Queue: Quilts I Have Not Made

This Tuesday for the queue post I sheepishly admit to designing quilts and then never making them. Again we have a slight issue with the brain writing checks that my skills can’t cash: my skills have not always been enough to produce these in reality. So I keep them, waiting for the day when I have the skills and time to finish what my brain started.

First up, the Quilt My Brother Asked Me To Make in 1999. Or maybe that was 1998. It was supposed to be black with flames. At the time we were 24 and 23 or thereabouts, and we both favored black, so you can see where the design came from. These days the kids all seem to be “emo,” but the two of us were, at times, old school goth. Nevertheless, I believe Jeremy still wants me to make this, and I’m still interested in trying to figure out how turn this drawing into something textile.This is the drawing I made of how I was going to lay out those flames. Sorry Jeremy! I will get to it! When we’re 40!

This second project is even older. I think this dates back to maybe when I was 17  or 18 years old. I saw an advertisement for a book called The Techniques of Japanese Embroidery by Shuji Tamura (a project of the Japanese Embroidery Center) in one of my mom’s sewing magazines. You can see the ad I cut out in the picture, top left. I never read the book (Amazon has only one copy, used for $241 so it’s not in my future), nor did I investigate Japanese embroidery (this was pre-Google days) but the cover picture fascinated me.

So I created the Applique Quilt That’s Not Really Quite Japanese. I invented a quilt based on the visual style I thought I saw on the cover of the book. Bold with large motifs and strong colors. It consists of four large motifs (right side and top left side) in abstracted floral shapes, to be placed in an overlapping layout and finished with embroidered fabric panels. The layout is bottom left (sorry, it was cut off). The motifs, I must stress, are big, this was intended to be a full size quilt. Again, still intend to do this someday, however, really didn’t have the skill when I drew this.

Finally, the Quilt That Resulted From My Fascination With Grimm’s. I love fairy tales – not the modern sappy Disney version that strips the story of all its zing. No, I like the old European folk tales where people met bad ends and got tortured, and people were dreadfully rude to one another, and everything had a moral, and sometimes animals talked.

I have a long-term personal connection to Grimm’s Fairy Tales in particular which probably eventually resulted in my interest in medieval studies. I owe the Grimm brothers, really. I used to get the flu badly a whole lot when I was younger, and I’d get dehydrated. One time I got pretty dehydrated, on the verge of going to the hospital, couldn’t keep even water down. My joints hurt so much I couldn’t walk or sit or lie down for very long. I was walking around crying it hurt so much. My parents sat with me and read fairy tales to me, and listening to them was the only thing that helped me get through that.

Years later, I still occasionally like to draw fairy tales. This drawing below is a basic sketch, one that could use some scale help. The second sketch was better. This is the very first draft of a very elaborate embroidered quilt design based on a fairy tale. This is intended to be a small art quilt. The design is meant to convey the entire tale in one frame. Can you guess which fairy tale this is?

So there you have it. Completely different from last week’s plastic canvas and crochet tiny villages. Yet still hiding out in my pile of Stuff I Really Seriously Will Get To Someday.

Owls, Part 1

Two or three weeks ago I got a request from a colleague of Jeff’s to make a coffee cosy. The original request involved a suggestion of pink and purple, but as the day wore on it became apparent that she really wanted animal face of some sort. And then it transpired that she was a Rice graduate. So the face was decided.

Specifically, I was going to come up with a Rice Owl coffee cup cosy. In blue.

Feeling (a) in need of a challenge and (b) up to a challenge, I set off to design my own coffee cup cosy. Along the way, I also designed a matching amigurumi, also an owl in Rice colors. In Part 2 I will unveil my tiny little owl and the pattern for said owl, but in the meantime, let me introduce you to the OWL COFFEE CUP COSY.

This owl would like you to have a lovely cup of coffee. He is snug on a cup, and plenty insulating, and features blanket stitching on top and bottom for decoration.  He has an eye patch and yellow eyes. The eyes are made from yellow felt circles and flat sew-on button eyes.  The nose is a crocheted triangle.

You may see an owl in the background? Designing that owl has been … interesting. Let me introduce you to the mistakes preliminary designs of the owl before I introduce you (in a couple days) to the final owl. First, there was a slightly more … oddly hexagonal body shape.  It was not practical. Then there were wings that were nicely shaped, but impossible to reproduce and way too long for the body. They couldn’t stay, but I might use them elsewhere.

I kind of liked the other eye patch pattern that I made. It has “eyelashes.” I think with the right project these could be really cute with something.

Once my brain can figure out how to complete the final bits of the owl pattern, I will happily post it for a free download, in case anyone likes my rendition of the owl and would like to reproduce it!  It’s always a lovely challenge and a welcome change to make a pattern once in a while instead of just following a design. Wouldn’t want to do it all the time, but sometimes …

My other reason for making this pattern was not being happy with any of the owl patterns I saw. Didn’t like the wings, or the eyes, or the shape exactly. So I made my own. The final one isn’t quite like this fat little guy in this picture (he was version 2), but it’s pretty close.

The owls (and I) say sionara for the evening and we’ll be back soon.

On Finishing, and Creative Road Blocks

Well, it’s done. I finally put the border on. Don’t know what you’ll think of what I chose – heck, I’m not sure about what I chose – but at the end of the day, it’s done. It even has hanging loops. And as a matter of fact, it’s hanging right now, in my office, above my computer screen. It’s hard for me, now, to just look at it without seeing every tiny or not-so-tiny stitch in it. I’m not sure I’ve been done with it long enough to see it as a whole. One thing, though – in my office, the gold in it positively glows like sunshine when I look up at it, even in fluorescent light. It’s a pleasing unexpected result.

So, details.  The finished size is roughtly  24.5″ wide by 14.5″ tall.  Base fabric and binding: upholstery-weight woven  fabric remnants, cotton (mostly). Trees, flowers & hills: repurposed cotton/polyester blend pieces from a 1970s quilt kit, 4 prints and 2 solids. Embroidery: DMC cotton.  Stitching: mostly machine stitched with cotton/poly blend.

My machine refused to stitch through the corners since there were 9 layers of upholstery weight material to chomp through. I hate mitering, so this is not that.

So if you’ve made it this far into the post, allow me to go off on a tangent for a bit and talk about Merlin Mann. He writes at 43folders.com, among other things, and is well-known for writing and speaking about how to be more productive. He’s written about the Getting Things Done system of staying on task, focused and organized. That’s not really much my particular worry, but lately Merlin has veered off into something more interesting to me.  These days he’s talking about how to be more creative - because his productivity work led him to realize that that many people clutter up their lives and minds with endless distractions and excuses to avoid the act of being creative (a type of productivity).  People can’t even start that thing they’ve been wanting to do/make for so long for reasons that seem to make sense, but instead are excuses to avoid the possibility of failure and fear.  Internal voices that tell you you’re not good enough, what you want to do will inevitably suck, that pursuing it is ridiculous or childish, or that you don’t have enough time or space or … whatever.

Anyway, Merlin says it better than I, and he’s funnier than I am, so you can read his blog post about it or listen to the embedded recording of a talk he recently gave on the subject. I read it/listened and a lot of what he said resonated with me as I completed this little quilt. For me, making something like this is intimidating:  it incorporates techniques I am unsure about, features subject matter that is personal, has no pattern, was begun with only a general picture of how it would turn out, and when I started I didn’t even have all the fabric I needed.  I did the first small picture quilt for someone else, which made it easier, somehow. I had a deadline, too. So it took some of the stress away. This time, it was harder to begin, hard to finish, and hard not to stop halfway through and think, “This project stinks. What were you thinking? What are those color combinations, anyway? It’s all lumpy. Your stitching is awful. You’re never going to finish, it’s taking too long. No one cares anyway,” and finally “Your border looks terrible.”

But it’s like Merlin says, if you want to do something that’s important to you, and foster that creative urge, you have to start somewhere, and put one foot in front of the other, and not care about suckage and pitfalls and insecurities and your relative ability to do whatever it is you’re doing.  Your first attempt might be horrid. Then you do it again, and again, and again, until finally you’re doing what you wanted to do, and the act of doing and making has become more important than the fear.

I say this rarely, but when I was very small I wanted, desperately, to be two things: an architect and an artist. Today I am neither one because when I was young people told me I wasn’t very good at math, geometry and drawing and I should really concentrate on things that weren’t analytical or creative. At 34, I still want to be an architect and an artist, and I know now that the people who told me I wasn’t very good were not very nice or correct, and that one day I will prove them wrong by doing a little of both.

And now it’s done. And hanging. And I can start on the next thing with less of the fear than I had when I began this one.

P.S. That’s my office, the top of my screen, the most boring wall color ever, and to the left my note to myself about the reality of the world:  absurdum ad infinitum.