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.

November Morning Make 2022

Well this was a different month!

I have a Creative Bug membership. In fact, it is like a gym membership for me. I pay for it each month and almost never use it. Oops! But the daily practice I did in November made it all worthwhile. Every day I worked on a book structure, as led in a class by Faith Hale: 30 Structures in 30 Days - A Daily Practice in Bookmaking.

There was an investment in supplies to start - book board, an awl, an Xacto knife fancy paper, glue, waxed thread. I shopped at two local art stores and the big A to get it all. In all honestly, the paper cost the most and I have a lot left. I was nervous about the knife, having sliced off part of my thumb as a kid with a similar blade. This time I followed instructions and I am 47, not 7.

Faith did a great job of moving through a number of techniques for folding, cutting, and assembling the book structures. Some were super simple and only took a few minutes. Others were a multi day process. We stitched sometimes, others we just folded. Some books have hard covers some are just paper. I even got to add fabric from my stash to a few because there was no official book cloth to be found.

The simplest ones are my favourites. Or the ones with interesting folds. Or the ones with hard covers. I picked out some of my favourites and filmed them for more detail.

I can definitely see making some of these again as gifts or for special notes for special people. All of these are currently blank. Now that I know how to make them I would like to try again with the pages already filled or at least planned out prior to assembly.

All in all, this was a fantastic month! I absolutely enjoyed this creative challenge. It still had me playing with colour but was a new to me experience. Totally perfect for Morning Make.

August Morning Make 2022

Whenever people tell me that can’t sketch out quilts because they can’t draw I like to pull out my own sketchbook. Chicken scratch, random lines, and quite often things that only make sense in my head. You don’t NEED to draw to quilt. As long as you can think about where your seam lines go you are good. That being said, I always want to draw better.

I’ve done drawing for Morning Make before. Quick little still life sketches of things around me. It was a good exercise but building a skill isn’t a one and done thing. So in August I decided to set myself a drawing challenge again. This time, however, I explored a technique called contour drawing.

In contour drawing - at least the way I did it - your pen isn’t supposed to leave the paper. You are doing one continuous long line. Some people do it blind, as in they look at their subject and never the paper. I was not ready for that. But in slowing down to look at my starting image and translating it through a single line I was able to focus on shape and composition. You can’t draw everything in the picture. Well, you probably could, but I didn’t. Depending on the source image (pictures from my phone) I narrowed the focus to only certain elements. Sometimes background were completely eliminated, sometimes just enough to give context. It was an exercise in looking just as much as drawing.

I’ll be honest, I think some, if not all, are quite bad. That is, if you compare to people for whom drawing is a livelihood or serious endeavour. There was improvement, for sure. Some are even better than I would have expected. All were, at least, recognizable. Regardless of the results it was an enjoyable exercise.

Jules, or my Arkison in Australia Quilt

Jules

85” x 66”

I’ve never been so sad to finish a quilt. Seriously, a few tears were shed.

This was an epic quilt making journey that started on my teaching trip to Australia back in 2016. I was demonstrating improv curves for some students and grabbed the first two interesting fabrics from the little shop onsite. Over the course of my trip I did a few more demos with that fabric, then collected fabric from both my students and a screen printing adventure. When I came home it made sense to me to keep playing with all those fabrics, like they were meant to be. I added a bit more from my stash and away I went.

Improv quilting can be a total free for all and work wonderfully, but it also works really well with guidelines or even limitations. In addition to my limited colour palette I restricted my improv components to a few key shapes/techniques: curves, diamonds, triangles, and little bits. It may sounds like a lot, but it actually isn’t. Not when it comes to improv.

I basically kept making components until I ran out of the fabrics, leaving a little behind to help me create a quilt top. I did not pay attention to size of the blocks when making or squaring up. When I felt finished making all the components I moved on to my favourite part - making them all play well together in the quilt top. Design wall play is the absolute best. It’s all about making it work as both a composition and simply to use up all the pieces.

And then she sat. And sat and sat. That’s just how things go in my world. I even had the backing fabric - gifts from Emma Jean Jansen, an Aussie designer and one of my students in Australia - but wasn’t ready to quilt her yet. The truth is that I knew how she deserved to be quilted and I wasn’t quite up for the challenge.

When I was asked to put together my show for the Heritage Park Quilter of Distinction display I knew I had to include this quilt. It was time to face the work.

My plan from the beginning was a combination of machine and hand stitching. And most of the machine stitching with would in the ditch. On a quilt like this that meant a lot, a lot of starts and stops. Which also means a lot of burying threads. Nothing like taking on this much work on a deadline! Did I mention the hand quilted elements too?

The bulk of the handwork was finished on an epic road trip we took in May. At least, the parts not done in front of the TV while I ignored the world. It even required a stop at a quilt store in Kelowna and I was very sad I did not have time to shop for anything other than a tool to help me bury my threads. There is at least 20 hours of handwork in her. She is full of my love.

Sure, it was a lot of work and every single stitch was worth it. The quilt came out exactly how I wanted it to, how I envisioned her.

The machine quilting was all done in a pale blue thread from my stash. It might have been a Presencia 100% cotton collected years before the quilt even started. The hand quilted touches were all done with Wonderful Perle cotton, in a couple of different blues and yellows. This included stitching down the binding, on the front, with big blue stitches.

I won’t lie, I was also intimidated by doing that much handstitching, even though it was my own idea. But thankfully, quilting an entire quilt for Morning Make last year built my confidence and comfort.

Did I mention there were a few tears when she was finished? That trip to Australia was formative for me. It was her furthest and longest I’ve been gone from home. I developed and delivered multi day workshops which were an absolute dream. The people I met were incredible and I am still in touch with many of them. This quilt also defined one of my favourite ways to make a quilt - by playing.

She is named for Jules. Jules McMahon was the woman who brought me to Australia. We knew each other online and had met at the early QuiltCons. But that trip solidified a friendship through road trips, sweets exchanges, late nights with wine, creative bonding, gluten free Chinese food, exploring for Lyre Birds, a love of circles, and one chilly ocean swim. We have similar levels of insanity and drive and I am grateful to her for the trip to Australia, yes, but also for continued friendship and inspiration.