A brief return to quilting

For those who may think that I simply skip from project to experiment to project, I present this as evidence that I do so finish (some) things! Granted, the First Grandkid is already three months old, but I know of some grandchildren who were in kindergarten before their crib quilts are finished. It's not a very demanding design, but it's to the Organizer's specs: she said his room theme was going to be elephants, and elephants he got; red and gold ones galumphing all over the quilt. (You can't tell from the picture, but the red pieces actually have gold elephants printed on them.)

Fortunately she didn't add the information that his room theme was going to be grey and ecru elephants. At least this doesn't clash with them, and I explained to her that most of the elephants I'd seen up close and personal were in Tsavo National Park, which has red soil and little rain, so they actually were red - well, covered in red dust. They blended quite well with the landscaps. A little too well. The road from Mombasa to Nairobi was, after you got into the uplands, well over two hundred miles of dead-straight two-lane and it was dangerously easy to get into a sort of driving trance in which you assumed a red elephant in the road ahead was a piece of the distant horizon until you were much too close to him. At which point one would turn off the engine and sit very quietly and politely in the car until the elephant decided to move.(As a matter of principle, I never honk at anything that outweighs me by more than two tons.)

Ah well, that was 40 years ago. I wonder if they've kept that road low-profile and easy to cross in the interests of the wildlife, or if it's been turned into a freeway with fences and occasional bridges over Designated Animal Crossings?

The die is cast.

Les jeux sont faits. The Rubicon has been crossed. I've drunk the Kool-aid....I've spray-adhered the beautiful ombred sheer fabric onto the front of the piece and have begun quilting.

Above is a close-up of the "improved" corals after I added those transfer-painted bits of lace. Everything above the bottom edge of the quilt will be somewhat obscured by the sheer overlay, then I'm going to put some more coral pieces on top of it. In fact, production is momentarily stopped since it occurred to me late last night that it would be a heck of a lot easier to spray-adhere the new corals down and quilt them into place rather than applique-ing them down later. So I'm back to the stage of pinning stuff up, wandering around the room and saying, "Hmmmm...." Fortunately, since the Great Clear-Out, there is actually some floor space in which to wander; I wonder how long that will last?

Taking snapshots of the piece and downloading them to the computer seems to help me figure out what arrangements work. Anybody know why this is helpful? I haven't a clue.

The most interesting window curtains you'll ever see

After pinning up some painted lace "coral" and staring at the results for a while, I felt it needed some brighter colors and some lighter lace dripping off the bottom edge. So I went thrift-shopping and came home with an armload of polyester lace curtains, and got out the transfer paints the girls had given me Christmas before last, and which had been sitting unused and unloved during the months of depression.

These paints are a delight to use. First you squeeze out a few drops of different colors, moosh them around on a piece of paper, and let them dry. (You can also paint very delicate, precise designs if that's what you want; in this case I just wanted a general look of glowing colors.) Any kind of paper will do; I used the back sides of a first draft, because I have a lot of first and partial drafts lying around. That was plain old cheapest-available copy paper from the office supply store, and it worked fine.



Once the paint's dry, you can start having fun. Cover your ironing surface with newsprint, lay out your polyester fabric, put the painted paper color-side down, and start ironing color onto fabric. G&S Dye, the source for these particular paints, says you can expect to get two good transfers out of every painted page, but with lace you get a lot more; I painted four pages and used only one. The stuff has no detectable hand at all, which will be useful if I ever want to drape the lace gracefully.



The whole piece is under the sewing machine right now, where I'm tacking down the pinned-on laces as a subtle hint that I'd like them to stay right where they are during the next phases.

Thrift shops have a ton of polyester lace curtains; I didn't use a third of what I bought. One piece even has sea motifs - starfish and shells and whatnot - worked into the lace. I'm saving those for the next water-themed piece, which is clear in my mind but not yet so good in Poser Figure Artist.

In progress...

I've been happily applying clumps of bamboo fiber and long water-weedy trails of dyed ribbon to "Drowned Woman." Now it's time to step back and...ok, first I need to pick out and re-sew that one piece of ribbon that has an angle in it. And then I get to pin up various bits of painted lace that look, I hope, very coral-ish, and stare at the thing, and try to decide if that's too much, and pin up the ombre sheer that's to overlay the whole piece and see how it looks. The thing is, I painted a lot of lace, and I don't think there's room for more than 3 or 4 pieces, and...oh, well. I can see another water-themed quilt in my near future; I've got to do something with all the leftovers from this piece, hand-dyed sparkly ribbon and silk ribbon and gauze and organza and painted lace.

Probably won't make a decision before we leave for the beach, where I plan to spend several days placidly bobbing up and down in salt water, alternating with hand quilting "Shrine Composition II."

For one brief shining moment...

...there was actually something like Cleanliness and Order in my sewing room. I've been clearing out my stash and classifying/putting away the pile of Things I Don't Know What to Do With that had gradually engulfed the cutting table, the little table beside it, and was encroaching upon the sewing machine table beside that. The Elder Spawn is planning a yard sale and was happy to carry away 2 large boxes of fabric and 3 bags of yarn; that helped considerably. Anyway, today I was feeling almost-done... and then I got ambitious. "That quilt I started yonks ago and got stuck on... the pieces and possible trims are filling up two big plastic boxes. I really ought to toss it and put away the fabric and then I'd be able to get, say, the two boxes of silk scraps off the floor and into the closet."

Well, whaddaya know, I'm not "stuck" any more. I've been happily stitching down cheesecloth "hair" on the floating figure.

A bit of background: this piece was inspired by a WWI poster based on the sinking of the Lusitania and a poem by Elinor Wylie. I'll spare you the poem (for now) but here's a scan of the poster:



So, you see, the "hair" has to look as though it's floating. I'm reasonably happy with the result:



And sewing is a LOT more fun than folding fabric and deciding what to do with various odds and ends.

And now my cutting table looks like this:



But there was that moment, earlier today, when the table was actually clear of everything but a cutting mat, a ruler, an iron, and the box for Mistyfuse scraps.

I should have taken a picture.

Shrine Composition #1

...because I really suck at making up titles, and last year when I thought I was going to do a whole series of quilts around the idea of shrines this seemed like a great way to avoid the title problem forever and ever, that's why. Unfortunately for this plan, after Shrine Composition #2 (now being hand quilted I veered off in a totally different direction. Anyway, here's a not-very-good picture of #1; when the design board's clear again I'll put up the photo lights and take a better picture.



Here's a look at the central section of woven tubes:



And here are a couple of those dangly strings of beads I was whingeing about making:



and here's a really detailed closeup of three beads so that you can appreciate their full, craggy, glitzy, comples, multilayered glory.


Looking at the pictures reminds me that I really do love these beads.

I just don't want to make any more of them for a while.

Basket of Beads

This is what happens when you don't think things through carefully:

I made a few of these beads with painted Tyvek and embossing powder and loved them and finally figured out a way to incorporate them into a quilt. The middle section of the quilt is composed of woven tubes and every other square is tied down with a short Tyvek bead. That required 40 beads. All well and good. I went on cheerfully designing with some strong verticals that looked sort of like columns, planning to decorate each column with a string of 8 or 9 longer Tyvek beads which I would, of course, have plenty of time to make while quilting the thing...

...Fast forward: I got to the binding stage and then remembered oh yeah, I have to make some more multi-layered, holey, embossed Tyvek beads to finish the thing.

I have now become quite painfully aware that it takes fifteen minutes to make each of these little suckers - and that's with the "efficiency" of actually making a three-bead-long tube and slicing it into sections.

I think I've got 63 beads now, albeit of charmingly varied dimensions. If I don't have that many, some of the inner columns will have shorter bead strings than the outer columns because I don't ever want to see Tyvek or embossing powder or a heat gun again!

(This is actually not literally true. During the final bead-making effort, a slip of the hot knife revealed a whole new world of possibilities to explore: mokume gane Tyvek beads! It is, however, true that I am quite willing to wait a few weeks before launching the exploration.)

Finally, a passable arrangement

So, I dyed all this fabric and screen printed it and discharged it with silkscreens of ancient texts (Irish, runes, and cuneiform) with a vague idea of doing a second shrine-inspired composition. (Shrine Composition #1 is on the shelf under the coffee table at the moment, being hand quilted; I'll pin it up and take a shapshot once the Great Purple Monstrosity is off the board.)

The idea for the Great Purple Monstrosity, aka Shrine Composition 2, is to go back to the origins of the word. "Shrine" comes from Latin "scrinium," meaning a thingie to hold books. I want the incomplete and overlapping layers of text to reference ancient writings; then I'm going to make a scroll to put in each of the "niche" areas. The niche idea is taking off from the niche full of fabric-wrapped books I saw at the Jama Masjid in Delhi a few years ago. I don't know why the "niches" here are half-window blocks. I tried some full-window blocks and didn't like the way they looked. I kind of like it this way, with some openness and some confusion about perspective.

Anyway, I've been pinning this thing up and fiddling with it and discarding "window" fabrics for quite a while, and today I finally don't feel compelled to move anything. I'll give it a couple of days and then start sewing - umm, well, with packages to wrap and stockings to stuff and Christmas dinner and both my girls in Austin for Christmas, it will probably stay on the design board more than a couple of days. We'll see. In the interim, if anybody has any suggestions for improving the composition, I'm all ears. (Try to ignore the fact that the strips aren't pinned exactly straight. I got awfully tired of positioning strips during the last week of the design phase.)

Now that I'm looking at the snapshot, I'm beginning to feel that the big windows should be below the smaller windows. Dither, dither, dither.

Another detail, and some details

I managed to get a slightly better snapshot of one of the embellished circles in Dreamworlds, and now that you can see it I thought I'd add some details about the making of this quilt.

This thing got started because, while rearranging fabric shelves, I noticed that over the years I'd acquired a number of pieces of lace with metallic accents, and I thought they'd look good over black. The background is a black suede-ish FUO (fabric of unknown origin) which I picked because I thought the slightly textured stuff would make a better contrast than just plain black cotton.

I made the quilt as a collection of square and rectangular blocks, each containing one, or two, or none of the embellished spheres, so that I could work on the embellishments without having to manipulate the whole quilt top.

The first stage was to cut circles of metallic lace and fuse them to the black pieces. Cutting out the lace itself was easy enough - I ironed freezer paper circles on and cut around them - but fusing with black Mistyfuse was a total PITA. Mistyfuse is so light and wispy that it likes to drift and ripple and generally not behave like a flat surface. Cutting out circles of it to go under the lace circles was hard. Lining them up with the lace circles for fusing was even harder. No matter how carefully I placed the pieces before laying down the parchment paper and fusing, some of the Mistyfuse would manage to peek out from under the lace and make a nasty shiny blotch on the black suedecloth. I spent a lot of time scratching the stuff off with my thumbnail.

I feel really stupid about this because there ought to be an elegant solution to the problem - there should be some sequence of freezer paper, cutting, fusing where everything is held stable all the way through - but I couldn't think of one. It's like getting the cannibals and the missionaries across the river - until you think outside the box, at least one missionary always gets eaten - and I didn't get out of the box here. If anybody can think of a better way to do it, please tell me!

(But don't tell me I should have used Wonder Under. Yes, it's paper-backed, and that would have given me the stability I wanted. But it shows through the lace. I made some test pieces of lace-on-black using Wonder Under, white Mistyfuse, and black Mistyfuse, and black Mistyfuse worked way better than the other two.)

After that, it was just a matter of searching through and playing with glitzy fabrics, cords, ribbons, buttons and whatever else came to light in my stash. The only hard part was that I had to reorganize four more stash drawers just to find the stuff!

Each circle went more or less the same way. First I tacked it down around the edges, then I bordered the edge with some narrow metallic braid. (I did try combining those steps. It was a mistake.) Then I "cut" out smaller circles of synthetic sheers, using a Versa-tool to burn the circles out and seal the edges in one step, and didn't burn myself hardly at all. Well, not more than 2 or 3 times. Next came any other relatively flat embellishments, like ribbons, yarns, or satin cords. Finally I added gathered circles of wired ribbon, puffy yo-yos of sheer fabric, and buttons.

I hand quilted it with Sulky holographic sliver thread. This was my first time using the Vivian Mahlab school of quilting (don't sit at a machine, do it by hand, don't worry about tiny little stitches, make the color of the quilting thread part of the design) and I loved it. I really, really, really do not like sitting at a sewing machine and wrestling a quilt under the needle for hours; it was much more rewarding to hold this piece on my lap and see the bright sparkling lines move over the black. Anyway, I don't think the sliver "thread" would have held up in a machine.

Artistic Photo Quilts

Last week's Quilt Festival in Houston was the usual orgy for the eyeballs; I don't think I'm allowed to post any photos of the quilts here, but what the heck - as usual, half the exhibits were No Photography, and SAQA was good enough to put out their own book of their two exhibits.

A slight design flaw (from my point of view; from the pov of the organizers, probably a Machiavellian scheme to get people to spend money) was the fact that there were hardly any chairs or benches in the quilt side of the show, but lots of places to sit down on the vendors' side. I blame this for the fact that I came home with three books and a new clip-on magnifying device for beading. One of the books was Charlotte Ziebarth's Artistic Photo Quilts, which is directly responsible for my spending more time fooling around with Photoshop than doing anything else since the quilt show. It's full of inspiring headers like "Bad Pictures Can Often Be Useful," and "Out of Focus Areas," - and examples to back up her assertion that you don't need a stunning, award-worthy, professional-looking photograph to make a stunning quilt. I love this woman!

The picture is one I took some years ago while hiking, divvied into sections and manipulated using some of the many ideas in her text. Now if I can just stop playing with Photoshop filters and go get some more color ink cartridges and print the sections, I think it might make a really nice small quilt. (And if it doesn't, you'll never hear about this particular bright idea again.)

One thing that frustrates me somewhat is that while Ziebarth gets magnificent results with the Cutout filter, I'm not getting much use out of it when I try to manipulate my images of Rajasthan. Cutout seems to transfer brilliant reds and oranges into muddy brownish earth tones. Any Photoshop gurus have a suggestion to fix this problem?