Finally, the Photos

Here it is, hanging in our dining room!

It still surprises me when I first catch sight of it. It definitely has the impact I was hoping for: graphic punch and then, at a closer look, the surprising stitching.

After it was up, I was straightening the left side and heard a pop. Argh! While hand-sewing the binding to the back, there was one spot where the thread tangled and broke as I was finishing it off. I hoped it would hold, but it didn't. Have to fix that.

A Puzzleball Diversion

Christmas Eve day. I needed one last gift. A handmade one. A puzzle ball! (Patchwork Puzzle Balls, by Jinny Beyer.) I've made a few of these little (and not so little) gems, and each one has been entrancing. So, I dug through my stash and pulled out a bunch of fabrics that I'm highly unlikely to use in a quilt but that are perfect for fancy puzzle balls.

The puzzle ball I chose has pentagons separated by triangles (final size of ball: 4-3/4 inches in diameter). Contrast between the pentagons is not necessary. A good thing, since my fancy fabric stash is limited. Here are the pieces. Well.....not exactly, since--oops--I cut these triangles too small.

Sewing well went, though! Not too many set in pieces, so I was able to machine stitch most of the seams. Lots of stuffing later (I used poly, not cotton), I had this:

This next photo shows the final hand-sewn seam to close up the ball (right and lower right). That one is really hard to sew.
One small warning: Despite Jinny's breezy assurances about how easy puzzle balls are to make, they do need precise cutting and piecing, plus plenty of unhurried time for fabric choosing and construction. This one took between 5 and 6 hours.

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.

Morning Views from My Kitchen

It's sunny and a whopping 5 degrees out. These are views from my kitchen's three-season porch. I had to work quickly, because moisture was rapidly condensing on the windows.

We had very wet snow, which dragged down branches. Then the deep cold froze everything in place. The trees and shrubs are showing the damage.
I drove a little bit yesterday--enough to find out first hand how awful the streets and parking lots are. The initial slush froze, so there's treacherous ice everywhere. For the past 24 hours, semis have been jackknifing, cars have been sliding into ditches or each other, and lots of people have ended up in emergency rooms because of falls and snowblower accidents. Tomorrow it should warm up enough for road salt to work.

And yes, I moved to Madison on purpose. Twice. (--sigh--)

Once again, I'm very glad I can work from home today, and I have plenty of quilt projects! Got a little more stab stitching done last night, and am hoping to start the spiral quilt later today.

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.

Current Favorite Book

Since progress on hand quilting is particularly boring to blog about, here's a bit about what else I've been doing---which is, mostly, reading about quilts and thinking about the next top to piece.

My current favorite quilt book, by far, is Accidentally on Purpose: The Aesthetic Management of Irregularities in African Textiles and African-American Quilts, by Eli Leon. It's full of wonderful quilts that I've seen nowhere else. (I really wish I'd known about this exhibition at the Figge Museum, in Davenport, Iowa, and seen these quilts in person.) But perhaps best is that this book has an analytical approach. I keep coming back to it, finding little nuggets of design wisdom and incisive explanations of process. I can learn a lot from these quilts just by looking, but I love having the author describe, for example, how a block is progressively altered and within what limits, or what the quiltmaker has decided to vary or not vary, how things like syncopation and deliberate departure from regularity are used in different ways---all sorts of things I wouldn't see so clearly on my own. The African textiles are beautiful, and the parallels with the quilts are striking. Love this book! Seriously, if you have any interest at all in this kind of quiltmaking, get yourself a copy while it's still in print!