Tag Archives: quilts

June 23, 2013 · 12:18 PM

Stick a fork in it…

I pre-wrote this post to publish while I was away on yet another brief jaunt to sum up a few things I recently finished.  Yet the thoughts in my last whining rambling post have continued to fester and raise many more conflicting/contrasting brain furies.  I still don’t have anything even remotely answered or concluded, but in a way I do have a decision.  I am going to move forward on creating pieces for a portfolio and if they are done by the autumn (crazy insane deadline now) I will apply to school.   If I don’t get in or I do get in but without funding, then I at least have a body of work to throw around out there (outside of the craft scene).  And I don’t want to blog about it much apart from keeping track of new techniques I might learn or continued thoughts on craft vs. art, artist vs. art museum, academic artist vs. independent artist, lone-wolf artist vs. social media butterfly.

So on to finished sh*t that has nothing to do with the above.

Several members of my family are encountering hernia surgery these days so I made a Happy Hernia mini-quilt.*

Happy Hernia

And I have become very paranoid conscious about the way I lift things and contort myself these days…

I finished my Pigeonroof Studios BFL “Mimsy” May/June SAL roving as a felted/fulled single.  I spun it with a heavy hand and dunked and steamed and iced and thwacked and whacked and unspun it and made it my fibery bitch.  And for a much-abused yarn, it became surprisingly sturdy and bloomed beautifully.  It’s a bit shy of 450 yards of a fingering-ish weight.  I love fuzzy yarn but I rarely actually knit with it – just ask the balls of neglected mohair in my stash.  But I did start something with it right away which I’ll show next time.

Mimsy spun

Since I was infected with group think during this spin-along, I joined team PRS in the Tour de Fleece (you spin during the Tour de France).**  I don’t have any crazy goals for it apart from spinning my recent purchases (of which I have to confess that there was another, and then another).***

Finally, my brother and sister-in-law are the hiking sort too, so I sent a set of butt warmers their way.

Buttwarmer

With the oilcloth, I think these are a little more practical than my original ones (which have gotten a bit shredded) but can also brightly and gaudily serve as a distress flag to wave about.  I’m concerned that they’ll be a bit slippery until they’re scuffed up a bit and unfortunately this sweater was thinner so it provides less ass comfort.  Also my stashed oilcloth has some creases I can’t seem to get out – can’t iron the stuff, so what to do…?

Everything else is still half-baked.  And I also recently realized that I needed to get much busier in order to become more productive, so I’ve taken on a load of new projects (and may also get to up my part-time work hours soon) but I’ve got also got a newly festering anxiety that I may have bitten off a little too much…something might have to give.

*Sh*tty picture intentional since I’m paranoid about image theft and f*ckery these days, and get used to seeing that annoying tag on everything too.

**I like bicycles, and I ride mine (awesome story behind it too) several times a week, but I don’t think I’ll be watching the Tour much… as Italophiles, we do often have calcio (soccer) on the tube though…

***I talk about this way too much!  I don’t know the person/people behind the company in real life nor do I get kickbacks – just love the stuff, and the last acquisition was someone’s bargain de-stash so my spending is ending for the time being.

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March 6, 2013 · 2:35 PM

Quilts in my past, part IV [and an update to part I]

Henry’s baby quilt (toes not included).

Hank's babyquilt1

No, this is not another picture of Yasmina’s quilt, but many of the fabrics are the same, though with hers, the “blocks” were smaller.  This one came a few years before that one, and was my first “crib quilt.”  I remember getting the roll of pre-cut cotton batting and upon opening it, had a WTF moment when I saw how big it was… I was thinking cribs were small and babies were small, and the whole thing would be small and quick, but it was about four times the size I thought it would be.  And aren’t babies not supposed to sleep with blankets anyway?  But regardless, it was still smaller than a twin, so I got some more fabric and soldiered on.  Much of this is from my original stash of reproduction feedsack, and my personal favorites are the blue border with the geese and the yellow pinwheely things.

And an update of Henry’s twin-size quilt with current pictures after a few years of use.

Hank's twin2

Hank's twin1

See, I thought that binding sucked – it was too wide and folded over… ah well, as I mentioned before I hate that part of the quiltmaking process.  Actually, I sorta like hand-sewing the back part on when done in a different way [insert proper term here] but this was an act of speed and I sewed both sides through like a sandwich [insert another appropriate term here].  If you haven’t noticed already, I’m a self-taught quilter, and I am a bad teacher who hasn’t assigned much book learnin’ except for looking at pictures.  Lots and lots of pretty pictures of quilts from way back when…  I hesitate to delve deeper into the actual mechanics of the thing because I tend to either loose interest or become completely obsessed when faced with loads of new knowledge.  Knitting took over my life after I forcibly removed myself from only the garter stitch, and hence a monster was born.  I want to keep quilting a bit more in check I suppose, but I do need some more skills in the binding department – mitered corners perhaps?  But I also do have limitations on what my vintage sewing machines can do – none of that long-arm freestylin,’ freewheeling, happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care quilting for me, though I’d like to….

Thanks to my sister-in-law for sending the pics and Charlie for modeling!

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February 24, 2013 · 1:55 PM

UFOs progess report

My current publicly acknowledged unfinished objects* are closer to being finished.  Let’s not talk about the sweater quilt just now, it is my favorite, but sadly banned back to the sack until I feel it’s ok to spend a little money on the backing – I’ve determined it should be a grey cotton jersey sheet, but damned if I can’t find one cheap.

I am tired of the rug.  I cut up the t-shirts so slip-shod and sheddy that I constantly sneezed as I braided, and my nose filled with buckets [shrew-sized] of lint – I also realized there are good tightly woven shirts that are best for projects such as this, and lousy loose ones – this is made up of mostly lousy.  So I finished with the old balls that I had already cut up, and cut up one additional shirt more since I wanted a little more green in it.  Then I remembered how much it sucks to sew these things up, and I can only do about 20 minutes at a time before my fingers are a bloody mess, my hands cramp up, or I’d rather be doing something else.  The right needle and thread would make my life easier, but I don’t know quite what those would be, and I don’t want to buy anything, so sewing while wearing kitchen gloves and multiple thimbles is sort of doing the trick at the moment.  I’m sure a heavy-duty sewing machine with a zig-zag stitch would work wonders…

(And I think I already mentioned I don’t really like the look of the “country style” home with braided rugs and too much barn red and faded blues…  But then we just bought a house which fell through, and then another which also fell through and both could have used a washable rug in one area or another, so I will continue in the hopes that a third house might not actually fall through and it might still be needed, especially for our dog that isn’t ours yet, and might not exist yet either).

rug ball

rug detail

And the shirt quilt is trucking along at a slow but steady pace.  If I put my mind to it, I could finish the top pretty quickly, but I don’t seem to have any control over my mind at the moment (I mentioned we keep buying houses that fail, right?).  I also know I will soon face the dilemma of not having a suitable backing material and possibly not enough for binding, but I have the cotton batting so my future purchase should be limited to just the fabric.  It seems that should be easy enough, right?  I’d be happy with a solid color or slight pattern – certainly there should be some basic cotton stuff on sale out there somewhere…

science fair quilt

Looks like a poster session at a rag-picker’s conference, eh?  I get to play-act being a professional again, only at my own conference there are no numbers or words (not that I don’t like words, and I have a healthy respect for numbers) or snooze-inducing power-points and sweaty nervous speakers.  Or maybe I am back at a science fair – I won a couple of those once… yeah, that’s right, boost my self-esteem with memories of victories past.  These “blocks” aren’t in any permanent order, or even in a decent layout at the moment – I just sew a bunch and then arrange them at the end.

*Yee hah!  If you only knew the real count of my unfinished sh*t…**

**I need to know about filters and whatnot – anybody know?  I’d hate to think I’d be censored for a “bad” word (godforbid the children!), though I wonder if breast still comes up as something to be censored… hmm… booby titty cans rack jugs dirty pillows.

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February 15, 2013 · 1:15 PM

Quilts in my past – part III

The reversible chintz quilt.

In the late 1980s my mother re-decorated our living room in a chaos of chintz – florals, stripes, and solids in wedgewood blues, peaches, and sage.  It was over the top, but the room suddenly became bright and inviting and a good place to read the paper in the morning, especially in the winter since it was perpetual springtime in there.  Fast forward to my first apartment outside of college and I needed a quilt.  I can’t remember how I acquired the fabric – if she was tossing it and I “rescued” it, or I mentioned making a quilt and she mentioned she had a lot of leftover fabric.  But I pieced up a top in large random blocks, realized I still had leftovers, and made a pieced backing.  I then sandwiched it with cotton batting and ran some “straight” lines through the thing and was done.  I wasn’t a fan of chintz but it brightened the room and went well with a tarnished antique brass bed I had.  Then in a few years, I no longer had the bed and the relationship that went with it, and discovered the joy and necessity of sleeping under down, so I gave the quilt to my mom who still uses it.  I never photographed it properly – just a few Polaroids to make transfers in the name of “art” back in the day.

DSCF7133 - Copy

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January 30, 2013 · 1:47 PM

Quilts in my past – part II

Yasmina’s quilt.

As with my family, my friends didn’t have any children either, but when my best friend from college told me she was pregnant, I happily started quilting away even though she lives in a tiny house on a tropical island and doesn’t need one.  At the very least I thought it might be good for tossing on the tiled floor when the babe crawled around.  The fabrics were partly left over from the first crib quilt I made for my nephew plus a few others – mostly though they came from a stash of reproduction cotton feedsack fabric that I collected in the late 1990s.  I loved the stuff, but a lot of it seemed too “baby” for the quilt I had intended to make for myself.  I still have some of it left, so at the very least it will re-appear in something in the future.  I think I was also thinking of a millennium* postage stamp quilt back in the day, which could still happen, but I’ll take out the millennium part of it.

yasmina's quilt 1

yasmina's quilt 2

I also neglected to photograph much of this one as well, which is also too bad since I can’t remember what I did with the back, and I spent a little more time to finish this one a bit better.  I believe the quilting was a random wavy line pattern.  She too has had another child who I have neglected with craft, but hopefully the quilt was used again, or at the very least was re-gifted to someone in a colder climate.

*My thoughts of a millennium quilt would have been one made of 2,000 unique pieces of fabric, or maybe I’d cheat and just have 1,000 unique used twice only…I have no idea how much fabric I already have though, so certainly I’d need hundreds more scraps…I guess people who made these were either social or rich, I am neither.

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January 20, 2013 · 1:22 PM

Quilts in my past – part I

Henry’s quilt.

My family used to be uniformly non-breeder (except for my parents of course) or maybe I should be kinder and call us child-free by choice.  We’re still largely so, but around nine years ago my oldest brother (and the one most irritated by the little buggers) surprised us all with a son, and then another.  This first child born into a family exclusively of adults caused quite a ruckus.  My parents soon became giddy this-child-is-perfect grandparents and I got an unexpected nesting/estrogen/crafty-auntie boost.  I made soft toys, a crib quilt, and later a twin-sized quilt.  I can’t find pictures of the crib quilt, and don’t even really remember it, but the twin-sized one is the last one I made in my old little apartment on the dining table.  It was made from cotton homespun purchased at a small town fabric shop and a few from the fabric big-box.  The quilting and binding was sloppy, but I had no room to properly lay it out and baste it, and I don’t like that step anyway, so I rushed it.  I have several vintage sewing machines, but this Atlas is my good old standby.

henry's quilt 1

henry's quilt 2

henry's quilt 3

I never took a picture of it when it was finished which is too bad, since I really liked the fabrics in this one, and I think I used them all up.  Funny thing about babies though, by the second one, I no longer had the motivation to make anything for him apart from a few simple knitted items which is sad?  But then again, I figured a crib quilt and toys and anything washable can be used over and over again….  But I do feel a little obligated to make a larger quilt for him sometimes, but my SIL now sews too so…

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January 11, 2013 · 4:17 PM

Long term UFOs – part III

The boyfriend shirt quilt.  I don’t have a good reason for why I never finished this, or why it barely got started for that matter.  When N bought the house, he had a window of time where the lease on his apartment ended before the closing on the new place, so he moved to my tiny weird but wonderful apartment.  In his last days before moving in with me, he tossed out half of his wardrobe (mostly over-sized 90s clothes) in a frantic windmill action – as he tossed, however, I snatched up.  He was irritated, my apartment was already crammed, so why did I want to make it worse?  I reassured him that it would turn into a nice quilt that he would have as a housewarming gift.  I was already in the middle of making a quilt for my nephew, so I didn’t start on it right away.  Then I began to enjoy N’s cooking more and more so I didn’t get out the sewing machine/s as often since I had to use the dining table that was previously minimally used.  Then the newly purchased house need work, a lot of work, so we spent the next year sanding, staining, tiling, painting, reconstructing, digging, and whatnot so I don’t think I sewed at stitch of anything.   Then I moved out of said apartment into the house and everything got boxed up and banished to the basement.  Eventually, I dragged everything out and up to my newly restored third floor studio.  I opened the beer box that held the shirts, cut up and ironed them, then made one patch and sort of started another.

DSCF6992 - Copy

Then what happened?  I know there was still work to do on the house and much to do with the yard, but I still had time in the evenings…  but I think my knitting obsession was taking off, then I was producing other things for craft fairs.  And then N took a job across the state but we kept the house with me in it.  I thought about making the quilt again for him to use in his new depressing apartment, but we were always traveling to see each other on weekends, so there never seemed to be any time.  Now I am here with him, so it’s time I made this quilt!  I started on a few scraps and will continue with my usual hodge-podge style.

N's quilt blocks

I’m not sure if I have enough for a queen size, but if I need to augment, I’d like to thrift a few shirts that at least look like ones he had before or have now.  I really should give myself a deadline.

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January 7, 2013 · 2:49 PM

Long term UFOs – part II

The sweater quilt.  I joined Ebay in 1996 – those were the good old days before the vintage market got utterly saturated and you could sell stuff for a decent profit and find great stuff to buy.   There were a few awesome thrift stores around where I lived, and I scoured one in particular weekly or more.  At that time I was working in a gallery, putting off grad school, and convincing myself that I could be an artist even though I made little art and showed none of it.  To supplement my meager income, I produced a few craft items for shops and fairs and sold vintage stuff online – mostly dishware, printed tablecloths, and some clothing.  For a couple of years life was good, and my Ebay earnings paid for a few trips to visit friends and family scattered from coast to coast, but then I noticed a problem – namely I had a thrift-store problem, and for every item I bought to re-sell, I bought another or two or three to keep…  This also coincided with the bottom falling out on things like Jadeite dishware and the like, so it was time to quit.  But.I.Just.Couldn’t.Stop.   I loved the sensory experience of whirring through a rack of old sweaters and my fingers landing on cashmere or something sturdy and sheepy, never mind the other senses tweaked from mothballs or a neighboring browser or her shrieking kid.  I couldn’t quit the hunt for prime fiber, so I continued to go, but less frequently and I tried to stick to just the clothing racks and electronics (did I mention I also collected sewing machines?  Yeah, back then I rarely moved…).  I started to believe it was my destiny and responsibility to “rescue” sweaters of beautiful fibers that couldn’t be worn  any longer, and I still do to some extent.  But back to the 1990s, I had amassed a stack of sweaters in a pleasing color palette that I determined should be a quilt.  I also determined that it should be a king-sized one, which I don’t know why – did I expect to get a bigger bed?  Did I have a buyer in mind? Was that just the amount of fabric I had?  I don’t remember.  I also don’t know why I didn’t consider fulling [felting] them first, though I had to use the laundromat then and only did so when the need was dire, so my disdain of the place, and not wanting to do it by hand was probably it.  So I started sewing (on one of my many vintage thrifted machines) and in a day or so, finished the top.

DSCF6996 - Copy DSCF7013 - Copy

And then all movement on it ceased.  I remember showing it to a few people who really liked it, and one in particular probably would have bought it for a decent price, but I just couldn’t figure out how to finish it.  I had a stash of old army blankets that I thought I would use for the backing and I experimented with one but the stretchiness of the sweaters wasn’t playing well with the stiffness of the blanket.  The blankets were also fairly heavy and I wanted this to continue to have a sweater-like drape.  I also remember seeing a bolt of thin knitted material (wool & angora) in a antiques/junk store that would have been perfect, but it wasn’t there when I went back for it.  Then I think I thought I would back it with a cotton/wool plaid material that just never went on sale, or a cotton flannel plaid that never existed in the colorway I’d desired.  And then I hadn’t addressed a few of the holes that were in the sweaters from the beginning – I believe I was thinking about embroidery, but now I’d just like to repair them.  So here it is about 15 years later, or maybe I’ll say nearly 20 since that sounds more dramatic.  I actually still like it too, but its lack of a backside or trim is still troublesome.

DSCF7007 - Copy

If I had fulled the sweaters beforehand (and some are a bit already) I wouldn’t worry about it and would leave the rough side naked, but as it is now, I can see little bits of sweater coming off everywhere and making me bats, and the seams probably aren’t the strongest.  The thought of attempting to back something so stretchy makes me ill, and I don’t really like a tufted look, but that would be easiest.  I’m considering maybe using a jersey sheet, but haven’t looked for a giant cheap one yet.  So this is the UFO that might fail my attempt to make it not so, but I will think about it, and maybe live with it on the bed for a bit…

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