Tag: journaling

Quilts at Step Back

This is a preview post of several quilt stories to come.  As you know, I love to photograph my quilts in unusual settings and sometimes leave home with one or two, then blog about the quilt in detail.

Today we had the opportunity to revisit Step Back, a privately owned rural community with twenty 1900-era buildings.  An earlier post with details about this place is here.

When our camera club was invited to come stroll about the grounds with cameras, I asked if I might bring some quilts.  When the answer was “yes,” I gathered a few pieces whose stories are waiting to be part of a blog post.  So today you see some glamour shots – later more complete stories.

The silvery gray buildings were a wonderful backdrop for quilts to shine.  Sometimes the contrast was minimal, other times it was strong, but always, the old buildings brought new character to fabric and stitches. As always, you can click on any image to enlarge and see details.

Miss Nellie’s Country Garden posed near the waterwheel.  This 12 foot wheel is perfectly balanced and turns with just the tiniest trickle of water as its power source.

Miss Emily’s Baskets rested in some cotton baskets inside the mill house.

This is the cabin where local ladies pretend to be floozies at the Christmas open house every December.  I thought my wool quilt, A Flock of Feathered Floozies, needed to pose here.

Here, Where the Soul says Ahhh is hanging inside the entry of the schoolhouse.  

And here you see why I chose this quilt for the schoolhouse.

A little goat quilt rides on a tricycle.  This quilt has been the subject of an earlier blog post here , but it seemed that a goat quilt needed to visit Step Back.  

Guineas visited Step Back, too.  Guineas on Parade posed at the base of the windmill and on the floozies’ porch. 

And, a man in overalls was visiting today. Of course he was.  A trip back in time to a rural setting would not be complete without that image!

For more details about the Step Back village, visit http://seniornewsga.com/NewspapersSN/Atlanta/2015/AtlantaSeniorNewspdfdec15.pdf or like the Step Back page on Facebook.

Shade Tree Mechanics

Life imitates art.

On a recent adventure to a pottery festival, I saw this beautiful 1953 Chevrolet truck.  It was a glorious blue, beautifully restored, and photogenic from all angles.  But my favorite angle was this one because it mimicked the truck I put on a quilt a few years ago.

 

In 2015, when pondering a design for a raffle quilt for my husband’s local Vintage Chevrolet Club chapter, I decided to create a scene where men might tinker on their machines. I love including trees on quilts, so the title was easy 

The quilt measures 44” x 70“ and is a combination of needleturn appliqué, raw-edge appliqué, hand-guided freemotion quilting, trapunto, and printing on fabric.

I drew the design on acetate transparency and using my vintage overhead projector, enlarged the image to fill the background fabric pinned to my design wall.  The same technique was used to draw the freezer paper templates for the tree trunks and the various pieces of the truck.  I used commercial fabric to build the images, working from background to foreground as I attached the pieces.

 

I posted these photos to Facebook as I worked and it triggered many memories my students in math classrooms in days gone by.

 

 

The quilt top on the design wall before quilting began.

 

Wool batting was layered underneath the Chevrolet emblem on the tailgate, stitched down with water soluble thread.  Then the excess batting was cut away before layering the entire top on a cotton batting.

Freemotion stitching made the layers become one, a quilt.  In addition, that stitching was used to differentiate areas of the dashboard, windshield, and tire tracks on the ground.  Freemotion stitching was used to attach the raw-edged leaves as well. 

A photo of an antique car tag was scaled to fit the license plate space and printed onto fabric.  Blue was chosen for the 1953 model truck because there is such a truck in Jim’s family.  And blue…well, it’s blue.

A bowtie-shaped Chevrolet icon served as the basis for the handwritten label.  Sadly, I don’t seem to have a photo of that.

Note:  One purpose in writing this blog is to record details of quilts I’ve made.  I had written most of these details in a draft a couple of years ago, but the photo of a real truck like the one I fabricated spurred the post to publication.  As I read the details I had written, I was reminded how important it is to write things down.  I had forgotten the details of the wool batting layer, raw edged leaves, and thread choices.  

Especially since the quilt is no longer in my possession, the written description of the process is more valuable in case I want to do something similar again.

Another note: Many of these photos were made with an older iPhone and poor lighting conditions.  Reducing them to post online makes for even poorer quality, but clicking on the image to enlarge it may reveal some details you miss in the original.

A Lily for Ruth




Ruth loved gardening.  She loved the feel of the brown earth between her fingers as she planted bulbs and seedlings, anticipating the color that would come later.  She reveled in a pleasant day with white clouds in a blue sky.

At least that’s how I imagine the Ruth whose family had this lily engraved on her headstone.

 

 

 

 

To remember Ruth forever, I made a crayon rubbing of the lily on silk fabric and added dimension and detail with free motion machine stitching.  I added some lace and beads with  hand stitching and layered it all atop an old quilt remnant.  

I hope Ruth would be pleased.

 

 

 

 

 

Jim and I enjoy exploring cemeteries.  Sometimes those walks end up in artwork.  Earlier references to other adventures are here and here and here.

Linen Baskets

We headed out the door on a “Saturday ride-about”, bringing cameras and a quilt.  This depot was abandoned at the moment, so we posed the quilt and snapped a few shutters.  

This little quilt, Linen Baskets, is a sample I made a couple of years ago when my favorite quilt shop had a fat quarter bundle of linen fabrics.  The polka dots are all linen, the white background is a Kona cotton solid.  Finished, it measures 35” x 43”, a nice size to drape over a chair or hang on the wall. 

I love the little baskets.  They are adapted from a pattern called Big Bloomers from QuiltSoup.  I added wool appliqué in the border with some beading and embellishments.

 

 

 

We live near Zebulon Road, but it doesn’t lead to the town of Zebulon.  That fact amuses us.  We have noticed many Zebulon Roads in the middle GA area which, when studying a map, do not lead to Zebulon either.  So for this little quilt to get to pose on benches and doors and roof brackets of the depot in Zebulon was a fun note to add to our day. 

The quilting is a quick loopy meandering trail done with cotton thread and using thin cotton batting.  The backing is a bright fun Jane Sassaman design.  Many people like basket quilts as much as I do, but when I take this to groups, there are always gasps of delight when they see the back of this one.

 

I liked the contrast of the soft quilt with the hard lines of the doors and the weathered wood of the floor boards.  Jim did some of his darkroom magic on some of his shots, intermingling color and black and white.  I never get tired of that!

Satterfield’s Farewell

We bid farewell to a good friend today.  A favorite restaurant is closing this week, so we ate one last lunch there.  There are other restaurants in town where boiled peanuts are served as an appetizer, where waitresses are friendly, and where the food is good.  But we will miss Satterfield’s.

This is a place where we’ve taken several out-of-town visitors to experience good southern food and atmosphere.  It’s a spot where we’ve happily bumped into friends and enjoyed an impromptu reunion.  We treasure the memories of conversations on the porch, meals in the sunken dining area, and the delight on the waitress’s face when our grandson ate everything he had ordered – and it was a lot!  We even had our favorite parking spot.

Many final experiences are enjoyed without knowing it’s the last time you’ll be there doing that.  In this case, the owner announced a few weeks ago that the restaurant will be closing.  Happily, he’s just slowing down, not stopping.  So some recipes and menu items will live on at another restaurant in town, but we will miss Satterfield’s.

One of my first thoughts when I read about the plans was, “where will that guy eat?”  ‘That guy’ being a regular customer.  He’s been there every time we’ve been for lunch, sitting at the same table.  I wrote about him here.  So, today I asked our waitress about him.  She said he was wondering the same thing.

We are certainly not the only ones feeling the melancholy today.  One waitress said, “it’s hitting me now.  I’ve been in denial for three weeks, but today it seems real.”  Other customers were ordering everything on the menu, to taste it all one last time.  Some were taking selfies with their favorite waitress.  One woman was there alone, her husband’s poor health having kept her away in recent months.  But she had made special arrangements today to come have lunch.  The staff pampered her with extra attention. 

That’s the biggest thing we will miss.  The love that was served with the food.

Farmer Jess

There weren’t any chickens wandering the yard, but there were cows and goats and sheep, even a pony.  And a mule!  I can’t remember when I’ve been close to a mule!  


On the land I saw, there wasn’t a farmhouse, but there was a barn.  With a refrigerator filled with fresh milk.  Customers buy the milk on the honor system, leaving the money in a box on top of the refrigerator.  Isn’t that a refreshing idea?

 

 

 

I was visiting this bucolic place with my friend Carol.  Carol taught me that cheddar can be a verb.  She makes her own cheese.  I was impressed by the stories of her process and begged to see the farm where she buys her milk.

Carol opened the refrigerator door and selected the gallon of milk with the deepest layer of fat, knowing more fat makes a richer cheese.  Regulated milk has a minimum of 3.25% fat to be called whole, but this was clearly richer; I’d estimate close to 20%.  Carol takes the milk home, pasteurizes it, adds enzymes and time – lots of time, to make cheese.  I know there are other considerations, including wax or cheesecloth wrapping, but my knowledge is limited to taste testing.


I don’t need another hobby, but I can see the fascination with this process.  The simple act of making homemade yogurt is a regular routine at my house, so the cheese making process is enticing.

But the farm.  The farm is entrancing.  A cool morning, hills in the distance, not another human soul to be seen or heard.  I know there are times when things are busy, but not the morning we visited.  Even the farmer, Jess,  was away.  He’s away every day – at work.  That’s right.  Getting up at 4:00 a.m. to milk the cows; maintaining his pastures, fences, buildings; providing care and keeping his animals healthy, working until near midnight each night (including another milking session) is not enough.  He has to have a regular full time job to make ends meet.  

My extended family was filled with farmers.  Aunts and uncles and cousins grew peanuts, cotton, watermelons, vegetables, and livestock.  Sometimes they had supplemental jobs to help with cash flow, but not full-time, eight-hours-a-day jobs year round.  

It’s sad that today’s food is grown primarily by industrialized farms.  Our nation’s health status reflects that, too.  There’s just something so much healthier about fresh-from-the-earth produce, milk, and eggs.  As a society and as individuals, we are recognizing that.  

I’m so glad that there are still Farmer Jesses in the world.  And I’m even happier that Carol took me to see his heaven on earth.  

photo notes:  the cows and sheep were in the distance, except the bull who came to encourage us to leave.  The goats were close enough to be subjects of many, many photos.  As always, click on any image to enlarge.

Seven Black Birds

Seven Black Birds is a quilt that’s been on an outdoor photo shoot and I promised more details of its story – a few months ago.

Later is better than never, so here it is.

My friend Kathleen and I shared a love of needle turn appliqué and wanted to make a large album style quilt, each using the same pattern, but varying the fabrics.  We chose the Friendship’s Garden pattern by Barb Adams and Alma Allen.

We shared the plan with other guild members and soon had 20 or more members each making her own version of this project.  At one of our guild’s quilt shows, nine completed quilts made from this pattern were hung together so that visitors could see how individuals personalized their own creations from one common pattern.

I kept detailed photos of my work in progress, so I can share some of my design process through the story of this quilt.

I found a toile fabric in soft shades of brown for my background.  The country scenes in the toile seemed to fit the mood of the pattern  and I chose rich reds, greens, and browns for the appliqué.


Before I was done, the primitive birds in the pattern had been replaced with more sophisticated ones, and I put a blackbird in every wreath in the design.  The one with the nest and its contents inspired the title.  I love to watch people try to find all seven birds.

I made all the sashing blocks (half-square triangles) the pattern described, but when I put them on the design wall, they seemed to overpower my appliqué.  In this photo, some of those triangles have been stitched together, others are just clinging to the design wall.

I redesigned the sashing in a few different ways, auditioned those, and chose the “on-point” strips of squares.

seven black birds

The original sashing pieces were added to the back, making that construction more complex than the front.  But I love it!  This quilt is often displayed on a ladder in the den, and the back is the side turned “out” as much as the front.  The photo above shows the entire back of the quilt as it was hanging at the Ga National Fair.

I quilted the big assembly (it finished at 84″ square) on my faithful Bernina home machine.  Using a 50-weight, two-ply cotton thread I danced with my sewing machine. (I’ve written many posts describing my free motion quilting technique, and if you put that phrase in the search box on the right side of this page, you will find many references.  Perhaps the  process has been described in the most detail here.)

This quilt was finished in 2009.  The photos are from several cameras, some indoors, some out.  That’s why the colors seem so different.  The earlier post with photos at The Farm House Restaurant is here.

The Button Lady

On a recent trip to Lakewood 400 Antique Market, I met Kristine.  Kristine has buttons.  She collects buttons, she plays with buttons, she sells buttons.

Kristine knows buttons.  I spent $24 at her booth, but the knowledge I gained is worth much more than that.

 

 

 

I’ve seen collections of buttons before, but Kristine ‘s display tops the list.

Kristine had bone buttons, china buttons, wooden buttons, bakelite buttons, glass buttons, beaded buttons.  There were buttons on cards, buttons in jars, even buttons made into decorative floral arrangements.

In the past, Kristine sold at the Brimfield market.  When other dealers found out that she loved and sold buttons, they would sell her their button finds. The years have grown her collection, and her knowledge base.  Kristine encouraged my questions.  When I asked about horn buttons, she showed me what to look for, talked about romper buttons and the use of those buttons by Civil War re-enactors.

There were other sewing accoutrements, too.  Belt buckles, rickrack, snaps and hooks and eyes.  Fascinating, intriguing, mind-boggling; all words that fall short of describing the sense of enchantment with such a simple notion as a button.

I frequently include buttons in my quilts, so I must regularly add to my collection.  What a pleasure to do this with Kristine’s treasures.

Kristine was one of several women whose wares and stories intrigued me on this Lakewood trip.  You don’t want to read it all now…more posts will follow.  Suffice it to say that two hours at Lakewood inspired many days of creating.  The colors, the textiles, the combinations, and the people, all inform my sense of appreciation of the world.  What fun!

Birds of Amicalola

On a recent visit to a train station and refurbished old store, I took my camera and a quilt.  Birds of Amicalola posed on a bench and in front of the weathered boards of Mildred’s Store.

The quilt is made using the same basket pattern I created for Miss Lily’s Baskets.  In this quilt, I used charm squares of Kaffe fabrics for the appliquéd baskets and Cherrywood hand-dyed blue fabric for the background.  I made a lot of these blocks (I still have quite a few left over for some yet unknown project) before deciding how to assemble them.

I had some bright fabric on hand that had birds flying all about vines and leaves.  Those birds said, “we want to fly amongst those baskets.”  And the leaves seemed perfect for the wreaths in the baskets of the three focus blocks, so I fussy cut the leaves and birds and attached those elements with the invisible basting stitch I had learned from Jude Hill.  When I quilted, I stitched those pieces down with free motion stitching before moving to the background quilting.

The quilt measures  51 ” x   58″ .  The background quilting was done using silk thread (100-weight) on top, two-ply cotton (50 weight) in the bobbin.  The vine in the border is quilted with 30-weight polyester thread.

 

 

Photos of this quilt in progress were included in the post here.  Oh, and we were on a trip to Amicalola Falls State Park when I added the birds and leaves to the basket blocks.  That’s the source of the title.

 

 

And here is a closeup of the vine stitched on the border.

You can click on any image to enlarge and see details.

An update to include a photo of the entire quilt:

Here it is hanging in our local guild’s show.  The ribbon is for Best Machine Quilting on a Home Machine.

Fern Fronds and Fibonacci


A historic covered bridge seemed the perfect backdrop for a quilt photo shoot.  On a beautiful spring day Jim and I loaded the car with a couple of cameras, a couple of tripods, and a couple of quilts.

This stop was at the Red Oak Covered Bridge near Woodbury (details and a map can be found here: http://www.exploregeorgia.org/listing/476-big-red-oak-covered-bridge).  The quilt you see is my Fern Fronds and Fibonacci quilt, made in 2007.  It finished at   56” x 61” and features a sunprinted image of an Australian Tree Fern (Cyathea cooperi ) which was growing in our backyard garden at the time.

Some of my first explorations into putting images onto cloth were through the process of sunprinting.  This predates the printing, painting, and dyeing I’ve been exploring more recently.

The life size image of the fern frond measures 29“ x 34“.  The turquoise and white blueprinted image needed some color to give the quilt a more spectacular “wow” factor, so I chose to include a variety of brightly colored fabrics in the border.

Many batiks were used, along with some fossil fern prints.  I still love that line of fabric, and continue to use them a lot.  They are soft and loosely woven, but to me this makes them turn easily for appliqué.

To create a unique border, I referred to the Fibonacci sequence – the infinite mathematical sequence 1,1, 2 ,3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34… .  Each term of the sequence (after the first two) is found by adding the preceeding two terms.  For those of you who want a math review:   t1 = 1, t2 = 1, tn+1 = tn + tn-1.  And the answer to the inevitable test question, “is it arithmetic, geometric, or neither?” can be found at the end of the post.

The Fibonacci sequence is found in the growth pattern and leaf structure of many plants, including ferns. Google will help you with more intense investigation if you want to pursue it.

To interpret this into my quilt, I made colored rectangles all 1” tall, but whose widths were 1”, 1”, 2”, 3”, 5”, etc.  To avoid single loooong bands of color, I did not use a length greater than the 34” (limiting myself by the dimension of the plant image itself), I just repeated that sequence in a spiral until I was satisfied with the look.


The woven ribbon portion of the border was a design taken from one of Sally Collins’ books.

I was very inexperienced with machine quilting at the time and didn’t feel confident stopping and starting at the edge of the design.  So I quilted the grid in the sunprinted space by hand.  Make that read BY HAND.  That pretreated fabric is more closely woven than your normal quilting cotton making this a less than pleasant experience.  I used Dream Cotton batting which is nice and thin and generally easy to quilt through.  But now I know that wool would be sweeter to needle.  I don’t think wool batting was widely available at that time.

Then I dared to freemotion quilt fern fronds in the border space.  I traced a section of the fern, transferred it to the fabric using a lightbox, then stitched with an invisible polyester thread.

As I write this, I am amazed at how much I’ve learned since that experience.  But even though it’s full of what many would see as mistakes; I love this quilt.  I still love the fern.  I love the unique opportunity to combine nature and mathematics in fabric, and I love that I’m still learning things about quilting.

At the time I printed this image, I made many more blueprint images of plants including multiples of this plant.  I love planning ways to include these fabric images in new projects.

Older posts with details of other quilts with sunprinted images are these:

https://sandygilreath.com/gbi-blues/,

https://sandygilreath.com/whats-in-a-name/ (this one had a sunprinted label)

https://sandygilreath.com/annie-maes-lace/

Answer to the math question:  neither.  Arithmetic sequences are generated by adding a fixed constant to one term to get to the next; geometric, by multiplying.  Neither is the case in this sequence.

The black & white photo with color accent is Jim’s darkroom magic.  The other photos are mine.  If you think the fern is blurry, it’s not the camera.  It’s the motion of the fern in the wind during the 15-minute sun exposure.