Grace Under Fire: A Quilt for a Comrade Going Through It

 ....being a master class in handling bad news, and a love letter to another work colleague but not THAT kind of love letter, please don't call HR.

I've mentioned the crowd I've worked with at a past client when I wrote about Ronnie, my non-boss boss; and how there is a tendency to seek out the teams that we know work well together, and try to rebuild those high-functioning (or at least highly fun) teams, especially when times/clients are tough.  Avengers assemble, if you will.

image stolen from internet

So it comes as no great shock that when one of our cohort - in this case, data strategy wizard (and explainer extraordinaire for his, ahem, less technical colleagues), destroyer of legacy systems, west coast Cub fan, and stalwart dinner companion, KB - started going through his own individual hell last year, the collective still wanted to assemble somehow: tricky, though, because if it were a work shitstorm we could all just pitch in and take some of the weight, and help him shake it off in time for beer at his favorite restaurant (Kordyshack tonight, anyone?).  In this case, all we can do is sit around in our respective zip codes, sending crappy, morbid jokes by gchat, approximating normalcy, and hoping for the best......our way of showing KB that we love him like fried chicken and we are thinking of him all the time, basically constantly, I mean 24/7, in a way that would be uncomfortable and weird if he weren't a liberated progressive man (despite also being a salty and phlegmatic Canadian, +/- one tam-o-shanter).

American war poster, 1942, demonstrating howAmericans have long needed things
to be spelled out for them when it comes to geopolitics. 

Anyway, KB sent a group of his past-team Avenger A-listers an email awhile back outlining some pretty craptastical medical ish he had just discovered and was coming to grips with: and despite the fact that it was Very Bad News indeed, he impressed me deeply for just how gracefully he conveyed it - directly to the point, specific where it helped to understand, practical in envisioning the murky future but not dwelling morbidly on any of what was at that time some upcoming heavy weather he would have to endure.  I can only assume that the zen approach he'd developed over multiple decades of explaining data strategy to complete fucking morons came to his aid in this, his darkest hour, as he brought to it the same unbelievable patience, the same knack for breaking down and summarizing of the strategy into smaller digestible pieces, and the same spirit of polite inquiry that I have always benefitted from in my time in his august shadow.  Whether he was doing it for his benefit or ours, I managed to admire the approach through, I freely admit, some bitter tears on his behalf.

So it was to this same A-team email group, minus KB himself, that I sent out a plea in turn - would anyone like to write KB a note that I could include in a quilt for him? And the answer there was a resounding yes: in part, I think, because we were all feeling that same sense of "Well shit, how do we help on this one?"  So I gathered up these sentiments, scribbled on post its or envelopes or index cards and captured on phones and emailed from all over the globe, some from folks I haven't worked with but whose signature I can probably now forge (KIDDING) and transcribed them on to some squares embedded in this simple pattern, in the same way signature quilts  were collected for life-changing events in days of old.  Back then, it was usually a gift to a leaver: "we're packing up the Conestoga wagon and will probably never see you again, community I was born and raised in!"  In this case, of course, we hope very much it is a gift to a stayer - at least, a stayer for a good long time, which is I guess all any of us can really hope for anyway.

The signatures/notes are in the 3x4 grid, alpha by first name
which is probably really annoying to a data strategist. :)

Here we are! Though this red is almost as hard to read as the handwriting, sheesh.

Close up on a corner to show the faux flange binding, ie, that little purple
stripe, which still delights me even after, I don't know, 6 or 7 quilts
I've done this way now.

(I should mention, too, that some of these signatures are ones you'd find in, like, a book of the history of Agile software development, and most certainly in a book of the history of this company, which added a little archival shine to these proceedings - KB has some friends and supporters in high places, is what I'm trying to say.  And now he has proof.)

As any of the quilting community can tell you, our first impulse ALWAYS is to wrap someone in crisis up in physical fibers as a proxy for an extended, heartfelt and possibly unwanted bearhug. And as anyone who knows me can equally attest, I'm prone to attempting a grand gesture when maybe a better, more useful show of support for someone whose world is turned upside down might be a constant stream of terrible jokes and tasty casseroles delivered with heating instructions. Of course I would never cook for anyone I care about, that would just be disrespectful, bordering on lethal.  

But  also just know, KB, that if you were feeling the quiet was a little too quiet - feeling any strange absence of gallows humor or noxious puns - that I was THINKING of them, and you as I poked every stitch of this quilt over these last few months, and making a mental note to send them along to you before I forgot them, and then forgetting them anyway because my brain is still damaged from that one time you tried to explain applied data mesh to me. But I certainly have not forgotten YOU, or this shit hand you've been dealt, one which you are nevertheless playing with such utter grace and equanimity; and neither have your other Avengers who are assembled here to provide you with that heartfelt bearhug/casserole in fabric form, captured  in allegedly fabric-safe marker that will nevertheless probably bleed and fade over time, as will we all.  Rest assured, though, that our regard for you will not. It could never.  

The picture that is supposed to be "artfully tossed over a chair" but ends
up usually more like "someone forgot to put the laundry away again."

So, to sum: in the immortal words of Winston Churchill, "When you're going through hell - keep going!" With much love, KB, and extended, heartfelt, and possibly unwanted bearhugs from the whole gang (whether they got their squares in on time or not).  Miss you bunches, and looking forward to assembling with you again soon, at a Kordyshack-to-be-named-later. 

Besos,

Astrid

PS...one for the road....

hahahahaha

(Technical quilty notes for anyone wondering)

• I copied everyone's handwriting through the simple expedient of pulling up the JPGs onto my laptop, heightening the contrast where necessary, and then painters-taping pre-washed quilt squares to my actual goddamn screen, which acted like a lightboard and made tracing everyone's notes quite easy. This also made it simple to resize the signatures until they each fit their designated square.  There are some tracing goofs where the contrast wasn't great so each signature looks a lot like my own handwriting if I were practicing to become a check forger, WHICH I'M NOT, so I sent along a paper copy of each note to KB as a guide and/or for posterity, and so that if my tracings aren't legible you'll know who said what, and that "Carlos" is not "Carbs", for instance, even though I kind of fat-fingered that one (sorry, Carbs.) Unfortunately, I lost the pictures of all of the above in a terrible I'm a Fucking Idiot phone accident - if they ever surface I'll add them.
• The pattern is Squareburst by Running Stitch Quilts, and I think it ended up being like 72x86 or so? This pattern is pretty easy to increase size on, depending on whether you can stand to have the top/bottom and left/right rows NOT be identical
• The fabrics are - well, started out being, anyway - an off-white Grunge, Kona Limestone, and an old French General forest green that has a pleasant striation to it while still being wholly solid.  I say "started out being" because then I used a rather violent purple as backing (it's Kimberbell wideback "Connected Stars" in Purple) which bled like a motherfucker DESPITE both prewashing it AND throwing the finished product in there with a whole phalanx of Color Catchers....it pretty dramatically turned that Kona Limestone into a pinky beige which, while still okay visually, was not at all how this started out.  Good thing I didn't at all stress out for weeks about which colors went best together, hahahah! haha! ahem.  The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft quilty, etc.

The bleedin' purple culprit....

...turned that Kona Limestone (the lighter green swatch on top) into the
lighter pinky-beige color in the quilt itself.  Look at that Color Catcher! (The fuschia thing
at top, which started out white). The darker green didn't change too much.

Another view of that astounding color change, woopsie.

• Quilting was a pretty basic "holy shit it's been 6 months and I haven't sent this fucker out yet" stitch in the ditch around the basic star design
• Batting was a thin, pleasantly drapey bamboo, because let's face it, we might want to give KB a bearhug, but he doesn't need to be smothered by it. He lives in a tropical rainforest, for chrissakes!

And just because progress shots are always fun:

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)

Syzygy Means the Planets Aligned Long Enough For Me To Get This Done

... being a quilt of a graphical nature, for dancing queen and designing woman, DB.

Welp, so much for resolutions.  A short post, just to get this sucker out the door.

It's not so much that I'm not doing anything crafty, as that I've been shuffling around a little for work: this quilt, for instance, which I call Syzygy, was started in NYC and made a trip to Ecuador before being finished in Chicago:

You can maybe see why I thought of it as "Syzygy", though it could have also come from Zzyzzx, CA.

Which is suitable for DB, who is herself a jet-setter of some reknown: a boot-scootin' country & western music lovin' Francophile that I know via an extended college crowd.  DB then moved into my neck of the woods in Chicago and promptly opened shop as THE best-catered party apartment north of Irving Park Road (and by "catered" I mean "she did all the damn cooking, holy shit", which is nothing short of magical to me and my pop-tart eating, can-opening culinary habits.)

Ms. DB, whom you might remember as the talent behind the Gramdrew's Home for Wayward Girls logo, is hereby the recipient of this cracked mirror of an offering.  She had expressed a desire for something of a graphical nature, and as always, these airy descriptions coming from an actual designer just baffle and terrify me and I demanded examples. So she picked out some of the quilts I had made for other folks that she had liked, and the one that stuck with me was Sister Lulu's Fractured Flowers quilt.  This pattern is "Arrow Point Path" by MeadowmistDesigns and seemed to fill the graphical bill, AND had the advantage of not being too complex to piece when I was in transit for pretty much 3 solid months.  I did a little bit of an ombre fade thing with the shades as I moved to the outer zigzags.   And I went with toasty reds and oranges, and a linen-y taupe-brown, in part because it was freaking cold out when I started to do this and I couldn't even look at my glacial blues and cold water greens in January or whenever the hell that was; but also because my impression of DB's living room revolved around these warmer shades.  Hopefully I'm not misremembering that, DB!  But if I am, let us just say this color scheme is reminiscent of the endless vats of salsa I have cumulatively consumed at your annual Cinco de Mayo party, as well as the cheery warmth of your hostessing in general.

The flip side is one of my favorite patterns (which I compulsively draw in my graph paper notebook) in oranges and yellows with one strip of the central red tone from the front to make it fit lengthwise:

Man, I love this pattern.  In Sashiko I think it's called Asa-no-ha, or hemp leaf.

As I pieced this top, it reminded me of many things: zippers, tire tracks, the cymatic visual representation of sound waves caused by dance music... this last, of course, because DB is a dancing fool extraordinaire, and once stayed out dancing so vigorously that she broke her foot (okay, or exacerbated a running injury, maybe): like, on and on until the *actual* break of dawn.  I know this because I witnessed it, since we were the only two that stayed out that late after many other wimpy dance-haters had left hours prior..... and we might have made it out at the same time they were leaving except at that crucial moment "The Killing Moon" started up and that was all she wrote.  Hence: broken foot. Eternal respect for your dedication to the craft, lady.

I started working with Suki the Juki on free-motion quilting, but my lines were still just straight(ish).  However, it's still like 50% faster than using a walking foot, IMO, because you don't have to wrestle with your quilt to reposition it so much.

This is to say nothing of her karaoke prowess, which runs a funky gamut from Stevie Wonder ("If You Really Love Me") to some classic Country & Western ("Tiger By the Tail") and I even saw her captivate a live-band karaoke crowd with that venerable old chestnut "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," because she is a born entertainer, and a natural onstage (something I never, for all my karaoke obsession, ever mastered.)  And indeed it was DB who introduced me to the dearly departed Carol's, the last honkytonk on the north side, which was within stumbling distance of her apartment, and mine, back when I was her neighbor in the RavensHood.  In addition to being the bar voted Most Likely To Be Playing a Patsy Cline Torch Song At Any Given Moment, it was also home to a truly David Lynchian cast of neighborhood characters, including a tiny, reedy-voiced librarian-looking woman who used to on occasion bust out with "Birthday Sex" at Thursday night karaoke (one of my favorite karaoke nights in the city, especially during the unemployment/grad school stint of the late oughts.)  Think the C&W bar at which the Blues Brothers sang, minus the protective chickenwire, mating with the Isle of Misfit Toys.  Aw, Carols. We hardly knew ye.

The edges are a little different from the diamond centers, nothing too crazy.

In any event, I hope this one works out, DB, and satisfies your preference for something of a graphical nature. Surely you know by now that your fancy pants artistic terminology falls on deaf ears when it comes to me, but maybe if you think of this as tire tracks or dance tracks or as an abstract rendering of the excitement one might feel upon being gifted a one-way ticket to a prepaid apartment in the 11th arrondissement, it will endear itself to you anyway?  In a pinch, at least, you'll have something to throw on top of any party guest that might decide to take a quick snooze on the living room couch, in spite of the raucous dance party going on in the dining room (ahem.)

In which it becomes clear that colors really do look way better in sunlight than in whatever you call the light in the basement I'm living in right now.  "Grotto-esque"?

I would tell you to let me know the next time you get your rock show on, but let's be real: these old bones do that like 1x per year these days and would likely take a raincheck. On the other hand, Summerdance starts in June with Samba, Swing, and Salsa - right up our alley!  Hollar if you're going: I'll bring a walking cast, just in case.


Besos!

Astrid.

Linking up with Confessions of a Scrap Addict - Fridays Whoop Whoop