domesticat.net -- quilts

Transit

domesticat — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:00:19 +0000

When I put yesterday’s fresh rounds of travel into TripIt, I saw a line that summed up my year:

You’ve traveled 43,660 mi to 44 locations.

I nodded, thinking to myself about the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met — or reconnected with — and felt profoundly grateful. I’ve been welcome in a lot of places over the past year, slept on a few new couches, met delightfully new recombinations of humanity. All unique, none replaceable.

Extended amounts of travel, over time, affect you. The anonymity of airports begins to rub off on you after a while. If you’re not careful, your web of connections to the world at large comes at the price of feeling a little less seated in the place where you ostensibly live: when you consider where to shop, or where to order takeout from, you first reset your expectations by asking yourself what city you are in today.

I asked my calendar how long I’d be gone for the next few rounds of trips, and the answer? 36 days, total, over 3 trips. I’ll be in cities I enjoy: Boston, New York, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. Good places, good people.

I’ve upgraded my camera, and plan to take it on all three trips. The D80 has been sold, and replaced with a D7000, giving me better opportunities for low-light work. I’ve also bought an on-camera GPS unit, so I’ll no longer have to wonder where my photos were taken.

My last decision is a more personal one. A few months ago, I made the painful decision to redo every bit of work I’ve done on Pentatonic, because I was unhappy with it. I showed it to a coworker (moment to stop and think, the conversation was in Boston) and demonstrated the problems with my technique, and even his untrained eyes could see it. I’ve tended to refer to this quilt, and Seven Brides, as my “masterwork” quilts, and they both deserve better than these mismatched corners and flubs.

So I started over. Ripped every seam, and have taken the sewing machine out of the equation. I began English paper piecing every piece, ripping out seams, and setting corners to rights. It is simultaneously deeply upsetting, and immensely satisfying. Was I wrong? Yes. Did I make major mistakes? Yes. Am I fixing them?

Every damn one of them.

The side benefit: Pentatonic can now be my airplane project. When I finish it — and I will — I want to be able to hold my head high and say, “Yes, that IS a king-sized quilt made of a Penrose tiling. Go ahead, look closer; the workmanship will get better, the closer you look.”

I may be in transit. I still need to square away when I’ll be in Canada. I’ve never had to say to myself before, “I’ll get my Vancouver airfare straightened out once I get the Boston trip booked!” but some things haven’t changed about me. I’ve been keenly aware that my travel schedule over the past year has forced me to take smaller and simpler projects while the masterworks sat, begging for time and effort.

Pentatonic, pack your bags. We’re going to Boston next week.

Invariant

domesticat — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 22:26:12 +0000

Date:

2 March 2013

Photoset:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/domesticat/sets/72157632900554336

Recipient:

Katherine's son

Pattern:

Half-square triangles

Level of completion:

Sewn, awaiting quilting

This morning, while working to finish Invariant, I found myelf reflecting on the travel schedule I’ve been maintaining over the past year and the conflicting effects it’s had on my creative time. My stash has picked up fabric from Denmark, Oregon, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Colorado, Holland, and England. That same travel schedule has made it very difficult for me to actually work through the projects in my head, making me feel that I am “unproductive” when, in fact, I’m just not at home long enough to dig into anything larger than what I call a “snack food project.”

I paused a moment to add it up, and the rough napkin math says that I have been either out of state or out of country 13.5 weeks of the last 52. That’s a quarter of the year. When I flipped back through the calendar, of course it made perfect sense; I remembered every trip, every airport, and nodded and said yes, those were real trips — but the cumulative number had never dawned on me until I counted. That’s just over three months.

No wonder I feel like I’m not accomplishing the ideas in my head. I’m not home to do them.

One of the trips I took that just barely missed the cutoff date was a January 2012 trip to Boston that let me swing down through New York afterward. Colter and I wandered around lower Manhattan, having hot chocolate and ambling from store to store. We traded interests; he wandered into guitar shops

and I wandered into fabric shops. (Quick, everyone find your shocked faces.)

Also, that hot chocolate from City Bakery? It’s the most decadent hot chocolate I’ve ever had. If you’re in Manhattan on a cold and blustery day, you should get some.

I managed to catch four Broadway shows over the course of a weekend (Godspell, War Horse, Book of Mormon, and Wicked) and came home with two packages of lovely Japanese kofu squares in heavy, linen-feel neutrals:

Didn’t have a bloody clue what to do with them, so I plopped them on the shelf and took them out and fondled them periodically to see if ideas came to me. For months, nothing did. (—Huh. Truth be told, that photo’s from October 2012, and since I didn’t start cutting into the fabric until early March of 2013, I sat on the fabric for over a year before I cut into it.)

I noodled around for the longest time with the idea of cutting the squares in half, into what’s known in the world as “half-square triangles,” and reassembling these low-contrast triangles together into a subtle pattern. I liked the idea but couldn’t settle on a single pattern, until I stumbled on http://finitegeometry.org/sc/gen/bdes/ and stared at the 4x4 grid composed of half-square triangles. Half black, half white, with the word “invariant” underneath. (In mathematics, the word refers to a type of object that doesn’t change when certain transformations are performed on it. )

I woke up the next morning and the idea had stuck in my head, which is usually the hallmark of “guess what, start sewing, because you’ve already chosen and you just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet.” I tried it out to verify that it would work, and it did:

and confirmed that the pattern was still visually interesting when repeated:

Then, of course, life had to throw a roadblock. For once, it wasn’t travel; it was ripping up the flooring in the entire house:

The pieces waited on the back wall while the carpet in each room of the house was replaced, one by one, with hard flooring.

Unsurprisingly, after I got my house back, a weekend to rest and recover and I was starting to nibble away at the project again:

While still unfinished as of this writing, I don’t fly again for a few more weeks, but I think I can get this one quilted and sent out before I travel again. In the long term, the travel is satisfying and enriching for me — my longtime lust to see the world has been amply documented over the years — but in the short term it is hard to see past the unfinished ideas I’ve been building up.

This idea, at least, is finally starting to see the light of day, and I’d be well-served to remember that the only person who puts this kind of pressure on me is … me.

Hyperspace Bypass

domesticat — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 01:01:30 +0000

Date:

21 August 2007 - 10 February 2013

Photoset:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/domesticat/sets/72157606877405925

Recipient:

Jen and Jerry

Pattern:

Strips and Curves

Level of completion:

Completed and given away

Blog entries referencing this quilt:

Some assembly required

I’ve posted a lot of projects on this site, but this one is hard — hard enough that it’s been many years in the making, and I’m only just now talking about it.

Hyperspace Bypass was my second attempt at quilting, and it was very nearly my last. It was too technically difficult for me at the time, and while I did my best, it didn’t work out the way that I wanted it to. In perfectionist terms, I knew what I had to do: I packed it up and put it away. I’ve been dodging this quilt top ever since, and it has bothered me more and more throughout the years.

I decided, late in 2012, that I needed to stop hiding this top and, perfect or not, it wasn’t doing anyone any good sitting folded away, unfinished, on a shelf. I sucked it up, pulled it out, took pictures of it, and posted it.

It’ll end up going to an old family friend, someone who has known me since I was a child.

It boggles me a little to look at photos like this one

and realize how much has changed over five years. In some ways, it’s better not to think about it. Therein lies a path of sadness. Better to just focus on the strips of fabric waiting to be cut,

celebrate the years back when I laid my pieces out on a couch because I had no design wall,

and stepped back and did my best.

I’ve learned a lot since I worked on this quilt top. The edges will be wobbly-wavy. I can quilt a good amount of that out, if I’m careful. But I also look back and see things that are my hallmarks now, in positive ways, like pulling out every scrap of the stratas, and finding ways to work them into the quilt:

It isn’t perfect. I’ve learned so much since then, and learning to forgive my mistakes is hard. I cringe at showing anything that’s less than perfect, but I hope that by talking about it, and talking about the process, it makes other people braver about trying new things. No one wakes up knowing how to do a craft; it is learned by time and study and practice and failure and flubs.

It’s fitting that while this was my second quilt top started, it will be my 42nd finish.

A Douglas Adams-themed name seemed appropriate.

Aperture

domesticat — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 02:38:24 +0000

Date:

1 January 2013

Photoset:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/domesticat/sets/72157632419940808

Recipient:

John W's family

Pattern:

Half-square triangles

Level of completion:

Sewn, awaiting quilting

We’ve been doing a slow but persistent de-cluttering of our house, and I’ve been looking at lots of items in our house, asking myself “what can I toss, finish, or tidy?” I’ve been staring hard at the beautiful, yet space-gobbling, silk fabrics I’ve had sitting on my top shelf for a couple of years —

— and looking at the pile of backing fabrics I brought back from Europe that needed shelf space, realizing that if I dealt with the one-time pile, these fabrics would have a permanent place to live.

I’m on holiday this week, an enforced break away from work and stress and people and talking in preparation for a six-week stint of talking, teaching, people, and travel; I realized the one thing I wanted most was to give myself a great deal of time in my sewing room to dive into old projects and tackle things.

So far, I’ve finished the top for Delft Punk:

and finished the cutting and assembly for the top of this quilt, which the recipient helpfully named “Aperture.”

These fabrics came from a friend who had worked in an industrial fabric shop for some time. A couple of Thanksgivings ago, she reached out to a mutual friend and offered bags and bags of samples, if we were interested in them. I expected to snag one or two things, but I came home with piles of drapery silk, all figured and patterned, all on the slightly heavy side for quilting but still suitable.

I gave away some of it last year when I realized I couldn’t use all of it. I sorted through what I had, tidied it by design, and stored it on the top shelf. I knew it was a one-time acquisition, and as soon as I burned through the fabric, I’d have the shelf space back, permanently.

Then I started traveling, and it felt like I didn’t stop for about six months. Not only did it tire me, it made me feel like I was completely and utterly incapable of actually finishing anything. (When you’re gone for weeks on end, you can’t expect your sewing room to do things for you in your absence. Mine certainly didn’t.)

So, this week, I promised myself a few things:

I would wrap up at least the hand-sewing of the top for Delft Punk, if not finishing the quilt entirely
I would tackle at least one portion of the One Time Use silk fabric
I would pull one of my (thankfully few) paused projects and make significant progress on it

I assessed the first pile of silk and realized I couldn’t do fine piecework on it. It was heavy, and textured by little fabric cords running through it about every 1”.

I thought, oh to hell with this, it’s jewel-toned and textured, let’s cut it large and fat and put together an Amish-inspired design. The half-square triangles were 12” on the longest side, and when I started putting them together on the design wall I immediately thought of the light-and-dark patterns inherent in log cabin quilts, so I started arranging them that way.

and you know what? It was satisfying to actually finish something. I burned through months of backlogged podcasts, played some new-to-me music on endless repeat, and within 48 hours had a finished top. Can’t quilt it until I’m back home again, but it’s now in the Awaiting Quilting pile (current quantity: 3) for when I’m back.

On top of that, I’ve finished the top for Delft Punk, and after wrapping up the top for Aperture, I’ve pulled out another long-languishing unfinished project, and am starting to move it forward in what home time I have left before the next trip.

For the name, I’d been struggling to think of something other than “Red Square,” so I tossed it out for public opinion. The recipient came up with “Aperture” because the center-diamond pattern reminded him of the aperture for the Olympus XA, a camera he owns. (Photo available here.)

It’ll be a little while before it gets finished, but at least it’s moved to the Quilt Me Dammit pile. I feel like I’m getting somewhere, and the backing fabric has already taken up residence. Everyone wins.

Needs name, not home

domesticat — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:27:45 +0000

Hi, I need a name. (But not a home.)

Keys to help you out:

The fabrics are all 100% silk drapery fabric samples that a friend got for me a couple of years ago.
The color arrangement is one frequently seen in log cabin quilts.
It’s going to end up with jowilson, an old friend of mine who is a photographer.

I have a goofy name in mind that I may or may not stick with, but it’s clouding my judgment and I’m having trouble thinking of others.

Jacob has suggested “Focus Ring” or “Lens Flare.” “Red Square” has been stuck in my head. Anyone else got any ideas?

Gonna need a montage.

domesticat — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 21:52:23 +0000

I’ve taken the rest of the week off of work in a fit of “oh crap I will be on the road for HOW long? and what can I finish if I focus on nothing but sewing for a week?”

We’re gonna need a montage. I realize that a movie about quilting can only go in either the “Beautiful Mind” (crazed genius throws fabric about long enough that amazing things happen) vein or the “Waiting For Godot” vein (audience sits around, waiting for the explosions and car chases that never happen) vein.

I’m going to have a LOT of time in the next few days to listen to music. I need recommendations. I promise jazzy montage pix.

A sample of the excitement level: I mean, right now I’m working on a top of almost Amish simplicity based on a huge pile of drapery silks I was given a couple of years ago. I cut them into huge triangles because — hey DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME, I’M STILL TALKING HERE.

Got any recommendations on music I should be listening to? At the rate I’m going, I will catch up on all of my podcasts … *looks* … today.

Yeah, send help and/or tunes. Also, if you’re in Huntsville and wanna come sit in the sewing room and chitchat with me while I sew sew sew, this is the week.

Quilt seeking love and permanent home

domesticat — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 19:21:16 +0000

This very low-contrast quilt top was actually the second one I ever worked on, but I put it aside and did not finish it at the time. I pulled it out this week and decided that it deserves to be loved and used, despite its imperfections, and that I should finish it and give it away.

It will be my 42nd completed quilt, and as such it deserves a good Hitchhiker’s name. Current thoughts are “Mostly Harmless” or “Hyperspace Bypass,” but I’m open to other appropriate names.

It does not have a home.

If it gives you a warm fuzzy, get in touch. I have a nasty travel schedule for the next couple of months, so I don’t know when I can quilt it, but I’d love to at least settle on an owner and a proper backing fabric.

Hopscotch

domesticat — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 22:41:15 +0000

Date:

29 February 2012 - 6 November 2012

Photoset:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/domesticat/sets/72157631832930696

Recipient:

Beatrice

Pattern:

Mod Mosaic

Level of completion:

Completed and given away

It’s weird to say that you can walk into fabric stores — which are, by definition, riots of color and print — and feel a little bored, but I’ve been struggling with that in the past year or so as I’ve become more familiar with What’s Out There. There aren’t that many manufacturers of quilting fabric, and there’s a strong faddish element to what’s in / out / hot / not at any point in time.

I’d heard about Liberty fabrics a time or two before actually getting to handle them in San Francisco for the first time, and I understood the allure once I handled them for the first time. They are light, tightly-woven, and silky in only the way that high-quality cotton voile can be. They don’t feel like quilt fabric, because they aren’t quilt fabric. They’re a different, lovelier, animal.

They’re also hideously expensive.

I learned about Shaukat (http://shaukat.co.uk) from some quilting site or another, and discovered that what they said was true — Shaukat carries virtually everything that Liberty sells, and at a tremendous discount. (The meter / half-meter minimum may be part of that.) Angel offered to pick up some fabrics for me, so I sent her some funds and she stopped by one afternoon, and I suggested that she pick up some fabrics for herself, so I could do a baby quilt for her daughter.

I pointed her to some designs, as well, and what I came out with was a design that was a contradiction from start to finish: the small-print traditionalism of classic Liberty prints with the improvisational piecing of the Mod Mosaic quilt pattern, which I can say definitively turns your sewing table into a massive mess:

I’ll also confess: I struggled with this quilt. Not because the pattern was hard, but because I just couldn’t get into a rhythm with it. It got sidetracked among other finishes and a great deal of travel, and I struggled to find my way. Some other sidetracked projects meant that it never had a drawer to call its own in my sewing room, and so it was always sitting on the sewing table, taunting me with its lack of doneness. It was the project where random pieces would show up scattered in the pieces for every other quilt I worked on, as if to say “Hi! I’m not done! You should finish me!”

So, aggravated one day after coming back from Europe, I made a bargain with myself. I pulled out my blueprint for the quilt:

and bargained with myself — one section per day. I’d focus on completing one mosaic piece per night, and stop. No marathons, no craziness, no tilting at windmills. One, and stop.

I’d pull them off of the sewing machine, scraggly and unpressed, and tamp them down:

before matching them up with the nearest possible mosaic-block size, and squaring them up:

and it worked. I knew I was gaming myself, but the slow-and-steady caused the project to actually move forward, after it had sat on the table for ages. I’d scribble the block off of the list at the bottom of my planning page when I had it done, and then as I hit the final weekend of block building, I started pinning the pieces up on the design wall and getting excited. It was a real thing.

On assembly weekend, I grabbed my crayons and started using colors to keep track of my jigsawing together the white sashing. These two, for example, correspond:

as do these two:

and the completed top:

I had one last little embellishment I wanted to add, though. On the bottom set of squares, you’ll see an Intentionally Blank Square. I’ve stitched initials into quilts before, butI wanted this one to be a little more floral, so I went trawling through my [immense] font set and found an initial-caps font with foliage. I printed it at 4” square on water-soluble paper:

and started stitching it in place:

I couldn’t see the end result until after the quilt had gone through the wash, but it turned out sunny and appropriate:

Jeff was kind enough to take it to the post office for me, so it got in the mail stream posthaste, and it has crossed the pond yet again to live a bit northeast of London. B, in this case, is for Beatrice, who is still young enough that she won’t remember the few months before her quilt arrived. I look foward to kitty, puppy, and kiddo pictures — those are always the best part after sending one of these off and away.

I’ve been struggling with a bit of travel-related blues in the past few months. I’m glad I traveled, and I’m glad I’m continuing to do so, but it’s hard to look around the house, my quilt work, and my life in general and see things that have to be paused or left untended while I am away, and it has been very easy to gnaw on myself artistically, personally, and professionally for the things left undone. The self-bargaining was a deliberate gambit to try to get myself to realize that even small amounts of effort can count as being “on track” if I focus. I needed to see some old projects finish; I knew it would reassure me that I was still capable of balancing travel and … well … me.

I was glad to see it done. I was glad to see it fly away. The incomplete projects bother me, because I can have the best intentions in the world but they don’t provide warmth or comfort if I can’t finish them — for the recipient, or myself.

There’s a lesson there. I’m still working on learning it.

Cinder and Smoke

domesticat — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 22:39:31 +0000

Date:

11 October 2012 - 6 December 2012

Photoset:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/domesticat/sets/72157631832749063

Recipient:

Jonathan's son

Pattern:

New Wave

Level of completion:

Completed and given away

Cinder and Smoke is a companion quilt to Sea and Sky, which I finished and sent out to a co-worker in our Portland office on the birth of his daughter. I thought it might be nice to use the same pattern again, but add in a bit of a different focus.

While working on Sea & Sky, I removed a few pieces I’d cut because they just didn’t work with the light, bright, clear-toned fabrics I’d chosen:

Knowing that Jonathan preferred more neutral, earth-toned fabrics, I found myself thinking of the greys and browns, the fabrics that I’ve had in my stash for years that never quite went with any other quilt top. I wondered what they would look like, if I asked these quiet, calm colors to stand together instead of trying to stand next to the bright shouty fabrics.

I was pleased when I laid them out, because I realized the colors weren’t boring or muddy. They’re just — quieter.

It was a fabric set for the quieter shades of autumn. I feared I wouldn’t like it, but when I put them all together, I liked the gestalt. It was quiet, and cozy, like a cup of tea on a chilly day. I tried to think of a name that followed the $x and $y pattern of Sea and Sky, and kept trying to think of quiet, lovely, and comforting things. When I tried to find music to play while working on this quilt, i kept going quieter and quieter until I pulled out Iron and Wine’s “Our Endless Numbered Days,” and realized “Cinder and Smoke” was just about perfect.

If this quilt could sing, it would sing quietly, and it would sound just like that. Just because something is grey and misty does not preclude beauty or intricacy.

It will, of course, have secrets. At Jonathan’s request, it will be backed with the outrageously bright and delightful Juhannustaika, one of the Marimekko fabrics I picked up as amazing souvenirs in Denmark:

It’s a good memory: a bright, cheery fabric bought as part of a memorable fabric expedition on a grey, drizzly Copenhagen day…

…soaked through in an Amsterdam rainstorm, spread out to dry on the floor of my London flat, and hand-carried all the way back to the States.

I had to go dig up a ranty moment from the Quiltifesto because it applied so much: “On good days, I will sit down to the machine and work because I hope the good day WILL sink into the fabric.” Here’s hoping these good days all sank in.

Consider modifying standards

domesticat — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 18:53:43 +0000

As I tidied up the entry for Fuego, since I put it in the mail today, I looked over the quilt list for the year and was a little disheartened, because I felt like I haven’t accomplished much this year. It’s also entirely possible that I’m an idiot.

It’s the end of October. In 2012, I’ve finished:

…and rescued this antique top and finished it out:

…and helped a friend quilt two quilts for his daughters:

I was also away from home for nearly two months.

I also have two quilts (“Cinder and Smoke” and “Hopscotch”) in progress, and hope to finish both before the end of the year.

It’s entirely possible that my standards are a bit ridiculous.