The Kaleidoscope that Wouldn't Go Away

I was contacted a week or two ago by the owners of a blog called Quilt Inspiration, asking if they could feature one of my quilts on their site. I said yes and provided them with some additional links, and they published it today.

The main page of the blog is here: Quilt Inspiration
The article featuring my quilt is "Straight piecing patterns that appear curved: Snail's Trail and Kaleidoscope."

It's a very pretty blog that (surprise!) features lots of quilts that appeal to my personal taste. Do stop by!

Squared away

Well, the girls are up the hill till after the Nicaragua trip, we have our bus tickets, my passport is not expired (there was a brief scare caused by an out-of-date photocopy), and the hotel likes to get paid in person, so I don't have to figure out how to get them my credit card number beforehand (I can call the US for free, but the next country over is more complicated). The only thing left to do for the trip is pack for it and coordinate getting to the pick-up point.

I spoke to the phone company this afternoon and they confirmed that whatever tech is sent over to install the DSL will have modems in the truck - you can rent the modem from the phone company for a dollar a month, but after we'd applied, I realized they hadn't asked if we wanted to do that, so I worried that the guy might show up and not be able to do anything. I still hope they don't come while we're out of the country, but there's not much we can do about that. If they haven't come before we go, I can call the phone company when we get back to see if they have a "not home" note on the work order, and if so we can set up a new time.

I finished the quilting I was doing for my friend in time for her to add the binding and bring it back in to work this morning; it looks great and she's pleased, and the proceeds will be almost exactly what the Nicaragua tickets cost, so that works out well.

And I moved a new family into the neighborhood so my Sims can make new friends. All's right with the world.

What today looked like

Checking in and checking out

Did some quilting, some routine cat maintenance (Raxi was much praised by our vet, who hadn't met her yet) and some computer stuff (from what we've seen, Zoo Tycoon II is a pretty cool game) today. Now we're getting ready to watch Aladdin, with Julia who has joined us for the evening.

Not a cat post - not that she doesn't deserve one.

It has appeared to be, over time, fairly important to some of the people in my life that I resume qulting.

I wasn't sure that I would, but on the other hand I never decided that I wouldn't. I just wasn't particularly interested in it.

And I might not have gone back to it, had it not presented itself as a potential source of income.

But it did, and I may just.

Except, when I actually got my supplies out today (and, in fact, carried them down the street to the neighbor's house) and cleaned off a nice spacious table and set up my machine and wound bobbins and everything...

It turned out my thread was aged and feeble, and not of a suitable quality for the project at hand.

Baby steps. Apparently.

Photo album

I have reason to compile a bit of a portfolio of my quilting work, which I have done here. Have a look and feel free to make with any sort of comments or suggestions.

Yes, Julie, this means you might one day get your quilt ;)

Reason #2 to love Costa Rica*

Costa Rica is a very small pond.

It's a wee little thing the size of West Virginia and with half the population of New York City, so events of note are small in scale.

That means that I got to see Sting and Mercedes Sosa (and, for that matter, the Harlem Globetrotters) in a "stadium" centered around a basketball court, not a football field. There's no such thing as bad seats in there.

It means I can reach either ocean in a few hours (I never do, but I can).

And it means that when our nascent quilting community manages to get a major quilt personality to come and give a workshop and exhibit some of her quilts, and one attends the reception, it's a cozy, friendly event spent largely chatting with the actual major quilt personality herself.

Alex Anderson and her husband are warm, charming, lovely people who are clearly thrilled to be in Costa Rica. I'm not going to be able to take her workshop tomorrow, but I'm so glad we went to the reception.

Those of you who went "SQUEEEEE!" yesterday, be sure to check out not just her website, but her new project with Ricky Tims, called The Quilt Show. I haven't explored it in depth yet, but it looks like there is a lot of free content, plus, for a fee, biweekly "TV" shows that you actually watch online.

Welcome to Costa Rica, Alex, and John, and thanks for coming!


* The second installment in an extremely intermittent series.

A potential case of CYA, or perhaps just Laundry Instructions: Fail

The Fancy Pants are 100% linen.

The settings on the iron go, approximately:

• Nylon
• Silk
• Polyester
• Rayon
• Cotton Blends
• Wool
• Cotton
• Really, Really Hot
• Tongues of Flame
• Linen

And yet the label in the Fancy Pants says "Warm Iron if Needed." I took the iron's word for it.

BTW, I'm ironing the Fancy Pants because we're going to a reception for Alex Anderson.

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(All the quilters just went "SQUEEEEE!" and everybody else just went, "Huh?")

Phrase of the day

I'm playing with fabric today and the phrase we are working around is: Accidental Accuracy. Bonus extra phrase from an email from DCup: Weird Symmetry.

Yup, that's today.

Shitty thing to do

I made a quilt in July. It came out like this:


I was kind of driven to make it in that way, that design, and it was all symbolic and stuff, of course. That's my wedding ring - recently removed - on the trunk of the tree there.

It was finished just in time and gladly accepted for the show where it was to hang. There were no awards or judging - just a collection of quilts answering the question "Who am I?" in whatever way each artist felt moved to respond.

I got a call from the curator of that show today. They're taking it down and I thought he was going to ask me to pick up my quilt. Well, I can do that too, but he was calling to say that somebody cut the trunk of that tree and stole the ring. And then somehow reassembled the thing which, having made it myself, I don't even know how they would have accomplished that.

What an unutterably shitty thing to do.

Asked to answer the question "Who am I?" in fabric, I responded thusly:

Now I just hope they'll take it - the deadline for drop-off at the quilt shop was yesterday, but I'm going to take it over to the cultural center where the show is actually going to be held.

Gardening

Well, I've decided that I can't let the branches stay that way. Not without at least trying a different idea I have. So I'll fiddle around with that before making anything permanent.

Tree of life

So yesterday I had a bunch of fabric strips, and a pieced background.


Today I started by quilting the background:


Then I began twisting and wrapping my strips into roots. Twist ties are your friends!


Uncharacteristically, I had to sew that down by hand. Normally, it's all machine all the time.


Once the roots were more or less figured out, I began arranging the branches.


And this is what it looks like now. I'm not completely sure I'm going to keep the branches like this, but it's likely. I'll have to sleep on it to be sure. I'll trim up the root ends a bit, but they will be left hanging, more or less like they are here.


Now I just have to get it all sewn down, bound, and a hanging sleeve on the back before the deadline. Also have to find out when the deadline is...

Weekend project

There's a quilt show coming up. I thought I missed my chance to participate, but then they pushed the deadline back by a month, so I'm working on an entry this weekend.

The show is called Tela Contra Tela: ¿Quien Soy Yo? which means something like "Cloth Against Cloth: Who Am I?" Very artsy :)

I had an idea a few days ago, and today I picked out fabrics:


These include fabrics I love, fabrics that remind me of the people who gave them to me, and fabrics from quilts that I've made for other people.

Then I spent the day sitting on a too-small floor space. Ow.

(I had a picture of that, but Blogger keeps rotating it which is, quite frankly, bizarre. And it also throws it a bit out of focus. Weird.)

I tore a 1-inch strip from each (well most) of the fabrics. Turns out that what I want to do with them limits the total quantity a bit, so some of them were left out.


I also pieced a simple background and got it ready to quilt.


I'll quilt the background in the morning, then add the strips.

Tune in tomorrow to see what the heck I'm talking about!

Wordless Wednesday

Stringfever

I have been commissioned to make a quilt on the theme of music and, as part of my initial research, I have watched and listened to several string quartets.

In addition to traditional, classical music played in tuxedoed formality, I discovered this one, which I found thoroughly engaging:



The group is called Stringfever; they're three brothers and a cousin.

Updated to add:

Okay, this is well beyond the realm of anything I can justify as quilting research, but check these guys out:

Make a quilt, get a shirt

You know what I never did? I never posted a picture of the quilt I made for pidomon. And after threatening him with dire consequences if he didn't photograph it for me and everything.

So here it is:


And I'm not very smiley these days, but fair's fair, so ... here's the t-shirt he sent me in return. It says "Frogs" of course.


Thanks, man.

Heading out

The retreat starts today, so I'll be out of town for a week. Unless something unspeakable happens to Rita's computer, though, I should still be able to post & check email on a daily basis.

Expect some more of the same old, same old gorgeous pictures from paradise, particularly on Friday and Monday.

Kaleidoscope Revisited

I blogged the making of this quilt back in May but I don't think I ever posted a decent photo of the whole thing.

I needed to link to a picture of it for this afternoon's Question of the Day at Shakesville, and also needed a post for today, so...here it is again.


It's a traditional quilt pattern called Kaleidoscope, but I messed with the color placement and stuff (obviously), so the quilt is titled Organic Kaleidoscope.

It was made for a Costa Rica/Hawaii quilt show where the theme was "Two Tropics, One Quilt" - pretty broad topic, right? So I used the traditional block pattern but went tropical with my interpretation of it.

You'd think, since I identify it as my favorite piece of art, that I would actually hang it somewhere other than over the banister, right? Maybe in the morning.

(Oh, and those are six-inch blocks, so the whole thing measures about 42" x 54".)

Phy's Quilt

Those of you who read Phydeaux and Phriends will have seen this already, but for the rest of you, here is one of the two small quilts I made while in North Carolina.


Phydeaux knew about his at least part of the time I was making it, but Pidomon didn't, so I didn't want to say anything about either one until he got his.

In my usual last-minute...ness, I neglected to take photos of the finished products, so am relying on the guys to provide me with same. Phy did an admirable job with his, as you can see. Click for extreme closeup, if you are so inclined.

Pidomon says he's going to send me a picture too, but his arrived just before he left town on business, so we'll just have to wait till he's back in town for the other photo.

The two quilts are, aesthetically, very different, but they were made using the exact same method: cutting shapes from fabric, fusing them to a background, and free-motion stitching around them to finish the edges. The free motion stitching also serves to quilt the piece. They're both quite small - this one is about 12 x 16 inches.