Artful Homemade Quilts Have A Way

[freedombecki]

Sewed some more and put the little squares on top of the others. The four-patches only measure 3" in the unfinished state. I cut a lot of sewn strips sidewise today. Well, back to it. Oh, and I found a little purple flower out in the field today. You have to get away from the sewing machine sometimes and just go out and take a little walk to keep your back straight. Have a lovely day, all. I might just go back and work on a couple of outer borders on quilts I've discussed above. Then, I'll just take them down and donate them to children's needs in the community nearby.

 

[freedombecki]

Today, I want to talk about mistakes in quilting. Just sharing some samples sewn from my table today. I may have at least one repeat, which brings me to 2 little problems--there are two things I'd have preferred not to have done. A charm quilt is one that has no duplications of cloth patterns in any 2 pieces (except the background, if a background is used, i.e. muslin). The pictured squares below have at least one duplication--the what-do-I-do-with-this-darn-piece-of-pink-polka-dotted-fabric that shows on the two upper 4-patch squares. That tells me that this will never be a perfect charm quilt, because I'm sewing the same strips together and finding the same patterns sewn together in the last 3 years from my 40 bags of squares. I'm a little older now, and I sometimes find myself using a piece I forgot I used yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, years ago, etc. My sharp memory has retired along with me. *sigh*

I'm going to let it happen. I once went to a critique of quilts the year my southwest quilt got Best of Show at the Wyoming State Fair. It was the product of classes for ladies in my community who wanted to do a southwest quilt, so every week, I designed a new square for their delight, to construct like a Baltimore album quilt--with certain little twists. A sashing that rocked but literally ate hours up off the face of the earth.

Pardon my going off the subject. The second anomaly this grouping shows is that little piece of fabric that shrunk and shrunk also showed up in the scrap 4-patch square that shows up in the middle row on the right side. The little wispy light blue fabric with royal blue flowers with bright green leaves, so demure? You can really see the far distance it was off (the full quarter of an inch), which precludes the piece from wise use. You would have to either sew more of the fabric on it, which I may not have since I purged my quilt fabric collection of questionably-contented materials last year, and gave the scraps away to people who do artsy-crafty projects, such as sachets and other throw-away items, and not fine quilting. The more I think about it, the more I realize how badly that fabric shrunk. It's almost like someone printed up a finely woven garbage bag, the way it shrinks, except not really that bad, it's just that it shrunk a little the first time, more the second time, and a n egregious amount the last time it was pressed. Cotton does not usually do any shrinking under the iron. Fine quilter's cottons do not shrink nor bleed into fabrics when they are washed. If they do, go back and look at the bolt at the store. Write the name of the manufacturer off the bolt. The next time you buy fabrics, do not buy that particular manufacturer's products again. You don't want your work destroyed by a company that does not do quality control to protect the serious quilter from bleeding fabrics which can and does affect other pieces by dying them in the bleeding process. Ergo otherwise your work today will shriek like a freak in 20 years after washing and using and running colors everywhere that manufacturer put purple, red, orange, turquoise, and anything mixed with those 3 colors to arrive at another color. You do not want trouble in your quilt. When you have purple, red, orange, turquoise or teal in the quilt, you might consider first sewing a small swatch to each piece onto a background of white muslin, wash and dry it in your regular wash, and see if there is any stain near the stitching lines made by your sewing machine. Splotches? I cannot say if manufacturers of the first decade of this century and the 1990s fixed the problem, but there was one offender I kept buying anyway, because my favorite quilt artist designs for them, so I would do the fix:

1/2 cup vinegar mixed with 1 gallon of water in the bottom of the washing machine basin OR 1 cup salt mixed with the same and dissolved before adding washable cotton quilt fabric. Put on cycle you would use if you were getting catchup, dog hair, and grass stains in your regular wash.

Some quilters wash everything. Some quilters wash nothing.

I can't tell you which school you are or should be from, wash or sew new, but whichever you prefer, just follow this rule of thumb: either wash all of them or wash none of them. If you mix washed fabrics with not washed fabrics, you are asking for big trouble. That's why it is important to check fabrics for bleeding PRIOR TO THE TIME YOU START CUTTING.

Take your large piece of fabric back to the shop where you purchased it along with your small swatch sewn onto white muslin, at which time it bled into the white fabric as your proof that the fabric really is a dog, if you do not care to vinegar or salt wash it to end the bleeding. I forgot to mention, after the wash, you need to rinse the vinegar out or it will eat your fabric up. Use cold water to set the color.

If you really, really love the offending fabric, get another piece of white muslin and sew a small swatch from the newly-set fabric, and run it back through the wash to see if the setting process fixed the problem (there are times nothing will fix the problem.) I've washed one fabric 30 times and it still bled. I just changed the background color to a light tealy-blue to avoid serious appearance issues after washing the quilt. The fabric was one of the most beautiful cerise rose print onto a dark teal background, and I just couldn't give up using it. The 30th final rinse water turned a little blue, but not a lot. Still, that's bleeding and can ruin a white-on-white fabric you just paid $11.00 a yard for. So you can still get a contrast from dark to light by doing that if you just HAVE TO have that one-of-a-kind bleeders in your quilt.

I have no bleeders to show, but after my grandma passed, a Betsy-Ross and Uncle Sam wallhanging I had made for her American Legion Auxiliary service for 50 years had gotten wet and the navy flag blue background had dyed the pale gray liberty bells a splotchity blue, along with the white stripes in the red-and-white border I had so painstakingly pieced. I felt sorry I had failed to wash a suspect blue fabric. Flag blue is so very dark, it has to be overprocessed on the dye tables, and I had just up and ignored the fact in my haste to get her present to her.

Grandma was a washer, and I just didn't realize it. My wallhangings didn't get yukky in Wyoming due to thin air. In muggy Houston Texas where my grandmother lived, Things get grimy just from the enzymes in humid air, I guess, and they need a good washing and airing frequently. So many of the quilters here are wash-firsters. Almost all the quilters I knew in Wyoming used crisp new fabrics.

 

[freedombecki]

Oops! had a phone call and got interrupted before posting that last one sans a picture. Here's some stuff I did this week. Note that the "propellers" are now "down under propellers" because they're going the other way. hahahahaha. I've had a three day binge of quilting errors. Here goes the damages:

Picture 1: repeat polkadot print and in middle row, you can see the light blue fabric on the piece on the right has shrunk. Panacae: rip and redo, remove shrinky-dink blue small print and toss. add reverse red and white dot for light value side to replace dorky fabric AND QUIT BUYING THE $1.00/YARD STUFF AT ...........'s junk fabric store. (note to myself)

Picture 2: Same fabric, bigger problems with shrinkage of "Unknown fiber content" fabric. (I even read the end of the bolt before having it cut and taking it home. Doh.)

Picture 3: The six itty bitty pieces? Rotary cutter blade error. The nice thing about rotary cutters is that you can cut up to 24 layers of fabric with a new blade on one. The downside is that you can cut up to 24 layers of fabric wrongfully, and the 6 pieces came from such an error. I took a break to go get donuts for breakfast, came back, forgot I'd cut a 3" piece for propellers, and proceeded to cut a 1.75" piece for the little squares...lol. Rotary blades are like computers--it's human to err, but you can really screw them up with rotary blades and computers.

Also in picture 3, I have a dangling piece. What happened to the missing side of the "down under propeller?" No clue, but it was there yesterday, I swear.

Panacae: pay attention before cutting. Also, sort pieces from scraps on a regular basis in and around the sewing machine or you will spend a lot of time digging through masses of strips and stuff to find your piece you need to finish something. Hmm, that happened last month in another sewing area, I could put the two lost mates together for a truly scrap horrible square, or could clean up both areas and find where each missing piece went. Oh, I couldn't any way. The first piece is from a politically correct propeller square. hahahahahaha!

 

[freedombecki]

Down-under propeller squares, and I'm not sayin' nothin except, what was I thinking?????
And the moral to this story is: "As ye sew, also shall ye rip."

 

[freedombecki]

I did fix that navy dot and aqua square. It was a special square in which I had a thin gauzy fabric (the aqua) that had been attached over a piece of light blue oxford cloth shirting material to give it support and endurance. Oxford cloth chafes , but underneath a smooth piece of batiste that has been printed, it ups the lightweight fabric to suitability of use with other prints, and that's why I like it. I'm saving those squares to do another on-point propeller quilt, except this one will be a down-under propeller quilt because it goes down the drain the opposite way.

In order to cover a lightweight solid fabric with broadcloth, basting needs to be done. In our mother's day, basting was all done by hand. In today's quilt-in-a-day climate of nearly instant gratification, a long machine stitch of 4mm or more does just fine. That way, if gathering or puckering is the result, it is easy to get a 1.5mm seam ripper blade under the stitch, whereas a 20-to-the-inch machine stitch is out of the question because the ripper finds its way into the two layers of fabrics at the seam line and could damage them beyond repair.

My projects since I got home have been to do quilt-as-you-go Chinese coins in a double border of fabrics in which the doner cut umpteen 3-yard-long 1.5" strips that I tried to launder, but which ended up in a tangle. I decided to dry and press the mass that was soaped up pretty good before I left last week, so decided to use them all up on a quilt-as-you-go style quilt panel situation that can be washed and any issues that arose from earlier efforts to clean (which resulted in a mass of fibers tangled in the most confused way) the fabric that may not have been effective due to their condition when removed from the washing machine early. It took two hours to sort and all day long yesterday to press and use as many of the strips as I could. The pot at the end of the rainbow is that the quilt will be ready to give to a homeless or abuse-sheltered child.

 

[freedombecki]

*repairs*

The navy dotted down under propeller has been ripped and resewn. If you click on the image, you can vaguely see a stitch line attaching the oxford cloth shirting to the gauzy little aqua with bows and roses print. You have to be so totally careful when working with fabrics that have been basted together. It is better now than it was. The floralesque mod royal blue print was totally taken apart, and the shrunken disaster fabric put in the stuffing bin for charity pillows. I mean, really there, you can use useless stuff for something, and it will stuff nicely in a well-made pillow that doesn't show lumps and bumps when you quilt 3 layers and make it a quilted pillow throw in sham form so that you can remove it from the pillow, launder it well, and then slip it back over the preformed or stuffed pillow. These will be stuff. I talked everyone for miles around for their sewing room leavings, and I have two huge boxes full of the acquiescence of many quilters to my request.

 

[freedombecki]

Yesterday's progress was to sew and quilt an approximately 20x60" piece, of which I copied a portion that shows embellishment quilt stitches through the adjacent pieces seams. I'm really quite thrilled with this project because it's fun and done all at the same time. If you click on the first photo, you can see my machine feather stitches in dusty pink threads.

Oh, yes, and I think I will add a couple of other peoples' Chinese coin quilts I found here there and everywhere. The first is Amish, the second is just good and scrappy on a black border which pardons all quilt errors:

 

[freedombecki]

There are other examples of chinese coin quilts I found:

Chinese Coin Quilt, Framed all Around

 

[freedombecki]

More tours of ebay. If you're looking for a pretty quilt, or if you collect quilts you ought to give them a try. I've had pretty good luck with a shoestring budget and buying quilts and quilt fabrics there.

umm a pineapple.

image 2, sailboats, cheap

image 3, pine tree detail.

 

[freedombecki]

This 1918 Red Cross quilt is commemorated as follows:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OVp3vEgpKM"]Red and White: 1918 American Red Cross Quilt - YouTube[/ame]
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[freedombecki]

Red and White Quilt Show Infinite Variety Extravaganza of Joanna S. Rose's Quilt Collection

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV0e7HfB_yo"]Red & White Last Day - YouTube[/ame]
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[freedombecki]

Closeups of Red Works (shows quilting details, trapunto work on some of the quilts that makes them terrifically special):

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJn0B7yLBGI]Red and White - Infinite Variety: Part 1 - YouTube[/ame]
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[freedombecki]

I've been trying to post parts 2 and then 3, but the 2 file is nearly twice too large to allow here. However, if you follow You Tube, go to the website and search for Red and White Infinite Variety Part 2. When you get there, you should be able to access Part 3. The music is rather beautiful, some harps, harpsichord, and other instruments that make you feel you are back in time to a day when there was no mass marketing of cds and downloads of mp3s. The quilts are visually dazzling, there are a total of 651 very, very fine redwork and red and white quilts spanning 3 centuries. If you have ever picked up a needle and thread and felt annoyed it took you an hour to hem a pair of trousers, consider that the women who made some of these quilts put over a million stitches in some of them--all by hand over months and years of perseverance to the cause of completing a master quilt.

 

[freedombecki]

Curator speech on Red and White Exhibit of Joanna S. Rose's collection

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc009Mo5uXY]Infinite Variety: Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts - YouTube[/ame]

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[freedombecki]

I finished one of the star shaped from log cabin blocks today. It had a bluebonnet border. I would love to make all those red and white quilts, but there were 651 quilts, some taking quite some time, and the hand quilting was exquisite. What a total inspiration that show must have been. New York City has all the fun.

 

[Sunshine]

This weekend I'm going to take the time to look at this entire thread. I love quilts. My mother was an avid quilter. I only made one in my home and that was for my sister when she married. My plan was to do some quilting when I retire, but I also plan to paint, do photography, knit, and travel the US. It has occurred to me that I need 2 or 3 more lives to do all the stuff I want. And that just isn't happening. I will buy that good set of Isabey brushes while I still work, though! LOL

 

[freedombecki]

This weekend I'm going to take the time to look at this entire thread. I love quilts. My mother was an avid quilter. I only made one in my home and that was for my sister when she married. My plan was to do some quilting when I retire, but I also plan to paint, do photography, knit, and travel the US. It has occurred to me that I need 2 or 3 more lives to do all the stuff I want. And that just isn't happening. I will buy that good set of Isabey brushes while I still work, though! LOL

lol. I know how sisters go. I delivered a quilt top to my sister on her birthday (Dec. 7) and another for her best friend, and 5 yards to back each one with fabric each of them love. Today, I took two of the charity quilts I completed to the Charity Bees quilt closet and finished one at the shop who is kind enough to host Charity bees, so all toll, 3 to the good today. They will go to the local shelter for abused families, who usually are sheltering there also. Hope you enjoy the thread, Sunshine if you get a chance and have a lovely holiday season yourself. I love sitting in front of the sewing machine and just plowing through stacks of strips. One of my friends took a picture and was going to email it to me asap, but so far it hasn't happened. It usually shows up in my mailbox within 3 or 4 days. She's a busy quilt artist herself, and is quilting one of the charity quilts I made last summer. It's bricks in mortar. Oh, how I hope she will send me a picture of it. It's one of the truly prettiest 30s quilts I ever made. Except they really liked the log cabin 30s quilt that was quilted by anoter quilter last year in the summer. So there are 3 quilts with no pictures. Darn. I not only can't afford a cell phone that takes pictures, I wouldn't know how to use it if I got one. So, I just depend on friends to snap and send them. Think I'll check the box anyway. bbl.

 

[freedombecki]

Well, nothing in my mailbox, but I was looking at Christmas quilts to share here, and lo and behold, someone out there made a log cabin star almoooooooooooost like two I turned in today (though not in Christmas colors and very scrappy):

Credits at Sew-many-stitches blogspot

The difference is that the maker of the above quilt cleverly arranged the dark pieces and white pieces so that there are definite points N, S, E, & W on the quilt's map surface. Also, the blocks are arranged so that there are 8 star points around the center. Her last two rows on the outside of each block is a green holly print that define the points well and forms almost a cross in the center. One of the red and white quilts was actually a red cross quilt. That was one of the most popular patterns of the early 19th century with the familiar red cross help with wounded soldiers in times of world war, and many who volunteered during the war stayed on afterword and did charity work. See if I can dig one up someplace. Joanna S. Rose truly picked out quilts for her collection that had the most fabulous quilting on them, even the plain red striped ones.

The Red Cross Quilt

credits and history of the Red Cross Quilt with Pattern Page

Darn, I got the bug. I have to have one of those quilts!! I guess I will just have to wash up some muslim off the big roll I keep in one of my sewing areas, launder the turkey red fabric I've been saving for a couple of years... and get busy! Oh, wait. I have to finish two more log cabins. This morning, before I was fully awake, I made 8 light squares to complete two more star quilts (with dark star points rather than light as the ones above) and when I sewed them to the light star points on my quilt, hahahahahahaha the star points disappeared heheh.

So that's what I get for getting up at 4:30 am to sew. So, I made four dark corners, ripped the light ones off (I'd sewn 4 10-inch seams before I caught the glaring error). My repair came to 3 hours. What a silly ditz I can be some mornings. It threw me an hour late to go to Friday sewing day at the quilt shop to put 4 borders all the way around. Oh, yes, I bought more fabric (like I need more) and made the quilt into a fisherman's quilt with one of the prints being tiny named fishing hooks and flies printed on it plus a marine blue fantastic ocean swirls print designed by none other than Caryl Bryer Fallert who is a regular contributor at the Paducah Kentucky National Quilt Gallery.

The small cross at the page above:

is made of 2 1/2" strips of red and 2 1/2" squares of white.

Also, an idea for a smaller quilt:

If it were enlongated a few rows, it'd make a great quilt for a shelter child. I really loved that redwork quilt show (above). It takes too long to watch them, but it's worth it if you realize how much time each quilt took.
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[freedombecki]

The first is an 8-row unique spruce tree that I designed in or around 1991-1995 when I gave free senior classes at my fledgling quilt store in Casper Wyoming. I've searched the world over and never found one single example of its pattern anywhere except among my souvenirs. The quilt was donated to the Artist's Guild of Casper for a raffle drawing fund raiser.

The second Christmas quilt is a log cabin Courthouse Steps arranged so that pinwheels form between 4 courthouse steps squares in a most tessellated manner. I saved it back, and when our favorite waitress at a local hotel restaurant got married, it got wrapped and given.

The third quilt is the first in a series of quilt squares I designed between 1991-1995 of young couples from around the world. The ones on this quilt are called "Children of the World" and have couples in folk costume of the cultures they are from around the turn of the 19th century in most cases, but not all. The quilt was done quilt-as-you-go-on-the-sewing-machine method and was the first all-machine made quilt to win the blue ribbon for applique quilts at the Wyoming State Fair in 1992. I kept accurate records of my time and clocked 600 hours in research in 3 local libraries to find a record of every shirt, skirt, cap, hat, and shoes worn by people on the quilt. Before I could complete the quilt, 7 of my completed and quilted squares disappeared from my shop. I was so sick over it, I couldn't look at one of those squares. It was a broken commandment of someone stealing, and I mourned for their fate and could not shake my sorrow for the plight they would someday have for stealing work a starving artist did to teach classes to make ends meet. My shop never did much financially, but I bided my time by writing 4 books on quilting, 11 manuscripts on embroidery and applique; dozens of pieced designs for quilts, of things I designed but could not find in any references, which hopefully are original; a few dozen original applique patterns to sell in the shop to help ends meet; etc. I quilted other people's tops when we invested in a Nolting's long arm quilter, but I was not very good at it. Even so, I finally figured out to look at the bottom of the work to ensure the stitches were even and not loose. The delivery man broke the quilt machine on delivery, but I just thought the bad stitches were my fault. My husband finally called the company, and they sent him repair instructions on timing the machine, replacing a couple of parts, and fixing it good enough so the bad stitches would not ever come back. That truly helped me do better work. I made an average of 40 quilts a year that were donated to one charity group or another until I contracted a disease called fibromyalgia, which took me from making 70 quilts a year down to 1 or 2 quilts every other year, with monumental pain that could not be controlled very well. That's now past, and I put up with some loss of mathematical ability with the pain control drugs of the pharmacology of this heinous condition.

I can still make quilt tops, though, and I love every second spent in the front of my sewing machine, even if I'm using a ripper, as I so often must do lately.

 

[freedombecki]

This morning, I worked on a pink "Fields and Furrows" log cabin quilt. I found a couple of yards of creamy ground fabric with little pink and green roses on it that could date back to the 1920s or before, I'm not sure. Maybe it is 1960s, when they were doing a lot of tiny flowers for quilts. Anyway, I'm still not quite used to aging fabrics in the state of my birth. In Wyoming where I lived on and off from 1969-2009 a total of 35 years, there were a lot of zero percent humidity days there, and fabrics aged differently. Here, with humidity and warmth most of the year, things get yellower. The quilt below was found on ebay and dates to the 1880s. I picked it because there were no pink fields and furrows quilts, so the blue will show the arrangement peculiar to the name "Fields and Furrows." It is most likely hand done.

When I completed the pink blocks, they made the quilt a little smaller than I wanted, so I went back to my stash and found two more pinks to complete the quilt, but I will have to replace 4 strips with a fabric that is different from the others. We'll see if I can place them in a way that will bring harmony to the rest of the quilt. Hopefully, some little girl at the shelter will enjoy the quilt.

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