A Little Interstitial Music: A Miscellany

...being not one thing or another, and certainly not the things they probably could have been.

Continuing my inability to focus on Things I Said I Would Do, being distracted by Things That Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time, here are a couple of quilty things that happened lately instead of things I've told some folks I would do for them.  I mean, I will.  Soon. Meanwhile....

First, a baby blanket for the cousin of a friend - kind of an odd color palate, but she gave me free rein on pattern and color, and I had been noodling with some orange-yellow-green-purple bits and bobs I had sitting around.  At her wise suggestion I swapped purple for blue and in the final analysis, it's a cheery, bright, non-gender specific lil Broken Windows strip on a mottled Grunge white, with a cozy gray windowpane flannel on back + a strip of yellow 40s juvenile print flannel I inherited from the Estate of the Unknown Benefactress.

Then there's this: a scrappy low-volume Rail Fence quilt with bonus Scrappy Rainbow Pinwheels - a super easy quilt for beginners, if you have a ton of semi-neutrals lying around and some bright squares.












This has still not quite used up all those shirt scraps that made Chris and JJ's Trip Around the World quilt and also appeared in the Cap'n's Low volume Postage Stamps, lo these many years past.  In fact, it was probably some of the first fabric in my stash, when I started a sewing class 7 years ago this fall.  (Seven years! That's kind of nutty. I was thinking 2015 but, no, per this very blog, it was 2012. Yowza.) Below, you can see I used the blue-er shirts more centrally and as I got out to the edges it was more whites and grey-er ones. This has very little to do with a grand strategy and everything to do with that being how it got laid down on the Design Floor the first time around.

Continuing a proud tradition of not having enough backing width by mere inches.

Anyhoo, these are 2.5" x 6.5" strips with the 2.5" color squares sewn in diagonally - though, trickily, since the blades of the pinwheel need to be free to spin, you can't strip piece these because the colors are on the inside, not the outside, of the block, so you cut out all of the 6.5" lengths, add the colors, and then sew the Rail Fences together.  It's great mindless sewing for summer baseball game "watching."  (Go Cubs!)

This quilting was a BIG DAMN DEAL for me - my first entirely free-motion machine quilted quilt, instead of just select easy-to-reach areas.  I did wavy lines in the direction of the rails which, as it turns out, may have been kind of wasted effort and I could have just done it as an all-over pattern, because you can't really see how the wiggles change from Fence to Fence unless you're looking for it.  But it was exciting to finish and I'm MUCH more comfortable with freehand wavy lines. I started with closer lines, almost a wood grain texture but soon discovered that was going to take me an ice age to finish, so loosened up a bit. That results in a nicer drape to the quilt anyway, IMO. 

Also, the binding: rainbow ombre! I dig how it looks, especially on the gray/black back.  Cheery!  Except maybe for the gray binding strip (centered on at one side - I just hadn't prepped enough of the rainbow stuff for binding and didn't care to go back and cut one more strip of it, when I had the gray binding already made for some previous project.  Because I'm lazy. Or thrifty. Or whatever, it didn't happen.

 Then there's this odd raspberry cotton-candy colored confection which is just a basic Coin quilt (also called "Chinese Coin", "Roman Coin", and "Bar Quilt" - mine's more of a Bar, since I think coins are supposed to be narrower columns, and sometimes also different heights).  (Why do people pronounce that "heighths"? I never understood that.) (Of course mine WOULD be a "Bar Quilt.")

But the color scheme has been in my brain a lot lately - this pink-yellow-orange-purple series.  Not sure why. Missing sunsets? Strong yen for sherbet?  Trying to rekindle a childhood love of FruitStripe Gum? Maybe being in Houston this long has made me a secret Astros fan, but in 1983?

Colors a little more true in the sunlight (if wrinkly)

The only thing I could think to use for sashing (since I am quite bored with white and gray, for a change) was this very light blue, which is a linen texture from Henley Studio, which *kind of* sets it off perfectly and *kind of* makes it look like the colors ran in the wash, which they haven't (yet. But I guess now it doesn't matter if they do.)

Finally, there's this unfortunate top, which probably needs several borders to make it a usable size.... except that it is wildly out of true, with these rows of wee 2" squares finishing up pretty dramatically different lengths, despite having the same count... uh, woops.

At upper left, we find.... wait, WTF?

So because this is not critical, it has been summarily wadded up and thrown in a corner until I have energy to fix it or take it apart for reconstituting some other way.  Bleh.

Looks better when you can't see the corner in question.

These will likely be donated at some point - but first, I have to get them back to Illinois, because I will shortly be ending my stint at this gig in TX and heading off for ... somewhere else, tbd.  And every time I move hotels/airbnbs/ accounts, I gotta pack up whatever giant mounds of fabric have accumulated in my pro tempore Sewing Studio, and shove it all into my teeny Mazda for schlepping to the next port of call. 





You'd think this constant upheaval would make me more conservative when I buy fabric in a temporary location, and force me to Kon Marie the crap outta my traveling selections, but.... then you'd remember who you were talking about, and you'd laugh and laugh.

In my defense, there are some GREAT fabtic stores around here.

In conclusion:  I might not be doing what I've told myself sternly to do, but at least I'm sewing, and mental-health-wise, that's better than not sewing and waiting for The Right Inspiration to hit.  I mean, these piles of fabric are not going to cut themselves into smaller pieces and sew themselves back together.  Right? Right!  Back to work!  Except maybe I'll just take a bath for a bit, and check out Pinterest, in case there's anything VERY CRITICAL that I must make RIGHT AWAY.

Linking up with Confessions of a Fabric Addict for Whoop it Up Friday ... er, Saturday.

Between the Sprit and the Dust: Love Letters to Strangers, Part 2

...being a second annual contribution, however humble, to a more crinkly, quilt-comforted world.

The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.

SUE MONK KIDD, The Secret Life of Bees

Greetings, fellow travelers, and lemme tell you this: on the list of quilts I am making IN MY HEAD (both the list, and the quilts) there are about 50 people who are due for some quilty-blog-love-letters and I have such grand ideas for you all!... but instead I make scrap quilts and give them to strangers, because they are patterns I wanted to try or color combos that seemed interesting or opportunistic usages of leftovers, but are not *just right* for my listees. So just know that if you're reading this there's a better than even chance you are ON the LIST (unless I made you one already, and then you are on the SECOND list, which is for when the first list is done) and I probably also have a Pinterest page devoted to you, which is probably like 500 quilts deep.  It's the thought that counts? (No, really, it's my life's mission to do this, and so it will get done. Eventually.)

Scrappy Brights Race Quilt

I do hope, however, that these 5 orphaned quilts are just right for someone, as they are going to Mercyful Quilts, run by the kind-hearted Bernie at Needle & Foot.  Mercyful Quilts gives quilts to folks who are dying in Mercy Hospital, Sacramento CA, and is one of the recipients of the Hands2Help quilt drive run by Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict every year.  This mission of providing a little down-home comfort to terminal cases in the hospital struck a chord with me, because my mom was in the hospital when she died, some 13 (!) years back now, and it was just as clinical and depressing as you might expect; whereas my dad was at home, in hospice, on a sea of morphine, and that seemed like a considerably more preferable way to go.

Blue & White stripe 2 color quilt, "Chill"

One of the things I remember clearly about my folks dying was exactly how surreal and clock-stopping it was.  How disorienting and sad and scary, even for my sibs and me as fully adult people, to suddenly be in a world where we simply didn't have parents anymore - no matter how old you are or how prepared you think you are, it seems, this is still a mighty blow.  And sort of impossible and silly, too, like maybe they're just punking us and have really just boarded a plane to Vegas to get away from their damn kids for awhile?  As Bean wisely noted, after her mom passed, "It is absurd to me - ABSURD - that my mother will never meet my children."  Because it doesn't seem like that should even be a possibility, yet here we are.

In my dad's case, there was this exceptional hospice nurse lady - I forget her name, sadly, because she was a rock-like, clear-eyed Charon to Dad in his weeks before passing, and a wise counselor to us left behind, in our time of confusion and grief.  And I thought how amazing a gift it was, to be able to escort so many people to the very brink of the unknown with such utter sangfroid and tact and sensitivity, without ever losing yourself in the drama and sadness of it.  So hats off to you, good lady, whoever you were.  You appeared when we needed you and you gave us exactly what we needed, and left us grateful and less at sea, and that is more than can be said for most occupations (ahem, looking at you, plumbers and auto mechanics.)

Scrappy Neutral Strip Diamonds

Anyway, this morbid trip down memory lane, prompted in part by Keanu Reeves' touching surprise answer on Colbert awhile back to the "where do we go when we die?" question, was the impetus for donating to Mercyful Quilts this year, in hopes of providing help to those nurses who are right there on the brink with the dying and their families, who try to bring a little color and softness to what may otherwise be a relatively sterile, unforgiving environment of hospital palliative care.  And if a bereaved person wants the quilt when it is all over, they can take it home as a treasured memory.... or, in my case, they have carte blanche, if it helps, to ritually set the quilts on fire or cut them to ribbons in anger and sadness and wishing to never see it again, as emblematic of what may have been one of the saddest points of their lives.  Hey man: whatever gets you through, I back it 100%.

Scrappy 9-Patches

So: five quilts to Mercyful, one for each of my siblings and me, to honor those who honor the dying.  And for every other orphan, of any age, and to the nameless woman who held our collective hand and calmly helped with funeral arrangements and kicked off the healing reminiscences when we were still awkwardly trying to maintain our best oh-shit-we-have-company small talk; and to the nurses and caregivers of Mercy Hospital, and everywhere sad, scared people look around hopefully for someone else to be the expert at dying when clearly no one has much personal experience in the matter:  I salute you.  It can't be easy being on those particular front lines every day, but many of the rest of us, more sheltered from that final inevitability, appreciate the sensible, stolid escort, whether we are the one getting on the plane, or the ones waving goodbye, sadly, from the ground.

Rainbow Colorwash Quarter-Square Triangles and 4-Patches

May we all know a little peace before dying.

Gratefully,

Astrid

Alhambra Stars and the Slippery Slope of Perfectionism

...being a *really* long time in the making, because I kept having to fix prior decisions.

A year and a half ago my office had a silent auction for a charity fundraiser. I wasn’t in the office at the time, but I thought aha! I have a skill I can contribute here. So I entered “custom quilt, within one year…” as an auction item, knowing that my travel schedule was always going to be an impediment, but figuring that at least any potential bidders from work would understand that, and be cool with it.  (And shout out to one of our finance folks for pinging me during the day of the auction to keep me abreast of the exciting bidding war that was taking place, since I wasn't there to witness it.)

Thankfully, the auction winner, V, has been EXTREMELY patient with my itinerant lifestyle, even though I blew through the 1-year mark and then dawdled another 6 months (well, okay, for part of that I was not in the same country as my sewing machine, in all fairness).  And she had some great ideas for the pattern she was interested in, which were the Golden Ratio primarily and secondarily a vacation she took to the Alhambra... and voila! Let me announce, in what appears to be a trend of having one annual post, that A Star Is Born:

the stars are sewed / i've sent what's owed / (clap clap clap clap) / and now i'm back in Texas

In the end, even though I was mostly lurching from crisis to crisis trying to fix errors in judgement from the preceding step, the final product was.... nice.  I was proud of it, and I never want to see it again because it was so exasperating (aaaaand now I know how my parents probably felt about me during my high school years.)

And that's about the end of the story, unless you want to know the process, in which case... read on, pilgrim!

Just the facts, ma'am: 

• This is applique - I ironed WonderUnder onto chunks of fabric like I did for El Jefe’sFlag (the fabric here was 5 colors of Grunge), cut out the shapes from templates I created with craft plastic, and working outward from the small inner 8-point stars, centered the pattern on big dark navy squares, ironing on the orange/yellow stars and the (more faded blue) 5-point stars.
• At that point I sewed together my big navy squares on point, added setting triangles, and then ironed on the brighter blue 6-point stars (because those actually go across squares in the pattern, and are geometrically equal on either side of the seam).  
• Then I outlined all of the stars with 1/4" black fusible bias tape, which was ironed on, and then sewed on with a double stitch (alas, since I don't have a double needle on my Juki, that just meant I had to sew all of the bias tape twice.) This hid the raw edge on the star appliques, but it also made the for kind of a dense, heavy quilt - it started to feel a lot like jeans, what with the doubled fabric and the double-stitched tape on every "seam".  
• I only stitched the bias tape through the top layer/flimsy - then I made the quilt sandwich, and THEN I stitched each star itself in a matching thread to hold it in place through all layers, did one inside stitch-line around each navy negative space shape, and stippled the outside edge.
• I also for the first time included a contrasting flange on the binding. Go me!
• The back was a pieced-together piece of lighter blue double-gauze, my very favorite backing to use, for the snuggle factor.  And I even remembered to make the nap on the different pieces go in the same direction this time. 
• The binding was just slightly darker solid navy.  I figured the pattern was busy enough, so I didn't want to muck things up too much with the fabric.
• It was around 84x62 before washing, and shrunk down to just under 80x60 afterwards.
• I still can't take pictures worth a damn.

Stippled edges, flanged binding

The back, about halfway through outlining the stars

Once More, This Time With All the Angst I Went Through For No Reason: The star-tile-pattern on the left came from V, from her "Golden Mean Coloring Book," by Rafael Araujo, (which was a Kickstarter project! Very cool) as a possibility when we were discussing what she might like.  And the one on the right came from, uh, Pinterest, somewhere… and was promising because it can be divided into repeating squares that would enable me to create one template and use it as many times as I needed to get to the right size.  (You can see the dashed lines that divide this into squares if you blow it up: the 8-pointed star is the middle of the square.)

Pattern that V provided as an option...(Rafael Araujo)

Pattern I thought I could do.

For a color scheme, V gave me two different sets that both sounded cool: mostly green with purple or orange or yellow accents, or mostly blue with yellow or deep orange.  I opted for the latter... mostly because I have more blue fabric lying around, but also because it matched with my mental image of the Alhambra tile work (whether that's actually true, I dunno. I've never been there!) . Here are some color inspirations I had in mind:

stars

stars

and more stars

I also wanted to replicate the worn quality of the tiles, hence: Grunge fabrics.

If you take the pattern I settled on and blow it up at the FedEx Kinko's store, then you get a big ol' block for making templates that looks like this:

You can see here how the blocks in the above design repeat. I set mine on point.

I did try a variety of fabric combos, including the one with spots which was just a scrap test-block anyway, but definitely reinforced my decision to NOT go with patterned fabrics: 

An attempt at piecing the stars came first, as did this lurid spotty background fabric.

as usual 

the color selection

STRESSED ME OUT

Initially I thought I'd be able to make templates for hand-piecing, but when I tried that I realized I am a SHITTY HAND-PIECER.  The sharp angles of the star points resulted in irritating little tucks in the star-arm inside angles (the starmpits?) which I tried to fix and never could. Next!

Final colors selected....on to shitty hand-piecing!

The templates had promise, though. So instead of cutting out pieces to sew them back into squares, I just cut out squares, and then cut out star-parts to iron on top of them.

Step 1: find the center of the square. Step 2: center a star on your square. Steps 3 through infinity: Iron, iron, iron.

Below is 7 squares laid out. The top one needs its light blue corner 5-point stars. The one with the bright teal half-six-point-stars on the edges is the one I hand-pieced, but for the rest I waited until the big navy squares were sewn together and then ironed those brighter stars across the squares' seams.  Easy peasy!

Here the brighter teal blue stars are just lying on the top, where they will shortly be ironed into submission place.

I AM IRON MAN

Next up: how to make sure those suckers stayed down, and also was this pattern enough? The stars seemed ill-defined, like they needed the grout of the original tile work to help delineate where they were. I fretted. Eventually it seemed I could tidy up my raw edges, keep my stars aligned (ha!), and add a grout-like design element with some 1/4" bias tape, made all the more user-friendly by the good folks at Clover who have a fusible version (thanks, Clover!)

Cut the bias tape at a 45ish degree, and then attempt to match that angle for the piece on the other side (with mixed results.)

Starting to look kind of stained-glassy

Well duh, Astrid - you're still going to have to sew down the fusible bias tape, so it's not like you're getting out of any work by covering your raw edges this way.  AND, in the cases where the star points did not quite meet, and the tape didn't quite cover the edges, you experience slightly curled star points or edges anyway. Solution: sew EVERYTHING down REPEATEDLY so no one was going anywhere, ever.  And then stipple the ever-loving snot out of the edges, just to prove the point. TRY CURLING NOW, BEYOTCH.

In the end, it wasn't even that hard to do, but as I might have guessed, the figuring out things part,and going down wrong paths part, and the second-guessing myself endlessly part, and the wandering around for work part, got in the way of my deadline.  And I'm not really sure this is a quilt... or, at least, it's not patchwork since almost nothing is sewn together, just on top of one another.

But all's well that ends well. I have shipped it off to V (to the office - I had a moment of panic during which I thought "I haven't emailed her in awhile about this - I hope she still works here!")  I have several new techniques under my belt, and also like 7 extra spools of fusible 1/4" bias tape, and a new appreciation for Islamic geometry, and so I will count it as a success, even if it did take me 1.5 years to get here.

And maybe this year, I'll get more than one thing done.

Besos!

Astrid

(Linking up with Confession of a Scrap Addict's Friday Whoop Whoop)