Roughing it

Two years ago my sister was visiting me and we decided to whip out a couple of quilts for her two little grandsons.  We finished one top and got halfway through the second but ran out of time.   The unfinished top had some tricky piecing, including a set-in curved seam, and I offered to keep it and finish it as soon as I came back from some extended vacations.  But no, she was in a hurry so she took it home with her.

And promptly misplaced it.  The first top got quilted up and given to the kid, but the second top had disappeared into limbo -- until late last month.  It resurfaced because my sister is moving, and she had finally gotten to the point where practically everything she owns is packed, and this bag of stuff was among the last to resurface.

So I was visiting her last week and she pulled out the quilt, in pieces.  If we finished the top posthaste, her longarm lady could get it quilted before moving day.

We were proud of this top -- we made log cabin squares with frogs in the center.  I had bought the frog fabric 20 years ago, knowing that it would come in handy sometime, and its time had definitely come.

Only problem was how many of the things you usually use to sew were already packed and gone.  I realize how spoiled I am with my studio -- not the greatest studio in the world, but it does have a big pool-table-sized work surface, and a design wall, and a big sewing surface surrounding my machine, and lots of cutting mats.  By contrast, last week we had a sewing machine, one cutting mat with heat ripples, a rotary cutter and an 18-inch ruler.

Trimming the top had to be done in sections as the whole thing wouldn't fit on our cutting table.  And we had to lay the quilt out on the floor.  Just the way I used to in the olden days before I discovered design walls.

But the tricky curved seams of the J went in beautifully, and the top went off to be quilted in a frog pattern.  High time we finished it, since there's now a third grandson on the way!

Embroidery tutorial 6 -- running stitch

This post is indeed about a hand-stitching tutorial, but the student is me.  I was browsing around on the Interweave/Quilting Arts website the other day and discovered a mini-book that's available for free download.  It's called Hand Sewing for Quilters and includes several articles on different stitches.  I glommed onto the article on the running stitch, which of course I have known how to do for decades, but was excited to see how it was used in this particular body of work.

The artist was Julia Caprara, an influential artist and educator in the UK who died in 2008.  I had not been familiar with her name, but a bit of googling revealed that she had inspired and influenced many fiber artists whom I do know.  The article I downloaded was a revisit of something she had written for Quilting Arts magazine several years ago.

Here's the photo that sent me running, so to speak, to my embroidery bag.

Julia Caprara, Goddess Cloth -- Aegean Goddess 

I focused in on the large motif at top center, with the red arc surrounding the blue sunburst.  I've been shamelessly using Julia's techniques in my daily stitching for much of the last two weeks.

The concept of using a bunch of running stitches to make shapes rather than lines is, of course, not new (think satin stitch) but I hadn't thought to use it that way until now.  I love it and hope that after working faux-Julia for a while, I'll be able to internalize the technique and make things that look less Julia and more Kathy.

Photo suite 32 -- dog show

More about quilting designs

I wrote earlier this week about quilting designs, and how I find it physically difficult to do free-motion quilting on very large pieces.  In reviewing my photos of past quilts I realize how much I enjoy those designs -- they're fun to do, and beautiful on quilts with enough blank space to show off the quilting.  On busy quilts, with lots of tiny pieces and/or patterns, elaborate quilting often just disappears and isn't worth the trouble, in my mind.

Here's an example of nice free-motion quilting that is lovely from the back, on solid color fabric, but barely visible from the front.  Too bad.  I probably could have quilted it in a plain grid with a walking foot in half the time I spent on free-motion mazes. 

Crazed 8: Incarceration (detail)

But for other types of quilt design, there's certainly an opportunity to add a whole new dimension of artistry by creative quilting designs.

As an example, I'd like to show the work of my friend Sandra Ciolino, who is one of the best machine quilters I know.  She has done machine quilting for Nancy Crow and taught machine quilting at the Crow Barn.  She will be teaching again at the Barn in October.

Sandy's strength is not just in executing beautiful allover quilting patterns but in combining several of them in the same quilt.  Here are a couple of detail shots:

Sandra Palmer Ciolino, Nova (detail)

Sandra Palmer Ciolino, Martello #7: Biofeedback (detail)

She also does beautiful quilting with the walking foot:

Sandra Palmer Ciolino, Martello #6: Skyward (detail)

Notice how there's not the slightest bubble at the points of the "darts," where she had to sew into the center, then turn the quilt around and come back out to the edge.  That's a sign of technical mastery.

Sandra Palmer Ciolino, Sgabello #4: Firecracker (detail)

Sign of the week

Piecing again

A couple of weeks ago Judy Kirpich wrote a blog post that exactly summed up what's going through my mind.  She wrote:  "It's that time of year when artists who work in the quilt media start to go bonkers.  Either they have not yet finished their pieces for Quilt National, or they have finished them and are wondering if they should try and produce one more, one possible better than the last."

I have two pieces quilted, blocked, and ready for facing.  I have a third one pieced, but I'm not happy with it.  Decided to take a calculated gamble and start a new piece which I hope will be better.  Maybe it will have to be a bit smaller than my others (you know I love to work HUGE) but I think I can finish it in time.  If all else fails, I can quilt up the one I don't love so much.

I've been using my technique of fine line piecing for several years now, and my mental to-do list of approaches I haven't tried yet is getting shorter.  My first several quilts were all in solids, but more recently I've explored using print fabrics for the very narrow lines.  Twice I've used striped fabrics for both the narrow "mortar" lines and the larger "bricks."  Now I want to use prints for both bricks and mortar.

Like many people in the US this summer, I have heat on my mind, and the new quilt is all hot orange.

Some readers have asked me how I go about piecing the very complicated designs in my quilts.  It isn't at all complicated if you take it one bit at a time.

I start with strips, which I sew into strip sets.  The "brick" strips are always separated by narrow "mortar" strips.  I don't make my strip sets very long, because I don't want to be stuck with the repetition of A-B-C-D too many times.  So I might take those four strips, slice them into shorter pieces, and make one set of A-B-C-D, another of A-D-C-B, etc.

This is a lot of tedious sewing without much intellectual challenge, so I listen to trash TV or the opera and just crank out the miles.  Finally the fun part starts.  I press everything and cut the strip sets into short slices.

Then I find three or four slices that are the same length, preferably with different fabrics or different arrangements of the same fabric, and sew them together to make a little block.

After I've made a bunch of small blocks I fit them together to make larger blocks.  I hate to waste fabric (by which I mean cutting off a quarter-inch or more) so I often use a two-step technique to fit small blocks together.

I find two blocks that are about one brick width apart from each other.  I sew the end of a long strip set to the shorter block, sew the two blocks together, then trim off the long strip set to the exact length I need to match the other block.

Then I repeat these steps to make larger and larger blocks.  And repeat.  And repeat.  And repeat.  And repeat....