Annie Mae’s Lace in the Garden

I love Queen Anne’s Lace.  Every year I get excited to see it emerging in our yard.  I’m 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 Mae’s Lace with this year’s 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…

Iron Water

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 hadn’t 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.

Before: this is a bit of linen sheet and some old tatting previously dyed in indigo, some old tatting not yet dyed.
After: those same pieces after a bath in iron water only…no walnut on these pieces.
It’s always a delight to see how different threads take the dye differently. The monogram on this linen towel is stitched with cotton thread. The linen towel was only in the walnut dye, the tatting was in walnut dye, then iron water.
Here are the two sides of a bit of a damask tablecloth. These were soaked in the walnut dye a few days, then dipped in the iron water.
This linen towel shows how powerful the iron water is combined with walnut. This whole piece was not in the iron bath, just the walnut…but the residue on my gloves made these splotches. I find the spots interesting, not offensive.
The top doily here was dyed with walnuts, then composted. It was unintentional composting…as I was rinsing these new pieces, I discovered the doily in the leaves – left there from the earlier walnut dyeing day.

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….

This is the featured photo on the website, but for those who just read the email version, you would miss this….I always think I need to mix browns with blue, you know….but maybe some with green, too.

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.

Fired Works

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 don’t 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.

The design element of repetition is prominent in quilting. On each artist’s table you could see the power of repetition in color, shape, and texture.
Another display showing the power of repetition…and the neutral of black, white, gray with a pop of red and green.
This simple folk art rabbit looks like he could be a trapunto design with matchstick quilting!
These wavy lines with crackle texture and neutral color combination really impressed me!
You know how I love focus blocks of appliqué in my quilts….I think you can see a tulip block in my future.
This brown pitcher reminds me of batik fabrics. And a mix of dots and stripes is always good.
These earthy browns make my soul sing!
And this punch of green with browns – oh, my!
Oh, I visited this table again and again. The whimsical houses remind me of Pam Holland’s quilts.
The color combination of seafood green along with turquoise is not one that would have come to my mind until I saw this….and the pop of orange? Genius!
Improvisationally pieced squares in black and white?
And, who doesn’t love a blue chicken? That base of a black white diagonal stripe reminds me of how impactful a similar binding is on a quilt.

Before and After

In the past week, three friends have given me fabric and linens.  I’ve 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 love the texture of barkcloth. Both pieces you see here are nice, but the darker one seems more interesting to me.
Bits of an old petticoat white, then darker. I love tucks….and I’ll remove some of the stitching later. It acts as a resist to the dye.
This tatting is gorgeous in its original state, but the darker color really enriches it. The top row in the image is the color all of it was before dyeing.

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.

Maybe my favorite fabric to come out of the dye was this bit of damask. I love how the dye increases the contrast in the woven design. Yes, more of this fabric is soaking in walnut dye now!
A couple of oval doilies before and after a walnut swim.

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!

Welcome to Quilt Village

One aisle of bed quilts and large wall hangings.

I just spent three days with my quilting sisters.  We hosted our guild’s 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.  We’ve 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.  

Susan’s Sweet Dreams quilt was made with many vintage feedsacks.

It’s 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.  You’ll 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.

Angie’s Roseville Album won many awards: Best Appliqué, Best Bed Quilt, Best of Show, and 1st place Viewers’ Choice.

Pam is telling visitors about her Wind Beneath My Wings quilt which included some vintage barkcloth.
Marie’s Heart Strings portrays an image of her homeplace. I love of Marie’s use of raw edges, hand stitching, and photos on fabric.
Donna’s Italy Dream won 3rd place in the Wall Quilt category.
Yvonne’s quilt, Betty’s Quilt, won Best Hand Quilting. Whole cloth quilts are always loved by viewers.
Starlight, a beauty pieced by Donna, shows Dewey’s astounding longarm quilting. (He’s the same genius who prepares our floor layout.)
One of many scrappy quilts in our show, Kathy’s Selvage Kites features selvages from her stash in the background of the stars.

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.

Idaho Square Dance was made by a new quilter. Carol got interested in quilting after making hundreds of facemasks for Covid in 2020. She needed to do something with her scraps. This is one of her first half-dozen quilts. And, she does her own quilting on her home machine.
Heaven’s Home was begun by beloved member Jean and completed by her son and daughter. Duree finished piecing the quilt, son Dewey quilted it on his longarm.
This photo shows many of my sisters as we pose with a group of quilts we made for the Methodist Home for Children. Our show was displayed in their gymnasium.

I had several quilts in the show, won’t bore you with all….but a few with links to their stories are here.

We shared our Challenge quilts from the past four years and my Playhouse in the Chickenyard was fun for many visitors, especially the men who attended. You can read that story here.
My Miss Nellie’s Country Garden sported a Viewers’ Choice ribbon on Saturday afternoon. Her story is here.
I admit that seeing my own quilt hung in the show inspired me…to do more work using linen. The lighting on this shot of Paducah Journey shows how wool batting and linen fabric work together to create glorious texture.

Flowers in a Jar

I don’t 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, “I’ll 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″.

Heart Project Update

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, it’s complete until I decide to add something.

I do plan to add some buttons and to quilt it at some point.  But for now, it’s 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.

I’ve 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.

Not a Lonely House

On our country rideabouts I like to discover old houses.  Those that have been kept in good repair or remodeled are appealing and happy, but I also love those that have seemingly been abandoned.  I can imagine stories and people that once inhabited those now bare walls.

I occasionally snap photos of these houses for future reference for stitching or sketching.  

This is actually not abandoned…an old church now used as a community center of sorts…but we’ve visited it with cameras more than once. It’s so serene.

I’m not alone in loving these houses.  On some social media sites, these have recently been called “lonely houses”.  An enchanting phrase that describes the essence of these places.

But there’s one house en route to one of our antiquing hot spots that’s only lonely sometimes.  If we pass by at just the right time of day, this house has visitors.  The four-legged kind.  How fun is it to see these horses eating on the porch.

The horses don’t like to pose in perfect lighting conditions for a photo shoot, but on this day we happened by at feeding time and I got a couple of shots.  

An update on the red hearts on linen…

Since my last post, I’ve abandoned the ‘one-heart-a-day’ plan and have been stitching several down during tv time each night.  Almost all the ones I had pinned in the last photo you saw are now stitched in place.  I’ll probably add more small ones…but it’s nearing completion of the appliqué stage.

Hearts on Location

You know when we head out the door with a picnic lunch and cameras I grab some quilts, just in case a photo op appears.

Recently, we had several of those days – bright sunshine, moderate temperatures, no other obligations.  Since it’s February, I brought quilts with hearts on them…and then I thought, I could bring some of my stuffed hearts, too.

Here are some images for your Valentine’s Day.

Hearts rested on the stacked stones at the base of a building.
This little heart posed on a fencepost.
Hearts in Bloom posed nicely on a porch railing.
A closeup of the heart bearing Princess Priscilla Wears Paisley.
This fountain at Tatnall Square Park in Macon has quotes at its base.
So these three hearts found a place to rest near love.
Sometimes displays in stores go along with my theme…an antique store in Woodbury, Ga.

I’ve embedded some links to details of quilts in the photo captions above, but if you want more, you can type “hearts” in the search box, or click on the “hearts” category in the sidebar.

Dancing Hearts was a fun Valentine’s Day project.

And…an update on the hearts on linen quilt….

I’m on schedule with the hearts on linen..Feb 13 had 13 hearts stitched in place.

I thought it was time to plan the rest of the layout…so here are more pinned in place for stitching.
This linen tablecloth has a story. I could cover it with a heart, but I love seeing the history in fabric. I’m thinking of featuring this inside a heart somehow.

Yoko’s Garden

I’m still in a red mode with Valentine’s Day on the horizon.  

Lately I’ve been finishing some projects that have been in progress for a while…I miss playing with art quilts and story quilts, but finishing some of these has been satisfying.

The one that I finished yesterday is Yoko’s Garden.  Several years ago I was inspired by some deliberately irregular polygons that Yoko Saito had appliquéd in one of her quilt books.  

I cut some freehand hexagons from a collection of Japanese woven fabrics I had in shades of taupe and appliquéd them to a remnant of an old linen sheet.  I love the soft neutral palette, but felt it needed a zinger, so I added a flower using a bit of a red cashmere coat I had felted.  For several years, this piece has been spilling out of baskets here and there when I needed a touch of red.  

This year in December I needed something to stitch with red in it.  I picked up this piece, layered it on a bit of wool (not wool batting, but a piece of felted wool) and began hand quilting.  I enjoyed that process through lots of tv time in December and January, added a binding and label, and I have a finished piece.  The final piece measures 15” x 20”.

Hearts were cut freeform and positioned randomly.

Progress on red hearts is going well.  Here, on the 8th day of February, you see the first 8 hearts.  These are scattered over the linen tablecloth.  I’ll fill in with more small hearts and add some embellishments, too.

I’m enjoying planning embellishments keeping in this beige/brown/red color scheme.

And let me just say, stitching on linen is so delicious!