New Stuff, Cool Stuff

Things I’ve found of interest out on the interwebs lately:

• Victoria Gertenbach of Silly BooDilly (one of my favorite quilters) is being creative again, this time stitching on handmade paper.
• I’ve often thought it was nearly criminal that the tech industry ignores the incredible achievement of Ravelry and its rabid community of supporters just because it’s technology focused on yarn. This article on Slate doesn’t, at least.
• I loved Columbo.  Totally wish I’d though of making Columbo and Dog out of yarn, but I wouldn’t have done as good a job as June.
• Design*Sponge did a Visitor’s Guide to Oakland, and it’s pretty good! I can tell the author has never lived in Temescal, though, she missed a lot of great stuff! She also forgot the town of Montclair in the hills, and didn’t include my favorite pub Cato’s in Piedmont. She did get the vibe of Oakland right – sure, it can be gritty, but most of it isn’t, and it’s full of a wide mix of interesting people doing a lot of interesting things.

In other news, I seem to have recovered from my vacation. I also had a birthday. Those birthdays really are relentless in their yearly appearance, aren’t they? I’m now thirty-six. In honor of that I’ve created a list of 40 things I want to do before I’m 40. If I accomplish them, it’s going to be a busy and fun four years!

In contrast to last time’s “I-can’t-think-of-a-project” mentality, I have actually begun work on not 1, not 2, but 3 new quilts. This first one will be around 2′ x 3′. You may be able to guess the inspiration for the quilt these fabrics represent (I posted it recently), but I doubt you’ll guess the new technique I’m trying out. I’m not even sure I can technically call this a quilt! But I will anyway.

As you can see, Wesley is intensely curious about what I’m doing, as usual. This next quilt was inspired by a pair of earrings I saw my boss wearing. It’s going to be the smallest one of this group at maybe a little larger than a foot square, but it will be oval or round, depending on how my sketches turn out. It will be constructed out of some of my newest kimono silks.

The last quilt that I’m going to start on, for which I have no photo, is theoretically going to be bed-sized. I say theoretically because I have to overcome the terror induced by my last large quilt effort. I remember vividly how much work that took and how much swearing. But it is a request of long standing, and will be a gift to my brother. Jeremy, YOU know which design I’m talking about!

It feels nice to have projects to get into again!

Can you see it?

This past weekend Jeff and I took a couple of days off and had a mini-vacation. It’s our 11th anniversary (when did decade two happen!?), and it was going to be hot in SF, so we figured – why not? So we went.

There must be hundreds of beautiful places for a weekend vacation within two hours of where we live, but after due consideration of the weather and the possibility of the San Francisco Hordes descending upon our chosen location, we chose a small Sonoma Coast town a couple of hours north of here. We picked the town and the inn sight-unseen, but as it turns out, we chose quite well. The town was fairly quiet, it was cool and breezy, we got to go beach hiking, we met the owners of every single lovely place we went, there was a surfeit of Sonoma County wine and we even got a surprise fireworks show before the fourth to boot. WIN.

In retrospect, it was a bad idea to drive ALL the way back down the Pacific Coast Highway to SF, due to the aforementioned SF Hordes. It wasn’t too horrid in the end because we were driving toward the city on the third instead of away from it. Just as a Public Service Announcement, if you’re in the area don’t ever think it’s a good idea to go to Stinson Beach on a holiday, unless you think it’s a grand idea to sit in a seven-mile, four-hour traffic jam on a small, windy two-lane road. That’s not my idea of a good time.

When I got home and was downloading the pictures from the trip I came to a sudden realization – I take most of my pictures with the idea of turning them into quilts! No kidding. Not ALL the time, but most of the time. A very few pictures I take are actually to remember a place that I went or a person or because something’s amusing, but I have quilting on my mind enough that I seem to keep it in the back of my mind whenever I have a camera in my hand. So to illustrate, all the pictures in this post are ones I took with a quilt pattern in mind. Can you see the quilts?

The pictures I take with the idea of a quilt in mind generally …

• have fairly simple structure,
• focus on a single element or the play between two elements,
• are somewhat abstract,
• have a strong message of some kind of sensory or emotional “feeling,” and
• usually feature a high-contrast color scheme.

I think that learning to frame a photograph well is analogous to learning to choose subjects for any kind of representational art – quilts, paintings, whatever. You have to decide what you want to show out of the millions of elements competing for your attention in real life. In the photo below it was really windy and chilly, there were plants with thorns that kept sticking my elbow, I was super worried about getting a sunburn (I did), the gorgeous Pacific Ocean was crashing at my back, there were butterflies flitting around, and I was up to my armpits in these flowers and could barely see the trail, which had an unnerving tendency to suddenly disappear over sharp dropoffs. But what I chose to show edits out most of that in favor of a simple field of yellow and blue.

Out-of-focus pictures are often better for the purpose of quilting (larger pixels), so sometimes if I really do want to make a quilt out of one of these photographs I will edit the photo in a few different out-of-focus or otherwise edited ways to think about composition and pattern. Other parts I’ll crop out and put in high, sharp focus to concentrate on the possibilities for embroidery.

I may or may not make a quilt out of any of these (I think the fireworks and the yellow/blue ones are the most likely) but I do keep a scrapbook of possibilities that I add to on a regular basis. If I started now working full-time I probably wouldn’t finish all of my ideas in my lifetime! I guess it’s good that sometimes it’s enough for me to just think about them.

Hope you’ve had a lovely holiday weekend if you’re in the US, or just a lovely weekend period anywhere!

The Mom Quilt – Finished!

Dear Mom,

Your quilt is finished! When the rain lets up, I’ll roll it up in a plastic bag and put it in a tube with a dowel rod to hang it on and mail it to you. I feel terrible it’s more than a month since I promised it to you, but it’s not like I haven’t been late before. I consider it a family tradition! And I have been working on it very hard. I didn’t really expect it to take this long!

You might have to iron it a little with low heat when you get it, but it’s pretty indestructible at this point. One reasons I find quilting with silks like this so interesting is that it gives the impression of being a delicate sort of thing but as I’ve said before, silk is not really delicate. Most of the silk I’ve worked with is tough – I’ve broken sewing machine needles and when I embroider it forces me to use leather thimbles and needle grippy things  or I dent my fingers. Plus the overall project, because it’s quilted so densely, is extremely sturdy. You’ll see. It’s a thick piece of work.

A few weeks ago when you wrote me, Mom, you said you didn’t see how I had enough patience to do this. Truth is that it doesn’t take me any patience. It might be weird, but I can’t sit still long enough to hand-hem a pair of pants, but I can spent 50 hours hand-quilting. It doesn’t feel like tedium, and I don’t get impatient. I love sitting down and putting stitches in this fabric. It’s fun. I even ripped out quilting I didn’t like in some places and started over. I’ve definitely found something that I love to do.

I’ll miss this quilt. I ended up liking it quite a bit, and the pictures just aren’t the same as seeing it in person. There is too much depth and texture to it to really get a good idea of what it’s like in a picture. But then again, I’ve been looking at this so long that I don’t see the picture for the details anymore. In a couple of weeks I”ll look at it again and see if I can see the flowers and leaves again. But I think I need some time away from it first.

Have fun with it when you get it!

Details:

Neutral oatmeal linen backing fabrics (2 layers), thin cotton batting, silk kimono fabrics from Ah! Kimono.

Needlepoint, Inc. silk floss and DMC floss (what’s that stuff made of?) for quilting.

Hand quilted/embroidered and machine and hand pieced. Hand bound.

Posts for this project:

Concave and Convex, Iris quilt: creating the quilt puzzle pt. 1, Iris quilt 2: fabric piecing technique, Iris quilt 3: putting it all together, The back speaks, The Mom Quilt – Finished!