There's a New Quilter in Town!

On Thursday, Hayden and I finally got around to putting together his fabric for a quilt we cut out a while ago. He successfully wrenched me away from my project (grid quilting the all-blue monster) while I had enough patience and calm to teach him a few basics. He learned how to thread the machine, pull up the bobbin thread, and sew a straight seam. We both agreed that for now, I would be the one to do the rotary cutting, and the ironing.

It was a lot of fun! I'm normally not the most patient when it comes to kid projects (a horrible admission for a full-time mom!) but Hayden listened very patiently and accepted his inability to do everything perfectly. The best part about the whole eneavor was his enthusiasm, demonstrated by his patented "happy jump" -- the pogo-like vertical two-foot hop he does on the soccer field, and at the carnival, whenever he is really excited and happy.

Yesterday he finished the quilting and sewed on the binding. The next step will be to teach him how to blind stitch the binding to the back side. He was a little resistant to hand-sewing, but I think it will be a good skill for him to learn -- and will also free up the sewing machine...for me!

Order Up!

The boys and I toted a crate full of quilts down to Jeanine's store today. And I was so glad to get them out of the house I felt like shouting "order up!" as I did when I was a breakfast cook.

I've had them mostly done for over a month now but have been dithering on tags, labels and signange. I finally beat Macintosh Pages into submission and created a "look" I really like. I bought a font ("Deviant Plain" dontcha know) and floated my text over a puffy white cloud in a beautiful blue sky. Sharon "got" the dreamy, peaceful concept I was going for when I showed her a tag today, so there's my positive reinforcement.

Jeanine had a scarf rack already hanging in the store where she decided to hang the quilts. I'd love to be a fly on the wall as people are looking at them...hopefully they'll say nice things, and even more, I hope they'll bring them home and find a cuddly baby to enjoy them.

I don't reckon I will really make what one would call a profit on these, but I did get the satisfaction of creating some wonderfully well made little works of art.

So, if you're looking for a special shower or baby gift, head on down to About Time Clothing at 839 Water Street in lovely Port Townsend and pick yourself up one of my creations.

Mini Quilt Monday

Over on a stitch in dye is a feature called Mini Quilt Monday. I' pretty sure this doll quilt I made for Harper's fifth birthday qualifies: at 17"X14" it's a wee little gem.

I was pretty random in constructing it - I'll call it a "disintegrating three strip," as I simply grabbed some strips of fabric off of my sewing table and sewed them together, then cut them up into 4" blocks, sewed those together, and then cut them apart a la the disappearing nine patch technique. Eureka! orderly, yet random, just as the disappearing nine patch is.

Harper's birthday party was yesterday, and the whole afternoon was a delight. Graham and I walked the four blocks to her house with me in heaven because he held my hand the entire way. I swoon every time I get to hold his hand. Harper's folks have a lovely big house, with an epic yard. After being physically attached to me for a good solid hour, Graham finally got up enough gumption to run and play and join in on the birthday fun. It was a "parent's stay" kind of party and I enjoyed a couple of glasses of white wine while having lovely conversations with the assorted moms and the few dads. Oh, and the weather was gorgeous! Sunny and warm enough to wear a skirt and sandals! My idea of the perfect temperature.

At present opening time I was trying to get a cute picture of Harper and her new quilt, but as I was using the little Canon camera which is dreadfully slow, my cutest pic has another child's head in the middle of the frame! I'm pretty sure Harper loved her gift as after the presents were all opened, she was carrying it around the lawn, clutched tightly in her little hand.

What an absolute treat to know adorable five year olds who love doll quilts!

A Big Hunk of Swirly Blue Fabric

What does six yards of 90" wide unbleached muslin look like after it's been low-immersion dyed in three different colors of procion blue? Like this:

In my quest to a) use up some of my fabric stash, and b) finish up some UFO's, I found this big hunk of fabric (purchased when?) and soaked it for 24 hours in the aformentioned blue. I sure hope I successfully rinsed out all of the dye, because now it is the bottom layer of a quilt sandwich laid out in the spare bedroom. Just one to two-hundred safety pins later, and I'll be ready to quilt!

The quilt began as a project for Graham, who was in need of a full-size quilt. He specified "blue" when asked for his preference, and lo and behold I found over 40 different blue fabrics in the mighty cabinet o' stash. It wasn't until after I had gotten nearly all of the fabric cut that he capriciously changed his mind, and declared that he wanted his new quilt to be 'green.' Oh well.

The pattern for the quilt top is called "Anvil Star" and turned out rather nicely, I think. Midway through the dyeing process I realized that I had been down the all-blue quilt top with low-immersion dyed backing fabric road before: for the "Making Waves" patterned quilt that currently graces the guest room. It may not be a ground-breaking innovation for me, but if I ever get it all quilted, I bet Hayden, the new recipient, will enjoy it. Perhaps he'll even dream swirly blue dreams while lying underneath it.

Manly, Yes, But I like It Too!

And behold, here is a manly little quilt I made for a friend's store. She specified "four girl quilts and two boy quilts" - roughly the same proportion of girl:boy clothing available at Gymboree!



I stole the colorway from a previously completed quilt made in a different pattern (which, try as I might, I cannot find in my pattern drawer!) - it features Kaffee Fassett's "Targets" fabric, which I loved the moment I saw it in the store. I've subsequently bought a little piece of "Targets" in the blue/pink/lime/ orange colorway. I'm sure it will leap out of my stash cabinet right quick.

For the pattern on this little darlin' I tried the currently popular "Disappearing Nine Patch" that has been taking the inter-blogs by storm. I made big beefy 5" squares and really enjoyed the orderly, yet random way this went together. As you can see, this quilt has a manly backing fabric, and I tried diamond quilting for the first time, simply chalking one 60 degree line down the middle of the quilt and using my stitch guide to keep the lines roughly 2.5" apart. The whole thing reminds me of men's ties and haberdashery.

I'm curious to see how this will be received - black and brown for a baby quilt? What do you think?

My First (Completed) Quilt

With late-life motherhood came an abundance of...free time! Well, not *free* exactly, but no longer was I working 40-60 hours a week teaching high school english or writing copy to promote music festivals, or raising money to put on said music festivals, etc. So, round about the time Hayden was 6 months old, I got the notion to start sewing. I had my grandma's Singer Featherweight, but no manual and no parts. Those had somehow been lost in the transfer between my mom, my sister and myself. Although I could find out the exact date of birth of my machine on the internet, I couldn't find a manual, and since I didn't know how to thread the machine - I was stuck! Stuck until I wrote some nice lady in Texas (whose address I did get from the internet) and she sent me a xeroxed copy of the manual. I was off and running!

My very fist quilt was an unlovely fence rail which annoyed me to no end once I got it done. There was an olive green in a paisley print that I could not overlook. Plus, this first quill suffered from numerous misaligned seams and so was relegated to the bottom of a drawer.

For this, my second quilt, I chose the fabrics with care, and settled quickly on a scrappy nine patch pattern. I learned how to set my blocks on point, and machine-quilted it all myself. I actually love the way it came out. Although I had intended it for a crib quilt for Hayden, it never quite made it there. Now, it still hangs on the wall of my second lil' darling's baby room - a room we still have yet to find a use for (except for storing the dozen or so finished quilts and quilt tops!)

BAD MOOD HOT MITT

Today dawned with a sore throat (for me) and the thought of making my mother a lovely little mini-quilt for Mother's Day. I thought; bright Amy Butler prints, some reds, some pinks, maybe even some applique. Once the kids were dropped off, the mood to create said lovely item had waned. Instead I spied the brown and green and orange fabric scraps from the two "boy" quilts I'm working on, and thought, "hot mitt."

Well, it was a slicing and dicing affair. I suffered not one, not two, but three rotary cutter injuries (!) and scrapped this thing together. i had to drag the young one downtown after school to take it to the little mail shop to get it in the mail in time. At any rate, it will probably keep my mom's hands protected. Tomorrow's bound to be a better day, right?

QUILT-A-LONG

Who knew? There's a vast global cadre of blogs about quilting? Mine is just the 4 millionth outcry from an overeducated woman sublimating her intelligence by cutting up beautiful fabric and sewing it back together again. One fine and robust example is "crazy mom quilts" a sparky sounding gal named Amanda Jean who is wondrously productive. Her blog has great stuff, and tutorials, too!

Last week she announced a "quilt-a-long" of a scrappy nine-patch. I, and over 250 other people announced their willingness to participate. The call was simply to create a nine-patch square once a day for 70 days, periodically post a picture of your results, use up a bunch of one's carefully saved fabric scraps, and soon; enough squares to make a delightful quilt.

I'm liking it, because a) it has caused me to actually organize some of my carefully saved scraps, and b) I am having fun making tiny color decisions and going through the manuevers of tiny assemblage. Quilt project writ small.

Anyway, here are my results (I'm a bit ahead of schedule: the thing started on Monday, April 27) - I'm two days ahead!

At first, I was randomly pulling scraps out of baskets and then I thought it better to curate and select my scraps. Have you noticed the pink theme?

In other news I did not get the somewhat career-esque position I applied for, and have been subsequently examing my navel and my place on Planet Earth.

San Diego Purse

In February, on my last foray as a traveler, I accompanied a friend on a buying trip to...Las Vegas! I took my big old Coach bucket bag as I figured it would make a good carry on, one that would hold snacks and water, sunglasses and mints, vodka and Kleenex. Well, it did all that, but was a big brown weight on my shoulder. Ouch.

So, for our Spring Break trip to San Diego (o.k., lets get real...to LEGOLAND!) I knew I’d want a big ‘ol bag to again carry the aforementioned stuff, but with room for sunscreen, granola bars, fruit leather, maps and hats. Clearly, what needed to happen in the week before we left, was to make -- and quilt, a purse!

I was limited to fabric on hand and had a choice of red or green corduroy for the outside, with a tasty selection of big-patterned juiciness for the inside. After dithering, red won out.

The pattern is from a great little book called Hip Handbags. Great directions, lovely diagrams, lots of great sample photos. I keep on making the same style from it, the “Tuck”, but that’s o.k., it has a pleasing trapezoidal shape and works well as a shoulder bag, even when I bump up the size a little.



I first started quilting the linings of my purses this Christmas, when I made small “Tucks” for my nieces. I hadn’t been liking the prescribed fusible interfacing (it just kind of gave a wan stiffness, with no body) that the book described, so I simply quilted some batting directly to the lining fabric. I ended up with a just right amount of stiffness and body, with of course, the added delight of quilty goodness.

I like my finish project, but now back from our trip, I think I would have liked a slightly smaller bag, one with a shorter strap that would hug in closer to my body, giving me freer motion to pick up children, cocktails or a People magazine at the airport newsstand.

Streak of Lightning


This big (96’ x69’) quilt was certainly a long time in the making. I started it in 2002 and just finished it last month. I found the pattern in the wonderful book 101 Fabulous Rotary Cut Quilts, a highly useful compendium with full page color photos and easy directions. One of the first books I bought as a novice quilter, I’ve since made about six quilts from it!

What I liked most about this quilt from the beginning was simply the fact that I chose the fabrics because they appealed to me. I mixed juvenile prints with batik, hearts with flowers, with no audience in mind. The Michael Miller “Font” fabric was a draw - and I like the way the zig zags pop out from the black and white. I’ve since gone on to collect even more fabric with text on it, enough so that when it came time to finding a binding I already had the fabric -- committing the cardinal sin of mixing a serif and sans serif font together.


This quilt also reminds me of the splendor that was Quilter’s Cove, the now long gone quilt fabric store, that used to be on Water Street here. Back before I was a quilter, I remember walking in and being sorely intimidated by the sheer vastness of the array of neatly arranged fabrics, and the somewhat stern-looking employees. Despite that, with Hayden in tow, or on a run downtown on the weekends during his naptime, I came to be quite good friends with the owner, who was good at helping me with sewing and fabric selection problems. The brick walled shop had great natural light, and some 40’ tall ceilings (the loft upstairs was reserved for sale fabrics and classes) - to me the place was like a combination of candy store, liquor store and shoe store, definitely a zone of temptation. My shameful stash is mostly due to buying just a little of this and a little of that, and from spending liberally at the twice-yearly sales.

Anyway, Streak of Lighting has been through many revolutions in my life, and has been shuffled out of the sewing room and out to the garage and back again. Since I started trying to machine quilt it, I’ve gained a lot of confidence -- moving from stitching in the ditch, to unmarked, unplanned zig-zagging. Originally just made to please myself, it now graces Graham’s bed, where hopefully, the five-years-old and one day young man will learn to identify the rest of the letters in the alphabet (at his teacher conference this week, we learned he can identify exactly half of his uppercase letters.) Maybe through osmosis?

The Rule of 10

Here it is, another freshly finished little quilt top. It caused me just a little bit of fabric selection consternation - but I found out that the more fabrics I added in, the better I liked it. The final number of fabrics came in at 10, and like many a quilter, I figured I'd make a rule about it - thus, the Rule of 10! Follow it and be wonderful.

It's not a truly "scrappy" little quilt, as I mostly stuck to some of the wonderful Amy Butler fabrics which have been biding their time in my somewhat shamefully large stash. Oh, and it includes the crucial bit of Kaffe Fasset, in this case "Paisley Jungle." Sigh, I think I could use Paisley Jungle in every quilt. Or at least some Kaffe Fasset fabric in every quilt.

I did have some key help with the photographing of this quilt, a certain someone who is turning FIVE next Wednesday. He opined that he liked the quilt top, and said it was pretty.

A Few Essentials

I think my shopping trip was intiated by our discovery last week that we were almost out of maple syrup. You know, real maple syrup that now costs something like $64 a gallon. The place to buy this Saturday and Sunday morning breakfast essential is Costco. One hour out of town Costco. So, after dropping the boys off at school, I zipped off to Consumerdale. There I went a little nuts.

Oh, I should also mention, our chest freezer was looking kind of empty. It is not empty anymore. Maybe it was because I was shopping without the kids, but man, did I buy a lot of food at Costco. Steaks, cheese, nuts, more meat, some chicken. Did I mention I bought some meat? If you are feeling low iron, stop on by.

Anyway, with all the meat stashed in a cooler chest I stopped by to buy some fabric essentials. Orange polka dots, orange stripes, some pink, more polka dots - basics. I was really trying to be thrifty! I think they look nice in the sun here, all washed and mostly ironed, and they look like they kind of want to be in a quilt together. We'll just see if they get their wish.

Seeing Double

These two lively little quilt tops were part of a test. The test was to see how long it would take me to cut and piece a stroller sized baby quilt. I tried to do everything as quickly as possible, including selecting the fabrics! I held my decision making down to a dither of about 15 minutes, and it took me a half hour to cut out the fabric for both.

The first quilt top I pieced together in an hour, in the very time-hungry manner of laying each square out individually on my design board, as I just can't quite figure out how to strip piece something so that it has that pleasingly random look I like.


For the second (nearly identical?) quilt top, I used the first as a template and chain-pieced the squares in order from left to right, top to bottom. Unfortunately, I didn't get an accurate stop-watch timing of this method, as I did it while; doing laundry, making dinner, running a bath for the boys and surfing the internet!

I'm mostly pleased with how they turned out - they look sunny and breezy - and hopefully will be very fetching with a bright orange flannel backing and a pink polka dot binding.

The Retired Quilt

Now it seems a little faded, a bit tired. It’s a little thinner now, five years after I made it, and it’s been replaced by a bigger, brighter quilt I just finished.

The retired quilt is noted as “Avery’s Quilt” in my sewing journal. Avery was my first pick name for the baby I was carrying as I made it. Crib size, it came from a quilt shop pattern called “Crazy Baby” which was an ingenious method of stacking eight fabric squares together, cutting them in random shapes and then shuffling the fabrics back together so each square was different. I started with the alphabet fabric border first, and then had fun mixing and matching the muted primary colors for the squares. I know I picked the alphabet fabric partly because Hayden, then just two, was crazy about everything alphabet. Alphabet blocks, stickers, magnets, cookie cutters, the boy who learned the alphabet in a week at 21 months was on fire!

I ended up liking the quilt quite a bit as I finished it, and spent quite a bit of time re-configuring the color placement. Now I look at it and wish I had done the quilting differently, it’s all stitch in the ditch, and as such, adds nothing, and doesn’t even make the shapes pop out better. I do remember finding solace in the act of making it that last month of that pregnancy, dealing as I was with nausea, heartburn, a sideways and/or upside down baby and painful varicose veins...in my toes! Not to mention the close quarters of sharing the house with my parents who stayed with us for that last month.

But finally, that sideways upside down baby, Graham Thomas, was born via c-section. Home from the hospital I stitched the binding in place and once he was ready for the big milestone of a big boy bed, “Avery’s Quilt” became his.

It seems like we are facing a lot of milestones of independence these days; Graham started Level One swim lessons this week, his first foray away from the “parent and child” class. The sight of him, bare chested, sitting on the bench clear across the pool, tugs my emotions in opposite directions. I’m filled with pride at his courage and autonomy, and with bittersweet sadness now that my baby is no longer at my side, or in my arms.

As for his retired quilt, I guess I’ll give it a wash and gently fold it up, to find a home at the linen closet at the end of the hall.

Making a doll quilt for a little girl is wonderfully fun. Not only do I get to choose the happiest scraps in my scrap basket, I can also amp up the pink and mix lavender, orange and green at will. These are mostly Amy Butler fabrics I had kicking around, with a super girly white with roses print for the back.

At Ursula's request, her parents threw her an "adults included" party. They'd recently been to Oaxaca, Mexico where they had been to a friend's birthday party. Ursula had such a good time there, she wanted to duplicate the experience.

I'm not sure what the party in Mexico was like, but this one was wild! Mostly it was wild due to the fact that there were approximately a dozen children there under the age of seven, with a high preponderance of boys. They were chasing one another in laps around the kitchen island, they were bouncing (literally) off the furniture and walls in the playroom, and they were devouring crispy tacos -- sprinkling taco meat, cheese and lettuce bits all over the hardwood floors.

When it came to present opening time, Ursula was totally in charge. She and a couple of the other little girls rounded up all the presents and put them in the middle of the living room floor. As the hostess was busy, I helped find a pen and paper for another mom to write down the gifts and givers (I'd hate for anyone to miss out on a thank-you note opportunity!) The happy five-year-old got a range of girly things, some princess puzzles, a Barbie like doll and some books. When she opened my present she beamed from ear to ear, stood up and did a little twirl, clutching the quilt to her chest.

I think quilts are a good thing. Bright, soft, all cotton and so fun to give away.