Wildfire Quilt

It’s scary to think that wildfire season started here in February. February, when it is supposed to be cold and dark and snowy. February, when we are cocooning and only dreaming of summer days and the dappled light of the forest. Not this year. Wildfire season already started and, indeed, zombies fires from last year still burning.

This quilt started life as a fun experiment and sample for a Cut, Sew, Repeat Playcation. I used it as a sample in the class then had fun continuing the play. The entire time I played and sewed I saw it vertically and just about the interactions of the colours. Then, the night I was basting it, I saw it horizontal and only saw the wildfire influence. Then I couldn’t unsee it. So I ran with it, adding quilting to accentuate that design aspect.

For the quilting I used a coordinating thread for each band of colour. It was a mix of Wonderfil and Aurifil 50 weight cotton threads - whatever colour I had around that worked well. In each section I changed my free motion design. The orange, obviously, had flames. The green was a triangle meander that I’ve used once before. I don’t know what you would call the blue section, it’s some kind of hatch but not really. The purple was a wavy meander for the sky/smoke. Breaking it down like this not only made it manageable from a working perspective, but really accentuated the overall design.

Binding the quilt was straightforward. My usual high contrast binding was not going to work here so I went with a charcoal grey. I want to say it is symbolic because of soot and ashes, but really it is about picking a neutral to frame but not take away from the quilt. Black was too dark, too sharp. The grey was perfect.

Most of us here are worried about what the coming months will bring for fires. We did not nearly have enough snow cover and cold temperatures to give our forests and grasslands a proper break. We can hope for a wet spring, but that brings its own challenges. With a kid with asthma that definitely gets triggered by poor air quality, wildfire season takes on another meaning too.

In my previous career I worked on the climate change file. I started there over 25 years ago, working to convince a lot of people that we needed to act, acting in industry where we caused a part of the problem. I had to leave because it got so disheartening, if I am being honest. While I am glad that I no longer have to define or explain climate change, if that had happened 25 years ago we might be in a different place.

Tree of Life Modern Quilt Interpretation

If you’ve been with me for a while you know about my wonderful list of Quilts Under Construction. I keep all projects that have progressed from an idea to a potential quilt to a nearly done project on that list. I update the list a few times a year, crossing off and moving things from different parts of the list. It isn’t fancy, just handwritten on a sheet of paper on a clipboard I keep in a drawer. It covers finished Quilt Tops, Quilts Being Quilted, and Blocks. It only enters the list when I’ve decided that some play or an experiment are actually going to be made into a quilt.

The reason I love my list so much is twofold. One, it gives me a direct appreciation for the time I’ve spent creating. It serves as a living memory of all the things I’ve done and can do. History and potential in one. Two, whenever I am blessed with some time, inclination, and less than normal motivation I can consult the list and get inspired. One day I might be in the mood for some easy piecing so I can consult the list and grab one of those projects. Maybe I actually, freakishly, have the desire to baste a quilt so I can see what is ready and has a backing made. Having it on paper means I am not storing it in already busy brain. In other words, I don’t have to open the already packed closet to see what might fall out!

So a few weeks ago I pulled out my list because I had an afternoon and felt like piecing. My tree of life blocks captured my attention. I had 4 blocks and vaguely remembered thinking 5 would be enough for a quilt. No problem! I could make one more block. So I did. This size (18”) is fiddly as you have to make a lot of 2.5” half square triangles but it’s not rocket science. One more block done with ease.

These blocks came in to being, firstly, as a sample for a class I did in conjunction with the Heritage Park Festival of Quilts. I took a quilt from their antique collection and created a modern version. This was one sample, then I made a few more, and now I’ve made 5.

At this point, I could have set the blocks aside but I loved where things were going so I went to the stash (and then the store) for some greens to border the blocks when set on point. My math was off so it is a bit wonky but it works well enough and will be fine with quilting.

Now I can move this set of blocks to the other side of the list for quilt tops. All the satisfaction.

December Morning Make 2022

A bit too on the nose?

In December I dug into my daughters’ craft supplies, augmented by yarn scraps from a dear friend who knits, and experimented with punch needle. Each day I used one little ball of yarn to randomly fill a space. It’s easy to do and doesn’t take long at all. Indeed, some morning’s I was at it for only 5-10 minutes. In the crazy days of the winter holiday season it was just about perfect.

We had a ball of that ultra soft acrylic yarn in white. A fake chenille? It was the right choice for the directions.

I’ve been thinking about touch a lot this winter. Realizing, mostly, how important it is to me. Not that I am a huge smuggler or hugger, but I do love a good hand hold. I was reading about how you can get your own body to release dopamine and serotonin and reduce cortisol (the stress hormone) through non-sexual touch. I found myself gently petting or rubbing my own hands in a calming gesture. My husband thought I was weird, if I’m being honest, but I found it very helpful.

Thinking about touch and seeing the benefit of these simple hand movements for myself also made me realize that this is part of why I like hand work. Using your hands isn’t just useful for the task at hand. It activates something else, something associated with the sense of touch outside of the brain’s task. When I am getting stressed or ansty I tend to feel an energy in my hands that is distracting and uncomfortable. I am often looking for an outlet to ‘get it out’. The more hand work I do, the more active my hands are in a positive way, the less I feel that bad energy.

Punch needle itself is practically fool proof with the right tools. Obviously some yarns and tools are easier to work with. It really does help, as well, to use the right base cloth. If I were to do this again I would upgrade our punch, the cheap plastic one we had was nice for being adjustable, but not very comfortable in the hand.

One of the things I quite liked is that the back is/can be as neat as the front. Depending on whether you used the punch from the front or the back it changes what you see, but both work. Varying the thickness and type of yarn as well as the depth of the punch meant I have a lot of textural and visual variation in the piece. Being open to the scrappy nature of this comes naturally for me as a quilter. If I hadn’t used words I could have chosen which side to display.

In the end, I mounted the piece on an old dollar store canvas with a staple gun. We don’t need another pillow in this house and I liked the visual of a mounted piece.

Small Piecing Pays Off

When your only goal is to clean up some little bits of fabric leftover from another project you don’t expect to launch in to sewing an epic quilt. In truth, most of my quilts start with zero intention of being a finished quilt. Rather, it is just something to sew at that time; some experiment to try; some play to improve my mood. So when I had those leftover red squares from this quilt I just sewed them together with some low volume scraps so that they wouldn’t go to waste or get lost. I had no plans, no design, no lofty goals.

But…

They did look quite good together. And what if you sewed two pairs to each other? Oh look at that cute 4 patch! Hmm, there might be something to this…

Reader, there was. I started adding turquoise, then green 4 patches. Those colours look great together and it was all so cheerful. Of course I have a tonne of low volume scraps so I could use them up too. So now I made a 4 patch of two 4 patches. Oh boy, this was getting good!

One thing led to another, one block led to another, and even though I sewed a whole pile of blocks I still had no clue where this was heading. Sure, it would be a quilt one day, but just how far was I going to go?

Quite often I just sew until I get bored. Then the quilt is as big as that many blocks, give or take a few. I use what I made to puzzle together something (hopefully) cool. In this case I reached a point where some actual planning was required. Since I don’t like to make small quilts I did some math and even sketched out the layout to see where I needed to finish. This was my guide for sewing.

Most of the blocks were made as leaders and enders while making other quilts. I kept a bowl of the coloured scraps and a bowl of the low volume scraps by my machine and sewed a pair together at the end of any other seam. These would pile up until I felt motivated to press them. Then I would make the 4 patches as the next round of leaders and enders. At some point these would get both pressed and squared up. That required more motivation because I was squaring them up to 2” by 2”. Tedious work. Then those would get sewn to a low volume square in the next round. Pressing again then the last seam to join two of those pairs together. Usually by the last step I was doing some dedicated sewing on these blocks instead of leaders and enders. It was all very reminiscent of this.

Eventually I became dedicated to finishing all the blocks. If I had started this quilt with the end goal in mind I can honestly say I wouldn’t have started. This was a very tedious make. Don’t get me wrong, I believe all the effort was worthwhile and any time sewing is time well spent. But when you make a quilt from small pieces it can be nearly impossible to see the end from the beginning. Like climbing a mountain when you have no idea just how high it is. Or deciding to swim across the lake without knowing how far it really is. It’s all possible, but it is going to take some time to see the final achievements. So even though I had a specific plan and number of blocks needed, it was hard, in the years I’ve had this quilt ongoing, to see the finish. Glad to be here now. Real glad.

Now that the quilt top is done I will probably get it quilted fairly soon. It isn’t impatience that motivates me, it is a desire to not have to press this quilt top again. That was a lot of seam management there!

Oh, and for those wondering, the quilt top finishes at 63” x 81”.