Checkboard

Checkerboard

60” x 60”

This, by far, was not the oldest UFO in the quilt closet, but it is getting up there. Finished the quilt top in 2014, but I’m guessing it was started a year or two before that. Now, however, it is done! Taking advantage of the girls being home more and a clean floor I got a couple of quilts basted and this was one of them. I won’t lie, I picked it because I knew it would be an easy finish. Nothing wrong with that.

The pattern is from my book Sunday Morning Quilts, co-authored with Amanda Jean Nyberg. It’s actually one of the patterns Amanda Jean wrote. We both had grand plans of making all of each other’s patterns. Obviously, that did not come to pass. But I did make this one, and now I finished it.

Some of the fabrics in this quilt are old! That purple floral? From my 3rd quilt ever, sewn in 1999. That purple with the little white dots? Something vintage I was gifted. The grey with the dots? That was background on Nap Like an Egyptian, also from Sunday Morning Quilts. This is the true joy of scrap quilts, or scrappy ones even, giving more life to fabric that’s already lived! It’s like the fabric had a near death experience and now it is back and living better than ever.

The quilting was simple. With 2’ squares this simple diagonal was easy, fast, and gives the best scrunchiness to the quilt. I actually quilted most of it while watching a few episodes of Mad Men and Brooklyn 99, our recent pandemic viewing. Thread used was an Aurifil 50W, colour 5006.

For years I hoarded this backing fabric. Not exactly sure where or when I bought it, but I bought it specifically for this quilt. Many times I’ve had to stop myself from using it on something else though. It comes from an old collection designed by Jessica Levitt. As you can see, it is just perfect for this quilt.

While I’ve been working my way through stash and supplies as I work my way through UFOs, I did have to go shopping for the binding. When I was ready for it I decided it had to be this exact shade of magenta, found on that backing fabric, and I had nothing remotely close in my stash. So I made an appointment and masked up to shop one of my local stores, Out of Hand. Dierdre, the owner, was there and found this perfect fabric within minutes. I may have shopped a little more, but I did indeed walk out with her choice. As you can see, I did the binding a bit different than normal for me. It was attached by machine to the back and brought around to the front. Then I stitched it down with a big, obvious, running stitch in an 8W thread. Conveniently, I had the matching thread in Valdani. I thought I had a turquoise colour, which would have popped nicely but no. For the record, this kind of binding goes quickly! Thanks for Shannon Fraser for reminding me about this technique.

While this finishing kick is great, it does result in more quilts leaving the sewing room for the outside world. Truth be told, my husband would like some more outside the house too. Bah! You can never have too many quilts.

Show and Tell

Show and Tell

43” x 45’

First quilt finish of 2021!

I’m in a mood. A mood from the state of the world and politics and Covid and all of that. But also a mood to finish things. Head down and focus on something else. This is 1 of 3 quilts I’ve finished in the last few weeks.

This particular project came about as class samples. When I taught improv curves in person I would grab from the same stack of fabric to demonstrate various ideas. Bits would get used and reused in each class. Eventually, I ran out of the background fabric. That meant it was time to turn things into a quilt.

I do this a lot. It’s better than using random fabric for class samples and being left with a bunch of orphan blocks. This means that the next time I teach this class I will have a different selection of fabrics to use, which will eventually turn into the next quilt.

I was able, thankfully, to use a single width of fabric for the backing. The quilting was based on a sketch I had. My daughter said it made her googly-eyed, but as a quilting pattern it worked fantastic. I’ll admit, I was tempted to stop after one pass, but on a small quilt the second pass isn’t that much more work. Enjoy this badly coloured, but blown out photo so you can see the quilting. One pass was a quarter circle, repeated. The other pass was a modified wave pattern in a different direction. It was all done with a walking foot and 50W Aurifil thread.

The background fabric is covered in little coloured dots. I used most of the colours in the quilt, so when it came time to choose binding I went with yellow, the one dot colour I hadn’t used. Besides, we all could use a little sunshiny optimism right now!

Maybe these finishes will be just what I need to clear some mental space to get back at it? It’s surely a point of privilege to even think that way, a luxury to get to escape to quilting and ignore the real world. Life isn’t going to change overnight, we know that. A lot of us have a lot of work to do to make the world a better place for all. Yellow binding isn’t going to fix anything. Ignoring the world to finish a quilt is probably the wrong thing to do as well. But we all need respite at time in order to have the energy to keep fighting the fight.

Morning Make December 2020

December saw a decided slow down, a necessary slow down. I was in the mood for hand stitching plus I wanted something that would carry me through the quiet holiday at home. Having done embroidery in February and already working on English Paper Piecing I decided to try something entirely new to me.

Pojagi is a Korean art form of patchwork. It can be done by machine, but I chose to go the original route of hand stitching. The end result is a finished seam from both sides. This means any Pojagi piece is entirely reversible.

It was never a one piece of fabric to represent one day in the month kind of project. Some days I did a single short seam, some days I did five. I will say that, initially, I thought I would make it into a curtain or shade for one of my sewing room windows. The low winter sun and Zoom events mean I have to diffuse the light coming in the room for part of the day. This would have been a very traditional use for the Pojagi. But it’s a big window! So partway through the month I switched plans and made it longer rather that wider, sealing its fate as a table runner (if I finished it.)

The first exposure I had to Pojagi was years ago from Victoria Gertenbach. Despite the time passing, it has always stuck in my head. She did machine work, but it was the history and the effect that stayed with me. For a hand stitched technique I used this tutorial. I won’t lie, I had to look at the tutorial each day for a week while I worked on it to have it make sense.

For materials and colour I stayed close to home. Many examples of Korean work will use different materials from silks to polyesters. I stuck with quilting cottons and linens, a mixture pulled from my stash. Included in this was a sparkly linen left behind when a friend from Australia visited, leftover blues from Shiver, and a scrap of fabric used to sop up dye when we tie dyed sheets with the kids last summer. My fabric pull was, in the end, an homage to a winter sunrise here.

I did actually finish this piece. It felt silly to leave it behind to be both forgotten and potentially wrecked. During downtime and while supervising virtual school this week I hemmed the edges. The tree is still up, candles light our evenings, and a lovely reminder to slow down graces the table.

As for Morning Make I am going to continue on the monthly change for 2021. I really liked the strong focus for a relatively short period of time. It is fostering play and exploration but still allows me to dig in to something new a little.

Names for Snow

Names For Snow

47” x 58”

Okay, so I finished this quilt more than a year ago. Then it was on display and stayed living for a friend for a year. He was paranoid about it getting wrecked and so gave it back. I’ve just been waiting for a proper snowfall to get a picture of it.

Of course, I forgot that proper snowfalls actually make it difficult to take quilt pictures. There is the feets of snow, for one. And two, despite all that white, it is quite difficult to get accurate colour representation in snow. Good thing this quilt is inspired by snow! In a strange twist in quilt photography, shooting this quilt in the sun was the way to do it. Got my tween and her best friend to help out as I forced them away from the snow fort they are building.

The entire quilt started as a love letter to my favourite scissors. Kevin from Knife Wear goes on buying trips to Japan. I made a comment about scissors offhand and he came up with some pairs to try. Yes, I know we quilters are spoiled with a lot of scissor options. These ones are, by far, my favourite. So I set out to freehand cut half square triangles and sew them together. Everything was cut by hand - the initial squares, trimming, and squaring up. The only time I brought out a rotary cutter and ruler was to square up the finished quilt. What a liberating way to work!

Note to self: do this again.

Playing with all these neutrals resulted in another love letter through this quilt. To my favourite season: winter! It isn’t often that I have the name of a quilt early in the making but this one was set pretty quickly. Whites, creams, beiges, more whites, a little blue. No yellow.

I spent way too much time obsessing over the quilting. I was researching different languages and their names for snow, I was trying to figure out how to stitch in Inuktitut. I brainstorming loads of options. In the end, however, a deadline and my desire to never mark quilts won. I went with dense, wavy lines (snowdrift) with little asterisk/sparkles here and there. Texture, more than anything.

The white binding seemed like a no brainer.

When making improv quilts, whether free hand cut like this or now, one key thing to remember is that perfection does not live here. Points will be trimmed off, lines might be a bit wonky, you might cut more than expected to make things fit, and almost nothing lines up. This is precisely why I like this. It looks and feels handmade. I see my own movements in every line of stitching, every shape. It can be a hard switch from the pursuit of perfection in quilt making but it is a liberating switch for many.

Now that we are settled in for a Christmas at home I am glad for another quilt on the sofa to celebrate my truly favourite season. Winter is indeed for snow forts and skiing (hopefully) and skating. Winter is for curling up with quilts and cookies at the bookends of those activities.

Here’s to the season!

This is the third in my landscape series. See Mountain Meadows and Ripples.