Abstract in Aqua

 

Great excitement! Today after a year and a month of languishing in a drawer, the quilt that I started in March, '09, at Quilting Adventures, came out of its hiding place. I lacked quite a bit of appliquéing to complete it, but after all my practice with appliquéing using invisible thread on the Jubilation quilt, finishing this one felt easy. This quilt is small, only 27" by 29".  And a funny thing happened once again. One reason this quilt has been lying in a drawer for13 months is that I hated the quilt when I stowed it away! Now that it is appliquéd, I love it! I am naming this one Abstract in Aqua.

A bit of background about how the design evolved: Teacher Katie Pasquini-Masopust had us do numerous types of exercises prior to deciding on a design. We began with three of us at our trio of tables assembling an all-white still life. First we drew it using the blind contour drawing method. Then we drew it while viewing the still life. We made a water color painting of the still life. And this is just a small sampling of all the exercises we went through. Finally in the middle of the week we chose two designs we liked best and put them up on our design walls. I pinned up an abstract drawing, painted in aqua, based on the very first exercise and one other, a positive/negative version of another still life. I chose the first to turn into a quilt.  Thus, "Abstract in Aqua" had its origins in a still life of a tall vase with a spray of leaves, a fat vase, a plate behind the vases, all in front of cardboard folded and draped with scrunched up fabric! I can "see" the round plate, and I see the leaf shapes, the short, plump vase, but not much else! But that's not important; coming up with an abstract design was the aim.  I love the design, an abstract in my favorite colors!

Rob's Quilts

I've just made a list, and I now know how many quilts I have made.  I had recently told one friend "Maybe a hundred?"  But I was far off!  Half that--I've made a total of 53 quilts.  I've written about the wedding quilts for daughters and the crib and bed sized quilts for the grandchildren.  Perhaps now it's time to discuss and those I've made for our son Rob.  Both have the same design.  A block has four squares which have different light colored triangles in their corners.  When the four squares are put together to form a block, the triangles form an on-point square at the block's center.  I first made him a quilt like this in many shades and values of blue and beige/tan/cream.  Then I used the same design for a quilt that was shades of red, with the same contrasting colors.  First is the blue quilt and then two close-ups of it.  I particularly like the border treatment, which alternated strips of various ones of the blue fabrics with "flying geese" placed at random. The next Christmas, I gave him a partner for his blue quilt, the red one.   Here is this red quilt, a close-up of the quilt in process, laid out on my design wall in the old house, and a close-up of one of the blocks. Rob's been remodeling his house for quite a few years now, so it might be a long time before I see these quilts in place on those beds!  I made them for two antique twin beds, beds he inherited from his grandmother, my mother, which will someday be used in a guest room.

Jubilation at the Compass Centre

I have just returned from a nearby quilt retreat center called The Compass Centre, where the Texas Blue Bonnets and Indian Paint Brushes are in full bloom.  Dear friend and quilting buddy Carolyn and I went there to complete the scroll quilts we began in Cara Gulati's class at Quilting Adventures last month.  Both of us arrived with our the scrolls sewn together, ready for the edges to be turned, glued down, and pinned closely along all edges.  Then we appliqued them to the background, a very dark blue for mine and a stone colored, stone-look fabric for Carolyn's.  We worked all day Wednesday on these tasks, and by 4:00 or so, we were done!  I felt jubilant, and I promptly named my quilt Jubilation!  I think the title fits, as it is such a bright and happy quilt.  Once it is quilted, it will hang on a high wall in the living room of our new house.  Below is first my quilt Jubilation and then Carolyn's, which she will probably call Serendipity.

Two Journal Quilts for QA

At last I feel I have the time to construct some journal quilts to commemorate the last few weeks of my life.  This is the first one of two journal quilts I've constructed for my week at Quilting Adventures.  I bought a fat quarter from teacher Cara.  The fabric is a clever print which depicts the scrolls that formed the quilts she was teaching us to make.  I've simply used a square of that fabric, surrounded with lime green and purple borders.  This journal quilt (unlike my house quilts--but I'll get to them eventually) is machine quilted, as is the baseball-themed one.  I don't enjoy machine quilting, and feel I'm not very adept at it, so it is simply quilted.  With the green thread I outlined all the sharp green points.  Next I "echo quilted" around the curves and points with white thread in the white spaces.  Finally I used a favorite serpentine stitch in green for the green border and in purple for the purple.  Here is a close-up that shows the quilting more clearly and also shows the very clever print of the fabric.  It is these "scrolls" that Cara is famous for.  And five scrolls make up the very large quilt-in-process that I started at QA and that now adorns my design wall. 

Next I made another journal quilt featuring a batik fat quarter that was a gift from the Creations store that was located on site at Quilting Adventures.  This batik has a cactus design, very appropriate for the hill country in Texas.  I paired it with a dark green batik from my stash.  The block pattern is called Whirligig, and it seemed appropriate too, given that is is sort of windmill looking and that  Texas is famous for having lots of wind!  Like the other one, I bordered a small 6" block to bring it to the 8" size that all of my journal quilts measure.  I quilted it with straight line machine quilting, outlining the 12 different triangles, using a serpentine stitch in the brown border, and a simple straight stitch in the

cactus border.

And here is a close-up of the quilting

of my Whirligig block and the cactus fabric: 

My Ribbon Winners, Part One

Now that my design wall is up and running, I have a place to put the various ribbons I've won since 2002.  My grandchildren, on seeing these ribbons in a drawer, asked me last time all were here:  "Grandmommy! Why don't you put these ribbons up somewhere, where people can see them?"  So now they'll be happy!  And I confess, I am probably inordinately proud of them.  So now I'll show a few of the quilts themselves that won the ribbons and talk about them a little.  BUT I'll be restrained and save some for another posting!

The first ribbon I ever won, a red second place in 2002, was for this quilt, which I believe I called Blueberry Bear Claws.  This was a wedding gift for Sally, daughter of dear friend and daily emailer Sherrron.  Sherron had told me that Sally loved the color purple, and we purchased the blueberry fabric when Sherron and Charles and Bob and I were on a cruise to Alaska.  The block pattern known as Bear Claw seemed appropriate for a young couple who lived in Colorado.  Sherron took this photo for me of the quilt hanging above Sally's youngest child's crib.

My second two ribbons were won in the next Waco Quilt Show, in 2004.  I wasn't present to see these quilts at the show with their ribbons, but dear friend Erin took these pictures for me and collected the quilts at the end of the show.  The first one is called Scrappy Stars, and it now hangs above our bed in our new house.  I took a class from my good friend Patty (she and her little grandbaby were recently featured in this blog) and learned how to make this quilt.  I used scraps and no star repeats a fabric in its construction, and no star is like another. 

The third red ribbon winner (I seem to be stuck winning either reds or whites!) was a crib quilt I made for my great-nephew Wyatt.  I named this quilt Krazy Kats Klowning Around.  The crazy cats ARE clowns, and the blocks that surround the cat-featured ones are crazy quilt blocks.  Yes, I know, the name is rather corny!

Here is a close-up of the blocks in this quilt, which is one of my all-time favorites quilts!  Stay tuned in a future posting for pictures and discussion of my other three ribboned quilts.

New Design Wall/Re-Discovered House Blocks!

Now, at long last I have a design wall put up, after over a year living in our new house which has a quilting/crafting room that, while anything but huge, gives me more room and more storage than did my quilting space in our old house.  I had such a wall in the other house, a fairly nice-sized one, which was actually an old cork bulletin board that I covered in batting.  But this new room was deliberately designed with a blank wall that was wider and much higher (natch, since our ceiling are 10' rather than 8') than the old one.  But it is only this weekend that I got around to putting up a design wall.  I used two 6'x8' insulation foam boards, with 4' cut off each.  Husband Bob nailed them to the wall with some very sturdy long nails, and we lucked out in actually locating some studs into which to nail some of them.  We put one foam board on top of the other, with the 6' lengths parallel to the floor and thus the two 4' sides making the design board 8' tall.  It is about 17" off the floor, allowing room beneath for an electrical outlet.  Too, I had learned with my former design wall that if it is too close to the floor, it is difficult to pin anything very low on the board.  Today after church we stopped by Jo Ann's for me to purchase 6 yards of pale yellow--really cream-colored--flannel.  I cut this in half and then pinned the two lengths along the top, sides, and bottom of the foam boards.  I used the sturdy yellow-headed # 28 pins that QA quilt teacher Cara Gulati recommended for the pinning of our scroll quilts to their backgrounds.  I used tiny dressmaker pins to secure the flannel where the two pieces overlap.  I love my new board and now can hardly wait to get my scroll quilt pinned up on it!

While straightening up my quilting room, I discovered a box where I had three house blocks stored.  These I made about a year and a half ago, when friend Linda tried valiantly to get me to be a journal quilting buddy with her.  But at the time I was so obsessed with the building of this new house, that all I could think of each week was "house, house, house."  I think Linda got frustrated with me for making these with the same theme each time, and felt that I was missing the point of journal quilting!  After just a few weeks, I dropped the project.  Now, however, I find that they are exactly the same size as the journal quilt I made a few weeks ago in honor of the time spent during Spring Break with my little Michigan grandsons--the baseball-themed journal quilt.  So why not go back to calling these house blocks journal quilts, too?  I have these four pinned way up at the top of my design board now.  Surely it will be a rare day that I use every square inch of this board, particularly that very highest section!  I'll keep these pinned up as I make them periodically and as I await deciding if I want eventually to sew them all together into a quilt to decorate this space.  Or just leave them as is, as does Linda.

Malcolm's Quilts

Malcolm's crib quilt, which Susan always used as a wall hanging, and his big boy bed quilt are both, like Locke's, from the same design--sawtooth stars alternating with double four patches.  (This is a Marsha McCloskey design.)  In the first picture, the twin bed quilt top with its old-fashioned-trains theme fabric is showing.  In the 2nd picture, the quilt has its backing showing, which is a race car fabric.  Perhaps Malcolm has outgrown trains and moved on the race cars!  His crib quilt is titled "Basketball Kitties and Wintertime Bears," with the kitties being in the double four patches and the bears, in the sawtooth stars.  This crib quilt is one of the few I've hand-quilted.  I used the so-called utility stich or "big stitch", using perle cotton, with a design of fat, puffy stars.  It is much easier to do and easier on arthritic hands than is the traditional tiny hand stitches.  Incidentally, if you click on the photo of the crib quilt by itself, you can see the quilting better both in the border and in the center.    His pillows were also machine-quilted, and I am particularly fond of them.  One of them is made of a block I rejected for his first quilt, but the block was very nice and used the same fabrics.  The other two are the same block patterns in both of the quilts.  Folded up on the bottom of the bed is the fleece throw I made for Malcolm, which had a Thomas the Tank Engine print.

Two Youngest Grandsons' Quilts

Bit by bit I plan to show as many of my quilts on this blog as I can work in.  While in California, I wrote about Lia's quilts and dolls. Now it is Locke's turn.  First, his crib quilt, which Kathy chose to display rather than to use.  For it I used transportation-theme fabrics, with planes, trains, and boats.   His big boy bed quilt had the same theme, to coordinate with the wall border and the crib quilt, but there is less variety in the fabric choices.  For it, I added hot air balloons for the border.   I did use the same design as in the crib quilt, however, and this is probably the quilt design I've most often used--a sawtooth star alternating with a double four patch block.  (Malcolm's two quilts have the same pattern.)  I've made pillows for all the grandchildren, too, and you can see his on his bed.  I took this picture before I gave him his new fleece throw, so the old one is folded at the foot of his bed. 

Dawson's baby quilt wall hanging is called "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat."  Mommy Susan chose the design for his big bed quilt and wanted the plaids and stripes in soft greens and blues; many of these same fabrics were used in the wall hanging.   (If interested in seeing details, click on the images; the fabrics can then be seen much better!)

Malcolm's crib and big boy bed quilt will be the subject of another blog!

Blue Bonnets and Flat Stanley!

Today is a gorgeous, 70 degree, spring day. Our state flower is particularly beautiful this year, thanks to a cold, wet winter and spring!  The flowers are late in blooming, but once they came out, they came out in much glory.  I went around our neighborhood this afternoon, taking pictures of the Blue Bonnets.  Likewise the Indian Paintbrushes, which are mixed in with the Blue Bonnets in the 2nd picture!

And who's the little guy below, climbing our stairway inside our house, sitting in the pansy pot, and sitting amongst the Blue Bonnets?  Why, that's Flat Stanley!  Our granddaughter Lia let us have Stanley for awhile, to show him our house and other sites in Waco.  We've got lots more places to go, so you might be seeing Stanley again!

California Kids and Their Birthday Scrapbooks

The last two days have been non-stop scrap-booking for me!  On Monday Lia and I got to work.  She wanted to begin with her latest birthday and work back.  We got her 9th and then her 8th birthday pages (multiple pages for each) done.  I asked her to choose her favorite page for a picture, and this is her choice.  Today Locke and I began to work.  Oddly, I found this six year old much more "into" the scrapbooking than was Lia!  He wanted to go on and on.  With his book, which had barely been started, we began with his 2nd birthday and have just now completed the 5th.  So just one more to go for him, but it will have to wait, as my time here is running out.  I leave tomorrow on a 10:00 AM flight.  I'll leave all the scrapbooking materials I brought with me, though, and hopefully, on my next visit, these books will both be up to date!