OMG OMG OMG It's SOOOOOO CUTE! Houndstooth plaid quilt

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Orlando Pulse Heart Quilt: The longarm experience

So I've got this quilt top for the Orlando Pulse project, hearts in rainbow colors, not terribly creative but instructive as good practice.  I plan to get creative with the back, putting some of the pieces of shattered hearts on the back as well as creating a 49th heart to put on the back for the purposes of honoring the fact that 49 people died in the shooting.  And I had started using some of the white/background fabrics to do an improvisational pieced "floating squares" piece from the book The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters.  BUT the problem was that I'm new at longarm quilting and this was my first piece.  And my longerm teacher... Sue Sandritter at Quilt Trends in Columbus, Ohio, explained that having all those seams on the back of the quilt would make it more difficult. 

I was frustrated, because I was so sure this is how I wanted to make it work... but I could see ht epoint of not making my first longarm experience be frustrating, let alone something that would knock the whole machine off it's timing, so I decided to just do a flat back of white on white fabrics and then I could applique the special stuff on after the quilting was finished.  I'm VERY glad I did so. 

A longarm machine is specially made so that the quilter can fit the piece they're working on into the machine.  It's not something you've ever thought about if you've done just seamstressing, because mostly in seamstressing, you are working on a seam or edge of a piece, the rest of it sits to the side while you only have to have a flat 5/8 inch piece of fabric on the inside under the arm of the machine.  RARELY in dressmaking will you have to find a way to create a seam in the middle of the piece, so that half of the fabric needs to pass through the machine between the needle & the arm, and even if there is such a moment when you're doing it, the fact that it's a dress or jacket or suit means that the amount of fabric is very minimal in comparison to a large bedspread that has fabric, batting, then more fabric in the finished piece.  Sewing those little lines in the middle of the piece becomes an exercise in wrestling your excess fabric & batting into the small space that the arm of your machine has... And if you think perhaps maybe it's possible to just work around the edges and only up to the point where the sewing machine will take you, and leave the rest "puffy", like a TA-DAAAAA, it's the focal point anyways, right?  Well... if you want your quilt to be USED, then you don't want the three parts of it... top, batting & bottom, to be shifting around & bunching up because you didn't sew it all together.  Believe me, I thought of it, but it doesn't work.  You will end up with an uncomfortable lump of batting that moves around in the middle of your unstitched area of quilt.

The batting you choose will determine how far away you are allowed to upt your quilt lines, and each one will be rated for a certain amount of space between the lines.  Some will be 3 inches, others will be 5 or 7 inches... What this means is that the batting you have chosen is intended to be able to stay relatively flat and NOT bunch up, so long as you attach it at least THAT often. 

The problem with most quilt patterns ... and this is kind of a joke among experienced quilters... is that they're very specific about their instructions on how to piece together the patchwork of their tops... but they rarely explain the quilting details that will turn your quilt into a happy piece of art for your home.  They joke is that nearly every quilting pattern ends with the instruction, "Quilt as desired". 

For those of us who LOVE the detail of the little lines of stitching that go through a coverlet, who sigh over a focal point that was allowed to be puffy and un-stitched, that was NOT a focal point until some skilled quilter chose to quilt around it rather than through it... for THOSE of us who are mesmerized by the fact that a spot of matchstick quilting can create a stiffer spot and a lot of little pebbles can become a design element of their own in our art... the thought that the last words of most patterns are "quilt as desired", is just frustrating as heck! 

SO I decided to learn more about the task of finishing up all these UFOs (UnFinished Objects) and WIPs (Works In Progress), in a more artful way.  This summer I took formal classes, in person, not just watching YouTube videos online (not to diss that, but seriously, there is a difference between a sewing class where someone can see exactly where you are placing your hands and tell you how to turn your wrist JUST A BIT and it'll work better... or where the teacher allows you to borrow her gloves so you can see how they work ON YOUR HANDS, before you decide whether you want to buy them or not... ).  I took classes in hand quilting, machine quilting, and also longarm quilting. 

In the hand quilting class, my seamstressing and embroidery experience translated nearly perfectly.  The tasks are very similar and the real value to the class is to learn the specific techniques helpful in the quilting process, as well as review the various pieces of equipment that you can use to create your artwork and to design your stitching lines before you're putting the needle into it.  I had a chance to check out different thimbles, see why a smaller length of thread works (I kind of instinctively knew this from how many hems I've handsewn and how many bodice linings I've hand tacked... but having someone confirm for me that it's easier to work with shorter lengths of thread despite having to knot it more often and bury threads & etc, was a good thing)... I learned how to knot and bury the thread in a way that does not happen in embroidery, needlepoint or garment sewing, and I got to practice the new techniques in front of a teacher. 

In the machine quilting class I learned how to move the fabric under the needle to create a design, and how to make allover designs like meandering, shells and curlicues, so that no one would be able to point out a beginning or end of the pattern, and the general principle that one doesn't want blocks of an allover pattern that would allow for a channel of puffed batting... no, one needs to vary the stop & start point so that the meander or allover pattern will not create an obvious seam line or stop point. 

But in the longarm class, I learned how the physical task of pushing the machine around on rollers over the quilt uses much less muscle strength than the task of moving the entire quilt around under the needle on a stationary machine.  I learned that the task of creating the design feels more intuitive, like driving or using a computer mouse, than the task of creating the design by moving the fabric under the needle.  I also learned that the task requires endurance... particularly if you're going to be doing it all in one session like I did on this one.  And when you're renting a machine, you NEED to work start to finish without taking it off the machine, so you're kind of stuck... and it IS an endurance exercise.  For this one, it took about half an hour to clean & load the machine (my first time), and 3 FULL hours of quilting... meaning I spent 3 & 1/2 hours just standing... reaching out over the machine rails to replace the needle once, reaching out to move the machine around, the bars that the quilt is rolled onto are not intended as grab bars or leaning bars, so there is no opportunity to lean against the machine and take the pressure off the bottom of your heels, it's JUST a bunch of standing. 

Aleve helps.  As does a good podiatrist.  I'm blessed with good foot doctors, cursed with poor foot mechanics.  As a tall girl who danced on toe shoes too early in life, I now have flat feet which over-stretch my plantar facia tendon when I'm standing up... If I don't move, I eventually am in pain (which makes tasks like following a tour group and standing around listening to a lecture difficult, also).  I can walk, hike, bike... but standing it ROUGH.  And after nearly 4 hours of it on the day I did this quilt, I know that I'll be looking for a rolling architects' stool that I can raise & lower to accommodate the height of the machine... BUT...

It's SO worth it.  FUN... like ... I can't describe.  Like being handed a great big piece of paper and a crayon and having your teacher say... DOODLE....

SO... here's how it went.  I want you to see the top left edge of this quilt. 

Notice that the batting, the fluffy part, extends out past the quilt top.  The backing is under the batting and ALSO extends out past the top.  You never want to be quilting and find yourself out of backing before you're out of top.  It's assumed that you've FINISHED the top and aren't intending to cut it down, so they suggest 3-4 inches extra on each side.  On THIS side, I did way more than 3 inches extra because another helpful thing is to bring along some of your fabric to put on top of the batting and use as a way to test out the tension of the stitches if you change out the needle and every time you change out the bobbin.  If you do it right the first time, in theory it won't need to be adjusted, but there's always the possibility that you ran the thread through slightly differently or that as you stitch it, things even out in a different direction than your original tension needed, but for sure you need to fix it when you first start.  WHY?  Well... there are two threads, one coming from the top and one coming from the bottom.  If the top is too tight (too tense) then it will drag each bottom stitch up through the three layers and you'll see the bottom thread on top.  Then when the top is finished, the top thread (no longer under the tension of the machine) will simply lay on top of your quilt and your bottom thread is doing all the work of keeping the three layers together.  If the bottom thread is too tense, you've got the same problem on the back of your quilt.  You need them to be equally tense, so that the loop where the top thread twists through the bottom one and locks them both, that point is buried in the middle layer and is not pulled either up to the top or dragged down to the bottom by uneven tension.  Laying a piece of extra fabric along the side of your quilt, on top of YOUR batting, will help adjust the machine to YOUR quilt, with YOUR choice of fabric for backing, YOUR fabric for the top, and of course YOUR particular batting.  The person before you on the machine might have been sewing through blue jean fabric, or fluffy minky, or silk... or linen... each of which presents a different issue for the tension of the top versus the bottom... so taking care to adjust the tension to YOUR quilt goes a long way to making the whole task easier. 

The next thing is to go to town on figuring out what design to use.  MY hearts were JUST the size requested by the Orlando Modern Quilt Guild, so I didn't put a border on them, which meant I needed to start my pattern for the main quilt, right from the very first stitch.  I tried a few little loopy leafs on the top edge, but I couldn't get them evenly spaced in that small area, so I gave that part up.  I had always intended to do a dense quilt for the white background portions of this quilt, and make hearts in the center, not perfect (these hearts represent real people, and real people are never perfect, are we?) so I didn't need to try to draw them on first. 

I used the idea of a maze... or a greek key design to create my hearts within the hearts.  I was going to start with the bottom left of every heart, and make a single smaller heart inside that one, then I'd turn and head back out of the maze.  In the white spaces, I found that little loops were easiest to create and make fill the oddly shaped triangles of white between the hearts... I've drawn a greek key border design, as well as a spiral maze.  And then on top of both, the heart that I ended up with... with arrows so you can see the direction that I would go on any of these. 

And the final quilt.  See the top of this post for the entire thing, but I wanted to highlight a portion of the quilting so you can see how even when done freehand, the hearts tended to turn out uniform ENOUGH, and quite charming in their imperfections. 

Yeah... Sorry... Sophie happened to decide this quilt needed a little test ride to make sure it was soft enough.  And she sat right on the part that was flattest, but you can see from around here... the little un-quilted middles of the hearts are puffy, the loops on the irregular white background managed to do quite well in filling up those spaces... and my first longarm experience was a WILD success... Next step.  Put the 49th heart onto the back, add a label, cut off the edges, bind & send.  (sounds like a whole lot more work than it is... THIS is the part where you know it's finished and those last few details will make it a working quilt.)  YIPPEE! 

Making many diagonal striped squares, the quick & easy way, for the Houndstooth quilt

Take a look at my diagonal squares: 

Nice, neat, FLAT (since today’s task is to iron the little devils).  I got a good start on all the squares that had blue in them, since that was the smallest color (just around the edges).  THere are a LOT of white & yellow & greys left to do.  WHEEE! 

Once you’ve got a whole pile of these, you can use the to do MANY things.  Alternate the direction of the diagonal, and you end up with little squares everywhere on the diagonal.  Alternate a bunch of 2 square diagonals with a solid, and you’ve got a traditional houndstooth pattern.  Line up a bunch of squares and you’ll have a solid diagonal striped pattern, with undulating or gradiating colors, if you choose. 

MY intent is to use them in a herringbone, which is one of the more complex ways of arranging them, and it requires mimicking the threads of a herringbone weaving loom, weft and warp going across & down… the thing that makes a herringbone when weaving is the alternating peeks of each thread as it crosses and then goes under a thead of a different color going down through the pattern.  My intent is to alter the traditional pattern by a bit, to include some stripes of different colors, ultimately getting a herringbone/plaid quilt, representing my stepdaughter’s alma mater colors.  Hopefully it will work. 

I’ve counted up all the little stripes that will come from the top and all the stripes that will come from the sides, and how many blocks of each stripe color combination I will need to complete this task, and I’ve cut them.  Here’s how. 

I took WOF (width of fabric… usually 45”) strips of 2 inches.  Anyone wanting to make diagonal stripes with jelly rolls (a more traditional, 2 & ½ inch strip), could easily do it, the little squares will be bigger and easier to deal with in terms of numbers, but of course, I wanted a lot of variation in my herringbone plaid pattern, so I went with a smaller size.  I could have gone down to 1 & ½, but the resulting squares would be so tiny, that doing a whole twin sized quilt out of them would have been extremely tedious as a first use of the pattern. 

What you need at a very basic level are two strips of two different fabrics.  Make them fairly obviously different… a large pink floral on a small green background, paired with a stripe of a large pink flamingo on a green background, will just look like a mishmash… for this pattern, you lose the identity of the larger prints.  It’s the perfect pattern to use with a solid or batik or small print, particularly tone on tone.  This is one where you want the two colors used in each block to be a clear contrast. 

Sew the two stripes together.  Width of fabric.  Press to the darker side.  Do it again. Then take the two lovely, flat pieces of stripes and put them right sides together, alternating colors facing each other (If you have the same color on the side, flip one of them to start with the other end).  Sew up one side, then turn and sew up the other side.  You will have a long tube with the right sides in, nice & flat.  The second side is SO easy to sew up, because the fabric is being held steady by the side you already sewed, and as long as you flattened them out, you’re good.  Just hold them against the quarter inch seam guide and it goes together easily.

PUT THIS ON THE CUTTING BOARD AS IS.  You don’t need to turn it inside out, press, or anything.  You’ll need any ruler that has a 45 degree angle on it.  I use a small square ruler that shows 45 and 60 degree angles also. 

For the first cut, put the edge of your 45 degree line along one of the seams up the side of your tube.  Please note that in this photo, I put the 45 degree line along the bottom of the fabric edge so you can see the line easier, but for the cutting, I slid it up to where the line was on top of the seam (harder to see on the photo, but when the line of stitching is kind of covered by the line on the ruler and you CAN"T see them separately any more, you've got it properly aligned on that edge). 

Position it so the END of the cut will be at the end of the tube.  Your first point will be just at the seam of the other side.  Slice the whole way through the tube.  The little end is a scrap.  If you have not sliced off your selvage ends of fabric before slicing the strips, then position your ruler so that the selvage is part of the scrap end.  There is so little waste in this method of creating diagonally striped squares, that the extra inch of selvage is not worth trying to squeeze into your square (and it would only make one of the edges more bulky with an even stiffer fabric in that line, a big issue since the seams of these squares will all meet in these little corners and create excess bulk if you don’t keep them carefully trimmed & small. 

Your second cut will start where the first cut began, at the point.  But this point is NOT at the edge of the fabric.  It’s JUST inside the seam.  A cut that made the point go to the edge of the fabric would make a larter square, but it would also require undoing the stitches in that seam allowance at the other end.  This is supposed to be EASY, so cutting it larger and then having to rip out several stitches in each square makes no sense.  If you need the larger squares, just make the strips larger by a half inch and cut to THAT line of stitching.  When you position your ruler to make the point just inside the seam and the 45 degree line across the bottom of the other seam, you've got it right.  Just make sure that as you adjust the point, you don't come off the bottom line, and as you readjust the bottom line, you keep the point just inside the seam.  It takes a little sliding around at first, but it pretty quickly becomes an easy task.

In order to get it apart from the other squares, you’ll cut THROUGH the stitching at the other end, and just follow through. 

Don’t worry that you’re cutting into an important seam line for the next square over.  In fact, cutting back that little diagonal piece within the seam only helps prevent you from having excess flaps of fabric at all the joined corners of the squares when you’re finished.

Continue this way up the whole strip, positioning so the tip of each cut is at the seam of one edge, and the cut makes a new 45 degree angle with the seam on the other edge.   

Before you know it, you’ve got a whole stack of triangles to flatten into squares.  For each triangle, pick it up by the light-colored tip.

  Lay the other side on the ironing board.  Put the iron flat onto the other side.  Hold the iron there as you tug the tip in your fingers away from the other side.  For this photo, usually I'd have my iron where my middle finger is.  I needed a hand to hold the camera (not yet completely high-tech with the presentation).  The point is to open it by putting the iron onto the larger light stripe and tugging the light colored end with your other hand, while pushing the iron into it so that the seam flattens under the larger dark stripe. 

Push the iron onto the seam down the center of the square, and push out. 

This should flatten the seam under the dark strip of that side of the square.  Make sure the seam on the other side of that strip also goes towards the dark stripe, and flatten the whole square.  Store the squares flat & ready to use in your pattern.  If you choose, snip off the little flapping ears at the corner of the square (it's seen coming out under the iron in the photo above).  This little excess seam allowance is unnecessary and will again create bulk at exactly the point in your finished piece where bulk is not needed. 

Quilts for Pulse: auditioning the layouts of hearts for the quilt top

We have 4 options so far:  Straight rows of color

I find it boring, but in a straight quilt of 6 x 8 in a rainbow, there’s not a lot of room to bend the rainbow

Diagonal rows:

I kind of like the diagonal, but do we lose the rainbow at this point?

Chevron:

If the diagonal lost the color theme, then the chevron just takes it a step farther down the lost path.  I like the idea of a kind of arrow or "arch"... but when put on the table, it doesn't make the cut.

 

Radiating:  Red in center and outside corners, other colors radiating in & out from them…

Just a hot mess, and NOT just because some of my block got twisted as I walked around the table & put them all together!

SO I’m sick of putting all 48 of these blocks on the table, walking around & re-arranging… but someone had a cool idea… how about if I turn the blocks upside down for every other row, or for each half of the quilt?  HMMM… I might have to put some rows together right side up & upside down, and then see how to combine them.  I like the idea.  It JUST might work… at least better than the straight rows. 

Thinking... thinking... thinking... needs more thought.  I'll give y'all the verdict later... but for now... notice, this kind of playing around with the layout requires a few things... first, the camera so that you can remember & put them next to each other, it takes WAY too long to arrange & re-arrange so you can see them back & forth.  Second, a big area to use to play with them... ALSO, you've got them all pressed so you're not dealing with lumpy seams on top of all the unfinished edges and the fact that the stupid blocks will twist & turn on the table since they're not completely together yet. 

AND an imagination.... preferably one that can think in patterns, so that you can envision the chevron and set the blocks in place to make it work.  ANYONE can think in a stripe, but if you can figure out how to move the stripe over by one block, for every new row... you've got a good start. 

Quilts for Pulse: Auditioning the selvage heart and cutting triangles off the heart halves

For my Orlando Pulse quilt, the intention is to have a heart for each of the 49 victims of the tragedy.  The front of the quilt will be 6 columns of 8 blocks each, which adds up to 48 (and magically, it takes 6 colors to make a rainbow, another major element needed in this quilt, so there are 8 blocks of each of the 6 colors).  But I need another block.  And  don’t want to favor any one color over any other.  I’ve been interested in selvage quilting for a while, and this seems a good opportunity to do it. 

 Photo of plain colored heart next to selvage heart:

I considered the possibility of positioning the selvages in a way so that it would appear they were curving around the edges of the heart, but to start with, the hearts called for by the initial Orlando Modern Quilt Guild request were squared off, no curving pieces required.  But on top of that, because there are 6 colors of selvages (and 6 colors in the rainbow), to try to turn it into a curved piece where one color was at the center and the others radiated out from it, would necessarily mean much less of the color in the center and more of the color around the perimeter.  I decided to do it as if I were simply replacing one of my rainbow single-color fabrics, and using the selvages to create a pieced stripe fabric.

I cut two 5 & ½ inch x 10 & ½ inch strips of one of my white-on-white fabrics to use as a base, and lined my 6 selvages up in order of rainbow color.  Because they are selvages, there is a large portion of each selvage strip that’s taken up with brand name, color dots, and other information that identifies the type of fabric, the designer, the store it came from, and the colors used.  One would think this would be good information to use to match and find the same fabric in the future if I ever need it again, but my favorite fabric store owner, whose “colors in quilting” class I took last week, assures me that these days the designs of the fabrics are changing so rapidly that it would be near impossible to find additional sources of a fabric just by keeping the selvages.  Still... I’m sure the manufacturers have a reason for putting all this information on the selvages, probably something involving identifying it in their own inventory, and customers who use fabric have spent centuries slicing off the selvages before sewing (because either the thicker weave of the selvage or the interruption of the pattern and color would ruin our projects). 

Quilters have a tradition of trying to be frugal about fabrics, so it makes sense that modern quilters would look at the selvages as we tossed them in the wastebasket and wonder if they couldn’t find a way to make use of them in a modern pattern… Selvage projects are becoming en vogue, so of course I had to try it. 

But the odd coloring of the edge of the selvage means that my rainbow will be oddly mottled… Still, rather than abandon the idea, I carry on.  I take 22 inch strips of selvage from each color, and sew them onto my base fabric, one at a time, approximately a quarter inch from the cut edge.  The un-cut edge will not fray, so I need now sew it just yet.  I intend for it to show and I don’t need a line of stitching showing down every strip of the stripe… so for now, I’m just sewing each piece down by it’s cut edge, lapping the selvage edge over far enough that IF I choose to tack it down later, it will cover the stitching from the previously placed selvage.  I finish attaching each of the 6 selvages (in rainbow order… ROYGBV) to the base fabric, and slice the two bases apart, cutting through the 22 inches of selvage at the halfway point.  This makes strips that are a half inch bigger than necessary, but that’s not really a problem.  THIS heart does not need to fit in a row or column of similarly sized hearts.  It is EASIER to complete the task if I cut if back by another half inch to make my selvage pieced “fabric” just the same 10 & ½ inches that all the other heart halves are… but it’s not a problem if I choose not to do it that way. 

Before I go further, I have to decide, which part of the heart will be the middle?  I audition the blocks by putting them together each possible way, just laying the white background down on top in a way that approximates the final heart, and I take a photo with my cellphone.  Then I switch the blocks around and re-position the background pieces, and take another photo.  Looking at a photo often clarifies an issue.  You no longer see the waves and threads and strips wehre it’s not quite sewn perfectly, you see it closer to the way it will look when it’s finished.  Before access to easy photos, quilters would put their fabric on a wall and step back, or maybe squint at the different options, to see which they liked better.  With cameras in all of our cellphones these days, it’s easier… we can snap photos and put the photos next to each other to make the choice. 

PHOTOS of selvage heart auditions:

Look at my options.  In one photo, I’ve put the Violet part of the rainbow in the center, in the other, I’ve put the red part in the center.  My informal survey of the people sewing around me at my Friday afternoon quilting gathering, was a tie vote.  And I could not decide which I liked better.  But I ended up choosing to put the red in the center, as this is the color of the blood spilled from the hearts of the 49 people who died in Orlando at Pulse. 

Slicing off the triangles:

My intention has always been to piece the back of this quilt.  We’ll see what I come up with.

My choices are starting to expand as I move forward in creating these hearts.  You see as I finished putting together each heart half, I piled them up, choosing to do all the cutting & sewing at once, and then trim the excess threads (so they don’t show through the white side of the fabric on top of the batting once it’s quilted), trimming off the excess part of the squares (since the heart form only needs the triangle to remain and leaving all that excess fabric inside the quilt is unnecessary and would make it lumpy), and press the hearts so that I can take the next step of sewing the halves together, all at the same time.  Pressing is a job I don’t enjoy, but the results are so wonderful that I don’t skimp on it. 

Photo of ruler ready to slice off some triangles:

Still, I don’t enjoy it, so I delay it as long as possible.  I spent a few HOURS trimming off triangles.  This seems a good moment to show how easy it is to line a good ruler up with the stitches and trim off the excess on a project like this.  My ruler has little quarter inch lines at each edge, and you just put that line on the seam, with the open edge hanging in the direction of the stuff you’re cutting off, then run the rotary cutter up the edge.  Easy peasy… If you’ve done a better job than I have, and managed to attach the little squares with perfect diagonal seams, you can even accomplish the slicing of all 3 little triangles off of every heart half, without spending much time on the repositioning of the ruler.  But if you’re like me, and your seams aren’t all perfectly straight, just match up the top & bottom of each seam, and make sure the middle doesn’t bow out for you to slice through (you need the stitching to actually still be there once you’re finished taking off the triangles) and then slice. 

We end up with a BUNCH of little triangles.  Some that are about 5 -5 & ¼ inches on the legs (right angle isosceles triangles, if you remember your high school geometry, we’ve basically cut a 5 & ½ square diagonally down the middle, leaving ¼ inch for the seam).  Others are about 1 & 1/4 inches to the legs, also isosceles, also right angles. 

It occurs to me that I might have little triangles of colors to pop into the backing of this quilt.  It could be a wonderfully symbolic idea… the pieces from the hearts on the front of the quilt, shattering and creating entirely new designs on the back.  Hopefully beautiful designs.  We’ll see.  It’s an idea.  The smaller triangles even seem a little too small to use, but sometimes a very small pop of color inserted into an otherwise white or beige background can be more powerful than large splashes of color, more pleasing to the eye… and I can’t resist the opportunity to use the little pieces of the hearts from the front of the quilt. 

mid century modern quilt

OK… so for a while I’ve been obsessed with the mid-century modern designs like my parents had when I was growing up.  I know now that we had some furnishings that would be considered Scandinavian (with a last name like “Lindquist”, how could we not?).  OH how I wish I could have back some of the stuff they got rid of when they retired & moved to Florida in the 1990s! 

ANYWAYS, I am more drawn to the sleek, contemporary, “atomic” designs than to the kitschy plastic… I have this ambition to create a starburst wallhanging out of wood shims (great opportunity to personalize on issues of color, as opposed to getting the same thing from a store).  And I’ve been doodling various mid-century artist motifs for a while, trying to come up with some fun quilt patterns… one I finally followed through on was a “chain” type form. 

Anyone who grew up in that era will remember the bead chain “curtains” that sometimes were put across doorways… you could block the vision from room to room while having a super-cool, hip, hippy-dippy decoration.  They even clicked when you pulled them aside to enter the room.  Lots of motifs similar to a bead chain were drafted, some more organic than others, some looking like a chain of amoebas and others looking like some type of interlocking machinery. 

I drew an inspiration drawing, and from that, decided I needed to find a way to do it without curves (at least the first time around).  I was trying to find a way to create this quilt with a bunch of strips and not have to cut exacting small pieces… Strip em together & then slice, strip & slice… seems like less little pieces of things flying around my sewing room all the time.  Always a good plan. 

So I doodle up an idea, then put together a more detailed way to look at it, blocking off several different sections until I can eyeball a single block that can be repeated.  I get to the point where I realize that to make the “chain” portion of it, I need to add “sashing” to the side of each block, then alternate the way I put the blocks together so that the sash turns into a chain separating two blocks from an alternate color. 

For my “chain”, I choose two colors, a light grey and a dark grey.  And for the “beads”?  It took a while, but I finally discovered that a layer cake would be the perfect variety of fabric to fish from.  This was before my selvage obsession, so I was not opposed to purchasing a pre-cut group of fabric just yet.  For the uninitiated, a “layer cake” is a group of fabrics pre-cut into 10 x 10 inch squares.  Usually from the same manufacturer and the same designer’s line of fabric for that season, a layer cake can often help you find a variety of fabrics that have already been curated to match each other in terms of tone, value, hue… You can almost always be sure that if you choose anything from that one layer cake, that you will be able to match it with anything else from the same layer. 

I chose a number of my favorites from this particular layer.  They were single color fabrics, at the most extreme, “tone on tone”, so that the beads of this design would pop from the grey chains by virtue of their color rather than their print… I sliced each of my favorites in half, divided them into two piles.  Each half of a 10 by 10 inch slice went into a different pile.  I wanted an even number of light greys and dark greys… I wanted each color to be evenly dispersed between light greys and dark… if it looked funny, I could always switch off, get a whole new set of colors (maybe pinks rather than blues), and do them up separately to see if it worked better to have the colors be wildly different in each chain.  If I ended up with extra blocks, who cares?  I can make them into pillows or placemats or table runners or a whole different quilt with a whole different look for having a different color combination. 

Then I sliced up a bunch of the greys in width of fabric (WOF) strips of 2 & ½ inches. 

I took all the 5 x 10 inch colored pieces from ONE pile, and sewed it to the side of one of the dark greys.  From the OTHER pile, every one of the colored pieces got sewed to the side of the light greys.  Yes, it would take several strips to get every one of them done, but after they were done, I sliced them apart, then I went down the other side of each strip with the same color.  Then I took the length of the layers and took another strip and went down them, then on the other side.  By the time I was finished, I had a number of blocks of 5 x 10 inch colors, surrounded by a 2 & ½ inch dark grey, and another number of blocks surrounded by the LIGHT grey.  Next step… on every one of the dark greys, sew a strip of light grey to one side.  On every light grey, sew a strip of dark grey to one side. 

CLEARLY, I need to do another of these tops, this time taking more photos of the intermediate process.  It's so much fun to work without slicing up teeny tiny little squares, rectangles and triangles of fabric before starting to do the work, ... it's great to zoom along and get stuff done and then slice it up bit by bit as you create, but I'm having a hard time stopping to show it.  So I'll make an effort... I"ll do another one of these.  But I like the general way it worked.  take a peek & see for yourself!

Now you didn't see that coming, did you?  SUPER cool mid-century-looking chain, from me talking about sewing strips of light & dark grey onto 5 x 10 inch blocks of color?  To finish this one up, I'm going to put more of the dark grey on one side to kind of offset it, and then I'll be using this as a sample top for a longarm class I'm taking later this month.  I want to have several tops finished so that I can rent the longarm machine for many hours & practice, practice, practice... so for now, this is where it stands.  Sitting in my project box, ready to be finished after I take a class in how to use the longarm machine.  HOW MUCH FUN is this? 

quilts for pulse: heart rainbow quilt in progress

OK, so I went to town.  I sliced the selvages off all my fabrics for the heart quilt.  Hopefully these will combine for a cool/modern heart that I can use as the 49th heart on the back. 

I sliced a bunch of "low volume" whites (3 different light beige-y ones) into 2 inch strips & 5 & 1/2 inch strips.  I took the strips and sliced the into squares (2 inches & 5 & 1/2 inch squares. 

I sliced each of my 6 rainbow colors into 5 & 1/2 inch strips... and then sliced each strip into 10 & 1/2 inches again, so from each 45 inch width of fabric, I got 4 strips at 5 & 1/2 inches by 10 & 1/2 inches (that's 4 times 10 & 1/2 to equal 42 inches)... it was VERY lucky that the fabrics were about exactly 45 inches wide and the selvages were not wider than 1 & 1/2 inches, because two selvages at 1 & 1/2 inches each brought me RIGHT UP to the edge of being able to slice 4 colored heart pieces out of each strip.  (It was not expensive fabric, so some of hte selvages were a little wider than I'm used to seeing, with the information printed quite far onto the edge of the fabric). 

 These are the selvages, in a baggie to keep them from getting scattered while I work on the rest of the project

Here are the background blocks, waiting to be sewn onto the heart halves


Here are the heart halves, piled up in rainbow order (ROYGBV) and awaiting their turn at the sewing machine:


Here is a heart block after the white pieces are sewn to the heart block halves (can you see the heart yet?  Look at the diagonal seams across each of the white parts):


And HERE is a heart block, white background parts finger-pressed into place.  NOW you can see the heart, right?:


OK. so I've got 47 more to finish.  After I get them piled up with all the white parts sewn on, I'll slice off the excess fabric (in this last photo, under the white parts), and clip the stray threads, and press them properly.  To press each of these, I'll have to fold under hte red part and press both sides towards the heart.  To press the heart seam towards the low-volume white side would be to risk it showing up through the white fabric in the finished quilt. 

UNLIKE in seamstress sewing, when you do most quilting, you press both sides of a seam towards the darker fabric (in general, there are some exceptions).  You do NOT separate the fabrics and press them open.  In sewing clothing, we want the smallest possible layer of fabric between the body and the top layer.  We also want the seam to ease over curves of the body, gracefully.  Open seams are the way to do it.  In quilting, we want the seam to take wear & tear of GENERATIONS worth of being lovingly used every night as a blanket.  And we do not want the slightest possibility of exposing the threads between the fabric.  So we press the seam allowance to the side rather than opening it.  It's harder to pull apart with rough use, if it's pressed to the side and the FABRIC is holding itself together, than if it's pressed open and the only thing holding it together is the little bitty piece of thread.  AND because we use many colors in most quilts, we want to make the least possible opportunities for the colors to show through each other, which is why we press them towards the darker fabric. 

Next post will have most of the blocks finished and I'll have pictures of how to clean up the block, trim the excess fabric, and press it. 

Quilts for Pulse (Orlando terrorist attack)

It's been a while since I last posted, but I suppose it's time.  We've moved.  We're now in a house in Orlando that's half the size of the one we were in when we last posted.  We've stopped the fostering adventure, having had our hearts broken one too many times and getting to an age where we knew if we made a commitment to adopt, then our retirement options would be delayed and severely limited... we will fulfill our commitment to the next generation in some other way (and I have a few ideas that are more appropriate for a later post).

With the move, there's no chance that I can return to work, at least not as a lawyer.  The process of un-retiring myself from other jurisdictions and transferring/taking a new bar exam, and THEN FINDING work as a lawyer, it would take so long and be so expensive and emotion-consuming, that it would not work.  We've become content to live on less, which is kind of cool.  There's a lot fewer rooms to clean, a lot less junk to manage... we're still busily getting rid of the junk. 

And I've been quilting up a storm.  Sewed a few skirts first, as my last foster daughter needed a new black skirt for a concert she was in a year & a half ago, and as she was insisting on skirts that were too small & short for a violin player on a stage to wear (first concert, lots of the youngsters don't realize how DIFFICULT it is to maintain some bit of modesty while sitting in a cute skirt in a chair on a stage)... so I sewed up a really lovely flowy, flippy knit skirt that would swirl around her legs if she took a little spin... lightweight and fun... and she loved it.  Black to match nearly anything.  She wore it so often that she ripped holes in the seams... choosing to wear it during playtime and running and tumbling around... at that difficult age between childhood and teenhood and not quite realizing that the clothing she chooses to wear at playtime MIGHT get muddy or torn if it's not made for the task.  But on top of that, I think she loved the idea of feeling like a Disney Princess with skirts swirling around her ankles as she defended the world and peace & justice... It was quite cute. 

So I made a few for myself, and then she left (broke our hearts), and I looked around my sewing room.  LOTS of half-finished projects (mostly my own... UnFinishedObjects, or UFOs, are typical for crafters to accumulate over a lifetime. 

SOOOO... since I last posted, there have been a few finished projects.  We'll talk more about them in other posts. 

I've been attending quilt camps (at Quilt Trends, http://quilttrends.com/index.asp , a WONDERFUL space close to our new home), and taking quilting classes (realized that the basic skills are probably worth knowing), and showing up at a Friday day-long sew-in... for a while.

Puttering along, worried about an old friend in Orlando who is now a judge and had an emergency appendectomy a few weeks ago... thinking about some other friends whose children are GROWN UP already and graduating college since I left the city... thinking how our lives would have changed, how we'd have stopped going out to the nightclubs & such as we aged, if I'd have stayed... I get up one Sunday morning for a leisurely walk to church (yep, our new place is WALKING distance from church... woo-hoo!), when my friend, who is being released from the hospital after some post-operative difficulties, posts that some horrible thing just took place in Orlando... This friend is very reliable, but ... well... my friends are law enforcement officers, judges, politicians, criminal prosecutors & defense attorneys.  A wide variety of people with a very wide range of what "horrible" might look like.  If it weren't Bob, making that claim of horror, I might have wondered what new politically charged issue had just come to light. 

But this was Bob... reliable, interesting, super-cool dude Bob.  (Is it POSSIBLE to be both a judge AND a cool dude?  Well, you just gotta know Bob). 

Within a few hours, we hears the news, and that there had been a terrorist attack in Orlando... my heart sank.  As the names and vital statistics of the victims came to light, I realize that most of these kids were truly just in grade school when I left Orlando... and though it was known as a gay nightclub, I recall being a young adult in Orlando and how the gay nightclubs are there... it's not about being gay, it's about having a fun night.  Having a SAFE PLACE to have a fun night.  And I realize the time of day this happened... 2 am.  Last call.  If I recall my young adulthood correctly, that's the time of night when everyone left has had just a few too many drinks, they're NOT at their best (except maybe the night club staff, who are starting the cleanup task)... There are probably a few people trying to fight off nausea from a few too many tequila sunrises... a few looking to hookup and realizing that most everyone they were flirting with earlier have gone already...

The irony for me is that I'm also the ex-wife of a Muslim man, who immigrated from Egypt.  I'm also familiar with that community and it's difficulty with the concept of being gracious about people with lifestyles other than their own.   I had watched as my husband at the time became more extreme about his choices in lifestyle... banning vanilla extract from our kitchen, for example, and refusing to go to a beach (he had proposed on a beach), because people in the mosque convinced him, an adult, that these things were evil.  He was disappointed that he had not been able to convert me, and I realized that the person he claimed to be when we first married, simply did not exist.  This person who claimed he respected my faith, was really trying desperately to convert me, hiding his true intend if necessary, as a 'ends justify the means' choice, because he really wanted me to be able to go to heaven with him and he really did NOT respect that my faith could get me there.  Oh well...

So I feel huge sympathy with anyone who has become victim of this faith that seems to encourage extremes... And I remember going to night clubs with my friends, from time to time, if there was a special event like "Latin night", even a gay club, despite that I'm not a member of the LGBT community and would not be interested in any hookups on any night that my friends & I went there.  AND I have friends who would be the first called out to the scene of any crime, trying to solve disaster... I've been to the morgue and to the medical examiner's office, and I know how this stuff works. 

And when he was first retired, my Dad spent a decade going to Orlando Regional Medical Center... I don't remember whether it was Thursday mornings or Fridays... for Grand Rounds.  He liked being the old recently retired doctor and feeling like the young ones were looking up to him and asking his opinion... and he liked even more that they had free bagels and hard boiled eggs (he told me the docs would peel them and eat just the whites, saying that the yolks were what caused heart disease)... he liked even more that he could keep up with the current trends in medicine, and particular mortality issues (as he had been a Pathologist and Coroner in his career).  THIS is the hospital where the injured were taken that Sunday morning... THIS is the town who were no longer going to feel safe in their own night clubs... THESE were my friends, being awakened in the middle of the night and taking any break in the action to call their own young adult kids at 4 am, to make sure they were home, safe and in bed. 

So when the Orlando Modern Quilt Guild said they'd accept and distribute quilts from other modern quilters for the victims, of COURSE I had to.  I suggested to our Columbus MQG's president that we do a heart quilt, rainbow colors... she said we'd wait till the Orlando quilt guild said exactly what they wanted... and guess what... DUH... heart quilts, rainbow colors.  On "low volume" background.

I know I've been quiet for a while, so I may repeat myself... in quilting terms, "low volume" means very soft, light colors... basically shades of white or beige, usually. 

So I ran out & picked up a rainbow worth of colors for the hearts... ROYGBV... if you recall, you pronounce it, "roy-gee-biv"... it's the acronym for the colors of the rainbow... Red, Orange, Yellow, Green Blue, Violet.  Basically, if you start on the red segment of the color wheel and just go around till you come back up to the color next to it, you'll have yourself a rainbow. 

They're wanting at least 5 x 6, or 30 blocks... but will take up to twin sized quilt tops.  If blocks only, then 10 inch finished (meaning 10 & 1/2 inches on a side if not already sewn into a top)... They have put out a tutorial for making a simple heart.  My quilt guild started the project when the simple tutorial heart was the one posted, but the Orlando quilt guild revised their suggestions several times so that some creativity appears to be acceptable. 

And I've decided not to just contribute blocks, but to do a whole quilt.  Let's see how well I manage that.  My idea SO FAR is to go with 6 X 8... which makes 48 blocks at 10 inches each, JUST ABOUT the size of a proper twin.  But that makes 48 hearts and it's just too tempting to the artist in me.  49 angels were created that night... 49 who went to the dance and never went home, who will be dancing in heaven waiting for their loved ones... 49 families who lost someone.  I can't make a quilt with just 48 hearts.  So I'm going to TRY... Here's my thoughts about making the 49th heart. 

I've been toying with the idea of doing an improvisational "bolt" of background cloth... trying out the "Modern Improvisational" book (I'll post a link to it later) suggestion for a "floating squares" quilt.  I've also been collecting selvages... got to a point of no longer even bothering with pre-cut fabrics, just buying from the bolt, in at least a yard, so that I have enough selvage to make it worth cutting.  I had thought of doing a second "bolt" of selvages, but was just toying with it. 

I think what I'll do here... I've started creating the hearts already... cut off all my selvages from my 6 rainbow colored fabrics and from the 3 low-volume (beige) backgrounds... MAYBE I can somehow create a heart out of the selvages.  I have to figure out how to shape the hart so that as it gets larger towards the outside, that it doesn't lose it's shape as a heart.  I know from experience (my "secret heart of my niece" quilt), that when one starts with a small heart and tries to follow it outward in concentric lines, that the curves get distorted... the problem seems to be that as you try to follow the interior V of the top of the heart, this starts to be less & less prominent as the heart gets bigger, because the depth of the V does not get proportionately bigger. 

I'm going to have to draw it out.  Or perhaps instead of starting with a small heart and moving out until I run out of selvages, I'll cut out a heart and use a technique like "foundation piecing", which is that I sew my selvages onto a foundation block in the designated pattern, rather than sewing them to each other and hoping it works.  My foundation would have the pattern drawn on and I'd keep my pieces within that pattern.  OR maybe it would work as well if I created two half-hearts, and then sewed them together.  We'll have to see. 

And then around it, I'd go with the low-volume floating squares improvisational background.  If I piece these around the selvage heart, it should be possible to grow the backing to the right size without too much muss & fuss... and so my back piece would be a single heart... the 49th heart, kind of near the top of the twin blanket, at the center. 

I worried that having the 49th heart on the back would somehow diminish the meaning of the fact that I was including 49 hearts... one being strange and isolated to the back... but then I remember the whole POINT of being supportive to issues involving the LGBT community, which is that even things which are different from the rest can be just as beautiful. 

So that's the plan.  I'll post a photo or two later... but I wanted to get this up now.