Back at the sewing machine

If the man from Mars started reading my blog in October or November, he would probably wonder why I use the word "needle" in my title.  To judge from my recently reported activities, I've been doing everything but fiber art.  To an extent that's true, partly because I lost almost the entire months of December and January to travel and illness.  But I am happy to report that I am back at the sewing machine in earnest on a totally new project.

Although I consider my "serious" work to be the creation of fiber art for exhibit, I do love to work with beginning and intermediate quilters, encouraging and enabling them to develop more self-confidence in both design and execution.  I've often said that my mission in life is that nobody should ever have to use somebody else's pattern to make a quilt.

In aid of that mission, I am writing a book about quilting without patterns.  It's about using the traditional Rail Fence block as a launching pad for many variations and experiments.  We hope to have it published this spring -- electronically, not on paper, because the process of finding a conventional publisher and getting a book done is vastly more complicated and time-consuming than the exciting new world of e-publishing.

I found writing the book to be the easy part.  The hard part is coming up with the quilts to illustrate it, and that's what has been occupying me for the last couple of weeks.  None of these are quilted yet; I've been in piecing mode, cranking out top after top, one every day or so (hey, they're mostly small!).  I must report that it's really fun to whip out little quilts with minimal agonizing -- quite a change from my usual time-consuming and tedious processes that might keep a quilt on the design wall for weeks.

Here's the traditional Rail Fence, with the prominent color at the side of the block so it forms zigzags:

Here's the traditional block again, but the prominent color is in the center of the block so it forms over-and-under weaves:

Here's a variation in which the block is rectangular, not square, and one of the rails is made up of smaller piecing:

Here's one in which the blocks are small, rectangular and stacked into long columns:

I'll show you more in a later post.

Helpful hint for February

So which way do you like this quilt?

Vertical...

... or horizontal?

Although I made the quilt in 2002 I haven't laid eyes on it for several years.  I took it to my neighborhood quilt shop to display because I was going to teach a class in this technique of piecing, and after the class never got around to collecting the quilt.  I kind of liked having it hanging in the shop to keep my name out there.  But the shop has closed, and the quilt has come home.

The other day as I was putting it away I noticed the back of the quilt, with a little detail that I thought might be helpful to share.

When I made the piece several years ago my first idea was to have it horizontal, and that's the way I put the sleeve on.  But for some reason I subsequently decided that it would also look good in the vertical orientation.  So I put a second sleeve on.

Because each sleeve is sliced off on the diagonal, you can insert a hanging rod in either direction and still have it support the entire width of the quilt.

Package project update 8

My very first bundle of 2011 was kind of an omen: it was a handful or two of fabric bits wrapped up in some tulle.  I love fabric bits; my motto is "if it's big enough to see, it's big enough to save."

It always hurt me to throw away bits, and for many years I have saved any scrap more than an inch wide, pressing and sorting them and often sewing them into quilts that I named "Shards."  Four years ago I had an exciting artistic breakthrough when I started making my postage stamp quilts, using even tinier bits of fabric to make little compositions on the small pieces.

From that point on, of course, I had to save even tinier bits.  I put large plastic bags at my cutting table and at my sewing machine, and started depositing scraps and thread ends into the bags instead of throwing them out.  Since the bits are so tiny it takes a LONG time to fill up a bag, but I do have a good collection of bits in case I want to make little postage stamps --- or incorporate the bits into a bundle.

So to make bundle 1-1 I just dug into my bag and got enough bits to fill up the tulle.

As the year went by I used this concept several times. 

Here's a videotape cassette stripped of its tape and filled with fabric bits.  The tape got braided and used to tie up the bundle.

Here's a pile of polaroid film cassettes filled with fabric bits.

Here's a plastic tube.

Here's a piece of translucent fabric.

Here's a bundle of threads without any container at all.

Still lots of fabric bits left in the bags and the package project is over.    What will I do with them now?  Guess I need to make a new postage stamp quilt.

Photo suite 6 -- spectrum of stairs

Uunfortunately, I haven't been able to find either purple or orange steps.  But these ought to be worth half credit:

Where is it?

In December I posted a photo and challenged you to identify where it was taken.  Perhaps the gods didn't want me to do it, because that very day I was struck down with what turned out to be serious gall bladder illness, and in the course of recovering from surgery I neglected to ever credit Silvia Dell'Aere for being the first with the right answer.

But now that I'm recovered, I have another mystery place.  If you know it in person that will trump those who know it through Google Images.

Spool mania

Zipping through the aisles at Hobby Lobby the other day I was astonished to find this product on the shelf:

That's right, it's three tiny wood spools.  You can't see from the photo, but each one is wound with some kind of threadlike material, not actually thread but larger strands, some metallic, some that looked like plastic coated wire.

I didn't examine them closely enough to swear in court, but I'm sure the spools are new, made in China to resemble real spools.  This stuff is sold as "mixed media artist materials."

I am a wood spool aficionada and when I see my favorite things on display I perk up.  Back in the day when all thread came on wood spools, I was careless.  I threw them away when the thread ran out.  Or I would use them as craft bases, sometimes painting them, sometimes gluing yarn or paper to them.

Oh, I shudder to think of the spools that I disposed of or ruined.  I don't remember exactly when it dawned on me that wood spools were things of the past.  At some point thread started to come on plastic, and to my credit, fairly soon I realized I should be saving the wood spools.  I still owned many from my own stash, and I commandeered all I could from my mother, my sister and unsuspecting friends and relatives. 

I'd grab them at grab bag.  I also started buying them at flea markets.  A decade ago, on a good day, you could get a bag of spools for a dime apiece, some empty, some with thread still on them.  Then the price crept up and up, out of my range.  Occasionally I'd score a batch from some back alley source. 

For instance, once I was visiting a sewing circle at a church and the ladies showed me a big pile of stuff that they were going to sell at a bazaar the next week.  Including four shoeboxes of thread, some on wood spools -- you could tell it was very old because spools and thread alike were stained.  I tactfully pointed out that thread that old wasn't good to sew with, volunteered to separate the wood spools from the plastic, and had to force them to accept my money so I could take the wood spools home.

I bought two old thread display cases, which hold many but not all of my spools, and I enjoy arranging the spools by color and size.  You can almost imagine how the case looked in its first life.

Bet you didn't know that the standard Lily spools are a hair shorter than Clark's; I didn't know either until I realized that I had to sort by brand to pack my cases.

Many others go in old type cases; large spools are arrayed on top or on cords.

Considering that my price point for antique spools has been ten cents, I had sticker shock looking at the faux spools at Hobby Lobby, $1.86 apiece.  Of course that included a little bit of faux thread that had to be wound onto the spool by a slave laborer in China. 

Of course the "artists" who buy this stuff probably wouldn't know the difference between a faux spool and a real one, but wouldn't it be nice to think that I could disassemble my collection, package the spools in little bags of three, and get two bucks apiece?