Isaac's Christmas collage

Isaac wanted to sew something for his mother for Christmas, so I cut a piece of denim from my jeans-for-art box and he rooted around through a bag of scraps to make a collage.

My contribution was to cut the zigzags in the top of the tulips and to stitch on some curly gold wire that we found on the worktable for hair.  Isaac did the rest.  Now that he is eight years old he is an old hand at the sewing machine, having made his first collage three whole years ago!  I know he's getting big because he no longer has to put the foot pedal on a shoebox; a thick book does the trick.  And he wondered if he could set the speed control up a little higher this time....

He wanted to use beads for eyes so we had to do a side project for him to learn how to sew on beads before he could do it on the gift.

In the past we have just made sleeves on the back of his collages and suspended them from a piece of coat-hanger wire or a chopstick, but since this was a Christmas present I thought we should splurge and mount it on a burlap-covered canvas, which I did for him (and did a number on my left wrist by having to hold it at an unnatural angle to avoid sewing into the top stretcher bar).  Since I discovered this product at my local craft store I have been using it for various purposes.  Surprisingly, the burlap has made a good backdrop for delicate silk collages made from old kimono as well as art brut pieces such as this one.

We look forward to our next project.

Gift exchange -- art!

I wrote earlier about the gift exchange at my fiber art group's annual holiday party and showed you several of the functional pieces that were made and given.  Today, some that were not functional at all, unless you happen to think that art is necessary, like breathing.

a collage/assemblage by Alyce McDonald

a quilt, wraparound-mounted on a canvas by Marti Plager

Spanish-marbled paper by Debbie Shannon

a needlefelted piece by Kathy Loomis

Gift exchange -- stuff you can use

My local fiber and textile art group has an annual holiday party in December, with a gift exchange as the highlight of the evening.  When I first joined the group more than a decade ago, the rules were to spend about $5 on a gift, supposedly fiber-related in some way, and the gifts were predictably minimal.  The worst one I remember was a package of rubber shapes to glue onto your bathtub to minimize slipping -- "fiber-related" because they were called "shower appliques."  Appliques, get it?

After a few years I joined the board and one of my early suggestions was that since we were all allegedly fiber artists, we should all be able to come up with a handmade gift for the party.  To my surprise, my snarky observation was endorsed by everybody else and we changed the rules.  Now you must make a gift, one that would sell in the vicinity of $20-25 retail.

And the holiday party has become a lot more fun!  Last week was perhaps the best one I can recall, with a huge variety of gifts.  Here are some of the functional ones:

Bags:

Scarves:

Jewelry:

Books and notecards:

Even bowls:

 Now don't you wish you were at this party?

Packaging extravaganza

Getting ready to mail off some photos and I decided that it wasn't special enough to just send them off in the envelope from the photo store.  So I decided to make a little case from heavy watercolor paper.

First I decorated the paper with a wash of walnut ink and then writing in red and gray inks.  On the reverse, a dark wash of gray ink, just on the portions that are going to be visible when the case is opened.

Then I laid out the pattern for the case, which needed to be a bit larger than 4 x 6 inches, to give a little room to easily put the photos in and out.  Here's the plan:  The back and front segments are the size you need for your case -- for mine, about 4 1/8" x 6 1/8".  The top flap is the same width but doesn't need to be as tall as the whole case; I cut mine about a half inch shorter.  The turn-in flap needs to be about two inches tall.  The side flaps need to be about two inches wide.

The four segments in red have to be the depth you need for your case.  I cut mine 1/4" wide because I had a relatively skinny stack of photos to put in the case.  Before I cut the pattern out, I scored the paper where the folds were going to fall, using the blunt edge of a knife, working on the back of the paper.  I didn't crease the folds flat or burnish with a bone folder, just turned them about 90 degrees up and gently finger-pressed the folds so they would stand at right angles.

Fold the turn-in flap segment and crease that fold so it sits flush with the "front" segment.  Now turn the "front" segment up, nudging the folds on either side of the red segment into position so it's sitting in space above the "back" segment. Do the same with the two side flaps.

Now comes the hard part.  You need to insert the side flaps into the space between the "front" and the turn-in flap.  When I have made this kind of case in the past it was fatter, and the side flaps slipped into place with just a little urging.  But since this case was only a quarter-inch tall, there wasn't much give in the paper for the flaps to sneak in.  I ended up not only cutting a good inch off the side flaps -- they started out 3 inches wide -- but also cut triangles off the edges of the side flaps for more wiggle room.

But after a good ten minutes of cussing, fussing, trimming and trying again, the flaps slid into place and the case looked beautiful.  

Do try this at home, with a couple of warnings.  First, make sure you choose paper with enough heft to make a rigid, sturdy case.  If you use lighter-weight stock your case will be more vulnerable to unwanted creasing and limpness.  Second, make sure you have measured accurately so the case doesn't fit too tightly around its contents.  When I learned to do this at a workshop, we actually didn't measure our pattern; instead, we just placed our contents in a pile on top of the paper and made each crease around the edge of the pile, eyeballing the ease that needed to be added in.

You still have three weeks till Christmas, time to make a whole bunch of these little cases to dress up your gifts
 

Properly appreciative 4

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a pile of baby quilts I made for the grandchildren of my dear friend from graduate school, using quilt blocks that my friend's grandmother had made many decades ago but never sewed together.  She always made the same block, although in different sizes and color combinations.

Here are three of the quilts in use!

Isaac, the oldest, was the first of my friend's grandchildren and got the biggest quilt, six years ago.  Hazel and Silas, his sister and brother, got theirs last month.

The quilts are getting a bit smaller as I don't want to run out of quilt blocks before we run out of babies.  So far I've made six and a new baby arrived last month who needs a quilt too.

Properly appreciative 3

I mentioned last fall that we have a new baby in our family.  I don't have an ironclad practice of making serious baby quilts for every new child, but I do have an ironclad practice of making each one a newborn quilt.

Newborns don't see colors for the first two or three months of their lives, but they are enthralled by the stark contrast of black-and-white.  It is amazing to see a tiny baby looking intently at a B&W composition, his brow furrowed in concentration, almost as if he is reading.  So I make each new baby a tiny B&W quilt.  Not big enough to suffocate him, so it can go in the crib or be propped on the sofa within reading distance.

I once thought that it would be nifty to make kits of B&W fabric that could be sold at Houston or other big quilt shows, with directions for sewing it up, along with a brochure explaining the physiology and neurology of tiny babies' fascination with this color combination.  If any of my entrepreneurial readers would like to seize upon this opportunity, take the idea with my blessing.  I can provide lots of photos of babies who love their B&W quilts.

Here's our newest family member, Luke, with his newborn quilt.

Properly appreciative 2

I wrote yesterday about how I'm choosy in whom I give handmade gifts to.  Unless I think somebody will appreciate and take care of my work, I won't give it to them.  However, I've come to that realization over time and I know that some of the things I gave away decades ago weren't taken care of or loved at the level that I expect today.

So it's especially nice to come upon stuff that I madeand gave away a long time ago, still being loved and used.

We briefly visited my sister-in-law on our way to our Christmas beach vacation and I was amazed to find things in her house that I know I made, once upon a time, but had frankly forgotten all about.

Two quilts were hung somewhat unorthodoxly in windows, since she didn't have curtains and needed to block the sun.  Had these been works of art I probably would have been offended, but they were only "goodbye quilts."  And they looked quite nice in backlighting.

Many years ago I realized that my stash was full of fabrics that I had outgrown, or that I never loved in the first place -- how had they ever gotten here, and why was I continuing to feed and clothe them?  So I made a long series of what I called "goodbye quilts" -- their major quality was speed of completion.  My rule was that if anybody said an unsolicited word of praise for one of them, I would finish it instantly and give it to the praiser.

Some of the goodbye quilts were donated to the Holocaust Museum in Houston, where Rachel Brumer had an exhibit in 2001.  She wanted to provide a quilt for every visiting child and solicited contributions from people on the Quiltart list.  I sent two or three.

Others went to friends and family, but not unless they first said they liked one.  Apparently I gave two to my sister-in-law, although I don't remember either one.

It was almost Christmas, so she had also brought out a log cabin quilt that I had made about 30 years ago.  I made similar Christmas quilts for everybody in my family with the same three-color, 16-block design but different fabric combinations.  I hadn't seen this one in many years so it was fun to be reacquainted.

Finally, I was in the closet searching out an extra blanket one night and found this afghan on the shelf.  Back in the days when we had only one TV set and no VCR, and I was a busy working woman, I was in the habit of curling up on the couch in the evening to watch TV and crochet.  This was especially nice in the winter, because the growing afghan would keep me warm as I worked.  I cranked out hundreds of afghans, some nicer than others.

This was one of the nicest ones, quite dense and warm.  It used a fancy stitch where I changed color on each row, and chose to deal with the ends by tying them into luxuriant fringe.  Seems that she's still saving it for good -- doesn't look as though it has been used for picnics, warmed the cats or been through the washing machine ten dozen times.

A worthy recipient, she definitely will get more fiber art gifts in the future.

Properly appreciative 1

I don't give quilts or other handmade things away very often, having been disappointed in the past when people didn't properly appreciate the magnificence of such gifts.  I have occasionally found my quilts spread out as tablecloths or my afghans used as a nice soft doggy bed.  In situations like this, I believe in one strike and you're out -- no more handmade stuff for you.

But when I know that people understand and value what goes into a piece of fiber art, it's a pleasure to give them presents.  Not surprisingly, fellow fiber artists make excellent recipients.  They know what skill and effort are required for such projects, and they are attuned to the subtleties of the techniques and materials.

Towards the end of last year I made two little quilts as gifts for good friends.  Both of them are fine fiber artists, both of them make quilts themselves, and I knew that the quilts would be in good homes.

As it turned out, both were made from leftovers from my summer-long quilting marathon.  When I like a quilt, I enjoy working with the same fabrics for a while longer.  My method of using tiny pieces always results in a lot of extra fabric, because it's so much easier to cut a lot of strips in advance than to try to gauge exactly how much will be needed.  So I feel quite righteous using up the bits and pieces in a small project.

Blue Ohio, 17 x 15"

Morning in America, 14 x 15"






Update:  Linking this to Nina-Marie's blog -- check it out to see what other fiber artists are up to this week.

Baby quilt marathon 2

Here are the four baby quilts I just finished from my friend's grandmother's stash, to send back to her great-great-grandchildren.

 

 

 

I sewed each one with the baby's name and date of birth, and signed them with my initials and the grandmother's.

When I sent my friend an email to tell her to expect the package the next day, she revealed that her daughter-in-law is about to give birth again -- and the baby arrived yesterday morning.   Fortunately there are plenty of muu-muu blocks still in the stash.

And since I'm a sucker for baby pictures, here's Leilani with her quilt.

Baby quilt marathon 1

A couple of years ago I wrote about some very special baby quilts I made for the grandchildren of my friend Zuki.  Seems that Zuki's grandmother, who lived in Hawaii, was in a sewing circle that got scraps from a factory that made muu-muus and Hawaiian shirts.  She made a lot of quilt blocks from the scraps.

Interestingly, she made only one block, in varying sizes and fabrics.  I've never figured out what the name of the block is, but it's a tricky one, with bias edges.

First Zuki and then I inherited this stash, and I made quilts for the babies.

But then came more babies, and I got sadly behind in my sewing duties.  Finally, just before Christmas, I was in the throes of catching up on overdue tasks, and decided it was time to haul out the muu-muu blocks and see what was left.  By this time the quilt-lacking baby count was up to four so I had to do an assembly line.

I was pleased to discover more blocks in the box than I had remembered.  Perhaps they multiply in the dark.  So I sorted through and found sets that seemed to go together.  Here's an intermediate step in my experiments:

Eventually I decided on two 12-block quilts that were a bit too small.  For the one below I found a Hawaiian print in blue and green colorways in the stash that made a nice border -- but not enough to go all the way around.

Here are several other fabrics auditioning to fill out the edge.

Here's the second quilt, also needing a border.  I had plenty of the red fabric, nicely printed with tropical motifs including a map of the islands, each one labeled with its name, but I thought the quilt needed to be a little more girly, so I tried the pink stripe instead.

I had a lot of fun working on four quilts at once. Some of the blocks got swapped back and forth between sets.  It seemed that making four quilts together took a lot less time than making one quilt four times, especially at the end with the binding and sleeves.

I think you always spend a half hour just trying to get yourself organized on those tasks, remembering how wide you cut your binding, deciding how wide to make the sleeve, remembering to thread your bobbin through the finger to increase tension for embroidering names, and such details.  So doing it only once saved a lot of time.

I'll show you the finished quilts tomorrow.

Cute little crafty things

My sister found three wonderful little doodads at a Christmas bazaar and we oohed and aahed over how clever they were and how easy to make, should the spirit move you.

Here's a tiny felted wool bowl, about three inches across.  The bowl was knitted, then tossed into the washer and dryer to felt and shrink it.

Here's a rose made from a man's tie.  This one is fitted as a hair clip, but it could be made as a pin or maybe even strung on a cord for a necklace.  Check out the bottom view for a clue as to how it's put together.

Finally, here's a sink scrubby, crocheted from strips of nylon tulle, cut from a roll.  (Don't know how wide the strips were, sorry.)

I know Christmas is over, but Valentine's Day approaches.  Could there be a more romantic gift than a handmade sink scrubby?  Probably you should do it in red.  And if you're really good at crochet, maybe you could make it heart-shaped.

The New Guy is here!

The new baby finally arrived yesterday evening, and his name is Luke.

And here's the perfect baby quilt.

Aren't you impressed?  That in less than twelve hours I have not only whipped out something with his name on it, but gotten it quilted and bound!

I wish.

Faithful readers of this blog may think this looks kind of familiar, and that's because I showed it to you a couple of years ago.

The quilt was made about ten years ago for another Luke, who lives in Australia.  It was one of the first pieces I made with my own hand-dyed fabrics, right after I learned about dyeing.  I still like the colors, the design, and the quilting (which I have no recollection of doing, but apparently did a pretty decent job of, combining free-motion spirals on the large empty blocks with diagonal grid checkerboards on the four-patch blocks).  Unlike many pieces that I made early in my quilting life, I'd be perfectly happy and proud to give this one away today.

But New Luke will just have to wait a bit for a big present.  (Heck, his grandmother and I just barely finished the quilt we made for his big brother, age four, so you can see that deadlines are somewhat flexible in this family.)

Baby story

I've written before about my practice of making newborn quilts out of black and white fabrics only.  Because babies' ability to distinguish colors doesn't develop for several weeks, they can't focus properly on multicolored objects, but love black and white.

The latest newborn in our family is Kate, who arrived last week and is now home.  Her father reports:  "When we showed her the quilt Kate stopped squirming, stopped sucking on her pacifier and... it looks like she's reading it."  So far every baby we've tried this out on has had the same response, which warms my heart.  Never too early to get those kids reading!

If you have a new baby on the way, try making a black and white quilt.  It doesn't have to be big -- mine are all about 16 inches square -- and it buys you lots of time before you have to actually deliver on a regulation baby quilt.  (And it lets you wait till the baby has a name, so you can sew that into the quilt.)

"I swear never to make a baby quilt"

Elena wrote a comment to my last post and said, “You're not in the group of artists who'd swear never to make a baby quilt. Care to share your thoughts on that?”

I understand how some people might swear never to make a commission quilt that has to match the sofa, but what is so awful about a baby quilt??  It's small, it's fast, you can make it out of your stash, it's going to be USED and it's probably going to be kept.  It will probably be the first work of art in the child's life.  And I think every baby deserves to have something that's his own, that's special, that doesn't have to be shared with everybody else in the family.  Maybe that's why I love to put the baby's name on the quilt.

Some artists may think it's beneath their dignity to make a functional quilt, especially one that might well get peed or chewed or spit up on or put on the floor. But I think that those of us who choose to make our art in the form of quilts must have some visceral connection with traditional quilts (i.e. functional quilts), else why choose this under-respected niche of the art world in which to operate? If you don’t love something about the traditional quilt format, then why not make your art as paintings, or sculpture, or lithographs, or collage, or photos?

Maybe all artists who make non-functional, non-traditional quilts ought to be required to make one functional quilt every year or so, as a ritual obeisance to our roots. When you make a functional quilt, for instance, you are reminded why you quilt densely, why you put a strong binding on, all those conventions that you no longer have to do, but once upon a time all quiltmakers had to do. We can choose, in the name of art, to make a quilt with no binding at all, or make a quilt from tea bags or bread wrappers or Coke cans, or leave thread ends wafting in the breeze, but our foremothers had no such choices, and perhaps we should regularly be reminded of why and how they made their work, why and how they developed the traditions that we so blithely flout.

I don’t make bed quilts for big beds, because I don’t have enough time. On the rare occasions when I am confronted with a wedding, I make a wall quilt if anything.  I’ve actually made only two quilts in my life for grown-up beds (and one of them, my first quilt, is currently taken apart, awaiting reconstruction, because I did such a lousy job of making it in the first place).

But I have made many smaller quilts that, yes, people actually pull over their bodies to get warm.  And I make baby quilts whenever I have the opportunity. When I do, I’m moving temporarily into a different world, a thankfully bygone world, where women got to show their artistry only within very limited areas, where making quilts was esteemed only insofar as the quilts were useful. It reminds me of where we started, and how far we have come, and it’s good to be reminded every now and then.

Babies on my mind -- part 3

Today's baby quilts have a long history.  They were made for the grandchildren of my best friend from graduate school, Zuki, who was raised in Hawaii; her grandparents came over from Japan. Zuki's grandmother had access to the scraps from a factory where they made muu-muus and Hawaiian shirts, and over the years she sewed together hundreds and hundreds of the scraps into a single pattern which I don’t know the name of.

I can testify that because the outer edges of the square are all bias, the pattern is a pain to work with. You can stitch those inside straight edges in good faith but when it comes time to put the squares together any tiny deviation in cutting (and remember, these were made in the days of scissors and cardboard templates) translates into big ruffles on the perimeter.

Several years ago Zuki gave me a huge bag of these squares and I made a twin-size quilt out of them for her to give to a nephew. But I still had many, many, many squares left. In the fullness of time Zuki’s daughter got pregnant and I knew exactly what I needed to make for her – a quilt out of the muu-muu scraps. I’m sorry this photo is so dark but it does show the quilt. Since the quilt had to be done for a shower in advance of the baby, I didn’t get to put his name on it, nor did I know he was a he, so I chose a unisex color scheme. 

Zuki, of course, recognized the squares the minute the package was unwrapped and we both got very teary, as did the others in attendance after she told the story of the baby’s great-great-grandmother, who had started the quilt. While this was a surprise for Zuki, I had been thinking so much about this family while I worked on the quilt. I love to work with other people’s leftovers, because it gives me such a bond with some other woman who sat at her machine and sewed late at night, trying to make something beautiful. And knowing from Zuki how much hard work and hard times and sacrifice her grandmother had gone through made working with her squares doubly poignant.

When Zuki’s son had a baby a couple of months later, I waited till she was born so I could sew her name on the quilt, and searched for all the pink fabric in the stash to make it nice and girly.

I am so jealous because Zuki now has three grandchildren and a fourth on the way. The newest baby is named Hazel, which is a great name for a quilt since it has no curvy letters. But neither she nor her cousin-to-be will get their quilts till after my Quilt National entry is in the mail this fall. And these two quilts may have proportionately less muu-muu fabric and proportionately more of something else; I’ll have to check out my stash and see what’s left.

PS -- no baby in Boston yet.

Babies on my mind -- part 2

Still no baby today, but here’s a nice baby quilt to show you.

I’ve talked before about how my friend Juanita Yeager is the best scrap-donator in the world. When she puts a “scrap” into her scrap bag is might be two inches square or it might be three feet square. She is of the mindset that when something doesn’t work, she wants it outta here, right now. That makes her a great friend for somebody like me, who is of the mindset that if it’s big enough to see, it’s big enough to save.

So a couple of years ago Juanita and I went to a Nancy Crow workshop on curves and circles. Juanita, of course, made glorious work, but she didn’t like much of it. So this study came home with me under the guise of “scrap.”

One day I needed a baby quilt and didn’t have much time, so I unearthed this top. Juanita had worked in Kona cottons, my favorite brand for solid colors or dyeing, so I was able to open my own Kona stash and find some green to match the green Juanita had used in the original. This enabled me to put the baby’s name on the quilt.  I decided to put the name in the white quadrant, since that's the color that magnetically attracts urp and poop and I wanted to minimize that big expanse.

Sorry to say I failed to photograph the quilt after it was quilted.