Angular Momentum

Angular Momentum

73” by 68”

My daughter, The Monster, named this quilt. She also helped baste it and held it for the photo shoot. Let me tell you, having teens has its advantages! Another one of those being the ability to sit and sew for extended periods of time without having to wipe a bum, get snacks, or fix the TV. Things sure have changed!

What hasn’t changed, however, is my love for all things Improv. It never will, it is totally my Love Language.

This particular quilt began life as a bit of play in 2017, the summer of 2017. One of the blocks in here actually inspired my Shiver quilt! I finished the quilt top itself in the summer of 2019. And I put the last stitches of the binding in just before the end of 2020. All in all, that’s pretty quick for me!

The entire quilt was an exploration of just a few improv techniques, led by a study in triangles. I made each block of the quilt with only two contrasting solids. I really did not think about how they might all look together, only how the two colours looked side by side. Selections came from my small stash of solids. This meant I was limited to what was on hand. Sometimes blocks are as big as they are because that’s all the fabric I had, sometimes I felt the composition of the block was good so I stopped.

The whole thing ends up being an exploration of positive and negative in colours as well as value. This makes you see different shapes or lines. (Is that a dragon’s tail or a zipper?) Playing with scale within blocks and among the blocks keeps it from feeling same same across the quilt. As does changing up the technique all over. There is so much to see, so much to study as you look at this quilt.

When it came time to quilt this I had a very specific free motion technique in mind. I spent a while doodling it on paper to make sure my brain understood how to make it work. It’s one thing to have the look in mind, quite another to translate it through the needle. Although it was terribly time-consuming, every minute was worth it. I LOVE the way it turned out. You could absolutely scale up this pattern so it isn’t quite so dense.

My go to thread on a quilt like this - multiple colours without a singular story - would be an olive green, but I had none. We’re still staying home so I picked something from my thread stash instead of shopping. Pink it was! I was pleasantly surprised at how well it performs in this quilt, never really being bossy, allowing the texture to be front and centre. The pink I used was Aurifil 2479, really nice medium pink.

For binding, that pink thread definitely influenced the fabric choice. I know a lot of people might have picked a single solid here. Or maybe a black and white stripe. Both would have worked. I also did not have enough of either. Besides, I wasn’t feeling those options anyway. That pink thread inspired me to look in my pink stash and as soon as I rediscovered this stripe I knew it was perfect. Unexpected and bold, but it doesn’t steal all the attention. You know me, I like the contrast on a binding.

The back came together with some panels purchased at a store close-out a handful of years ago and some of my own Tag Fabric. The pink kind of glows here, doesn’t it?

My plan is for this quilt to be a teaching sample, stay tuned for those details. In the meantime, it is already in heavy rotation in the house. My son grabs it when he wakes up in the morning for snuggles with me or the dog. It’s also keeping me warm now that winter truly arrived as I read on the sofa. The whole thing is such a shot of necessary colour right now.

That’s 3 quilts finished in a month! Who am I?

PS

Lest you think I am some kind of a machine, check out the full glamour of quilting literally in the middle of a blanket fort over the Christmas break.

Show and Tell

Show and Tell

43” x 45’

First quilt finish of 2021!

I’m in a mood. A mood from the state of the world and politics and Covid and all of that. But also a mood to finish things. Head down and focus on something else. This is 1 of 3 quilts I’ve finished in the last few weeks.

This particular project came about as class samples. When I taught improv curves in person I would grab from the same stack of fabric to demonstrate various ideas. Bits would get used and reused in each class. Eventually, I ran out of the background fabric. That meant it was time to turn things into a quilt.

I do this a lot. It’s better than using random fabric for class samples and being left with a bunch of orphan blocks. This means that the next time I teach this class I will have a different selection of fabrics to use, which will eventually turn into the next quilt.

I was able, thankfully, to use a single width of fabric for the backing. The quilting was based on a sketch I had. My daughter said it made her googly-eyed, but as a quilting pattern it worked fantastic. I’ll admit, I was tempted to stop after one pass, but on a small quilt the second pass isn’t that much more work. Enjoy this badly coloured, but blown out photo so you can see the quilting. One pass was a quarter circle, repeated. The other pass was a modified wave pattern in a different direction. It was all done with a walking foot and 50W Aurifil thread.

The background fabric is covered in little coloured dots. I used most of the colours in the quilt, so when it came time to choose binding I went with yellow, the one dot colour I hadn’t used. Besides, we all could use a little sunshiny optimism right now!

Maybe these finishes will be just what I need to clear some mental space to get back at it? It’s surely a point of privilege to even think that way, a luxury to get to escape to quilting and ignore the real world. Life isn’t going to change overnight, we know that. A lot of us have a lot of work to do to make the world a better place for all. Yellow binding isn’t going to fix anything. Ignoring the world to finish a quilt is probably the wrong thing to do as well. But we all need respite at time in order to have the energy to keep fighting the fight.

Morning Make December 2020

December saw a decided slow down, a necessary slow down. I was in the mood for hand stitching plus I wanted something that would carry me through the quiet holiday at home. Having done embroidery in February and already working on English Paper Piecing I decided to try something entirely new to me.

Pojagi is a Korean art form of patchwork. It can be done by machine, but I chose to go the original route of hand stitching. The end result is a finished seam from both sides. This means any Pojagi piece is entirely reversible.

It was never a one piece of fabric to represent one day in the month kind of project. Some days I did a single short seam, some days I did five. I will say that, initially, I thought I would make it into a curtain or shade for one of my sewing room windows. The low winter sun and Zoom events mean I have to diffuse the light coming in the room for part of the day. This would have been a very traditional use for the Pojagi. But it’s a big window! So partway through the month I switched plans and made it longer rather that wider, sealing its fate as a table runner (if I finished it.)

The first exposure I had to Pojagi was years ago from Victoria Gertenbach. Despite the time passing, it has always stuck in my head. She did machine work, but it was the history and the effect that stayed with me. For a hand stitched technique I used this tutorial. I won’t lie, I had to look at the tutorial each day for a week while I worked on it to have it make sense.

For materials and colour I stayed close to home. Many examples of Korean work will use different materials from silks to polyesters. I stuck with quilting cottons and linens, a mixture pulled from my stash. Included in this was a sparkly linen left behind when a friend from Australia visited, leftover blues from Shiver, and a scrap of fabric used to sop up dye when we tie dyed sheets with the kids last summer. My fabric pull was, in the end, an homage to a winter sunrise here.

I did actually finish this piece. It felt silly to leave it behind to be both forgotten and potentially wrecked. During downtime and while supervising virtual school this week I hemmed the edges. The tree is still up, candles light our evenings, and a lovely reminder to slow down graces the table.

As for Morning Make I am going to continue on the monthly change for 2021. I really liked the strong focus for a relatively short period of time. It is fostering play and exploration but still allows me to dig in to something new a little.

Names for Snow

Names For Snow

47” x 58”

Okay, so I finished this quilt more than a year ago. Then it was on display and stayed living for a friend for a year. He was paranoid about it getting wrecked and so gave it back. I’ve just been waiting for a proper snowfall to get a picture of it.

Of course, I forgot that proper snowfalls actually make it difficult to take quilt pictures. There is the feets of snow, for one. And two, despite all that white, it is quite difficult to get accurate colour representation in snow. Good thing this quilt is inspired by snow! In a strange twist in quilt photography, shooting this quilt in the sun was the way to do it. Got my tween and her best friend to help out as I forced them away from the snow fort they are building.

The entire quilt started as a love letter to my favourite scissors. Kevin from Knife Wear goes on buying trips to Japan. I made a comment about scissors offhand and he came up with some pairs to try. Yes, I know we quilters are spoiled with a lot of scissor options. These ones are, by far, my favourite. So I set out to freehand cut half square triangles and sew them together. Everything was cut by hand - the initial squares, trimming, and squaring up. The only time I brought out a rotary cutter and ruler was to square up the finished quilt. What a liberating way to work!

Note to self: do this again.

Playing with all these neutrals resulted in another love letter through this quilt. To my favourite season: winter! It isn’t often that I have the name of a quilt early in the making but this one was set pretty quickly. Whites, creams, beiges, more whites, a little blue. No yellow.

I spent way too much time obsessing over the quilting. I was researching different languages and their names for snow, I was trying to figure out how to stitch in Inuktitut. I brainstorming loads of options. In the end, however, a deadline and my desire to never mark quilts won. I went with dense, wavy lines (snowdrift) with little asterisk/sparkles here and there. Texture, more than anything.

The white binding seemed like a no brainer.

When making improv quilts, whether free hand cut like this or now, one key thing to remember is that perfection does not live here. Points will be trimmed off, lines might be a bit wonky, you might cut more than expected to make things fit, and almost nothing lines up. This is precisely why I like this. It looks and feels handmade. I see my own movements in every line of stitching, every shape. It can be a hard switch from the pursuit of perfection in quilt making but it is a liberating switch for many.

Now that we are settled in for a Christmas at home I am glad for another quilt on the sofa to celebrate my truly favourite season. Winter is indeed for snow forts and skiing (hopefully) and skating. Winter is for curling up with quilts and cookies at the bookends of those activities.

Here’s to the season!

This is the third in my landscape series. See Mountain Meadows and Ripples.