Blogging for attention

This Old Quilt

Wed, 8 Oct 2008 09:54:01 -0700

Victorian Crazy quilts, the kind you often see made of silk, velvet and wool and covered with fancy embroidery stitches, are not my favorites. The crazy quilts I like best are usually made of cotton and unadorned with embroidery. This one, however, is a sort of hybrid crazy, with silks and cottons, with some embroidery and some simple ties to hold the whole thing together. What I am interested in is how the quilter went about constructing the blocks so that the end result would be so unified and yet so spontaneously composed. Each block has an embroidered ball in the center, all different. From there on out the quilter built a rough log cabin block, adding strips to create a rectangle, then adding more strips or triangles or scraps of some kind to get it large enough to square up. Each block is different. Each block is the same. The whole effect is one of a manic energy that I am not sure hangs together as well as it could. Nevertheless, I admire the freedom with which she approached the project.

Big Stitches

Wed, 1 Oct 2008 11:39:28 -0700

A one-time student of mine wrote to me this morning wondering about the origins of Big Stitch quilting. I took a few pictures of quilts from my own collection and told what little I knew. The above quilt, for instance, was made sometime around the Civil War. It is wool front and back, but the inside is, I think, another full quilt. So this quilter was quilting through at least 5 layers. No wonder the stitches are rather large, about 2-3 to the inch. So I think that sometimes the size of the stitches was purely practical, with aesthetic considerations being secondary. This quilt is stitched with heavy back thread in an allover diagonal pattern.

I wish I could have see this when it was new. The star points and the first border strips are faded to a mostly uniform pink, but if you spread a seam apart you can see that the fabric was once the color of ripe raspberries. By the way, the upper right star point of the corner star seems to be pointing at something white and blotchy. It is drywall compound. Apparently this quilt was once used as a drop cloth to cover up something more precious during a sheetrock project.

Slave Made Quilt

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:16:31 -0700

One day in Nashville I was teaching my favorite class: “You MaverickYou.” In that class I get to improvise in teaching the way I do in quiltmaking. We had a fantastic morning, with everyone busily making their own original blocks, so I was excitable and happy as I strolled out onto the merchant mall, looking to see whatever I had missed so far. As I rounded a corner I came upon the booth of two women who call their business “Pique Trouver.” Hanging on one side was the most perfect quilt I could ever have found to illustrate what we were trying to do in the class. So I asked if I could borrow it for the afternoon. They graciously took it down and allowed me to walk off with it.

The quilt was made around 1890 or so by a woman who had been born a slave. At first glance it may seem to be a jumble of random bits, but if you pick out one fabric to study, the music of the piece starts top reveal itself. I like the brown and blue plaid in the middle of the left-most border. Notice how it is spread around, how it gives a weighty balance to the whole composition. Look at the red pieces. Analyze the horizontal strips from which the interior of the quilt is constructed. Each strip is like a musical development of a theme. See how the interior is made of the pieced strips, and how they are contained by the borders?

A quilt like this is deceptive in its seeming “craziness.” It is not crazy at all. I wanted to buy it, but it was out of my range. Pique is going to be in Houston, though. Maybe they will still have it then. Check them out: http://www.piquetrouver.com/index.html

Back From Madison

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:16:15 -0700

I got back from Nancy Zieman’s Quilt Expo in Madison, WI last night. This is a picture of my friend Spencer Pearson posing in the booth at the convention center. It was a blast to meet so many people for the first time, to see so many old friends from that area that I had not seen in 20 or 25 years. This quilt, which I thought would be along the “normal” lines that I keep getting requests for, actually seemed as foreign to most quilters as my bias tape constructions.

It’s just an old fashioned quilt: simple, pieced blocks with lots of room for fancy quilting, done in a two-color scheme. But quilts of today have so much print and so many dazzling color schemes that a simple quilt like this looks peculiar next to them. Still, most everyone seemed to like it, even though I felt like an ambassador from another era.

The show was big and fun, and one of my favorite parts of it was a booth in the lobby where
Margaret Jankowski was talking about her organization, The Sewing Machine Project-mending communities (www.thesewingmachineproject.org). She collects sewing machines to take to people who need them. I should just let her speak:

“The Sewing Machine Project was conceived in early 2005, following the devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia. I’d read an article about a woman who had lost a sewing machine in the storm, “a machine she’d saved for years to buy,” and in losing it, she lost her means of making an income. I began collecting donated sewing machines here in Wisconsin and shipping them to Sri Lanka.”

There is lots more info on her site. It seems like a great organization and they have a great track record, like Margaret taking 350 machines to people hit by Katrina. If you have a machine around that you would like to donate to help others, please check out her site.

Quilt Kits To Go

Tue, 2 Sep 2008 09:26:00 -0700

Last night I got back from the studio with 300 quilt kits all bundled up. The great thing about this project has been the doing of it all, from designing and making the quilt itself, to printing, cutting and sewing the bags with my partner Spencer, to measuring and cutting all the fabric for the kits. As ever, it is the hands-on part of the process I enjoy the most.

The quilt is so old fashioned that it looks fresh and new. I am trying to bring it a little more into this era by having it machine quilted by Angie Woolman, the great quilter from Berkeley. I can’t wait to see if other people like it as much as I do. But my criteria for choosing projects is the same no matter what I do: it has to be fun. This has been.