No. 17

No. 17
84.5 " x 84.5"

I am the little one. The big one is my baggage. Sometimes, a lot of times, it is grief, a lifetime accumulation of losses. And it hovers immensely large and just above me threatening with it's crushing weight. 

Sometimes it is fear.

Sometimes it is mental illness, depression, unregulated chemicals in my brain that can only see gloom.

Lately it is the staggering loss of democracy in the land that I love. The trauma of violent and illegal kidnappings of our people wrapped the unsubstantiated cloak of vilified 'illegals'. The invasion of our military on our home ground and people. Or the vengeance of an unhinged leader also vilifying everyone who disagrees with him. I cannot forget the incitement of violence during the Jan 6, 2021 change of leadership, and the current pardons of all the violent felons...by a felon. The denial of science, climate change, the politicalization of vaccines, and the loss of women's rights to control their own bodies. The criminalization of using words like science, climate change, and DEI. The government censorship of education and ensuing retaliation. The loss of separation of church and state. The erasure of our history. The removal of health insurance, and jobs, and closing of our government. The sell out of our national parks. Corporate bribes, grift, the wanton greed and pocket lining of the president, and rising inflation. The loss of the value of truth. The loss of freedom of speech. The list is long and begs for accountability and the rule of law. Where are the spineless and mute leaders of our elected Congress?

This is my personal story. I am hoping that you will notice the little me is fully formed and not squashed flat. This is a quilt about suffering and resilience, and even though small....the mighty of the individual. And it is written in a visual language of abstraction. For my viewers it can be whatever you think or feel that it is about. Maybe grape flavored gumdrops? It is all valid. It is art.

The selection of a color palette was easy. Finding all the fabrics was not. I picked from my stash first, and then supplemented with a 'few' more. Here are the squares, cut out, and paired with some friends!

Here are the blocks, sewn into half square triangles, cut apart, and stacked. I love how the stack takes a star shape. 

Finally, I get to open them and see all the lovely color pairings. After pressing, they are trimmed to size and put on the design wall. 

This little quilt had a number of false starts and detours. I originally thought I would put a set of fabrics for the little hump from this palette. 

These are all batiks I made from my early days of being a quilt artist.  I love how they pair up with solid fabrics that I already had in my stash.

I was still liking it, not yet aware of just how awful this is going to look when stitched and paired with my dark cool big hump. I will spare you that one!

Once I changed color palettes, and remade the smaller hump, I knew it was a good decision, and I was happy with it!

The blocks were then stitched together, and cut out into their hump shapes. I used a paper template for both humps. And, drawing the big one was harder than drawing the little one!

Cutting into the smooth shapes... And cutting out the background from a whole cloth. 

I like to baste by hand, and decided to try individual ties, instead of a long running stitch. It is so cute how the ties ended up looking like faces! A perfect complement to the theme of the quilt. 

I wasn't sure what quilting stitch, or stitches I wanted to use for the hand quilting, though, I was quite sure that I wanted to hand quilt this one. I took a scrap and made a sample quilt sandwich. I spent 2 days working on different ideas, some that worked, some that did not. It was time well used!

Then I set about handquilting. This was another one of those false starts I referred to earlier. At about 2/3 of the way finished, I realized that the tension had a big problem, one that was not going away with increasing amounts of work. I still can't believe it took me so long to decide to rip it out. I think that once I got invested in the hand work, and then did it, it seemed an impossible choice to rip it out. But, it looked really bad. And, I didn't need it to look perfect, or be perfect, but this was far beyond my comfort level. So, in 4 hours, I ripped out 20 days worth of work. Sigh...

Then I had to start over. I rebasted it with safety pins this time (because it was faster, and I wanted to get started correcting the problem). Then I machine stitched the entire quilt in chunks along the seam lines and removed all the pins. This made it so easy to do the hand stitching later because I was using a hoop, and the pins weren't there to get in the way! And, the backing was now securely attached to the front, so it wasn't shifting at all. 

Loading the needle with stitches.

I also used varying weights of thread for the handstitching, some thicker, Sew Sassy, and some finer, variegated King Tuts threads. I loved the diversity of using different colors and different weights of threads for this project!

Last was the trimming of the quilt and the binding. A nice bonus of all the handstitching was that the tension was so incredibly even. I did not have to block the quilt to straighten it out! I applied the binding to the front of the quilt by machine, using white fabric to bind the white sections, and blue fabrics to bind the hump sections. 

And then I flipped the binding over the edge and hand stitched to the back. 

And right after I finished sewing the hanging sleeve on, the sky was filled with bright intense light from the sun behind the clouds, and there was no wind. So, I RAN outside with a hanging rod and ladder, and snapped some photos! YEASSS! A perfect finish!

No. 16

No. 16

50.5" x 40"

This one is another quilt addressing the issue of privacy. Literally, this quilt is about windows, specifically, the extensive use of floor to ceiling glass windows in many new modern houses. If you can see out, then others can see in. I love the idea of being able to see out, and bringing nature into a building (which was the original intent of this style of architecture). But I also really value my privacy. This would not be an ideal house for me. Also, because guns, when I see a house like this, all I can think of is, where do you hide from the bullets? I will leave you to imagine the metaphorical meaning of this work, because it is not obvious. (HINT: Think of the word 'windows' and privacy, and you'll be there!). 

I have been dreaming of this one for a long time, like YEARS, but I couldn't see the whole picture. I wanted fish swimming in a house of floor to ceiling glass windows. Then about 9 months ago, I found a commercially printed paper with koi fish. I KNEW that these would be the fish for the quilt. Except that, they were paper, and I wasn't sure how this was going to work??

I got the courage to go ahead and try moving forward on the project by trying to sketch the house. None of my efforts were working. I drove around Austin looking for the perfect 'model' house to sketch. I did not find it, though I suspect it is out there somewhere. Then I decided to look online for some ideas. I found these 3. 

None were perfect, or had the right angles, so I just jumped in and tried making a perspective drawing of a house in my sketchbook. I have never done a perspective drawing before, though I had seen one on social media. I was surprised how easily it all came together. Then I had to upscale the drawings for each room to make a pattern. 

Here is the sketch of the kitchen:

After sketching, I had to decide how to cut this apart and make it into a pattern, and which pieces would be sewn together first? I wanted to minimize the Y seams because those are more challenging. I used colored pencils to outline the shapes that would be sewn together as a group. Then I cut the sketch apart...labeled the pieces, and selected the fabrics for each piece.

This part feels a little daunting. However, a friend reminded me that I have done projects with more pieces, and that helped!

The next step is to trace each piece onto the back of the fabric and then cut them out with a seam allowance. And, it is a little challenging because some of the pieces are small and hard to hold still while tracing around them onto the fabric. One by one, they are stitched together. It would probably have been easier to paper piece this and definitely more accurate, but I find this method to be mentally easier.

After getting the house pieced, and the background, it was time to consider the fish. So, I cut them out and freed them from their backgrounds.

I wasn't sure how many I would need, so I just keep cutting and placing them on the design wall. Ultimately, I decided that this was too many fish!

You can see from this photo that the fish are swimming in FRONT of the house. However, I wanted them placed IN the house, which means they would need to be swimming behind some of the house walls. So, I cut open the seam allowances in the house, where the fish would be, and inserted them in through the new slots. Then I hand stitched the seams to match the size needed for the fish opening. I also needed the fish to stay in place before I got to the quilting part, so I used Mistyfuse on the back side of the fish. Did you know it works great on paper too? Cool! Note: This was a sequence error. It is easier to put Mistyfuse on the fish before cutting them out than afterwards, so trimming the Mistyfuse to the fish body was a bit tedious.

If you look closely, you can see the fish behind the just barely transparent fabric of the door!

Then I started the machine quilting. I was very concerned that the needle holes from the quilting would rip the paper the fish were on. Fortunately it was such a heavy weight of paper that I had no problems! Whew! I did have a very clear vision of how I wanted the quilting lines to look, and it required a lot of stops and starts, which in turn meant a lot of thread tucking.

The other minor parts of the project included some hand applique for the lights in the kitchen, and a bit of satin stitch to define some of the shapes better. This put me on hold for a couple of weeks because I thought I needed some shiny black thread. I did get the thread, but the delivery was SO slow, and my patience for finishing the project was wearing thin. And then the new thread did not perform well in my sample testing, and I ended up using something I already had (which I can not remember now what it was...). That is the way it goes sometimes!

The last little part was the scariest! The fish took a bit of a beating with all the machine quilting from pushing the quilt through the machine so much. I decided to 'fortify' them with a couple of coats of high gloss medium, applied by hand with a small paint brush. I thought about doing it first, but the fish were ironed in place with the Mistyfuse, and I didn't want to try to iron a fish that had medium on the surface. So maybe it all worked out okay? 

I am overall very happy with the way this turned out! It is so satisfying to see an idea become actualized! I entered this quilt into Quilts=Art=Quilts, but it did not get accepted. As happy as it would have been to have my little quilt go out into the world, I am comforted when they get rejected because then I get to look at them a bit longer, and I don't have a lot of shipping expenses. Possibly a warped perspective here, but I am okay with that. I hope you like this one! Thanks for stopping by! 

No. 15

No. 15

49" x  29.5" 

Design.

This one had a number of design temptations.

It was originally designed in my sketchbook to look like this:

It was a white background variation of No. 6:

But after the blocks were stitched, I decide to play with the layout because I had another idea:

I had a hard time deciding which one I liked better, but ultimately went with the second version.

Making it:

I can do the math to get the right sized white pieces to construct this, but, I fail on sewing accurately enough for the math to work. So this time, I decided to measure as I went along. It worked much better!

After constructing all the blue arches/bridges/hurdles I played with putting a large or small white border on top. In my mind I envisioned a really large blank white canvas above the blues.

So I placed some fabric behind the piece and looked at it. Then I tried a smaller border on top. 

After looking at these, I didn't really like either one, so I opted to just truncate the top with the last blue section. It is funny to me that sometimes what I think will look good, does not. 

Quilting closeup:

No. 14

No. 14

43" x 43"

I love the simplicity of this one, in both pattern and color. It is soothing.

Making blocks...these are ready for trimming.

The marimekko test... (always a favorite of mine, if it goes with the unikko mug, it must be good!)

Yep, this works! The project has a green light to proceed now!

Channeling Salvador Dali as the quilt top 'melts' over the edge of the ironing board.  Ha ha! I also love how well it goes with the quilt on the wall!

Photo bomb... I can't decide which one is better? 

AKA: the camouflaged cat...

Happy coincidence? Or am I just drawn to the same colors?

And last, a close up of the quilting.

No. 13

No. 13

42" x 42"

This is the quilt that is made from the other half of the blocks I used to make No. 12. I was curious how it would look with the blocks slightly removed from each other, so I moved them apart on the design wall.

I really like how much lighter the quilt feels. Next up was to make the white sashing for the new arrangement.

And, I am always fascinated by how much a quilt shrinks after sewing the seams! 

And, for the quilting, I opted to use a warm thread color in one direction, and a cool thread color in the other direction. For all the angst of choosing quilting threads, I still maintain, that it does not really matter that much. In this piece you can see the quilting design and the texture, but the thread colors don't really show up. 

And last, a photo of my quilt, in the wild! ha ha!

No. 12

No. 12

30.5" x 31"

No. 12 in the wild

This beautifully painted utility box in my neighborhood seemed the perfect complement to my little quilt! I wish the artist had signed their work. It is a perfect blend of garden themes in the intersection of representative and abstract works!

The idea for this one came from the color palette of No. 11.  I wondered what a quilt would look like with the HSTs made from the color gradients of the background for No. 11. I reduced the selection down to 12 colors in each color path because I wanted to make a smallish quilt. 

Then I started cutting out the squares and arranging them on the design wall. Here is the first layer of brown to greens. 

Now to add the layer of warm fabrics in the other direction on top. Each block will have a different combination of colors, no two will be the same.

As you may have guessed and what has become apparent to me, is that each combination will make 2 identical blocks. So this quilt and No. 13 will be inherently tied together by sharing the same blocks. This will give me an opportunity to try more than one idea with this color palette! So fun!!

Here are the trimmings from all the blocks. I love how colorful they are!

Here's the very first idea arranged the way I thought I would like. Except that it didn't really sing to me. It is lovely, but I was still wondering what else I could do. 

So, I tossed all the blocks to the floor, and picked them up randomly and placed them chaotically...

Also nice, but it doesn't really give me that meadow experience I was hoping for.

Third try was the final outcome where I rotated every other line of blocks so that the colors blend into diamonds. It is appealing and so saturated with color, it jumps off the page!

Next the basting and quilting.

To finish up the quilt, I opted to use the yellow from No. 11 that was not included in this selection of colors. It is a nice bright edge for this quilt and I like the way it refers back to No. 11.

And last, a detail photo!

Next week, I will share with you No. 13 made from the same selection of blocks. It looks VERY different from this one.