Morning Make - February 2020

As the granddaughter of the quintessential Ukrainian Baba it might have been inevitable that I would embroider something at some point. I won’t lie, I’ve avoided, even resisted, embroidery over the years. That was Baba’s thing, not mine. When the girls played around with it I could support them, but stayed out of the way. Mostly, it just never appealed to me.

For February I decided to face it. A new stitch or motif every day for all 29 days. No commitment to finish a designed piece or fill a space. Just pure experimentation and play.

I did not account for really enjoying this.

To start, I fused a stabilizer (some random one in my drawer) to a piece of linen. I dug out my Baba’s stash of embroidery floss, colour sorted thanks to one of my daughters plus my stash of Valdani threads. I found a few videos on You Tube and a couple of books on my shelf to begin. Using basic stitches like back stitch, stem stitch, lazy daisy, and a running stitch I got the first few days in. Then I looked for more things to do. The more I looked, the more I wanted to try! There are a heck of a lot of embroidery stitches out there!!!

My one stipulation was that I only use one thread per day. A couple of times it was a variegated thread so it looks like more than that though. This limitation kept me from making intricate designs, both a good and a bad thing. Good because this was about learning stitches and experimenting. Also good because I only had my 20-30 minutes in the morning and more detailed work takes time. Bad because I would get really excited and start thinking about things I could do with the stitch and patterning if I could just add another colour or alternate stitches.

This is ultimately the point of these Morning Make exercises - to see what you can do with your limitations and open up your mind to creative possibilities!

I will confess, that part of the reason I wanted to do this was to see if I could find some potential quilting stitches. You see a lot more hand work beyond the perfect quilting stitches and cliche big stitch out there. Those are great, but could I do more than plus signs/Xs? Here is the back of the piece - what do you think?

Here are some of my favourite resources for technique or inspiration:

S is for Stitch by Kristyne Czepuryk
Handiworks You Tube Channel

@kim_broidery on Instagram

Now on to March! I’ve started the month with the flu so have chosen some relaxing Colour Meditations by Lisa Solomon via CreativeBug. They’ve been a lot of fun to share with my son, who is also sick.

Itty Bitty Improv Curves - A Quilt Top

No one prepares you for the emotions of making a quilt. The thrill of picking fabric. The boredom of cutting fabric. The thrill of sewing. The boredom of pressing. The thrill of finishing a top. It’s a roller coaster journey for sure. And this is not counting the therapy contained within the emotional journey. Quilting can often have me working through some stuff, processing and feeling the feels while making a quilt, to have the release at the end.

Sometimes, though, the opposite happens. The quilt making gives you all the thrills and makes you smile with each stitch, no matter the work. Then you finish and there is a let down. There was so much joy in making that when you finish you are sad. I want to keep going! Don’t make me stop.

Alas, I’ve run out of fabric.

I started this quilt with some scraps, a stack I grabbed for the initial class with the amazing Chawne Kimber at QuiltCon. Once I embraced the itty bitty curves I made in her class I eventually augmented the selection - more from the recesses of my stash and a trip to a local shop. I tried to match the colours of the vintage pieces (I think some of these purples came from my Baba’s house) and samples as best I could. With no real plan in mind other than to make blocks I made blocks until I more or less ran out of fabric.

Okay, there is a bit of fabric left, but not enough to make a random assortment of blocks. If I continued on I would have a big pink section somewhere. Yes, I could buy more, but I can’t replicate all the fabrics so, again, it would look less random. It pains me a little to not have this be a giant quilt, but so be it.

So with not enough fabric left to make it bigger I’ve stopped the sewing. It measures into a generous lap size (73’’ x 66’’). Considering the smallest blocks are finishing at 3/4’’ that amounts to a lot of piecing. Not once did that piecing feel like work or drudgery. It was addictive. Better than eating M&Ms, although the let down kind of feels like a sugar crash.

The whole quilt isn’t square and I’m not sure exactly how I will deal with that, but for now, let me wallow in it being done. And count the number of blocks. 1,2,3,4,…1000, 10001, 1002…

Chawne warned us about going small, that the high from it was glorious. That only means the low of finishing is that much so. That’s okay, I’m not done with itty bitty curves yet, even if this quilt top is finished.

Ripples - A Water Inspired Quilt

Ripples

52” x 68”

Next in the landscape series of quilts. (First there was Mountain Meadow, then Names for Snow).

Completely inspired by the deep blue landscape of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. Whether it was the morning sun reflecting off the calm ocean, or the hidden blues of the spruce trees in the rain, or even the rolling fog covering the community like a quilt, they all found a home in this quilt.

Simple improv curves, the repetition of blocks and colour an homage to all that I saw that long weekend on the coast. A way to capture the energy of the community and the creativity of all the people I met. This is absolutely Improv With Intent.

Quilted with concentric circles to emphasize the Ripples. Kind of like the ripples on the surface when you toss a handful of rocks into the water. Or the ripples when the seals poke their heads up to see what you see. Or when the fish bubble up, trying to hide from the seals and the herons. Or, as I see more often than not in our life on the Prairies, kids jumping in a pool!

The quilting was done on my Bernina 820 with an Aurifil 50W in teal. It blended with the front and the fabric on the back.

Backed with a gorgeous loon print from Mark Anthony Jacobson, an Ojibwe artist. Bound in grey, one of my own prints, to remind me of the fog, the logs, and the weathered wood of the docks.

To see more of the inspiration, check out the original post.

Contentment versus Happiness in Life and Quiltmaking

Where do you find happiness in your quilting? Is it is the process or a specific part of the process? Or is it in the finished quilt?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between contentment and happiness. Here is what I shared with my newsletter readers last week:

So many of us are always on the look out for happy. We think happiness is the ultimate goal. We are wrong, I see now. Contentment is what we should seek. 

Think of it this way. When you have a baby the exhaustion level, physically and mentally, is high. So is the amount of stuff and drudgery in your day. But then the day comes that they genuinely see you for the first time, the day they roll over, the first night they sleep for 6 hours straight, pulling themselves up at the coffee table, crawling, walking, the first word. These milestones are all the happy we desire. They are excitement and pure joy. But they aren't really enough to get us through the day to day, the repetitiveness, the mess of parenting a baby. Unless, of course, we can embrace the naps on our chest again, cleaning the favourite toy of spit up again, the screeching, and even the diapers. Contentment is when we can look at all of that and still smile.

Happy is an exclamation point. Contentment is a smile. 

If our lives are filled with nothing but exclamation points it will be fun, sure, but also exhausting. Here's another way to think of it. Imagine your last good vacation, if you can. Was it all adventures - zip lining, horseback riding, spicy cooking classes, the tallest building in the city, surfing lessons? Probably not. But maybe you did one or two really exciting things and then otherwise enjoyed strolling the beach or city streets, reading a book, a delicious bakery where you lingered. If it was all the adventures - the exclamation points - it would be a lot of fun, maybe a bit stressful, and very, very tiring at the end of the day. But those quieter moments, the ones that make you smile and sigh are delightful.

Regular life needs to be a combo of both. However, instead of seeking happiness, we should be looking for what makes us content. More importantly, we should be looking around us and realizing that what we have is good and brings us contentment. You might be surprised at what you see.

Then I was speaking with a lovely lady in my neighbourhood this week, also a quilter. She spoke about how she will look at a finished quilt and wonder just how she got there. Like suddenly it is finished and the making of it has slipped away. Yet the making of it is where her peace is.

Contentment = enjoying the quilt making process.

Happiness = the finished quilt.

So I suppose that now that I’ve thought of it this way, I see my love for the process in an even better light. And it explains my defence of unfinished quilts. I would much rather have contentment, a smile, in my life on a daily basis than the energy of an exclamation point. Don’t get me wrong, happiness is awesome, finished quilts are awesome, but finished quilts only come around a few times a year. Why hang all my joy on sometimes success when I can have peace everyday in the making?

To that end. I did finish a few quilts recently so I was happy to pull out an old, favourite project. I’m jazzed for it and sneak in to the sewing room in spare moments to put together just one more string of Itty Bitty curves. The piecing makes me feel joyful, the work growing gives me all the smiles, and the daily making is 100% about contentment.