about the person in the photo.  Yes, like I did with Margene and Ruth, to name a couple – just makes stuff up!  When I shared that I love to tell stories though my work, too, Kevin and I bonded.  He gave me permission to share a photo of him, of some of his work, and later, he demonstrated his technique with wax.  An earlier photo shows a closeup of one of his collages, but the shot below includes one of the fabulous vintage frames that completes his work.

Inspired, intrigued, amazed, fascinated; all good words to sum up the day.  Another example of retired life with open-ended adventures!  Except for the old geezer who pretended his name was Jim in order to claim our food in a crowded restaurant, the day was fabulous!  Even that situation was quickly remedied by a poised waitress and it gave us another funny store to share for years to come.

Note:  here are links to more of the artists whose work I described:

Sandy Burr

Jo Lynn Still

Houck Medford

Nancy Marshall

Rory Doyle

As Is

I love to find a vintage textile marked “as Is.”  To me it means the price is discounted.  There may be hole in it – giving me an excuse to cut it up and reuse it, or to patch the hole with appliqué. There may be stains on it, meaning i am free to dip the piece in the indigo dye bath, making it beautiful and blue.

Elegantly presented and pristine linens delight me.  I sometime buy them to use just as they are and I do appreciate the dealer’s work in laundering them and packaging them so nicely.  But there is a special thrill in digging through a basket of miscellaneous bits of cloth and finding the treasure that is 100% linen.  Or a towel made from huck cotton. 

Of course, the value is not only in the eye of the beholder.  Most dealers know that even a worn faded sliver of barkcloth will sell for a pretty penny.  But occasionally I find a piece that was just recognized as old and worn.  I don’t squeal with delight until after I’ve paid my pittance for it.  Oh, I do love a find like that.

A worn cotton petticoat that has tucks and lace holds all kinds of potential to become part of a rescued remnant.

Here is a worn dresser scarf with a hole and a stain and a tear in the trim – all signs of use and deposits in some girl’s bank of memories.  There were other pieces in the set; some with more wear, some with less. 

One of the bluebirds flew from a tattered piece and became this heart. 

This heart was made from the intact embroidery from a tattered pillow cover.

And another came from some very very worn curtains.  This corner was bright and colorful.  I love how the old fabrics keep their brilliance!

See why I love “as is”?  I love giving those surviving elements a new home.  Some woman loved these fabrics, either because she stitched the embroidery herself or maybe she selected a color combination to brighten her kitchen.  Now her work survives to brighten someone’s day again.

 

The Story Shop

This is not a post about a quilt.  This is a post about magic, or at least a magical place for kids of all ages. 

 C. S. Lewis would be proud.  The glint in this boy’s eye says it all.  When you go, look in the wardrobe  – you won’t be disappointed.

This shop is on a downtown street in Monroe, Ga.  We go there frequently to visit family, to shop at some great antique malls, and to eat delicious food at local restaurants.

As we drove through downtown on recent trips, this storefront beckoned me.  It seemed to be a children’s shop of some sort, but until I entered, I had no idea what to expect.

There are books, book, more books, and nooks to read them in. 

There’s a yellow brick road, murals to delight children and adults around every corner.

I paused in my giggling with delight to get permission to take photos and write about this haven.  Do click on the images to enlarge them so you can appreciate the detail in the decor.

I learned that The Story Shop has been open for about two years and is as wildly popular as you would expect.  The owner and designer has created a delightful destination for kids of all ages.  


Groups are welcomed and school groups can come to presentation geared to their age groups.  Teachers will love that the programs are correlated to the state curriculum standards.  What a wonderful place to learn more about your favorite wonderland.

There’s a room for parties and gatherings.  And a bit of non-bound merchandise can be found, too.  

Just seeing the graphics on this tote bag brings happy memories of libraries and bookstores from my early reading life.  Imagine the memories made by youngsters who have the privilege of visiting this wonderland!  

How many favorite books from your childhood did you identify from the photos?

 

Backsides

 

I like backsides.  When I’m doing street photography, I often focus on images of people from the rear.  Maybe that’s because I think the result is more likely to convey a universal truth than if the face is there; identifying the individual as, well, an individual.

 

With quilts, too, I like the backsides to be interesting compositions.  The expected traditional way to back a quilt is to use yardage of one fabric.  I admit I do that sometimes.  But most often when I do that, I find the result to be boring to me.

I often piece the backs of my quilts, especially the large ones.  The blue “wonky star” above is on the back of GBI Blues.  I included lots of my favorite blue fabrics that hadn’t found a home on the front.  In 70 and Still Wearing Jeans, I used pieces of fabrics collected for Jim’s quilt where the images were too large to include in the stars on the front.

In Seven Black Birds, I incorporated the discarded half-square triangles created for the sashing in the back.  That quilt hangs on a ladder in the den and more often than not, the “back” side is what is turned out to the viewer.  That’s the quilt here on the hayrack and bicycle.

Sometimes I have fabric that I don’t want to cut up into little pieces for use on the front of the quilt, so I use a whole piece of it as the back of something.  That way I can leave the piece as a whole unit. The toile piece in the photo above is on the back of Blue Tumbling Blocks, a small wall hanging described here.   I recently wrote about Linen Baskets in which I did the same thing with a fabulous Jane Sassaman print.

My most recent piecing effort was inspired by a piece of fabric I’ve had in my stash for many years.  I just didn’t want to cut it up.  So a pattern involving books (paper foundation pieced) seemed perfect for the front of a quilt with the “reading” fabric on the back.  So, it’s true.  I designed a quilt with the back planned first.  Here is a photo of the backing fabric folded on top of the pieced top.  More details and photos will follow when the quilting is done.