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.

Rainbow Thread

About a week and a half ago I decided I really needed, somehow or other, to get back in the crafting groove. My energy has been elsewhere for almost two months, which is understandable. I wanted to find some way to get back to it, even if it wasn’t much, even if it didn’t make so much. So …

Yes indeed. I organized. That’s standard 6-strand embroidery floss. Wound neatly onto little plastic bobbins with all the kinks worked out and the really stubborn knots cut off. Stored in rainbow order in a nice little clear box like a box of sunshine and flowers. Guaranteed to make me happy just looking at it. I love rainbows and color, and I’m somewhat OCD, so lots of things get arranged by color in my house: my sewing thread, the clothing in my closet, Sharpie pens, notebooks, fabric stash, yarn stash. If there’s color and I’m nearby, it’s probably in rainbow shades.

Did I actually buy all of that floss? Nope. I’m not that crazy, I don’t embroider enough to use several miles of thread, and there wouldn’t be any pink there if it were up to me. The majority came from my inheritance of Jeff’s grandmother’s crafting supplies and is marked with an asterisk. I would describe her style of floss organization as “Giant Ball of Stringy Chaos.” There were a very few faded and “crunchy” specimens over thirty years old that weren’t salvageable, but most were fine. I rewound those and Jeff was patient enough to unknot the really nasty ones.

Oh, and any of you who embroider, you might be happy to know that your humble standard DMC embroidery floss will probably still be in good shape in 2040. Only the pink faded a bit.

I took pictures of it all because of how GLOWY and nice and shiny and ORDERLY and pretty these were. Where’s my next project?  ‘CAUSE I HAVE THREAD.

Done (well, almost)

All the stitching is done on the birch/aspen quilt now. And I have judged it finished. Except for the binding, of course, which I need to address soon. It’s really hard to show what this thing actually looks like in pictures. It never looks like it does in real life.

So in the final analysis, the way I made it is supposed to divide the piece’s aspects in two.  The applique and piecing depicts the objects within the scene (hills, the patches of flowers, sky, lake, 2 kinds of trees) and the embroidery depicts the movement of the scene – the breeze, the leaves twirling down, the motion of waves on the shore.

The problem with the last part, the binding, is that I don’t know what fabric to use. The front and back pieces were sample pieces, I don’t have any more. I’m pretty sure that using fabric from the trees is a bad idea, and even the other solid cottons probably won’t work well because the backing fabric is a looser and thicker weave than the cotton. I think it would come out all wrong.  This is one of those times where I wonder where my forethought was, but that’s kind of the problem with this work.  It’s intended to be spontaneous, to foster that sort of creativity, and indeed if it weren’t I wouldn’t bother.  But then I run into a problem like this binding thing.

That’s the sky embroidery, it’s supposed to be a lazy breeze.

Anyway, if any of you have ideas about what will look appropriate, tell me!  I’m up for all sorts of suggestions.  I will make some sort of decision within the week. All that’s left really is to iron it, and bind it off, and add a hanging strip. And that will be that!  Seems funny the end is so near, after working on it off an on over these last months.

The final look of the waves on the shore of the lake. You did know that was a lake below the hill of trees?

I have two more quilting projects in the works when this is done. One is a jacket and the other one is based on a fairy tale.  The former is pretty planned out, the second is in its initial sketch details.  Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a couple of photos of the crochet jewelry piece I’m experimenting on. It’s made of three colors of thread and the base is sport-weight yarn. It makes nifty shapes. It also takes forever to do this and is fairly hard on the fingers.  But no matter.  It’s definitely interesting.