Photo suite 7 -- tropical food

Over the holidays we took a cruise up the Amazon as far as Manaus, which was quite the metropolis at the turn of the last century when the Amazon was the world's only source of rubber and the growing auto industry was gobbling up more and more of it.  The opera house is a replica of La Scala in Milan; Gustave Eiffel designed the marketplace.  Tres elegant!

Today the rubber trade has dwindled, since a British entrepreneur/thief smuggled out rubber seeds a century ago and established plantations in Malaya.  Manaus is still bustling but its almost two million people make much of their money assembling electronic devices.

One thing hasn't changed: people need their food.  Eiffel's little market building is under renovation and the vendors are in vast temporary quarters across the street.  Here are some of the sights (more market photos here and here on my food blog).

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.