I recently discovered this project Save our Stories on the website of The Alliance for American Quilts. They have hundreds of interviews conducted by quilters with quilters, who tell their own story about their quilting. These interview transcripts are being made available on the website.

I was looking for work by my teacher Dena Crain at QU and discovered that she had recently been interviewed for the project. It’s a great idea I think because so much has been lost about the people who made the quilts, which now are hung in museums or stored in boxes in people’s homes. Another interesting use of the internet.

I have a very scientific way of choosing fabric for a quilt top. It involves emptying the contents of my fabric stash onto the sewing room floor and turning it into a bomb site. A part of which you can see below.

That was what I was doing this afternoon. I started yesterday evening but couldn’t find anything suitable A fresh look and some experimenting with Photoshop Elements enabled me to make a first choice. (It’s the fabric run from black to yellow in the middle of the photo.)

Since I then had the entire contents of the cupboard on the floor - not to mention piles stacked up for weeks on the work surfaces, since my trip to the fabric market - I decided the time had come to attempt to sort the fabric into colour piles. This accomplished I still had to stack them up in the cupboard. What I really need is lots more space. Who doesn’t?

I am currently working on a new quilt that I am designing in a class at QU. The working title is “Breaking out of fear”.

The original sketch was made by drawing lines on one quarter of a folded piece of paper. The resulting design is then reflected onto the other 3 quarters:

That was the first draft. We were then supposed to refine the design. I had an idea in my mind, but the first attempt at putting the idea onto paper was detrimental. I ended up with bug eyes and the arrowheads that were the main feature of the design faded into insignificance:

The idea was right but the articulation of the idea was not. However there were some changes that I liked. So after sleeping on it I had another attempt and came up with the final design which incorporates the idea and the best aspects of the failed revision.

This final design sketch is after experimenting with grey scale values.

I am taking 2 classes in parallel at the QU at the moment. The second class is called “To Bead or Not to Bead” and as you can guess it is about bead embroidery. I have done my first exercises and here are the results.

Scattered seed beads

Beaded bars

Beaded pathway

Not perfect, but what did you expect!

The Quilt University has an annual virtual quilt show, where students enter photos of quilts they have made in classes over the year. Almost all the entries were for pictorial quilts - portraits, landscapes etc. There were a few abstract art quilts and very few traditional patterns. As was to be expected the winners were pictorial quilts.

I don’t know what to make of this. Would the same people who voted for the winning quilts actually buy them and hang them on their walls? Is quilting now moving away from the traditional format and trying to compete with other mediums? That is not what appeals to me about quilting. If I wanted a portrait or landscape my choice would still be one of the more traditional mediums for these. Am I out of date and out of touch already?

Having finished the Mariner’s Compass quilt top and also the quilting design I got cold feet. So I took the advice of many experienced people in the yahoo groups and decided to make a practice sandwich. Just as well I did. This frame is not as simple to use as it would appear. After a few false starts and mistakes I have the practice sandwich on the frame and I have sewn a couple of lines of quilting.

There are a few remaining hitches which need sorting out, but at least I haven’t put the whole lot on eBay. Though I admit to coming close at one point. I had forgotten to lower the pressure foot - no wonder the machine wasn’t sewing properly. I solved the problem myself, but afterwards read on the yahoo groups a number of comments that imply that this is a common error

If it wasn’t for the advice available on the yahoo groups I would have been extremely frustrated. I viewed the DVD (copied at great expense from the VHS tape) again, but it just breezes over the tricky bits and then announces you are ready to start quilting. Thanks a bunch.

Is what you see and buy really what you think you’re getting?

As you may have gathered, if you’ve been reading this blog at all, I take quite a few courses at the Quilt University. Today I discovered on one of their forums a link posted by Carol Miller, the dean at QU, to this article in the Balitmore Sun about how the Amish are outsourcing the making of quilts to the Hmong refugees in America or even to Thailand itself.

There was quite a lot of discussion. It would appear that the Hmong people have a long tradition of needlework and are skilled at appliqué. There is no reason why they should not do this work or that their quilts should not be sold in the USA. What is not correct is that the quilts are being sold as work of the Amish with no mention of the Hmong workers. Of course many of the stores in Pennsylvania Amish country are not actually run by the Amish themselves, so from here it is hard to judge who is to blame.

It is rather sad that traditional handicrafts are being commercialised so much that it is necessary to resort to deceit.

It has been the first weekend this year that has been sunny with blue skies. In fact it was so warm that we ate breakfast outside both days. Today I left the cellar - where I sew and dye - and moved my studio into the garden. This was possible because I was doing stuff using paper and pencil. First of all I needed to come up with a design for quilting the mariner’s compass quilt. I have been pondering it over the last week and came up with some ideas as sketches. The next stage for me is then to draw on top of a black and white print of the quilt top.

Concentrating not frowning!
Once I have something I like, the next stage is producing templates to scale if necessary. I shall need 4 templates for this quilt as the corners of the borders are to have individual motifs. After that as much of the design as necessary gets transferred to the quilt top. I like to do most of this freehand, as up to now I haven’t wanted a geometrically precise design. The quilting of the central blocks of the MC quilt will be shadow quilting.

I have started a new class at QU. It’s a design class. The aim is to learn some design principles to help me design my own quilt tops. The homework this week was to produce 24 line drawings based on reflections down one axis (x or y) and both axes. So that was the other thing I was able to take into my outdoor studio. Here is just one example.

Here are a couple of photos of the stuff I wrote about yesterday. The first is my piece of silk velvet, which has turned out to be a blood orange tiger! What you can’t see here is that when the light catches the pile of the velvet it shimmers yellow. So that’s where it went!

The second is of the finished quilt top for the mariner’s compass quilt.

The backing for the mariner’s compass is now drying. It has turned out pretty neat, if I do say so myself. Only thing is, this time I managed to produce a real red instead of a pink/red. I really will have to start taking notes To prove my good intentions I have noted down the recipe I used for the backing.

Today I finally got my act together and made the leaders for the quilting frame. Even having had the assembly video transferred to a DVD I was still none the wiser as what I was supposed to do. I got the most information from the Yahoo user groups for machine quilting. There is a lot of useful information including photos and files to download there. Where would we be without the web? I ended up glueing the hook part of the velcro to my fabric leaders - there was no way that was going to survive the attempt to sew it on. Most people seem to stick the leaders to the frame with duct tape, but I thought there might be advantages to being able to pin the leader to the quilt off the frame. We shall see.

Apart from that, yesterday I finished the quilt top for the mariner’s compass quilt. Today I am in the process of dyeing some fabric for the backing. It is the first time that I have dyed a large piece of fabric so I am interested to see the results. I also caught up with my homework for the Shibori dyeing class. I have been dyeing silk scarves and velvet. The velvet gave me a surprise. I wanted to dye it yellow yesterday, ready for overdyeing today. I decided to use my other yellow and not the lemon yellow. I have used it with success on cotton. It turns out a warm yellow with a somewhat orangey tinge to it. Imagine my surprise when the silk turned out a definite orange. Quick change of plans. Today I overdyed it with red - like a blood orange. It’s drying now and looks good - even it isn’t quite the piece it started out to be