A Little Catching Up

It's been ages! Unfortunately, not a whole lot's been happening in my quilting world. The combination of not much time, and one project that's going to take hundreds of hours (I'll put that in the next post), keeps progress to a minimum. But, I decided I'd like to post when I have something to share, even if it's months in between.

First, here's the linen quilt that was in pieces back in October---finished! The lighting isn't the best, but it shows the texture of the quilting. The acid green looks almost the right color, but the hot pink looks orange. The size is somewhere around 45 x 50.

And some details, while it was still in the quilting frame ...

This next one shows the pinks, orange, and reds properly.

I wanted a relaxed quilting pattern, so this one was all freehand. Well, except for dragging a heavy pin tip on the fabric to roughly "draw" the chains and waves.

What a Week!

Whew! I've had a very busy week. I took on a freelance project that we all agreed would take about 10 hours, but it turned out to take 30. I got it done Sunday just before noon and have been catching up with the rest of my life since then. Yesterday, I finished the hand quilting on the stones quilt!

It's off the frame now. I just have to take care of a few loose threads dangling from the back, and then bind it and add a sleeve. When I get it hung up on the wall, I'll post a final photo.

In the mean time, I have a couple of detail pictures.

I learned a bunch of things from this quilt, and one of them is that heavy cotton twill (aka khaki pants) didn't mesh well with the kind of hand quilting I used for the wavy lines. The problem is that the stitches cause the fabric to bunch in a way that creates noticeable vertical texture. This would be fine if that's the look I wanted, but I really had in mind a smoother, more horizontal effect, with more visible quilting lines.

At a distance, the verticalness is even more visible and the quilting even less visible.

This next photo is of the back. Every stitch you see is stab stitch. Personally, I'm truly amazed that the stitches are so well aligned with the stitches on the top. I fully expected them to zig-zag all over. I didn't even take particular care to remember to keep the needle perpendicular to the fabric (which helps a lot to position the needle tip in the right spot). Stitch length varies quite a bit, but it varies almost as much on the top. I just didn't have the patience to be more careful.

Yikes! I still have lots to do this afternoon, and the snow keeps coming down. Better get to it.

Yes, It's Winter

We have 14.5 inches of snow (acquired in less than 24 hours). Yesterday, everything except the most essential services was shut down....and a very good thing, too. Now the cold sets in. It was -3 degrees when I got up this morning. The compensation is that it's too cold for clouds, so we have a brilliantly sunny, blue-sky day. Nice to look at, but I'm glad I can work from home.

Hanging around the house is certainly good for making progress on quilt-related tasks, although the stones quilt (not the most inspired name, but that's what I've been calling it) is not yet done. Only 12 more inches to go, but I've had to give my hands and wrists a four-day break from the hard work of pushing and pulling a needle through that tough fabric. Decision: No more hand quilting of khaki pants fabrics!

In the mean time, I'm planning a new project. Requirements:

1. Hand-quilt-able fabrics.

2. No purchases. Stash only.

3. Appropriate for a wall in the kitchen or living room.

4. Usable as a real quilt, too.

5. Cheerful and bright.

6. No templates, no exacting cutting, no matching of seams.

Here's what fits the bill:

I dug out all the reds, oranges, and yellows (the ones on the left are not quite as pale as they look here). I love these colors together! I drew the line at pink. (Frankly, it's a little worrisome to see how many pink fabrics I've acquired.) All are cottons. I don't have many linen fabrics in this color range, and I'd rather not mix the fabric types.

Two-thirds are purchased yardage---languishing in my stash for anywhere from 5 to 20 years. I remember buying several yards of red in 1989 for a planned red-and-white feathered star quilt. All the measuring and matching required to feather a star turned out to be more effort than I seem able to muster. Time to do something else with it. The rest (all the plaids and the stripe) are from thrifted clothing.

The current plan is to use log cabin construction to make a single, very large, square spiral. Each "log" will be pieced from (mostly) square and rectangular patches. Beyond this, I'm making it up as I go along. Which, if I ponder it too much, feels kind of scary.

A Few Spirals

I've made some good progress the past few days. I wanted to take a photo of the central rectangle before I turn the poles again. All the visible stitches are stab stitched. The rectangle is 8 or 9 inches wide. (There's very little natural light this morning--the flurries are starting, and we should have a couple of inches by dinner time--and the lamps make these colors look darker than they really are.)

Here's a bit of detail (with the colors skewed the other way), showing one of my attempts at a little person.

The quilting is roughly three-quarters done. Yay! Around this time in a project, I get antsy and start calculating the number of hours of work left. Current estimate: 13 to 15. Total hours will be close to 60. The cutting and piecing probably took another 8 to 10, and I figure 3 or 4 for binding.

Once every few days, my husband wanders in, looks over my shoulder as I quilt, and says, baffled, some variation of "Where do you get the patience for that?" I have no idea.

Quilt Update

Scratch that deadline.

After a serious push yesterday, I can see that even spending my maximum number of hours per day will not get this quilt done in less than another week and a half. The patterns are taking way more time than the straight stitching. Oh well.

But it definitely feels better this way. Pressure's off, and my hands and wrists can get a break from the tough, tightly woven twill.

The good news is that I really like how this quilt is shaping up! The camera isn't dealing well with the intense black, and I'm not savvy enough to fix it, but these photos give the range of the patterns I'm stitching. Some are inspired by a little book that's been sitting on my bookshelf for years but I've never really used: African Fabric Design, by Shirley Friedland and Leslie Pina.

The Stab Stitch Experiment

This quilt is my current active project. Wish I'd taken a photo before I put it on the frame. The sense of perspective is striking. (Credit for the idea for this quilt goes to Loretta Pettway for her quilt shown in The Quilts of Gees Bend, p. 77.)

The fabrics are very dark and very light cotton twill (men's and women's "khaki" pants in their previous life), plus clear pink and clear orange cotton twill (girls' pants in their previous life).

I cut all the orange and pink pieces with a rotary cutter. But all the darks and lights were cut with a pair of scissors and no marking, to purposely provide a little variation in width. I didn't want any of this quilt to be precise.

I'm really into hand quilting these days. I'm finding machine quilting to be too much drudgery, too stressful, too hard on my back and shoulders, too hard on the quilts (most of the fabrics I use are seriously damaged by safety pins), and just generally not how I want my quilting to look.

Fortunately, I'm also seriously into ignoring the Quilt Police and into applying Liberated principles (thank you Gwen Marston!!). Otherwise, I'd never, ever attempt hand quilting this quilt...and I probably wouldn't even have bothered making the top at all.

It's pretty darn thick with all that cotton twill, the flannel backing and the "select" weight Quilter's Dream batting (my local quilt shop no longer carries the "request" weight, and I didn't feel like waiting for shipping). Still, I can do a fairly decent rocking stitch until I get close to the seams. Then, well, it's stab stitch or nothing. I knew this going in and decided I was willing to live with the outcome, whatever it might be.

The zig-zaggy bits are purposely large stitches that shift direction, which is hard to do with the rocking stitch. None of the stitching lines are marked. I'm just winging it. In the beige areas (which I visualize as steps of stone), I wanted gently undulating lines, kind of like layers in sandstone but a little more curvy, that begin and end within each fabric strip. In the dark areas, I just make it up as I go along, keeping in mind ideas of ancient or alien symbols and patterns on African textiles.

To my surprise, the stab stitching looks really good (at least on top). In the photos, there's a mixture of stab and rocking, but I can't tell which is which. The stab stitch is easy to do, and it's just as fast and maybe even faster than the rocking stitch (especially because with the rocking stitch, I put two stitches on the needle, let go of the needle, pick up my jeweler's pliers, pull the needle through, drop the pliers, pick up the needle....). A bonus is that stab stitch can be done in any direction just as easily as any other, which is truly wonderful when your quilt is on a frame. All in all, it's.....liberating!

As John Lennon Once Said...

"Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."

Too true.

It's been almost a year and a half since my last post--a time so full of things that had to get done, that quite a few other things just had to go by the wayside, and I was very sorry to find that quiltmaking was one of them.

The good news is that pretty much everything I've been dealing with turned out well. A few highlights: My parents are in the memory care section of a nice assisted living center and doing pretty darn well. My sister and I cleared out their house (packed solid from basement to attic!) and got the stuff and the house sold. I lost my largest freelance client, but gained a wonderful job at the university. And, I'm back working on quilt projects!

To get things rolling on this blog again, here's some quilt content. This is the linen quilt I had just started hand quilting before I got overwhelmed. I finished it a few weeks ago.

And here's some detail, showing the combination of fans and diagonal lines.

This is my first hand-quilted quilt, so I learned a lot. My plans were to stitch all-over freehand fans, not get too focused on precision, and not mark before loading it into the frame. I scratched the lines with a pin, which worked really well, but I found that completely freehand fans were stressing me out. So after a couple of rows, I made a simple cardboard template for the outermost curve, and put the underneath curves in freehand. I felt much better.

Then, even though I liked the fans, I kept wondering what it would be like to quilt straight lines. So, I did sections of diagonal lines, scratched with a pin along the edge of a rotary-cutting ruler. After a while, the logistics of interlocking the chunks of diagonals got a little complicated, so I switched back to fans, and then braved another section of diagonals to finish off the top end.

I really liked hand quilting! I gave up on the left-handed stitching, though. I got pretty good at it, but right-handed was easier and faster. I also gave up on spoon quilting. It places one more layer between me and the quilt, which was annoying, and I really didn't see any net benefit. Yes, it kept my underneath fingers pristine, but holding the spoon was a strain. Turns out that without the spoon, I really don't prick my fingertips very much.

Wow. It's good to be back! More soon.

Expensive Needle Threader Appreciation Day

With an abundance of extremely inexpensive needle threaders available, I didn't see much point in one that cost more than $10 (sometimes available on sale for less). Now I do! I literally would not be hand quilting without this little gadget. 

Yes, it's ugly. No form-follows-function elegance here. The designer couldn't even be bothered to pick a cheery color. But can this thing thread needles or what?! My eyes are not what they used to be, but I can still thread an ordinary needle. However, threading quilting needles goes beyond seeing what I'm doing. The eyes are so small that even with a perfect thread end, I can't get the darn things threaded. 

One solution is using larger needles and getting the ones with the largest eyes. But I use lots of tightly woven fabrics and sometimes hand piece them and occasionally hand quilt them. Large eyes are not good. And even they are not quick to thread. Ordinary needle threaders still require substantial effort and time, break easily, and sometimes are too thick to work with my needles. Enter the Clover Desk Needle Threader! This baby just works. Drop in the needle, place the thread, push the lever down. Done. I even abused it unmercifully, trying to get it to thread John James size 11 applique needles. It took as many as six or seven tries for each threading, and I could hear the poor mechanism clunking against the needle end, the needle itself sometimes popping out of the needle port with the force of it. I was sure I had wounded it, maybe killed it. But no. It still works like a charm on my size 10s! (It may work on certain brands of 11s and 12s; it works on larger-eyed needles also, although not the huge ones.) I've had it for a couple of years now, and it's still working like new. To be on the safe side though, I bought a second one. 

What special little gadgets do you all have that you simply couldn't live without?

New Thread, Happy Quilter

Yesterday, I found a much better thread for this quilt. The greens are lighter, and there's more yellow. I got a second thread too, one with only yellows. The green/yellow one is in the left fan. Hard to see in the photo, which means it's somewhat more noticeable in real life but still muted. The partly done fan on the right has only the yellow thread. This is really subtle, and I plan to use it only here and there. 

Still stitching with my left hand. I've included using a quilting spoon. It was awkward at first, and pretty discouraging to have to figure it out---it felt like a major regression---but it eliminates underneath-finger pricks, use of fingernails to move the needle, and sideways pressure on the fingers---all worthy things to avoid. I can tell that I'm relaxing more, knowing that my fingers are much less likely to get poked. Another benefit is that it actually works and works well! It certainly does a great job on the stitch length I'm aiming for, and I can see potential for standard short stitches, too. Heaven knows what it's doing to the tip of the needle, but so far there's no noticeable effect. 

I see definite improvement in stitch quality and am hoping for a speed increase soon. Right now, I'm somewhere around the 4 or 5 hours per square foot rate. 

This Thread Isn't Working

The quilting thread I'm using is variegated in colors that go perfectly with the quilt top, and the thread itself is great. But the dark green in it is just too dark and too frequent for what I had in mind. I wanted the quilting to show up, but, well, not quite this much. The photo damps down the contrast a bit. It's more obvious in person. 

The lighter parts of the thread are much better, though, so I'm going to look for yellows, golds, and light greens. And hey, the fabric colors in this photo are so close to real!--even though I took the photo under a fluorescent lamp. 

By the way, I was going for a casual look, with large stitches, but the lines are definitely wobbly and the stitches uneven. This is because though I'm right-handed, I did all this stitching with my left hand. The hardest part was controlling the depth of the needle-travel. I didn't have much fine control. The next hardest task was getting the knack of tilting the needle enough but not too much, and bending the quilt sandwich to get the stitch length right. Meanwhile, I kept forgetting to pay attention to the direction of the needle. The whole process is very slow, too. It really shows how much right-hand skill I take for granted.  

And why, you may ask, am I learning to quilt with my left hand? I make my living via the computer and spend significant personal time on it too. What with mousing and the keyboard layout, my right hand, arm, and shoulder get overused. Right now, I'm only a few steps away from developing significant problems. I have my ergonomic keyboard set up to give my left hand more to do, and I'm trying the same thing with hand quilting.

A Bit of Progress

Another work deadline met! It was another long week of long days, but I was done by lunchtime yesterday and took the rest of the day off. I've decided today is a free day, too. 

Yesterday afternoon, after a couple of hours of decompression (and laundry, etc.), I tackled the second half of loading the linen quilt into the frame. I'm very pleased with the final setup! 

I was almost obsessive about arranging the layers. In fact, I laid it all out on the floor first, with the backing taped down, just as if I were going to pin baste. This showed up distortion in one end of the top, so I restitched one entire border. It was worth it---it's much better now. I also went nuts with registration marks all around the edges. I figure they can't hurt, and they give me a feeling of security (whether that's warranted is another issue). 

The next two or three weeks are going to be very busy with three editing projects underway, but at least I have lots of hand quilting to turn to.