From the sewing room...

Crafty time! I started this quilt in June and finished it in the twilight of 2007. It's for a baby boy... It came together kind of freestyle, because I'd wanted to do something with weaving stripes... but weaving ended up being a little out of the range of my ambition, when the time came, and I decided to continue the diagonal checkerboard.



Here's a closer look (that backing is the checkerboard dog/cat fabric, but I don't have a photo posted):



Hope everyone is having a great Friday!

Baby quilt: "Teagan"

This was made for the child of some friends of ours. The baby was 12 days early; the quilt is two months late. Oh well! She hasn't outgrown it. I handed it over at Thanksgiving.



That faux patchwork backing fabric (peeking over the sides and featured in bias-cut squares in the design) is from Joann. I found it on clearance a few months ago and bought the entire remainder of the bolt, which was four yards (and that is a LOT of fabric for a quilter... this was before my bare minimum was three yard cuts).

I must say, I love the colors in this quilt. At some point, I developed an affinity for vibrant colors, and lots of 'em, all in the same place. I especially love red.

This is a bit of a departure from a lot of quilts I make, because I didn't do the quilting "in the ditch" (on top of other seams, for you non-quilters out there). You can see here that I did diagonal squares:



I'm pleased with it. I hope baby Teagan has many happy baby moments looking at the colors.

Happy weekend, all!

Baby quilt: "Adelaide's Birds"

Once again, displaying my creative use of the word "tomorrow"... here's part 2 of baby Adelaide's gifts, the quilt.

Birds!


My inspiration for this was a tablecloth pattern from The Big Book of Quick Rotary Cutter Quilts, by Pam Bono Designs. The tablecloth was just blackbirds gathered around cornstalks, but instantly I started imagining a scrappy quilt of colorful birds. Eventually I decided to set them on a tree, and the rest is history.

The birds themselves were pieced using a method that mimics foundation piecing, mixed with the traditional flying geese piecing method. In short, put the little piece of fabric on the big piece and sew a diagonal line Then unfold, cut off the excess seam allowance, and voila. You gradually combine your pieces and eventually you get a bird. Or sixteen (although four didn't make the final cut).



In this photo, you can see the details of construction. I quilted this by outlining the birds and then using variegated thread to make "bark" on the tree, and a zigzag stitch for the grass.

I played with all sorts of color combinations to get my sixteen birds. Eventually it became obvious that they turn out MUCH better if you use the lighter fabric on the wing and the darker fabric on the body. All of the rejects were light body/dark wing. They just didn't look quite right. Thus we were left with 12, which I think works better for the size of the quilt anyway.

I used 100% cotton batting, which I don't always do. For the non-quilters, cotton batting, unlike polyester, shrinks (some say 5%, though I don't believe it) when you wash it in warm water. So if you sew everything together first and wash later, there's a chance the shrinkage will look wonky. Ideally when you do this, you will get a sort of rumply-wrinkly antique effect. All of the quilts I make should stand up to warm-water washings (how could they not, when they're for babies and dogs?).

Luckily, this quilt did not disappoint. Here's a closeup after the washing:



So you can definitely see where the texture is a little different. I also used this batting in Ida Millie's pig quilt in June:



I've heard that some very hardcore quilters don't even preshrink their quilting fabric in order to amplify the shrinkage effect. I'm not that brave yet. Nor do I have any unshrunk fabric, since it all goes right into the washer when I get home from the store.

I handed this quilt over last week with the sushi dress, although why I didn't bother to get an in-focus picture of the whole thing I'll never know.

(search term: bird quilt)

Too small vs. too ugly

I love quilting... I just love to do it in small doses. Also, our house is 1960s boxy-modern, so the down-homey look doesn't really fly (except on my clothes!). That's why the perfect solution is for me to confine my efforts to quilting for dogs and babies.

I've made Winston a few quilts, and I'm gradually working my way through all the other dogs in my life. If you check out my Flickr photos, you can find a set called "unwearable" that includes all of my dog quilts. One of my favorite things is that these quilts come with built-in design names -- the name of the dog or human baby that they're made for.

Right now I'm in a total quilting crunch because there were two babies due this month and they were BOTH born early! So I'm frantically varying between the two efforts. One is a very (very very) colorful patchwork and one is a slightly more artistic and agonizing bird motif. They'll get their own post when I finish them. Which should be soon, considering the babes are already here.

My most recent dog quilt was made for Sydney, an Australian Shepherd-slash-something (Malamute?) that belongs to one of the guys who owns the company I work for. It's a continuing theme that Sydney's owner thinks I am nuts, primarily because of the way I coddle Winston and dress him in clothes. So every once in a while, I'll put something really girly on Sydney and send her in to see her owner.


Hilarity ensues, as well as threats to my employment status.

Sydney always makes a big show out of sleeping on the wood floors, so I thought it was time she got a quilt of her own. I thought it should be kind of low-profile (i.e., long and narrow) in order not to cause hundreds of on-the-job quilt-based slip & fall incidents. One evening I set out to make the whole thing -- it was just plain patchwork, so it shouldn't have been a big deal. Out of consideration for Sydney's owner, I chose colors that I thought were less girly.

Alas, when I laid it all out, it was kind of weird looking, and I couldn't get the colors to look right. I ended up dropping three entire sets of squares -- the pineapple squares, the flowers-on-cream, and this one other that I can't remember.

When I finally had it the way I wanted it, here's what it looked like:


(Don't you love how funky quilt squares look when they're off-kilter?)

Here is the quilt sandwich all pinned together:


So it was saved from ugly (of course that's a matter of opinion, but we'll run with it). But right about then-ish is when I started to realize that it was going to be... you guessed it, too small.

I bravely finished it, which took forever because I had planned to self-bind it (which is where you just fold the backing over the front, instead of using a separate strip of fabric), and then I accidentally cut too much off the backing to self bind.

Approximately five hours after I started it, here is what my easy 2-hour quilt looked like:


And I was totally right -- it's way too small for Sydney.

Not that that even matters, because she won't go near the thing. It's the darnedest thing I ever saw. Every single other dog in the world sees a small quilt and immediately wants to sit on it. But not Sydney... I even set it down in her usual spot (thinking to myself, "Sure, it's too small, but maybe she can use it to cushion her shoulders and hips"), and she went and lay down NEXT to it, taking great pains to look as uncomfortable as possible.

So alas. Anyway, it was still a cute quilt and it looks great in the office.

And Winston likes it. Obviously.

Like writing, only faster.

A very wise and wonderful woman, an accomplished artist, once told me that if she's away from a painting for even a day, she comes back to it feeling a little bit like a stranger. Overall, this is true of my writing as well. The more I write, the better things go. And when I really get stuck, agonizing weeks can pass before I hunker down and get past it. (Note: this isn't writer's block -- this is writer's laziness.) The point is, sooner or later, I move ahead.

Revising is kind of like that, only instead of having the luxury to spend two weeks quilting and trying to forget what a slacker I'm being, I have fifteen minutes to go sew three crazy quilt squares (side note: anticipation is high for this being the Ugliest Quilt Ever), stare at the wall, stare at the dog, eat some pretzels, and then sit down again.

My typical feeling is that solutions are out there waiting to be found. When revising, that becomes, "Solutions are out there, so start covering ground like a cocker spaniel at a field trial." Flush those suckers out of the brush. Go go go!

In a way, this is painful, and more frustrating and soul-sucking than I would have guessed. Because it must. be. written.

And then, it's also freeing. Because it must. be. written. And that's that. And hey, if Idea #1 flops, take five minutes and think of a fix for it. I've been pleased to realize that the fix does come. Maybe fifteen minutes of staring agonizedly into space is as productive as two weeks of quilting and soft focus on the writing.

I hope so, because it's all going in. Some may come back out.

But it's liberating to do this speed round. Like finally amping the treadmill up to "run" and then realizing you can actually keep up.

New dog quilt, coming right up.

I'm adding the finishing touches (i.e., binding) to Leo's quilt. I'll put up some pictures soon. I like this quilt a lot. In retrospect, I would have done the quilting slightly differently, but it's too late to worry about that now. There are always more quilts.

I like the fact that my quilts all have names. This one is called "Leo." I also have "Winston", "Angus", "Hugo", "Winston's Camo Sampler", and "Sondheim". I just think it's funny that the names don't fit the personalities of the quilts very well. Perhaps I'm not making the right quilts for the right dogs. Anyway, "Angus" might as well be called "Ross", because Ross (the cat) has taken it over.

I realize that this doesn't make much sense. Luckily, I'm the only one reading.