Photo suite 59 -- Big Four Bridge

In 1895 the Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati and St. Louis Railroad -- popularly called the Big Four -- purchased a newly built bridge over the Ohio River at Louisville.  But the last train crossed in 1969 and for many years the bridge stood empty and rotting, its access tracks cut off at the last stanchions.  Finally last week it was opened as a pedestrian-only crossing, part of the Waterfront Park.

It will be a few more months before the access ramps are completed on the Indiana side of the river, so for now you walk across from Kentucky, turn around and walk back.  By this summer the project should be complete.  Meanwhile, opening day was a big party, with bicycles, kids, dogs and hundreds of happy visitors.

Sign of the week

Recurring motifs 7 -- hearts

I love heart shapes because they are so forgiving.  If you make them symmetrical, they're beautiful.  If you squeeze them tight or make one side different from the other, they're still beautiful.

More to the point, it's impossible to draw a heart badly freehand.  Start at the point of the indented V on the heart's top, go up and around and down to the point at the bottom.  Turn around and go up the other side.  You can start curving back to make the top lobe any time you want  -- after you've come across the top just head back toward your starting point.  Guaranteed to work.

I made all kinds of hearts last year as part of my daily art project:

plain

with an arrow

broken.

Many signified anniversaries.

 

I'm linking this to Off the Wall Friday -- check out what other fiber artists are up to this week.

Recurring motifs 6 -- highways

After taking some time off, I return to my contemplation of shapes and motifs that kept appearing in my daily hand-stitching last year.

For my daily art project in 2001 I made a quilt block to depict the day's events or my studio scraps from the day.  As we did a lot of traveling that year, I decided to design a pieced "highway block" that would be used every time I was on the road.

This year I brought back the highway block for the same purpose.  Sometimes it just sat there.

Once it had a highway marker (Interstate 71).

Sometimes it went through the mountains.

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.