A recently completed quilt has been on a photo shoot. We took this big baby (it measures 80″ square) with us to Zebulon last week when we went to see Slow Exposures (the photo exhibit described in my last post). The quilt posed on a bench, in a gazebo, and in front of a brick wall.
I called this one Jewel Boxes. The traditional tumbling block pattern, one of my favorites, has been surrounded by a vine of colorful foliage.
Inspired by a magazine cover with a similar quilt many years ago, I cut many rhombuses with a 60º angle and hand stitched them together to make the tumbling block. Then I assembled the blocks into rows and added a black border.
Here, I’m having a Vivian Maier moment including my reflection in the photo. I’ll share my love of Vivian Maier in an upcoming post.
I planned the applique on the border in a free-form manner. After positioning the border vines, I cut leaves and flowers from assorted fabrics, laid them in place until I liked the color placement, and began stitching.
Dewey Godwin did the longarm quilting. He did a great job!
Dewey used a dark gray thread for the quilting on the border, prompting me to select a little gray dot on black for the binding.
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.
Here are the blocks on the design wall in February. The box on the apron of the sewing machine is where they lived for years.
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.
Here you see I marked a suggested path for the vines with a wax pencil (removable with a hot iron). You also see that I do not feel compelled to follow those lines very carefully.
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.
This full view was taken with a drone…a great way to photograph a quilt without a sleeve.
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.
I loved that this outdoor image captured the shadow of real leaves on my quilted leaves.
The on-location photos were taken at a rescued country store, Mildred’s, in Houston County.
There is something soothing about the pulling of thread through cloth. I find myself out of sorts if days (okay, even one day) go by without some time spent stitching.
Some say it’s a prayerful experience to sew. Some liken it to Zen meditation. Maybe it’s the rhythmic motion of the needle penetrating layers of fabric. Whatever it is, it soothes my soul. The ritual of pulling needle and thread through fabric has been a part of my life since childhood. Even when very busy with demands of family and motherhood, I had some sort of needlework project in the works. Then days might go by without much time spent with a needle in my hand, but just knowing it was waiting promised serenity.
During years that my mother and later my mother-in-law were in failing health, I learned to keep a sewing basket in the car at all times. Since each of them had also been seamstresses, I saw it brought peace to each of them to see me with a project in tow.
In the basket was always a project with a threaded needle in the midst of a stitch. That is still my strategy – without having to find the spot where I stopped, match the thread, locate the needle threader, I’m ready to take the next stitch. In preparing for a trip, I sometimes spend more time ensuring that I have enough to keep me busy than I do planning my wardrobe. I might not ever open the basket while away from home, but most times I do find some stitching moments.
I look at Ollie Jane’s Flower Garden and remember visiting with my mother while sewing those hexagons together. I look at Granny Zee’s Scrap Baskets and remember sitting with my mother-in-law as I stitched the fabrics she had kept from her mother’s stash. Both of these mothers of mine were suffering from confusion and dementia, but if words weren’t to be had, we communicated through our love of sewing. I stitched my soul to each of them during their last years of life.
The top photo is one of me working on Blocks in Blue while staying at the Inn at Iris Meadows in Waynesville, NC. That quilt was hand pieced and machine quilted in 2005. It finished at 27” square, and was one of my early attempts at free motion machine quilting. I used invisible nylon thread in the top, a matching cotton thread in the bobbin.
There is something soothing about the pulling of thread through cloth. I find myself out of sorts if days (okay, even one day) go by without some time spent stitching.
The top photo is one of me working on Blocks in Blue while staying at the Inn at Iris Meadows in Waynesville, NC. That quilt was hand pieced and machine quilted in 2005. It finished at 27” square, and was one of my early attempts at free motion machine quilting. I used invisible nylon thread in the top, a matching cotton thread in the bobbin.