Spices - A Trio

This theme said circles to me, and I struggled with it.  I had an idea of the tops of spice bottles with gorgeous warm yellow and orange, and deep earthy, rich colours, but for some reason I couldn't get it to come together.  So I abandoned ship on the first big idea, and thought about a smaller lifeboat sized idea.

 

I have a tendency to go big on these challenges and then struggle with getting them finished so my lifeboat idea was going to be small, only 6 inches.  So, still playing with that spice bottle concept, I came up with this illustration of three bottles side by side.    I had a lot of fun playing with shadows and highlights and selecting colours from my scraps that I thought would work.

This came together very quickly, though the little highlights were a bit fiddly, and I used fabric glue in addition to bondaweb to keep them stuck.

 I had the idea of matchstick quilting but after completing the first pass of straight line quilting I added a line between the quilt lines and I didn't like it.  So I ripped that one line out and went across instead for a grid. I managed to catch each of the pieces quilting in both directions.

Single fold binding to finish which as this was small I thought would be a good piece to practice machine binding and I hated it (I always get a neater finish handsewing the binding down).

But you know when you have a challenge in mind it informs other things or other projects inform the challenge idea in your head?  I took a curves class with the Quilters Guild who had Carolina Oneto doing a workshop online and it was a lot of fun.  

 

So I went back to playing with circles and came up with this idea the other day.  I just had to have another go at it.  

A project for another day maybe.  In the end what exists in the world is my trio of spice bottles.  Looking forward to seeing everyone's interpretation of the theme!

How old is Vintage?

Isn't it funny when you have a themed piece to create it seems the topic "Vintage" seems to seep into everything creative you have in mind or are working on? Do you find that too - suddenly everything you look at making is an opportunity to explore the theme? 

 

When "Vintage" was first picked I imagined a sewing room with a tailor’s dummy and a quaint desk with a featherweight sewing machine. Then I imagined a vintage typewriter which brought me to these expensive digital typewriters. I really like the yellow one! 

Too many thoughts and sketches living as only sketches until I saw a workshop advertised "not for beginners". That caught my eye and curiosity got the better of me. River of Dreams is an annual quilt exhibition held in Limerick, Ireland and for the last two years the organisers have provided workshops in the middle weekend. This year there was a two-part workshop - drafting in the traditional method of graph paper with pencil and compass on the Saturday and making the design on the Sunday. The class was led by Emer Fahy, and she brought us through the drafting and construction of the LeMoyne star in her design of a 28" block. 

I thought this could be a fun way to look at Vintage. How old does something have to be to be vintage? Google tells me 20+years but less than 100 for vintage and over 100 is antique! Barbara Brackman has the LeMoyne star design going back as far as 1894 so maybe this is not quite vintage but older again.

What I didn't know is that this type of block is based on a circle and doesn't evenly divide into an evenly spaced grid. Rather the diagonal measurement of the corner blocks equals the width of the two centre diamond points. That's what makes the drafting of it a little bit more complicated than an 8-pointed sawtooth star made from Half square triangles. Sewing it together is all Y-seams. 

Emer added a mitred border to up the difficulty level with more Y seams so this was a get as much as you can done in a day and finish it at home type of project.

Selecting material with vintage in mind I went straight for calico - that cream speaks of olde worlde to me and the little flecks in the fabric add character. Whenever I think of vintage photographs or books I think of a yellow tone to the whites and a sunny washed our effect on the colours, so I was trying for that in the pinks and blues with the creamy calico.

Instead of having a border same colour either side of the accent colour as in Emer’s design of pink-blue-pink, I changed them up to give a bit more room for the centre star using inner border as background fabric and then the blue to frame the design with pink leading into the colour change. In the second border I used background fabric with pink as the inner colour to frame the pink stars.

This finishes quite big, and I was a bit stuck on what to do with it. I don't have anywhere for it as a wall hanging and was thinking of making it into a bag to carry a cutting mat and ruler but at 28" it’s a bit big for my 5ft nothing height! I think it needed to become the medallion in a bigger quilt. Do your pieces talk to you sometimes like that telling you what they want to be?

 

So, I went medallion hunting and bought a few books(from the 1980's so I think these count as Vintage too!), lost hours on Pinterest and the Quilt Index looking at some really old quilts and came to my senses and remembered to keep it simple. 

 

Sticking with 45-degree angles that the LeMoyne star is based on I decided on square in a square and flying geese.

As this has turned out quite a bit bigger than intended, is now going to be a 70" quilt  and I changed my mind on the colouring, I didn't get it finished but I hope you enjoyed hearing about my exploration of Vintage - I certainly enjoyed learning new skills and letting my curiosity follow where the theme led. 

So I'll leave you with two vintage quilts of Emer's that she brought for show and tell, no idea who the makers are only that they are vintage Irish quilt tops.

Harmony in quilt making

When the theme of Harmony came up on the wheel, my mind immediately went to music and I had imaginings of quilts with music notes, or intricate lines weaving in and out of each other in waves like sound waves amplyfying each other.  I was very surprised that I went in a different direction. 

 

 

 

I think its because I was having fun just making quilt tops with no purpose in mind other than to make.  My mind enjoyed being in the moment of fabric selection and playing with colours to get them to flow and live well together, and it occurred to me that is Harmony too.   

 

I think it is something we do subconsciously as quilters (unless we are using contrast or asymmetry to draw attention to something specific), we strive to make the pieces fit together in a way that is pleasing or balanced.  

 

I was in a bee of 12 people, and the 11 hive mates made me drunkards path blocks.   I got a 5 pinks and a mixture of other colours and I was struggling to come up with a cohesive design for them.  So I decided to make 2 quilts.  Out of the 12 blocks 1 had a dark centre, and I love the block but it was fighting me in every way I used it, trying to get it to play nice with the others.  Until I added in more dark.  I call this quilt Garden Paths, as I imagine the diagonal lines as paths and the triangles as raised flower beds. Now it feels to me that the dark centre belongs and all is resolved.  Harmony achieved.

 

So with that in mind I had another challenge this quarter.  A friend asked me if I would be in a bee for her and make a block for her quilt inspired by Portuguese tiles.  I had the opportunity to visit Portugal in April when we went for a short city break to Porto and it was glorious!  Beautiful weather, lots of walkign up and down hills, tasting port wine and eating very well.  There was also the chance to see lots of different tiles, all in various shades of lovely blue with white and smatterings of yellow here and there. 

 

 

Some were very intricate and some were painterly, depicting life in the city.  So I had a go at designing my own tile, and I came up with this design that I thought would repeat really well.

And here it is tiled as a quilt.

On its own though as an individual piece I thought the secondary line made it feel unfinished.  It belongs in a group and the line leading off to nowhere felt wrong to me, but I liked the idea of it, so I cropped it.  It still frames the central motif but doesn't pull you out of the frame.  This made me feel better.  Is that Harmony too- feeling in tune with your work?

And tiled it could look like this with grouting lines (aka skinny sashing) in between.

So I had a go at making it.  It was trickier than I thought and the applique is far from perfect but I think the idea works. 

Apologies it's not quilted or finished as a piece of art.  I gave it to my friend for inclusion in her quilt and I didn't have enough time to make a second one.  It's interesting where the theme will take you and I really enjoyed the journey on this one.

Circles and squares - oh this one was a challenge!

I was very excited when I saw this months theme of circles and squares, and prepared my brain for taking in all things round and curvy for inspiration.  Inspiration never struck and my sketchbook was looking very empty, until I sat myself down with the goal of just playing with shapes. 

I doodled and played with balance and scale, looked up cathedral window projects in pinterest, googled circles and squares which for some reason threw up lots of pastry buns, but nothing was making that lightbulb go off and I was starting to crave a cuppa and a chocolate croissant.

I remembered Leonardo daVinci's Vitruvian man, that shows the symmetry of the human body inside a circle, and started playing with circles inside squares and squares inside circles.  Eventually, I got something I was happy with and then I got stuck again.

I've noticed in these challenges that the greater challenge sometimes, when you have settled on an idea, is how to make it?  I thought  about needle turn applique or sew and turn inside out applique but eventually settled on raw edge applique using bondaweb.  

I realised, in the middle of making it, I should have used fabric mod podge as it doesnt fray and when you iron it, you can still move it, if you need to.  

The other thing I've learned with these challenges is my mind is often thinking of bed quilts when I'm brainstorming and sometimes the idea wants to a bigger piece.  I struggle with that; keeping it small so the project is manageable in the timeframe and fun to make, and not a burden that a bigger project would be.  This is what I think it could be made large: 

 But for this challenge I decied to make the one flower and chose the slanted stalk over the lollipop look of the straight one.  I thought it might look a bit contrived at such a jaunty angle but I think it works.  For some reason we all agreed on orange binding (feels a bit Irish Flag to me!).  I did suggest Fuchsia but Orange won out - probably the influece of Halloween colours being so prominent at this time of year.  

 So here you have it : a cirle and square inspired spring flower in the middle of Autumn!

Improv fun!

I dip in and out of collage as a quilt making techinque and I am always surprised that there are so many different ways to collage a textile piece.  

Improv piece of the fastnet rock lighthouse using fabrics other then cotton.

Making Waves using bondaweb and raw edge, I entered this into an Irish Patchwork Society exhibition, inspired by the Great Wave by Hokusai.

Using up scraps from a Laura Heine collage workshop to make Jupiter!

Whimsical fun using scraps and big stitch embroidery in the style of Laura Wasilowski.

So when the theme of collage popped up I thought : Yes!  I've got this... and then I thought what can I make that's not the same as all of the above?  I got stuck! 

Then, the opportunity came to sign up for a collage portrait class, with Paula Rafferty, at the River of Dreams annual exhibiton in Limerick and I jumped at the chance.  We made a portrait of Dolores O'Riordan from the Cranberries, also from Limerick, and I had the opportunity so many times to hear her sing and the band play as I was growing up, when they were starting our on their amazing music journey.

 

In the end though, I ended up going back to improv and having a play.  One of my favourite places on the West coast of Ireland, about an hours drive away, is Kilkee.  It has a horseshoe bay and two cliff walks on either side of the beach.  Maybe this colourful, cartoonish, childlike collage is my go to.  I don't know, but I had a lot of fun playing with shape and colour and straightline quilted it to put in a frame.

 

I think I might change or add to the car pulling the boat, thats a tiny bit too basic I think.  I really like the houses falling away on the frame and I think this could be fun to make bigger and add more detail, like the steps going down to the beach and some boats in the sea.  Otherwise, I quite like its happy maddness, and it was very much a happy way to spend a rainy afternoon playing with scraps!

Hello Islay!

This one took me a while to get going on.  When the subject is so large and open as Maps so many ideas pop into your head and this is the bit with quilting that I struggle with; which idea to make?  I have a notebook full of designs and variations of designs and sometimes I think I play too much and end up with too many options.  

My initial thought was an olde worlde map feel but I had done something similar before with a compass rose and a windmap of Shannon Airport.  Then I thought of the gorgeous work by Alicia Merrett and the winning quilt in Birmingham a few years ago by Mary Palmer and how different maps can be.  My first attempt was a line map of our neighbourhood and while I think there is something in this it wasn't doing anything for me and weeks slipped by.

2023 is a big birthday year for myself and Gordon.  His 50th was in March so being seriously into Whiskey we had to make the trip to Scotland.  We went to Edinburgh at the end of March and last week to Islay, an island off the west coast with 9 working distilleries and 2 more in the works.  The island has a population of about 3000 people!

So on our return I thought thats it I'm making a collage map if Islay.  Once I had settled on what to make I got stuck in, turned on Netflix and had this made in half a day.  I shocked myself!  This was so much fun and so fast to do. 

I traced the map onto parchament paper, ironed scraps to bondaweb and had fun making a mish mash of greens.  The island reminded us of Galway on the southern side where the 3 distillery walk is 3 miles long and the home of Laphroig, Lagavulin (Ron Swanson's favourite) and Ardbeg.  

And then on the Northern side of the island Mayo and Sligo with its beatiful rolling hills and peaty bogland.

 

I cut out the shape of the island I had traced from the back so the mish mash made some sense!

And I ended up with this cleaned up collage map thing.  The brown greens for the bog and the brigher greens for the pastures with the sheep and their playful lambs and rocky walls.  Two small bits of blue for the larger of the natural lakes and later on I added in pops of yellow for some of the larger beaches.

I had a scrap of brushed cotton in a flannel print left over form an Irish chain winter quilt I'm making and that seemed to be the perfect background. 

Straight line quilted in gold/cream thread echoing the backgrount print and popped into a frame to finish. 

It's a lovely reminder to have of a great holiday (lots of walks, lots of sunshine, lots of whiskey tasting and lots of fun meeting new people and feeling rested).

Our view from the guesthouse in Port Ellen was so nice to return to at the end of the day.

And while whiskey isn't my drink of choice I have a better appreciation for it now and the work that goes into it.  I have to admit I might be a little bit obsessed with the barrels as I have more photos of those than anything else!