Summer Time

Hazy crazy lazy days of summer…

There are no lazy days at this house.  Watching the hustle and bustle of children working on quilts without prompting makes my heart go pitter-pat.  Laura and Emily are my latest protégés in my quilting world and I have teased more than one customer that since they won’t let me quit quilting for people, it is never too early to groom my replacement.  I get great joy teaching someone how to cut fabric apart and sew it back together again and I have been blessed with many instances of sharing something I love so much with the next generation.

 Laura got to quilt her first quilt this year using my Gammill.  One of the prerequisites is you have to be tall enough.  I have my machine set up pretty high to make it easier on my back and my neck and I don’t really care if other people think it is awkward to use my machine. I quilt 5 days a week and my comfort is most important.  I cringe a little when the kids do use the machine since it is my daily job to get your quilts done when promised.  If the machine goes down due to negligence or an unforeseen mishap, I get behind schedule and that is never a good thing.

Before the quilting though, comes the construction. I have had quite the sweat shop going here lately and thought I’d share a few pictures.

Laura and Emily are busy doing what they need to do. Emily pins sitting on the floor and Laura does an excellent rendition of our friend, Pattie, crawling around getting all the blocks in the perfect spot.

I got blocks done for one of my own.  My friend, Pattie, lays out the blocks for me.  She surely loves me.  I cannot get on the floor to do this anymore and she is so gracious to do the crawling around for me.  She has some help, though.  Kiwi and Ducky supervised this job.

The finished layout job gets stacked back into rows and I take them home to sew together.  The finished quilt will be a future post! <GRIN>

In the mean time

Over at the barn...

Over at the barn there is little assembly line of bird house parts being manufactured by my husband and my great niece, Laura.

Our old cedar picnic table had seen better days and the holes for the lag bolts were getting too loose to tighten up anymore, so when Tony and Hazel visited from England in early May, Tom and Tony disassembled the picnic table and burned all the short wood and stacked all the long pieces for bird house construction at a later date.

Many nights after school, Laura helped Uncle Tom mill the wood to the proper thickness and I found two bird house patterns for the little carpenter crew to make.

Tom is easily confused when you have to measure and cut and when there are multiple pieces for a project, stand aside.  Laura was a huge help making a list of all the pieces needed for a bird house and how many to cut, etc.  She is an excellent list maker.

Before anything at all could be done, two boards would have to be glued together.  That was the first step.  Then milling to the proper thickness, Then measure, mark and cut out the pieces.

One afternoon Laura came and asked how big a hole was needed for wrens and I looked it up on the internet.  1 1/8” is how big the hole can go and that keeps the sparrows from using the bird house.  Down the basement and searching the drawers netted a drill bit that was the proper size.  I think this is the very first time a project got started and no tool had to be purchased…well wood glue, they ran out of that.  It doesn’t freeze well apparently!

I went to the barn today to see how things were progressing and found Laura painting designs on the bird houses so they look pretty.

Recycle, reuse and build a skill.

And they planted the beans and tomatoes in between the sunny days and the rainy days.  Perfect timing.

Quilting as an Art Form

The Art of Quilting

Quilting is an art form.  From designing the piece to the final stitch that finishes it.

I sometimes follow a pattern when piecing, but a lot of times I follow my instinct from choosing the colors to making the choice for the block.  There is no rhyme or reason in my thinking process; I just do what pleases me.

If I admit to having 12 unfinished projects sitting in boxes under my ironing table, you would know that I am human.  I start things and don’t finish them.  Well, eventually I will finish them!  I pull out a box of pieces and have to remember what my original plan was.  I have made a habit of putting all my notes I have made for assembling, pressing direction, etc. in the box of a project so I don’t have to swear at myself when I do go back to it.

Some of the most magnificent tops I have quilted are not pieced by me, and I am satisfied with the finished top after quilting as if I had made the whole thing.  It is an honor to be able to put the design in stitches on the top someone else pieced, and I take great satisfaction thinking of how to place design and color of thread to enhance it as well.  My favorite client is one who lets me do what I chose; especially if they have specific instruction on basics.  A guideline always helps me be more creative.

Paper piecing is not my forte.  I fumble with the paper, I can’t chose fabric colors, I feel like it takes too long…you name it, I’ve made the excuse for not ever paper piecing my projects.  My sister is not adverse to sewing fabric to paper and she has done the blocks for several projects for me that I really wanted but would not suffer the paper part of achieving it.

Recently I have had the pleasure of quilting three different paper pieced tops for a teacher who teaches classes and is a certified instructor for Judy Niemeyer patterns.  The quilts are amazing.  There are no other words to describe the piecing.  Her color choices are phenomenal and her finished top is always flat and square.  I don’t think there is anything else I can say about the beauty of her work.  I will let the pictures speak for me.

I can only say that the quilting of these tops just proves that simple title: The Art of Quilting!

Sewing for Scraps

Why Scrappy?

There seems to be a never ending supply of scraps in this studio. Whether from the trimmings of my quilts as I prepare a finished top for binding or just from trimming fabrics as I cut out projects and even from mystery bags that are left behind by my lovely customers, scraps never seem to go away.

What to do; what to do! I had such a hard time at the beginning matching my fabrics for a regular quilt project. That hard time multiplied when it was scraps I could not throw away because they were still pretty big and there were so many colors I could not decide how to make it work.

I decided one day that there was no reason why the colors could not work together; I just had to find something to make them all play nice. What followed was an 18 month foray into “sewing for scraps”. I experimented with all the colors I had in my cupboard.  

Starting with a rather light medium color of green, I made a sampler style of block using half square triangles made by sewing a square of scraps sewn on telephone book pages and cut into 6 ½” square and sewing that on the diagonal with a whole piece of green.  I cut these apart to make half square triangles that were strips on one side and green fabric on the other.  I experimented with different style settings to create six blocks.  The resulting quilt pleased me enough to have me move on to another color.

The next set of half squares that were strips on one side and whole fabric on the other became a very striking purple quilt that actually read as black.  I gifted that quilt to a friend who helped serve the food at a party I hosted for my longarm quilt group.

I learned from the first two quilts that I liked pairing the scrappy halves with dark rich jewel tone colors.  It seems to make the scraps pop better than middle range tones.  I’m not sure I created a monster, but I did start ripping through the scrap buckets.  Actually, my sister was ripping through the scrap buckets because she was the one sewing the scrap colors to the telephone book pages after her famous “any idiot can sew fabric to paper” statement.

 

One thing we found out, even after sorting scraps into color categories to make her brain happier working with them, one quilt or a dozen, the scraps never seemed to go away, the tubs (yes it went from one tub to tubs) just got fuller.  In self- defense Joanne started sewing strings of scraps (all the blacks, all the reds, etc) and she took them all to our friend Linda to weave bags with.  Linda reported back after the first group of scrap strings got woven into product that she had created over $600 in inventory.  The scraps still did not go away.  They are handled now in one tub again, still sorted into color category.

I make scrappy strip quilts still but have moved on from the half square triangle brain teasers.  Someone said once in a class I took that you paid the same price per yard for that scrap fabric so don’t waste it.  It appeals to my “use it up” upbringing as well.