Just Under The Wire

I managed to squeeze in one more finish in August – “Transgendered.”

Because the quilt is about 54 by 61 inches, I had it quilted by a local longarm quilter who did ruler work on it.

It’s based on a quilt called “Fire and Ice” by Fun Easy Designed. I saw the picture and thought it would be a great way to use a bag of scraps I had purchased from Sew Batik. It seems I purchase only scraps rather than yardage from that vendor, but my rationale is I’m sure to find fabrics I would never buy otherwise.The pink fabrics came from stash and include batiks, and hand dyed and painted fabrics.

You can see I kept the two color concept and the corner wonky triangles but changed the line of demarcation to a diagonal. I also changed the size of the rectangles.

The title came about as I considered the tyranny of making blue quilts for baby boys and pink ones for baby girls. See this post from the Textile Ranger about how that wasn’t always the case. My personal feeling is that gender is fluid along a continuum. We all have bits of male and female in us. Just the proportions differ. The recent skirmishes about transgendered people led me to the title.

Around Here Week 34

My sort of daily walks take me across the Cuyahoga River on a footbridge. Lately the river has been low as we haven’t had rain, but the curtain of green I see from the bridge never fails to cool me off. This photo seems so summery I want to break out the voile fabric and sew gauzy layers. And to think it will be September next week.

Yet Another Finish

August has seen one finish after another, and when I say finish I mean I’ve even sewn down the facings. Here’s “Mean Streets” (33 by 22.5 inches) which I began as one of the last assignments of my Elizabeth Barton master class.

I used a grab bag of fabric – eco-dyed linen and silk organza, painted silk organza, coarse weave linen, netting, and a fabric softener sheet. There’s non-woven interfacing under the top to help stabilize the varied assortment of fabric.

The inspiration for all the shadows was a photo of a rough town on the Mexican border. A harsh light filters through a grill to cast stripes of light onto the buildings and street. Away from that light the scene dissolves into shadows.

I really did a lot of free motion quilting on this. In fact, it’s so stiff I think it can stand up on its own.

I made the graffiti with a freezer paper stencil and fabric paint.

I used black netting to give shadows to the side of the building.

Electric wires are strung haphazardly across the buildings.

This piece won’t hang in my house, if my husband has anything to do with it, though I’m proud I managed to realize my initial idea of danger and menace.

Around Here Week 33

They’ve finished blooming now, but I enjoyed a bountiful display from my Stoke’s Aster plants this year. I’d like to try an abstract of this flower, surrounded by the swirl of leaves

My Finishes Are Like Buses

From years of riding public transit I know that buses are happiest when traveling in packs. Often three on the same route arrive nose to tail after a long wait.  It seems my quilt finishes are the same way.

After months of not quite getting there, I have three finishes, plus one quilt that just needs a facing.

First,  A Grand Day Out (24 x 36 inches) got its hot air balloons sorted out, and minor repairs made.

The girls waited patiently for me to give them something to look at.

Winter Fields (26.5  x 47 inches), the third in a series of a Nova Scotia salt marsh, got painterly finishing touches with a paintstick and watercolor pencils. I still need to make the summer version, though so far all I have towards it is a lot of green fabrics.

The quilt for each season features a gate, which marks the entrance to the salt marsh from the Annapolis Royal gardens. If you’re ever up that way I heartily recommend them.

An array of  fabrics found their way into this one. The reddish/purple fabric is a silk scarf I painted, and the light area on the left is part of a damask tablecloth.

Lots of the hand dyed fabrics were made by Vicki Welsh.

I needed a break from landscapes, so Rick Rack (36 by 46 inches) got yanked from the back of the closet and wrestled into a quilting design inspired by Jacquie Gering’s walking foot quilting book. It began as practice for sewing half circles. Then, I joined the halves with ribbon, and added another round of fabric every so often. The colorful fabrics were done by Marcia Derse and Valori Wells.

I thought my to be quilted list would have dwindled, but I’m back at five as of last week. I don’t even want to think about the number of hanging sleeves I need to make.

Around Here Week 32

I’m back to looking at my feet, thanks to a piece of sycamore tree bark that immediately reminded me of a Henry Moore sculpture.

Here’s what I mean.

It Seemed Like A Good Idea

A few months ago I wrote about Wen Redmond’s book “Digital Fiber Art” and my confusion about how to proceed with her techniques. So I was glad to see steps to follow in her article in the latest Quilting Arts about how to transfer a photo to cloth. Of course I had to try out the technique.

I made my base fabric collage with scraps that included an old tee shirt mop up rag that had turned lovely pastel shades.

Then, I covered a black and white inkjet copy of a photo from my Around Here series with mat gel medium per the directions and rubbed it onto the fabric base.

Once that dried I moistened it and rubbed away the paper to (hopefully) leave the transfer print behind. At this point my results diverged from the instructions. Either too little or too much of the paper came off, so some of the edges were jaggedy. Maybe I didn’t apply enough gel medium. More important, the photo looked really dark.

I thought I could brighten it up with big stitches.

After three colors of perle cotton I decided it was still too dark, so I moved on to machine stitching. Then I got the bright idea to highlight the light areas with metallic paint.

That turned out way too garish, so I tried sanding the painted areas to tone them down. I found that gel medium stands up well to sanding with fine sandpaper. Unfortunately, it didn’t remove as much of the paint as I had hoped.

Right now my experiment resides in the drawer of shame. Lessons learned:

-choose a photo with a lot more light areas and just a few dark lines

-do a practice photo transfer before the one that counts

-remember that subtlety isn’t my strong point, and there’s a fine, but definite, line between subtle and dreary.

Around Here Week 31

Last week we stopped by a local orchard and bought a peck of peaches. Yes, peaches grow in northeast Ohio. To let them ripen before we cut them up and freeze them, we set them out on our dining room table to ripen a bit more. I don’t know about you, but our dining room is used mainly for non-dining purposes, such as laundry folding.

I couldn’t resist photographing the voluptuous peaches on the blue check tablecloth. Such a fabulous, classic color combination. Wouldn’t you like a bite?

“Walk: Master Machine Quilting With Your Walking Foot” Review

I have always been a fan of the clunky looking walking foot attachment for my sewing machines. I began to use it for sewing long seams to prevent the top fabric from being pushed ahead of the bottom one. Then, I found it helpful for lines of machine quilting. Jacquie Gering has elevated this humble accessory to front row status for fairly complex machine quilting in her Craftsy classes and now her book, “Walk: Master Machine Quilting With Your Walking Foot.”

Many of the quilting designs Gering lays out are simple to accomplish. Her chapters on lines, gentle curves, and decorative stitches show what you can do with no or minimal marking. You do need to pay attention to the distances between your lines and the distances on your walking foot. She helps you figure out the latter in her Walking Foot 101 chapter.

Then, if you want to get fancy, Gering walks you through (ha, ha) marked curves, using the reverse button, and turning designs.  Some of these designs require stitch counting and careful marking.  She tackles designs like orange peel, clamshell, braided curves, and nested diamonds. For such designs I think you’ll need to keep your wits about you, so you can’t do what I often do – zone out and sew. This link to a post written by Kathie Kerler, one of Gering’s workshop students, shows some class samples.

Gering covers much of the same material in her Craftsy class, Next Steps With Your Walking Foot. I’ve taken that class and find the book a useful companion to it. The book includes more designs, especially straight line point to point ones. It has lots of photos of stitched samples (easy to see white stitches on black cloth) and stitching diagrams. However, the class shows how Gering deals with marking, sewing the designs, and handling quilt bulk. It includes some curved designs not found in the book.

Gering’s complex quilting design below involves lots of marking and patience. As Gering says frequently, it’s a walking foot, not a running one. I don’t know if I’d tackle a big quilt like this one; maybe a pillow.

Helpful takeaways from the book:

-After you layer but before you pin your quilt sandwich press it on both sides to make sure there are no wrinkles. Pressing also encourages the layers to stick to each other. Gering presses her cotton batting before use to get rid of wrinkles. I spray my batting with water and run it through my dryer on low heat to relax it.

-Play with the setting on your pressure foot to eliminate puckering where quilting lines intersect. Lighter pressure may eliminate those tucks.

-As you stitch, look at where you’re heading, not at your needle.

-Use textured painters or masking tape whenever possible to mark your stitching lines.

-Even utility stitches on your sewing machine can make interesting quilting lines. Gering uses the blind hem stitch on some of her quilts. Try out those stitches on your machine at different widths and lengths, and keep notes of the results.

Whether this book will resonate with you will depend in part on the style of quilts you make. Gering’s quilting designs have a modern sensibility and work well for the large spaces and angles of such designs. I don’t know how well these designs would work on a traditional quilt pattern. I’ve used Gering’s approach on several quilts such as “Winter.”

Other quilters have also addressed walking foot quilting designs. Leah Day has videos on walking foot quilting. Melissa Marginet has a book on walking foot quilting that promises dozens of designs. Of course you can find several free videos online as well. If you’ve tried these or other walking foot quilting resources I’d love to get your feedback. I go to great lengths to avoid free motion quilting.

Around Here Week 30

Since I live in a city much of my inspiration comes from urban artifacts. Case in point is an iron grill like many found throughout my city. I like the heavy curves and the spool shaped links between the horizontal bars. The printing adds character, and the shadows cast in the drain are intriguing. I tried to get a better shot of the shadows, but the sun’s angle was wrong. Maybe I could expand the shadows and have them show behind an upright iron curtain.