A change of pace

After working on ice colors for the last month trying to depict Antarctic glaciers and ice floes, I was ready for some different colors.  I knew I needed plenty of fabric to make a huge expanse of piecing, so didn't even bother to look in my big stash of solid colors where the typical piece of fabric might be a yard.  So I went to the store for Kona cotton.

My first thought was to choose two colors very close in value but near-complementary in hue.  I know that combination often causes the pattern to vibrate and shimmer.  I had made a small quilt with that plan and sent it out in public recently, and wanted to replicate the effect at a much larger scale.

Gridlock 1, 2011
















But I couldn't find a combination that worked.  I think the store was awaiting a shipment because many of my favorite colors were absent without leave.  No good rich purples, no  darkish blues.  I looked in the medium values trying for something that would go with some nice browns, but wasn't inspired.

So how about a total change of pace -- hot orange and hot pink?

Several years ago when I had a big crush on Ellsworth Kelly I saw a tiny photo of something he had made; I don't even remember if it was a painting, a print or what.  The photo was about an inch square, just big enough to get the general idea of the design.  In fact, I stole (rather, adapted) the design and made three quilts from it, and may go back and do more in the future.

What stuck with me was not just the design, but the colors -- hot orange and hot pink, so close in value that you almost couldn't tell where one stopped and the other started.  And here they were on the shelf, and they passed the shimmer test, vibrating before your eyes.

So I loaded up on them, came home and started sewing, without even stopping for lunch.  When inspiration strikes, you want to get on with it.

My design plan is to sort of replicate Gridlock, except a lot bigger.  At this stage I'm sewing modules more or less a foot square, except they're mostly not square.  Almost all of them have strong diagonal edges, which means it will be a pain in the butt to get them to fit together in the end.  But that's a problem to deal with in April or May.  For now, I just want to sew.

on the wall -- March 24

on the wall -- March 27 -- moving right along....

I was there first

Last week the New York Times had an article on the art scene in Lisbon, illustrated with several luscious photos of the older sections of town.

New York Times photo, Nacho Alegre

When I saw this photo I thought it looked pleasantly familiar -- in a very brief visit to Lisbon in 2007, an afternoon ashore from a cruise ship, we had strolled through a seedy (no, I mean picturesque) old part of town with very similar buildings.

Then I happened to be looking through my pictures from that trip and what did I find....

photo by Kathleen Loomis

Sure, his picture is better. He probably waited around all afternoon for the cars to leave -- or maybe he paid them to clear out.  And he crouched down a bit so the lamp ended up higher.

But what fun to see that nobody has bothered to paint the building in the last five years!  And to realize that I was there first.

Spool story

Coats & Clark, the thread manufacturer, is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year.  The firm started in Scotland, came to the U.S. in the mid-19th century, and is still going strong.  I  happened upon a special anniversary section of its website the other day and spent many pleasant and some frustrating minutes looking through its history.

You will drool over the photos of old sewing machines, thread cabinets, sewing notions and, of course, spools of thread.  If you don't want to take the time to visit their website, I'll give you the second-best Coats & Clark nostalgia tour from my own collection of sewing memorabilia.

Unfortunately, you will gnash your teeth trying to figure out the details of the company's history, as many fun facts are as cleverly hidden as Waldo.  Each page of the site has big arrows left and right, which you can use to move forward and backward in time.  But each one also has tiny arrows which you can use to find more info from the same time period.  It took me a whole lot longer than I should have spent on the site in toto to discover the second set of arrows.

The best joke in the website came at the very end, where they show an array of spools from then to now.  The copy reads:  "Gold metal spools replaced wooden spools.  These were soon replaced by plastic spools."

I don't know how old you have to be to remember the gold spools, but they haven't been gone all that long -- it took me less than two minutes to find a representative sample in my own thread stash.

And no, the gold spools are not metal.  They're plastic.

Which makes me wonder who put together this website, and who at the company approved it before it went live.  Surely in a company celebrating its 200th anniversary there's somebody around who sewed with their thread in the last decade or two.

Photo suite 13 -- door travelogue

Chios, Greece

Kyoto, Japan

Samos, Greece

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Vestenberg, Germany

Antigua, Guatemala

Puntarenas, Costa Rica

Sign of the week

Made to measure

I am one of the artists participating in an upcoming exhibit sponsored by Studio Art Quilt Associates, which will make its debut in Houston this fall and later travel here and there.  It's called "Seasonal Palette," which as you might expect deals with the different colors that represent or evoke the seasons.  We were juried into the exhbit last summer by submitting images of some of our quilts, and by choosing a season and specifying which colors we would use to depict it.

Surprisingly, a disproportionate number of the selected artists wanted to do winter (and I was one of them).  Some of those chosen for the show were assigned other seasons, but I was fortunate to get to keep my first choice.  I think it had to do with my remarks about being inspired by my trip to Antarctica.  Something about that continent commands awe and respect even in those who haven't been there.

So several months later, I've just about finished my entry for the show.  Just the sleeves to attach, and I'm ready to send my baby off into the world.  I am really pleased with what came out of this challenge.  I think the quilt does a good job of evoking the huge glaciers and icebergs that I saw in Antarctica.

What's on my mind this week, though, is the particular twist of this assignment that has to do with measurements.  Specifically, we were told to make our completed quilts 32" by 78".  Obviously this will result in a cohesive installation, but achieving it is not as easy as you might think. I've only constructed to a specified dimension a couple of times in the past, again in order to conform to the rules of a prestigious traveling exhibit.  And it was just as hard this time as it was in the past.

You may think you know exactly what to do -- you block out the given length and width on your design wall and arrange your composition within those boundaries.  You make it larger than you really need, knowing you'll have to trim off some at the end.  But wait.  Constructing a quilt isn't like making a painting -- you can't just design something that seems like it's going to be 32 inches wide and have it actually turn out that way.  Instead you make it 34 inches wide and expect to trim some off at the end (and hope the extra two inches are enough).

For instance, look at my unquilted top on the design wall -- it kind of oozes toward the right as it goes downward.  Once it gets squared up will it still be wide enough?  Will I have to slant the ruler as I trim it to its final dimensions? 

The wild card, of course, is the quilting.  I ended up quilting this piece in parallel lines that went across the narrow width of the quilt.

In parallel line quilting, you always find that the fabric takes up between the lines of stitching; the cross section, if you could see it, transforms neat, flat layers of fabric into bulges that would look like figure eights.  If you were to grab the top and bottom and pull them taut, everything would stretch out a bit, but in ordinary display that's not going to happen.

As a result, what I thought was plenty long enough ended up not.  I lost more than three inches in height because of the quilting, to the extent that when I got to the bottom edge of the quilt, I had to stop quilting and add more pieced fabric to the left side of that diagonal edge to make it 78 inches long. 

With this quilt it was no big deal -- I just found more of the fabric I had been using, pieced a new triangular section in which some of the existing pieced lines were continued, folded back the batting and backing and sliced off the pieced top on a diagonal, then sewed the new section to it.  Everything got folded back to its proper place and pressed, and I continued the quilting till I got to the (now longer) bottom edge.

After I measured the width of the quilted piece, I decided I couldn't risk quilting a whole new set of vertical lines, because I didn't have much width to spare and couldn't easily augment the quilt because the horizontal quilting lines stopped at the original edges.

More important, with this quilt cutting to fit was no big deal because the pattern really isn't a major element in the design.  The expanse of fabric in certain values is important, but who cares if a little triangle of piecing disappears or has to be extended?  By contrast, if you're working with an actual design rather than an expanse of similar fabrics, it can cause real problems if you have to cut off a certain shape to make your quilt exactly so wide and tall.

Layout 2 --  a quilt that was in an internationally touring show several years ago that had to be 52 inches square.  When I finally quilted it and cut it to size, the design was somewhat of a surprise.

I'd much rather work unencumbered by specifications: making the quilt so it looks right, then finishing it and discovering at the end how big it turns out to be.  Making to measure adds another fiddly dimension to quilting that I'd just as soon do without.