Christmas Almost Here

Mr. & Mr. Claus have dropped by the neighborhood, Christmas cards have been trickling in . . .

. . .and just today this lovely floral arrangement arrived from my niece back east as I was shoveling the 7 inches of snow that fell overnight from my walkway! What a wonderful surprise to brighten my week!

With the baby quilt and books finished and sent on their way, I've been working on my own Christmas card list, on the home stretch. I've not bother with much decoration (yet), just hanging a few pewter snowflakes and silver stars and getting out this pillow which has a holiday feel to it. It's made from a test block for an antique reproduction quilt I was commissioned to make; the block is called forbidden fruit tree and is machine quilted. I also have one that looks like an appliqued poinsettia (although it is actually a variation on a coxcomb block from the 1800's).

As I stared at the autumn-themed wallhanging in my livingroom, the spot where I rotate quilts in and out, I couldn't think of a holiday-themed wallhanging to replace it with. Could that be? I think perhaps. Then I thought of this quilt in blues made in 1995 (and hand quilted), and decided since so many people DO decorate with blue at Christmas time, this would have to do.

It's called "Life's Waters" and has inscribed on the back:

"While we attempt to regiment our lives, uncontrollable events color our emotions murky dark to flashing bright and swirl beneath the routine like waters under a bridge."

'95 was the year the job that brought us to Wisconsin started to go south and an offer my husband couldn't refuse emerged. We'd been less than 2 years in a house we had built on 6 acres in the country and loved so much. To take the job meant selling and moving from what we thought would be our dream place until retirement. No wonder I was waxing philosophical as I finished up this quilt that suddenly looked like a bridge over water.

So not exactly a Christmas quilt but I am enjoying having it out again and remembering the lovely loft studio where it was made before the move. And it's been another year of uncontrollable events that I've learned to be philosophical about. No wonder I haven't been able to stop reading this quotation since I ran across it not too long ago. I hope it brings year end peace to you as it has to me.

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. C.S. Lewis

Happy holidays to all, no matter how you celebrate or in what clime!

Project Revisited

A binding in need of help

Now that the baby quilt is done, it was time to return to a bookbinding project that needed some tweaking. It was meant for the father of the baby and would go in the box with the quilt along with some other things. And in the time since I'd set it aside, I'd come up with two solutions for adding "bulk" between the signatures so that when closed the book wouldn't round at the binding making the fore-edges of the signatures uneven with each other as in the above photo.

I considered just adding more signatures in the quarter inch gap between the stitched in ones but I didn't think those long stitches could be packed, not enough space, and I wasn't sure about just adding a long stitch between the packed ones either. Then I hit upon the idea of adding elastic between the signatures like in a traveler's journal, and saw one of Ali Manning's videos showing a different way to add the elastic than I'd seen before. I could punch holes a quarter of an inch from the edge of the cover above the spaces between the packed stitches and thread elastic through two top and bottom which would place elastic down the center of two of the gaps, tying off the elastic on the inside. Repeat for the other two gaps. This left minimal marks on the spine that didn't interfere with the packed long stitches.

But what to slip under that elastic? I could use more paper like in the other signatures, sewn together with a simple pamphlet stitch, or maybe graph paper or dot paper. Not really sold on any of these. And then I had a light bulb moment. The recipient is a poet, and I'd introduced him to Austn Kleon's newspaper blackouts which he said he was eager to try. And I had a stack of old books that the library had removed from their collection, brought home with the idea of experimenting with art journaling/altered books and just waiting for me to pull some pages from. I made four stacks, one for each gap, trimmed them to size and decided not to sew them together so they can be easily removed to work on and replaced with fresh pages. Sometimes I'm just this side of brilliant.

I even did a blackout on the first one of these so there'd be no question about what they were for. Click on the photo for a larger size you can read.

These added signatures did not have to be the same height as the sewn in ones, I realized, nor even the same width. They just needed to fill those spaces that were making my book collapse.

Now the spine no longer rounds, making visible the first and last long stitches. If not for that thick seam running through the middle of the leather, I would have considered a leather strap closure or even a button. Instead, I added a simple loop of elastic . . .

. . .which not only keeps the flap closed but also keeps the top and bottom corners of the flap from curling back which they were wont to do. And too late, I realized I didn't take a photo of the back so you could see the way those angled seams intersect the horizontal one. I still have things to learn about working with leather.

I'd wanted to make the mother a book that was another 5 day challenge project, but got no further than cutting and weighting the signatures. Instead, I decided to send her this little coptic book which was my first project with the Handmade Book Club. But I was never happy with the paper I painted for the cover. Fortunately I had another one of those lightbulb moments when I realized that the picture of a stained glass Celtic design I'd cut from a magazine could be adhered to the cover to improve it. I'm very pleased with that look but I have to say the cutting out was not as easy as I thought it would be. I used part of a Scor-tape sheet, peeling the protective paper off one side and placing the picture on it, then started cutting those inner shapes with an x-acto knife whose blade should have been changed first. Yeah, that first cutout was a mess. New blade helped but I still had to be careful, I think because of the adhesive. At any rate, it needed some definition around the edges anyway, so a dark blue gel pen helped to hide some of the dinged up areas. I'm glad to see this book on its way to a new owner.

Final Steps

The camera lies, reading the dark pink fabric as orange. I was able to fix it somewhat.

With the quilting finally wrapped up, it's time to cut some binding strips and trim off the excess batting and backing from around the quilt. Past experience has shown me that especially when using cotton batting that will shrink, it's always a good idea to wet down the quilt before doing that trimming and adding a binding. I just liberally sprayed the entire quilt with water and let it dry overnight. As expected, there was some shrinkage - a quarter inch one direction and a half an inch in the other. This quilt is around 40 x 49 inches so you can imagine there would be substantial loss in length and width on a full size quilt, another thing I learned to take into account in my early years of quilting. 

The fabric I chose for the binding is not used anywhere else in the quilt but pretty much matches the darkest pink fabric in the top. I absolutely love the way it framed the quilt and brings it all together. My camera however seems confused about it and in trying to fix it with my photo software, I can make it less orange but then the green becomes more blue. So bear with the differences from photo to photo. This is why I like to attach fabric swatches to my documentation files.

Here's a detail shot of the quilting and binding. The greens are pretty true but the dark pink too dark and too reddish orange.

As I did on the quilts made for this baby's siblings, I found a few spots to quilt in his name. Here the pinks are more true but the teal greens have gone a bit blue.

And here's a shot of the back. I'm pretty pleased with the way this turned out, although it did remind me that I'm not that fond of overall quilting designs. With my start in traditional quilts and studying antique quilts, I've always been drawn to use the quilting to highlight or enhance the design of the quilt, be it pieced or appliqued. Back in those early days of learning and before machine quilting was widely accepted, overall quilting patterns tended to be derisively referred to as "mattress pad quilting" as they were often just repetitive pantographs barely more complicated than the quilting on a mattress pad. All that has changed, I think mostly because of the advent of the longarm machine where it is much easier to quilt designs side to side across the top than to do any stitching in the ditch. And the overall designs that are being quilted by these longarm quilters are anything but mattress pad quilting, beautiful in their own right.

Still, I ponder how I could have quilted this differently, especially in a way that would have emphasized those lozenges. The other baby quilts were also based on strips and long narrow rectangles, and they all got stitching in the ditch with quilt motifs added between the lines. However, I knew that kind of quilting would take more time and I just didn't have it in me. The overall designs of hearts and leaves was quite fun to do - certainly not done perfectly but adequate for the project - and hold the layers together such that this quilt should be able to take the wear and even abuse a quilt for a little one will get.

So yeah, from start to finish I was able to let go a bit while making this quilt, trying new things, new combinations, using up fabric languishing in the stash too long, enjoying different parts of the process, because there wasn't the same sort of pressure I feel when I work on an art quilt. Let's hear it for baby quilts that don't require perfection, although we always strive to do our best!

On To The Quilting

This top had been covered up on my design wall by the backing for so long that the image of it in my mind was quite different from reality. Thus the leaf design I'd been auditioning in my head, a bit inspired by this free motion design from Angela Walters just wasn't going to work. I've often used a meandering leaf motif in my quilts but not an overall design like this. But it turned out to be the perfect solution because my idea to stitch a leaf on either side of the vertical seams while simultaneously stitching in the ditch wasn't practical. Those seams between the lozenges were much shorter than I remembered. As for the thread, I was surprised that I did not have something more teal green to use. All my choices were either very blue or very green. I was a bit surprised at how well this light bright green was going to work. It's a Sulky 12 wt cotton thread with a very slight variegation, but a sheen that initially made me think it must be a polyester thread. I honestly don't remember buying it, and it wasn't stored with the rest of my threads but in a bin of extra spools, oversized spools and other odd threads. I'm thinking it may have been a freebie included in an order, or perhaps one that was part of a grab bag special. It looks to be used but I truly can't remember on what.

On the first day of quilting, I have to say nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong, really taxing my patience (and reminding me of the things in this post on Patience). First, after moving some things stacked on the plastic extension table around my machine, I noticed something sticky on it like what's left when you try to peal away a label. I'm still not sure how it got there but I suspect it may have transferred from some exposed fusible web. It did not come off easily but eventually I got the table clean enough to start the quilting. But within maybe 6 inches from starting, my needle broke as it hit a spot with a bulky seam. Well, maybe I should switch from embroidery needle to a titanium topstitch needle. But within another few inches up the section, the thread shredded. Ok, maybe I need to go back to the embroidery needle and just be more careful. As I was rethreading the needle, the thread wouldn't move and I realized that it had somehow slipped under the cap that lifts up so you can secure the thread before storing the spool. Maybe that had something to do with the thread shredding and breaking. Decided to stick with the embroidery needle and had not gone very far when the bobbin thread ran out. Oh sure. I'm using a lighter King Tut thread in the bobbin and so when not filling the bobbin with the thread running through the needle, there's a specific group of guides to use, and because I was sort of day dreaming as the machine ran, I didn't notice that the thread had jumped out of the last guide which meant it was building up on one side of the bobbin rather than winding evenly back and forth on it. As that half built up, the thread jumped off the bobbin and started winding on the spindle! What a mess when I finally noticed what was going on.

That seemed to be the last hurtle though, and I could finally get into a rhythm and get this first wavy strip quilted with leaves. I'm such a stitch in the ditch sort of gal that I wasn't sure I would like this overall stitching over seams, but I do! 

Here it is from the back. Not sure how leafy a lot of my leaves look but it will do. And I love this batting to quilt through and how it maintains that little bit more thickness after being quilted.

On to the lozenges. I'd seen somewhere a loose and elongated heart quilting design and decided that was what I'd put in those areas. This thread is Connecting Threads Essentials 50 wt cotton thread in fuchsia. It's a beautiful thread to piece with and works well for quilting. The extra-long staples creates a very low lint thread. 

I briefly worried that the thread might be too dark, i.e. show up too much (which is my usual worry with quilting) but it really works well over all those different fabrics in the lozenge. And these hearts were much more fun to do than the leaves. They look more like feather quilting than I anticipated, really lovely. For now I have quilted the partial lozenges on one side and one along the top which was about what I could manage in a sitting, will take another sitting to get the rest of the way round, then probably two sittings to complete the four full lozenges in the center. A little every day and the progress is steady.