Recently in Quilting Etc. Category

My mom can't find an armchair chair small enough to replace an old one in one particular corner of her house. Everything she can find is "overstuffed" or somesuch. Cars have turned into SUVs, which have turned into mega-SUVs, which caused me no end of giggling when one of my former co-workers lamented that they'd just bought a house but couldn't park in their new garage. Serves them right.

More distressing to me, though, is that older quilts don't fit on today's beds. By older, I don't mean antique. I mean 10 years old. Deeper mattresses mean that quilts sized for mattresses common when I was 20 years old are now too short.

Ah, progress. I had managed to memorize the suggested dimensions for a queen size quilt, but my knowledge is already obsolete.

I do apologize. I've been a bit distractified.

You see, I'm writing elsewhere too. Yes, I know, you are the most important readers. However, unless you're going to start sending me checks, I feel I must see other people as well. After six months of all-baby-all-the-time, it's time for some Real Work around here.

(All of you who have children are now laughing, yes?)

In case you are behind on what I've been up to, I am blogging about environmental issues in crafting at Crafting A Green World, part of the Green Options network which is totally for great justice. They have a food blog and a fashion and style blog as well, and then a good number of other blogs that are much more serious and also quite good.

Hey look, a commercial on my blog!

Seriously, though, y'all know I'm all about shaming you for using plastic bags saving the world, and I feel good about working with these folks. So stop by and check us out. Or if you just want to see what I've been doing, visit my own personal corner of the GO empire.

I just caught the baby staring at the Bernina with a huge grin on his face.

Our good friend SBW has been working to ensure that baby's first word is "quilt," with "craft" as a backup. Perhaps it's working?

Those of you who know me are aware that I shy away from 3-d sewing, preferring the flat world of quilts. It's a bit odd, since I started my sewing habit by making clothes, both for myself and my Barbies. (Yes, I admit it.) However, Victoria Everman posted a list of Top 5 Must-Have DIY Sewing Tomes at new blog Crafting a Green World - and despite my aversion to 3-d, I found myself strangely tempted. 99 Ways to Cut, Sew & Deck Out Your Denim? Hmm, there's a whole rack of denim at Goodwill just waiting to be explored...

The book I would add to Victoria's list is Second Time Cool: The Art of Chopping Up a Sweater by by Anna-Stina Linden Ivarsson, Katarina Brieditis, and Katarina Evans. Though I live in warm and friendly Austin, there are a couple of weeks out of the year when it's on the chilly side. February, basically. And I hate being cold. So I wanted to check out what I could do with great wool sweaters that have fallen victim to holes. I have a few here, and I regularly see them at thrift stores. Second Time Cool delivered. Even for someone who doesn't want to do a lot of hand sewing and embellishment, mittens and scarves are easy. If you want to do something funkier, there are wrist cuffs, necklaces, and even skirts. So now I'm trying to decide whether I'd rather wear the blue sweater in my drawer or felt it and chop it up.

After all, I have several more weeks until it gets cold here. Surely I can take on a new craft during the baby's naps and bust out some winter accessories?

1. Gee's Bend - Ties and Christmas Ornaments, blogged by Kyra E. Hicks at her blog Black Threads. (Ms. Hicks is the author of several books on quilting. If you're into quilts and you're not reading her blog yet, why not?) Yummy ornaments, ties, and other Gee's Bend designs.
2. Crafting a Green World, a new blog at GreenOptions.com, covers eco-friendly crafting books, events, companies, and more. It's just started, so head over and give them some love.
3. This 404 page is overwhelming, but amusing.
4. Wallpapers and screensavers from National Geographic, via this post on etc.. Lovely.
5. Where cats go when they die.

Friday in the craft blog world is Work In Progress (WIP) Friday. So here are the three quilts I have in progress. In progress, in this case, means started but not finished. I'm not really making much progress lately... for some reason...

1. Purple, Green, and Cream colored quilt for our king-sized bed. We planned on 12 inch blocks, randomly arranged. We laid out the rows across the bed. Then we realized it would look cooler if the rows were different widths. So I sewed the rows together, then cut two of them apart into skinnier rows. One was cut in half, the other was cut into 1/3 and 2/3. If we could manage to lay it back out to choose the new order of the rows pretty soon, I think it could get done by the end of the year. I'm eyeing Thanksgiving weekend hopefully, since there will be people around to cuddle the baby.

2. Earlier attempt at a quilt for our bed, made entirely of scraps of previous projects. 2160 rectangles, each 2.5 by 3.5 inches. You can perhaps understand why this didn't get done, and we moved on to the 12 inch blocks idea. (Side note: when I suggested putting this one on hold and trying to get the other one done before the baby was born, C-Man expressed trepidations about starting another project before this one was completed. Ha ha ha ha ha! He is not a crafter.) But this is a nice one to do in 20 minute increments here and there, because it's just chain piecing and there's no risk I'll run out and have to stand up and iron any time soon.

3. T-shirt quilt for a certain someone who helped me paint my quilt studio. I am trying not to feel guilty about not getting this done before I had the baby, since I know the recipient doesn't hold it against me, but I wish I had finished it already. I don't know when I would have done it, but I wish I had.

The Recycled Yarn Tutorial

I'm always interested to see people's thoughts about who makes quilts and what quilts are like.

Christine Liu, a guest poster on Decor8, saluted hip quilter Denyse Schmidt but contrasted her work with Christine's image of quilting: "At least for me, quilting seems still relatively entrenched in the German Dutch tradition and midwestern generational home-making." Then Brent Myers, a Decor8 reader, commented that "I've been looking for books that teach you how to take traditional ways and put a new spin on them." Decor8 posted his his cool men's suiting quilt the next day. (Definitely check it out.)

Then on Whip-up I saw the post International Quilt Festival: What's a Modernist To Do?:

The show always makes us feel a bit lonely, wondering whether or not there will ever be a critical mass of really interesting quilters at one of these shows. There are some contemporary quilts on display but few vendors carrying fabrics or books we would buy. Mostly there were a whole lot of versions of 19th century patterns and predictable novelty fabrics one might expect to find used in pediatric nurses’ uniforms. Need any tea-stained lace? How about a CD you can stick in your sewing machine so it can automatically embroider a Disney character onto your quilt? Lonely, very, very lonely.

I blinked a little bit after reading these. I forget that not everyone has gone through the process I did. When I started quilting I saw all the boring junk, but since then I've developed a bit of selective blindness. The quilting industry flourishes because of the huge market for pastels, florals, novelty prints, patterns for traditional blocks, etc. However, I've tuned it out. Unless I'm making a kid quilt, in which case novelty prints can come in handy. When I'm at IQF, I don't notice how many booths are full of boring stuff, because I'm caught by all the booths that offer hand-dyes, batiks, and Japanese fabrics. (Though the 2005 show did seem a little drab.)

My dominant impressions of quilters are people like Ruth McDowell, Judy Dales, and Hollis Chatelain, who are seriously boundary-exploding artists. They are the stars of the quilt world, the sought-after speakers and teachers, and the award-winners. I guess I look to them and others like them as what "defines" quilting for me, rather than the mass-marketed products that support the industry.

In fact, I've stopped subscribing to one of the quilt magazines I've taken for over 5 years because it's full of pictures of modern, artistic quilts and I'm getting tired of it. I'd rather focus more right now on things I might actually make.

I'm not saying these folks are wrong to feel that way. When I first tried to get involved in the Austin Area Quilt Guild I thought I was doomed to hearing about Sunbonnet Sue for the rest of my life. But there's a heck of a lot out there on how to break out of the block-block-block-all-identical-all-pastel routine, even before this recent crop of hip young quilters.

The hip young quilters are cool, though, and you should check them out. Kim from Dioramarama is a Whip-Up quilt correspondent who knows her stuff when it comes to the intersection of art and quilt. Check out her profiles of quilters Wendy Huhn, Lisa Call, and Angela Moll. Way to smash those preconceptions, ladies! And I'm loving Denyse Schmidt's new book.

But don't ignore it.

Attitude.

Science fiction.

There, aren't you happy you didn't ignore it? Especially you, I-ROCK. I know how you love robots and the undead.

Yesterday I did get off the computer as promised and work on a quilt. Though it did not have the mood-lifting properties I was hoping for, I got a lot done.

This will become one of the two quilts for Jped's twin girls:

I'm still deciding whether this blue is a good border (it's brighter in reality than in the picture). It sort of jangles me to add a blue border to a red, yellow, and cream quilt, but adding a red or yellow border looked like overkill. We shall see.

This is the quilt that I was trying to complement, which I got up on the wall in March:

I didn't want to make these two quilts matchy-matchy just because the girls are twins, but I didn't want one to look amazingly more elaborate and complicated than the other. Because of the fighting, y'know.

But here's the question. When you're making quilts for twins, which one is for which?