More Red

In the week leading to Valentine’s Day, there is red everywhere.  

A mockingbird is enjoying some holly berries in our yard.

And the nandinas are displaying lots of berries.  Yes, I know they are invasive, and they are bad for the birds, and we clear out some.  But my mother and Jim’s mother both loved their nandinas, so we don’t remove them all.  And the berries this year are big and red.

In my thoughts leading to a GBI Red project, I found these blocks that have a lot of red.  I like a focus block as a start, and sometimes an orphan block sparks an idea. The two blocks on the right are Maggie Bonanomi designs.

I have a couple of these Beligian linen tablecloths with red stripes.  I love red/white/tan as a color combination, so that leads me to see possibilities.

And, there is this.  Red and white is a tried and true combo.  And, in one of our forays through an antique mall, I found this linen tablecloth with embroidered red signatures.  I’d love to know the story behind it.  Was it used at an event like a wedding party, or a going-away party where guests signed the cloth? 

I presume Percival and Marian are husband and wife, but I don’t think they embroidered their names at the occasion.  Did they write their names on the cloth and then someone else did the stitching in red?  Some threads are heavier than others; some stitching is tight, some is loose.  So maybe more than one person did the embroidery – or one person might have varied her stitches to more accurately match the signature.

Interestingly, Jim has an ancestor named Margaret Hudson. We didn’t buy this in the area where his great-grandmother lived, but perhaps the antique dealer did…. Certainly that’s not a unique name, but to find this is quite interesting.

What will I do with this?  I’m not sure…but there’s a story there!

Even the Christmas amaryllis has decided to grace us with red once again…

Red Hearts

Everyone knows I love my blue fabrics, but this time of year, red always shows up in something. As Valentine’s Day approaches, red is on my mind.

I began making red hearts before Christmas this past year. This small bowl held the first grouping. As is the case with many explorations, I couldn’t stop until I played with more and more fabric combinations…so the little bowl grew, too.

No self-respecting lover of vintage linens can ignore the beauties that are red. The collection above includes tickings, vintage woven pieces, and a lovely cross-stitched tablecloth.

My shelves that hold commercial fabrics has plenty of red, too. I especially love the reds from French General. ( I used this collection almost exclusively in Miss Lily’s Baskets.)

Hearts are a favorite motif of mine, so there are hearts made of things other than fabric around the house, too. Above are a compressed wool one, an enameled bit of jewelry, a metal one, and a pottery heart.

In the photos above, you see the two sides of the collection of hearts. The usual “fronts” on the left, the “backsides” on the right.

Remember GBI Blues? This stack of delightful reds makes me think I need to work on a companion, GBI Reds. Uh-oh, we all see where this is going, don’t we?

I’ve written about hearts many times before. WordPress has changed some ways to label things, so I’ve added a category for “hearts”. If you click on that word in the category list on the right, you’ll see a listing of all posts about that topic. (I haven’t updated everything yet, but “hearts” and “red” are current.)

New Hebron

After my latest post on quilts posed at New Hebron Baptist Church in Pike County, I thought you might like to see more photos of this beauty from the past. On an earlier visit, Jim captured images of the vicar and the interior of this church while I enjoyed memories of my childhood that this place triggered.

We visited this idyllic spot for the first time as part of the Slow Exposures Photography  Exhibition in 2019.  The organizers included a display of some of the photographs from the volume Historic Churches of Georgia.

A church that should be in the second edition of the book “Historic Rural Churches of Georgia,”  New Hebron Baptist Church near Concord, Georgia is an idyllic and picturesque place and is what you might expect when you first open your eyes in the afterlife. Thanks to Vicar Dwain Penn for the tour of New Hebron and his hospitality.

A church that should be in the second edition of the book Historic Rural Churches of Georgia,  New Hebron Baptist Church near Concord, Georgia is an idyllic and picturesque place and is what you might expect when you first open your eyes in the afterlife. Thanks to Vicar Dwain Penn for the tour of New Hebron and his hospitality.

Jim’s words from his facebook post about New Hebron

In my journal writing of that day I noted that Vicar Penn doesn’t call himself a pastor since he “has no sheep.”  He explained that the church has had no members for several years, and is therefore no longer affiliated with any denomination.  

At the time of our visit, services were conducted once a month, on Sunday afternoon at 3:00 p.m.  That allows people to attend their regular church and enjoy this spiritual place, too.

They sometimes host special events here, too.  Sacred Harp Singing Schools have been held in this church.  Oh, how I would love to hear those songs echoing off these unpainted timbers!

The church, built in 1908, was seen in the movies Cold Sassy Tree and Mama Flora’s Family, but most of the time, it’s maintaining its position in a bucolic scene on a quiet country road.

For more information, check out the entry on the Historic Rural Churches site https://www.hrcga.org/church/new-hebron-baptist/ .

And this article includes more of Vicar Penn’s story: http://www.thegospeler.org/ChurchBrochure.htm

Dots and Vines went along on this trip, too.  Here she poses on the back door of the church.  The story of this quilt is here: https://sandygilreath.com/dots-and-vines/

Indiana Homestead

We traveled to the past down an old country road and took along an old-fashioned new quilt.

I’m one of many quilters who has used all this time at home in the past year to finish some UFO’s.  An oldie but goodie that finally saw completion at my house is a quilt I call Indiana Homestead.  After spending a few years folded on a closet shelf, a few days of work in late fall 2020 brought this piece to completion.

Yesterday was not a glorious sunny day, but we were ready for a ride-about.  We threw the cameras and a few quilts in the car, and drove away from home for a while.

We found ourselves on the grounds of an old church building with fabulous trees.  The quilt posed in one tree, under another, and then hanging on the back door.

We had visited this church before when the vicar was there and got permission to come back with quilts.  It’s been a while; there’s been a plague, you know, but we did return.

Indiana Homestead is based on a traditional pattern.  What you see is my interpretation of a pattern Fig Tree Quilts designed based on a time-honored peony block.  A little research when I was making these blocks (12 or more years ago) led me to the title Indiana Homestead because Indiana’s state flower is the peony.

Non-quilters, and some really structured quilt makers, may question why an almost finished project might languish on the shelf for years.  In this case, I made the blocks and loved them, began the machine quilting process and still liked the quilt; but life interrupted.  

While this quilt was under construction, we moved houses. Our new home did not have a room with these colors, so finishing this was not a high priority.  Once I pulled the quilt off the shelf to work on it, I realized I wasn’t happy with the batting I had selected (some organic cotton that sheds everywhere – I had since found other battings I liked better), and I didn’t like my original plan for the border.  After considering several alternatives for the border quilting (over the years I would pull it out, think about options, put it back up), in late 2020 I solved the problem.  I cut the border off!  I liked that much better.  And to get rid of the shedding batting, I bound the quilt edges before I completed the quilting of the blocks.  Done!

The quilt now measures a lovely 60” square, a perfect size for a napping quilt. In the above photo, Jim worked his magic with color…perfect for this old setting!

Chortling

Thousands of Sandhill Cranes winter in a county near us.  It’s a thrill when they fly in groups over our house on the way to this temporary home – the sound of their call is unmistakable.  Varying terms are used to describe the sound:  bugling, trumpeting, rattling, croaking, but I like the word chortling.  These birds seem to be so happy that a muffled laugh fits.

We went to see some of these wonders yesterday.  The flock we saw numbered in the hundreds, but they were accompanied by thousands, yes, thousands, of blackbirds.  The vision of the groups in flight was enchanting!

The cranes look gawky in some cases.  When they fly about in small groups over short distances, they are funny with their wings and long legs all akimbo.  In serious flight, up high for long distance traveling, they are elegant.  They tuck their legs neatly behind them for streamlined flight and they fly in a v-formation.

And the blackbirds were so abundant that their flights about the field created a murmuration.  Well, I thought of it as a murmuration.  That term is by definition applied to starlings, not blackbirds.  But the image of the huge numbers of blackbirds twisting and swirling in some sort of shape shifting cloud was mesmerizing to me.

Jim’s Canon camera with 1.6 crop factor and 1.4 extender paired with a 500mm lens gave him the best view of the birds.

The skies were blue, the fields of brown and green stretched on for acres and acres.  It was a glorious day to be out in nature.  

This photo is a good representation of what we could see with the naked eye. Binoculars and cameras with long lenses gave us better views of the birds.

The Sandhill Cranes were more than 200 yards from our vantage point, but Jim’s camera setup could “reach” them. 

I did get some passable shots with my little Sony. In all cases, if you enlarge the image, you can appreciate more detail.

At another stop on this outing, I had fun photographing cows.  More on that later.

I didn’t think to take a quilt along for a photo shoot – our days at home have ruined my sense of preparation for a drive about.  But the day certainly provided inspiration for future quilts.  

By the way, these Sandhill Cranes are huge birds.  Here is a photo of some walking by me a few years ago near Melbourne, Florida.  They are comfortable with humans here and you can get an idea of their size relative to me.

A Christmas Garden

We have a new Christmas quilt in our house this year.

This large quilt was finished earlier this year, but I wanted to share it at Christmastime.  It hasn’t been on a photo shoot outdoors yet, but here are some shots and its stitching story.

The design is from a Barb Adams and Alma Allen book, Where the Cold Wind Blows.  The pattern Mistletoe and Holly looks quite different in their version, but the appliqué basket is their creation.

I had this fabulous toile-like fabric that looked a bit Christmasey to me, with lots of green and brown and red.  Wanting to leave big swatches of that intact in the background, I chose to do minimal piecing.  

I did like the pieced stars that Barb and Alma had included, so I pieced a few stars.  

One it was assembled, it needed a bit more color, so I inked my initials and their title Mistletoe and Holly in red.  

It needed a bit more red, so birds flew in and landed in some spaces.

I was teaching paper foundation piecing, so used that technique to add a spiky border.

I quilted it on my Juki with a combination of freemotion echoing and several filler designs.

I chose to give my version the title A Christmas Garden.  It measures 60” x 78”.

Before and After Blue

I recently promised more images of things from the indigo dye pot.  I love them all, but perhaps my favorite is the old embroidered tea towel you see above.  I bought this tattered piece at an antique store, and though the stitching is lovely, it was a bit pale, as you see in the next image.

The beauty of buying a towel with stitching at both ends is that I can play with one and save the other, so I at least have one intact bit of stitch with history to use.  So I ripped it apart, and dipped one in the dye pot.  Oh, my.  Isn’t it lovely?  Yes, now I know the other end just might go for a swim, too.

Here are more results from those recent days of dyeing.

a pile of linens fresh from the dryer
A beekeeper’s garden toile from a bargain bin is now happier in my stash – it’s blue!
some handwoven linen from Belgium overdyed…great for tea towels, placemats, who knows?

A bit of old barkcloth curtains is now brown and blue…my favorite combination!
And the blue roses I shared last week…they still thrill me. Here they are on a different background.

Blue Roses

On an antiquing trip before the stay-at-home life began, I bought some old fabric flowers.  I had been experimenting with making my own fabric flowers (which I wrote about here), so I thought this bouquet would allow me to examine someone else’s construction techniques.

The roses were dirty – stained and discolored.  But at $1, I didn’t mind that.

Last week I chose to spend a few of the last hot days of the year playing in the indigo dye bath.  One of the pieces that I dipped was this bunch of roses.  Aren’t they nice?

I dipped other things, too.  This shot of two lace coasters shows the difference in one dip in the dye and two.  This shot on the wooden table could have been part of the last post on Blue and Brown.

A vintage crocheted tablecloth went for a blue swim, too.

More blue things in the next post….

Blue and Brown

I love blues and browns and I especially love them together!  

Mother Nature loves blues that go to brown, too.  Look at this hydragangea in different stages of its blooming life this summer.  The final brown bloom hanging on is just as beautiful to me as the most cobalt of blues!

I recently made a slow stitched study in blues and browns.  

It started when I made this notebook cover as a gift.  The colors were so rich and entrancing that I wanted to use the leftover bits in another project.

The linen background came from some yardage a friend brought to our quilt guild from her mother’s stash.  The mother was downsizing and moving – we benefited from the clean out!

The bits of blues and neutrals were from my collection of old and new bits of fabric and lace.

The hexagons led to a bee theme of sorts.

I experimented with various weights and colors of thread, added beads and buttons.

This format, the rolled up collage, is a favorite of mine.  I used a thin layer of batting under the brown linen while doing all the stiching.  For a backing to cover the messy seed stitching, I added a bit of an indigo overdyed linen sheet.  I attached this with a tiny seed stitch with a fine thread; going only through the layer of blue and the batting.

Queen Anne in Quarantine

Today is our 226th day of social distancing.  It’s October 18, the 292nd day of 2020.  (I’m keeping track of those things for part of my journal quilt for 2020.)  We still have Queen Anne’s Lace blooming in our yard!  

As I’ve shared before, I’m sending a photo to “the girls” each morning, letting the next generation of our family know that the old folks are up and at ‘em each morning; all is well.  I have an album on my laptop containing these nature photos.  There are daylilies, geraniums, clematis, roses, lots of wildflowers; there are rabbits and deer and mushrooms, too. 

One plant stands out as being ever-present.  Queen Anne’s Lace.  I truly love this plant…we’ve had patches of it in the yard every year since we moved here nine years ago… but this year there are more patches and they have been blooming constantly since mid-May.  

I love photographing these specimens from all angles, and I especially love the cage that forms as the flowers go to seed.  I’ve collected these seeds and scattered some already, hoping that in the future, wild carrots will be EVERYWHERE!

And, in the winter, I’ll still have some…these made with needle and thread.