What would Michael do?

There has not been much talk of Michael Vick lately.  Maybe because football season is over.  Maybe because of the headline-only nature of our news media.  Maybe because of the more recent devastation of one of country's most economically influential eco-systems.  Whatever the reason, it was possible today could pass us by without anyone saying Happy Birthday Michael Vick.

Michael Vick's background is not particularly auspicious.  He was born to an unmarried teenage couple & raised in a housing project.  He parlayed his exceptional skill into a college scholarship, but left before graduation to pursue what was a lucrative professional career.  His would have been a largely unremarkable story in the world of professional athletics, including but not limited to being accused of a felony, had he not included gross animal abuses in his repertoire.  The descriptions of the pleasure he took in...well..let's just say you probably would not want him dating your daughter no matter how much cash he pulls in.

So the direct question "what would Michael Vick do" probably does not need to be asked again.  I thought I would instead take a look at what he could maybe have done differently.  Vick's defenders insist that the kind of people who protest his behavior do not have any kind of inkling of what it takes to make it out of the projects, competing with everyone else who wants to make it out of the projects.  Okay fine.  It is also fair to say that as a white woman I know nothing about the kind of racism a black man could face in the American South.  Fair enough.  So let me present a very short list of other notable black men who got out from under Jim Crow:

Arthur Ashe:  It has been a long time since I have heard his name, but Arthur Ashe was first in lot of things.  He grew up in Richmond Virginia & while not a child of the projects, Richmond was a segregated city & Arthur, a small skinny runty boy was no one's idea of a future star athlete.   He did all the normal things, including serving a tour in the USArmy as well as many extra-ordinary ones.  Before there was Tiger Woods, or even Serena or Venus Williams, there was Arthur Ashe.  He used his position as a world class athlete to promote athletics, setting up scholarship programs, publishing historical research, ultimately earning an EMMY for the production of same.  He died of AIDS, most likely received during a blood transfusion, but not before making a name for himself as an activist, in AIDs awareness, but also against apartheid.  Like Vick, Ashe has a famous arrest record:  he was arrested outside the South African embassy protesting Apartheid & a few years later outside the White House protesting a crackdown on Haitian refugees.

Rubin Carter:  Paterson, NJ is not the deep south, but there is plenty of racism to go around.  Hurricane, as he is better known, was indeed a violent child & a violent man, but he is most famous for the crime he did not commit, largely because of the years he served anyhow.  Upon leaving prison, he left New Jersey, he left the US, but rededicated his life to helping others who had been wrongly convicted.

Too famous for you?  Maybe you need someone a little more every-day-joe?  Okay:

Vivien Thomas:  his grandparents had been slaves & his formal education ended with high school.  His personal ambitions dissolved with the onset of the Great Depression & his plan to become a doctor took a backseat to feeding his family.  He took a job cleaning up after the laboratory animals at Vanderbilt University.  The rest, as they say, is history, but at the time I am sure it seemed like the end of a dream.  With  Alfred Blalock, Vivien Thomas developed surgical techniques & tools that changed the field forever.

Cory Booker:  Actually, Booker grew up in affluent surroundings, prestigious education, the whole package.  His parents were among the first blacks employed by IBM, they were the ones that fought tooth & nail to scramble up.  Booker is notable for scrambling back.  For eight years, starting when he was elected to Newark's City Council, Booker lived in one of the city's housing projects:  no heat in winter, no hot water ever.  He left not long before the demolition crews arrived, relocating to a smaller building in one of Newark's most ravaged neighborhoods.  Early last month, he won another term as Mayor.

& for our final look-see how about someone who did everything he could to escape Jim Crow laws, only to be dragged back down by them:

Charles Drew:  I remember learning about Dr. Drew in a film strip (yes I am old enough to remember film strips) on notable negroes; I think the series was even called Notable Negroes in Science.  The film strip was not trying to be disrespectful, that is what many black people called themselves when I was a child.  Anyhow, Drew was born in Washington DC, a community still infamous for poverty.  Attended school, graduated Amherst, so he must have been studious, graduated  McGill University's medical program, taught at Howard College, but mostly he revolutionized the way blood was stored for transfusions, how the white & red blood cells were removed so that it could be handled as plasma.  Without his work, I know I would not be alive today, nor would my sister, nor just about anyone else who ever needed a transfusion.  Still, what I remember most about that film strip though was his death.  He died as a result of a car accident; he might have survived but the closest hospital was a white only hospital & he was not admitted. 

Everything that everyone of these men did could have been bettered by Vick.  He could have donated money, he could have been a spokesman for causes, he could have spoken at colleges & churches, he could have set up summer camps for kids just like himself.  There is almost no too-small effort he could not have made that would not have made a huge difference.  Instead he worked hard, paid much to make sure that violent despicable life people try to give him credit for outgrowing stayed with him.

I said it did not need to be asked, but I am asking anyhow:  what would Michael Vick do?  As far as I can tell, Michael Vick would do everything he could to keep the violent, limited life anyone in their right mind would work to leave behind with him always.  He reminds me of nothing so much as a turtle; you can take that turtle anywhere in the world & it will never leave it's shell.

Batik with 1/2 border for December

For the Facebook Quilt Block Swap in December (12/2010) we are doing two things:

FIRST a return to the more free-form block pattern choices of the first two swaps
SECOND limiting the fabric-type quite strictly for the first time ever.

You can make any 6" finished/6.5" unfinished block of your choosing.  Any 4-patch, any 9-patch, any block you like.  After you have completed the blocks, please add a 1.5" finished/2" unfinished border to two adjacent sides. (making it a 8" unfinished/7.5"  finished block, in the end).  In other words, once you have completed your blocks of any pattern you choose, so long as they are 6.5"/6" finished, add a 2" x 6.5" strip to one side, press & then add a 2" x 8" strip to an adjacent side.  & that's it, as far as block pattern goes.

The fabric is a different matter.  You must use only batiks or hand dyed fabrics.  No exceptions to this requirement.  If you send blocks with some batiks & some not-batiks (fabrics printed to look like batiks do not count as batiks), you will get your own blocks back.  More than half batiks/hand dyes with less-than-half other fabrics & you will still get them all back.  This is an all or nothing requirement for this swap, but I am hoping the flexibility with block choice will make up for it (& maybe let everyone use up scraps from a previous batik project).

All swap blocks are always due the last Saturday of an even numbered month, in this case December 25th.  Blocks will be swapped Sunday the 26th & brought to the post office on Monday, December 27th.  I do realize this is Christmas day & there is in fact no regular mail delivery on that Saturday.  Last year there were a few people who thought the deadline should be extended when the last Saturday was 12/26; the deadline was not moved & I do not know if they choose to sit the swap out or not, but we ended up with plenty to swap from.  In this case there are six months to prepare, which I feel is more than enough time for anyone to get their blocks in the mail to be here before December 25th.  As for making the deadline earlier to get blocks swapped & back out before Christmas, I expect to be in Honolulu during PacifiChem & then on until the 24th, so we would be looking at moving the deadline up by almost a month, which would just be silly.  Don't worry about your blocks going AWOL while we are gone, we have a caretaker who deals with everything (livestock, mail, water pumps, etc.) while we are away. 

In addition to your blocks you should include a return envelope of the same size with the same postage & your address already on it. If you are swapping from outside the US, please include the addressed envelope & a fat quarter to off-set the cost of your return postage (US swappers could do this, too, I suppose, but a fat quarter is more costly than the postage would be).

//I am having trouble posting this, I think because of the pictures, so this block swap direction is going up without pictures.  I am hoping because the block itself can be anything so long as it is 6.5" unfinished/6" finished that lack of photo-samples will not be a problem.  As for the border I hope this sketch helps; these are the FINISHED dimensions.

Funky town for October 2010

The October block swap has been a challenge for me.  The only clear front runner/popular requests have either been done recently or are already scheduled or are very similar to blocks we just did/are about to do as part of a special swap (think "stars").  Also, last year's October block had a limited showing, despite being a much requested block, I suspect because of the many things going on in September/October.  I don't know about the rest of you, but I actually have bigger chunks of free time in November/ December than I do as school starts, the days gets shorter & the whole slide through Rosh Hashannah & into Yom Kippur happens (which is doubly odd as we have no children & A is not  himself observant, but there you are).

So I decided that I would take a chance & instead focus on an idea rather than a specific block or color/fabric scheme.  So without further ado: we are making a funky town, each block being different building in our town.  I realize that this block is only likely to appeal to a minority within our overall swap group as we usually lean towards more traditional pieced blocks; I promise this is not a sign that is changing.  This is just a short summer-is-truly-over vacation to Funky Town & the next swap will ease us back to more conventional pieced blocks.

There are a variety of basic house blocks all over the internet, in books, on software.  By & large they are a central square or rectangle with a smaller rectangle representing door somewhere in there & a triangle-more-or-less shape for the roof.  These pieces are by no means set in stone (bahahahahahaha); any building you can come up with that fits in the overall dimension of 9.5" unfinished/9" finished is just groovy.

I made a few houses with something interesting in the windows.  This particular house is NOT part of the swap but was my contribution to a larger quilt on the theme "home for the holidays".  It just photographed the best.

For others I focused on the landscaping, or as in my case, city-scaping.  & do not feel you need to limit yourself to houses.  Schools, hospitals, barns, shops, churches, synagogues, go crazy.  Plant gardens, fly flags or anything else you can think of. 

Still others I just kinda winged it, liberated quilt-style.  My only self-imposed rule was to keep anything pointy or important more than 1/2" in from the border, so it would not be trimmed away.  The frequently seen white outer border is more about my stash than any planning.

As you look at traditional house block patterns, you will see that many have a border around the whole thing but others do not.  For this reason you might want to make your block slightly smaller & then add a border.  That being said, there is no reason any special background feature (that does not involve potential clipped points) cannot be carried out to the edge.  The NYCityscape block could lose up to 1/4" on all four sides & it would not make much difference. 

If you are still on the fence &/or completely clueless what you might do with these blocks: one set of six (your five to swap & one you keep for yourself) would make happy place mats or even a table runner.  Four blocks could be a fun wall hanging.  & any number at all could make a cute fabric book along the lines of the bingo block color book.  As of this posting, a 6th block quilter has not yet come forward.  These could make a kids quilt, but I honestly do not think they are just for kids.  They could just as easily work for a Habitat for Humanity quilt or a cheerful Hospice quilt or...don't let me limit your thinking.  If someone is interested in being the 6th block person, you must make that request through the FaceBook Quilt Block Swap Group.

& last but not least, if you absolutely don't feel up to striking out on your own, Quilter's Cache has a very traditional, very conventional Schoolhouse Block that wants only the small border to "size it up".

I also made a few for which I can give you no pattern because I just went through the scrap bag, looking here anything that might work & free-worked it.  I also searched the interweb for more ideas.  You can find inspiration at  FKA Park City Girl, Tallgrass Prairie Studio, & two of my all time favorites: Lisa Boyer & Gwen Marston

Anything goes color split 9-patch variation for August

It is hard to think about quilting over the summer vacation.  Even if you are not on vacation exactly, your kids might be.  Or your potential house guests.  Also, like the February block, the August block only gives you two months to get everything together & mailed for swapping.  So, I  thought I would go with a simple classic:  the color split 9-patch.

The August 2010 block swap block is made of eight squares & one 1/2-square triangle.  One half of  the block is primarily one color, the other half is primarily another & the 1/2-square triangle is half&half.  This is a good scrap blaster, because no piece starts larger than 3 inches (& most start smaller).  For those who participated in the December 2009 Bingo Block swap, yes I am basing the cut piece dimensions on those used in that block so you can mostly use the leftovers from those scraps.  You're welcome.

In the past I have suggested a theme for the fabrics:  kids or patriotic or floral.  This month the theme is get this (s)crap out of my sewing room.  Anything goes, so long as the color divide is maintained.

For myself, I strip pieced those parts that could be strip pieced & made the 1/2 square triangles without having to deal with open bias edges BUT how you put the blocks together yourself makes no-nevermind to me.  I often cut a strip from the beginning &/or end of a piece of fabric to even the edge up & these strips just kind of pile up, but you could work with squares instead of strips, if that is how your stash is arranged.  As for the 1/2 square triangles, this is the same technique I blogged in floral sunny lanes, but if you would rather put them together another way-go for it.

The 8 individual squares (or strips) should be 2.5" unfinished/2" finished.  Four should be primarily one color the other four should be primarily another color.  If you are cutting down a large &/or boldly patterned fabric, please double check that the square you cut out meets the color requirement.  For example, a fabric patterned in large red roses may very easily produce smaller green squares if you are cutting up just the stem; I know because this is exactly what happened to me.  As you can see, there are other colors in the fabrics I grabbed BUT no one looking at anyone square would say it was anything other than either obviously intended as  red or obviously intended as blue.  As for your own color choices, please feel free to represent any two of the following colors:  red, orange, yellow, green, blue, pink or purple.

The layout is:

• First row color 1, color 1, color 2.  
• Middle row color 1, 1/2 square triangle, color 2.  
• Third row color 1, color 2, color 2.

As always, we swap in sets of five.  You can make (& swap) more than one set, just keep it to sets of five.  You are very welcome to submit a 6th block for every set you send (or more, or just for one-any & all are welcome).  You will still get only five swapped blocks back, the 6th blocks go to a member of the group who has requested them (after participating in a certain number of swaps) to make community quilts.  The guidelines for requesting 6th blocks are on the Facebook group page but the highlights are the quilt must go to a person or persons (not a raffle, not an auction, not for fund raising), through an organization that distributes quilts, or uses them in their facilities.  6th blocks are not for gifts for family members or friends, etc.  If you think this might interest you, you MUST join the Facebook Quilt Block Swap Group & make the request there.  As it happens, this swap is looking for a 6th block person; usually the kids blocks have long lists of pick-mes but I timed this one badly, what with summer vacation & all the waiting list people asked to be re-waiting listed.  The sad thing is this EXACT thing happened with last December's kids block.  You would think I would learn.  Oh well.

Blocks are due the last Saturday of an even numbered month.  In this case Saturday, August 28th.  Blocks will be swapped on the 29th & will be brought the to the post office Monday, August 30th. 

& for anyone looking for a little music to get them started - I give you Mister Porter à la Miss Gaynor.  Or if you prefer, something even more vintage.

It is block swap block time again, 2010-2nd half

The next three posts are the directions for the next three Facebook Quilt Block Swap Group's swap blocks.  If you are not interested in quilt block swapping, just skip this message:

We swap blocks in sets of FIVE- you send five blocks & get five blocks sent by other swappers back.  You can make as many sets of five as you like, joining only those swaps that interest you & skipping those that do not.  We also collect 6TH BLOCKS, that is a block in addition to the five, that goes to one of the group who makes a community project type quilt.  There is a little more to it than that, actually, & you can find all the details on the group page.  Lastly, you also need to include a self addressed, stamped envelope to return your blocks to you.  Envelopes with insufficient postage will take a very very long time to get back to you so the best idea is to use the same size & weight of envelope you sent your blocks in & affix the same postage.

If you are not currently part of the swap group, but you are interested in joining our swap group, you are very welcome BUT it would make my life A LOT easier if you joined the group through Facebook.   Log into Facebook, search "quilt block swap" & find the Quilt Block Swap Group.  There will be a picture of the current block as the profile photo.  Ask to join & you should be approved within a day or two.

If you are not on Facebook, but still interested in swapping & just need the mailing address, leave a comment with your e-mail address & I will send you that information but be warned:  I really cannot do trouble-shooting, take future block suggestions, handle requests to receive 6th blocks, etc. via individual e-mail messages. 

The blocks & their deadlines are:

 - Saturday, August 28, 2010:  Anything goes color shaded 9-patch
 - Saturday,  October 30, 2010: Funky town
 - Saturday, December 25, 2010: Batik with 1/2 border  --yes, the 25th & since there is no regular USMail that day you should really aim for Friday the 24th & anyone who swapped last December can tell you that while generally packages brought to the window at the post office by the Tuesday before the deadline make it on time, in December the cut-off it is more like the Friday before that. Sooo, think about mailing this one no later than Wednesday December 15th.

Blocks are swapped on Sunday & brought to the Post Office on Monday (unless Monday happens to be a holiday & then it is the next not-holiday day).

It is fine if you want to mail multiple swaps together, just remember that if you do not include a return envelope for each swap, you will not get anything back until the last swap.  There is no limit on how many sets you can make for any swap, just please submit in sets of five (& maybe one more to donate to the 6th block quilter).  Within any set, the blocks should be more or less the same, but each set of five can be very different within the guidelines of the particular swap.