Stripping Christmas

There are few things I enjoy more than a quilt-y themed swap in which I am not driving the bus.  One of those things that I DO enjoy more is foundation free string quilts.  I have extolled on the virtues of string quilts here before.  In short, I love them.

It took a couple days to find the time.  Yes, I had PLENTY of Christmas fabric.  I sliced my strips & was stuffing envelopes then it was pointed out to me that one of my Christmas strips was actually a Chanukah strip.  So I ended up sending out a baker's 1/2 dozen. 

& I got all but one reciprocal set, seven of them before the deadline even.  I cannot help it, this irks me.  I know, I know life gets in the way.  but 20% of the participants are late & another 10% are never going to show.  I enjoy it when I don't have to be in charge of a swap & I enjoy it when the way our group's swaps are handled are reaffirmed.  I am snarky that way.  Oh & 10% of the strips that got here on time were the wrong width.  Which means that there was a problem with 40% of the swap sets.  Yea, I have no plans to do this again.  For a while, anyhow.

So now I have these strips & I am thinking it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  & this year I am really in the mood for it, despite all the bitching about swaps gone wrong.  & now I get to decide on a pattern.  Any thoughts?

The 12th day of Christmas & a Chinese curse

Those of you who think the winter holiday is a distant memory should know that today is, in fact, the Twelfth Day of Christmas.  I always wonder at people who complain about the commercialism of the holiday, but stop the season with the day gifts are given.  Whatever, this is not the first, last or even close to either time that people will just plain puzzle me.

& I have no business starting the new year pontificating on why other people drop the ball; starting just before Thanksgiving my world has been slipping, sliding fast.  The good news is there is fodder for many upcoming posts originating (or culminating) in these last few weeks.  The bad news is a lot happened in the last few weeks.  Bad news for me, anyhow, while I live in interesting times.

But I am trying to think about right now & what comes next.  My parents are very likely undecorating tomorrow.  They usually leave the tree etc. up through today:  Little Christmas.  Last year, I had lunch with M*******, which was accidental....  We planned to have lunch, I had just lost track of how full-circle it was to spend Women's Christmas with a woman who works in a woman's shelter.  This year I have just finished a project that I would like to deliver & today seems like the right day. 

The larger of the two is the string quilt pattern I often make.  It's quick, it's bright & it's not so fancy that someone won't use it.  There are some quilts or hand knits or whatever that are future heirlooms; mine are more for every day. 

The other, smaller quilt is more or less (more really) the Once Upon A Time quilt from The Modern Quilt Workshop.  Sidebar:  When I was in the business of selling quilt books, I used to tell people there were less than 1/2 dozen quilt books a person really needed to own.  This is one of them.  I also told people that some of the fabric was evil.  You would have to ask M****** & A***** why they did not fire me.  As for the pattern, yes, I have altered it some, added a border of international children (a gift from A**** with her October 2010 swap blocks, left over from a UNICEF fund raiser, I think), etc.  It is still the same pattern really.  & it is for these story quilts, which I make almost compulsively, that I collect all those novelty scraps, participate in I-SPY swaps, etc.

As you may have guessed from the kid-i-ness of these quilts, M******* has been working on a project of her own. 

& that's it, the first post of 2011.

Scraps gone wild

A few weeks ago, when I did the string quilt trunk show, I also got back (temporarily) one of my other quilts.  I consider it a string quilt but no one else does so  I will let you be the judge:

Yes, these are more of the omnipresent Classic Pooh scraps.  Two of my mothers three grandchildren had Classic Pooh nurseries (the other had all trademark figures banned; we are not a family of compromise).  Then there are all the other babies born around me & what with living so near the Magic Kingdom, most people consider Pooh a basic.  Like black.  Or plaid.

It made sense to buy what I saw on sale & just hang on to it.  When I got down to more minuscule pieces, it was hard to just toss them, so I would run them through the machine "just to catch the threads".  Then I would iron them, to practice my ironing...?  They would grow into these odd, amorphous, blobby shapes -much like the man himself- only to be squared off, sewn together & Voila!  Scraps gone wild.

Years after I made this first scraps gone wild quilt top, I came across someone in blog-land (I do not remember who, I would give you credit if I did) who framed her scraps on three sides with white.  She was going for ultimately uniform squares but still it segwayed nicely into what I was already doing.  What with printing a lot of photos on fabric I have a lot of strips of bleached muslin.

So I have started to add scraps, orphans block parts, previously unused scraps gone wild to the strips.  When I have a few in more or less the same width, I attach them.  Then maybe border them in white.  & keep going.

I have become one of those cooks who is more interested in the left-overs than the main course.

Quilters quiz me vis à vis quips & quackery

Apparently some of my friends were astonished that I agreed to do a brief presentation of my string quilts to one of the bees (the Miniature Quilt Bee to be exact). While it is true that I have called the guild that sponsors these bees the Symbionese Liberation Quilt Guild the fact remains that I do still have friends there & when they ask me to do something that does not involve anything from me but to be listened to & admired, I am pretty much willing to do it. It helps of course that this group does not meet before noon. Finally, the SLQG was not actually charging for me to be there while I was expected to donate my time & that was indeed the clincher. No it was not; it has been the clincher in the other direction (group charge but me not get paid). This time the clincher was J*** asking so elegantly if I would "be so kind as to" & of course I said yes.

This is how I happened a few afternoons ago to be standing in the community rec center blathering on about foundation free string piecing. Again.

The group theme is mini-quilts: those small scale replicas of larger quilts, with tiny patterns on tiny bits of fabric held together with tiny stitches. Whereas I consider a 4' by 4' quilt to be on the small side. They have been making mini-string quilts last month, this month; mini-quilts take longer than you would think.

For me, this meant getting together at least some of the string quilts I have made & then flung to the far corners of the US. I wanted to say earth, but although I have sent strings, sample blocks & patterns to Australia & Iraq (they asked for them, no really) that seemed an exaggeration. Although now that I think about it most of my string quilts are in Florida & New England, which are actually the closest corners of the US. Whatever, it meant tracking them down.  Some were just across town, but others had further to travel. 

& track them I did, with varied success.

While not the first I ever made, this is the original pattern.  Concept, too as there were many many classic pooh scraps left over from something.  The first is, I am sorry to say somewhere in limbo.  It left here in March 2008 to be given as a mitzvah for one of my niece's First Communion (yes, we like to mix things up).  & there it has sat, still pending for reasons I am not sure I understand but...I digress.

My sister sent the quilts she & her daughter got one year at holiday time.  Guess which one belongs to the grown woman & which belongs to the child who just painted her new bedroom weirdly orange-red? 


From my mom the first string quilt I made.  I think.  The scraps were from a much larger project & we needed to use them up & clear them out.  & I showed a few others but they are either pretty routine or their pics have already been shown on this blog so Iwill spare you.  As I look over my left-overs though I am realzing I could use some freshening.

Blogger's Quilt Festival

The idea is to choose my favorite quilt, show it & tell the story. This would of course require that I actually take pictures before I ship them off (sad admission for a professional record keeper, but there we are). But there is one quilt I do seem to make over & over again. It appeals to me in so many ways: it is graphic, it is simple while looking complex, & it is so forgiving we taught it at Arbor House helping new residents learn how to use their machines (& prove to them, no really you CAN make something) & that would be the Foundation Free String quilt.

The idea for the blocks had tumbled around in my brain for a while, but gelled when I saw the cover of Gwen Marsten's book Liberated String Quilts. I backed into the sashing (I call it Reconciling the Disparate; I am a big Daisy Parker fan) while trying to put together my guild's bingo block squares & discovering we had a size variation of more than 3/4" across the blocks & a shocking number of the squares were not square. This layout takes care of all that.

I really have lost track of how many of these I have made myself (10? 20?) & how many I have taught (30? more?) & I never stop being amazed at how different each one is, even when people share the same random pile of scraps. But of all of them that I have made, this is my favorite.

When C***** told me she had painted her bedroom black I thought "oh dear" & then when I saw it I could not believe how peaceful & restful it was. Black walls, windows with filmy white curtains & light blue accessories. It sounds gloomy but it really is one of the nicest bedroom color schemes I have ever seen. & this quilt was made especially for her in that room. I think what I love most about this quilt was my complete conviction that it would not come together (the black & white is tooo contrasting, the blue tooooo flat), but I used them because they were the colors I had to work with & it it turned out to be more than the sum of its parts.

//thank you Park City Girl for hostessing this great idea! & welcome to my 100th post.

Stringing along

For a while, I have volunteered regularly at a local shelter that gives mothers with young children (or child or pending child) a place to live while they finish their schooling/get their act together/etc. Do not panic, I am not on the counseling end of things. I have long felt that most people should 1)grow the f*ck up & 2)get off their lazy slacker asses. This is almost the only potentially life changing advice I ever give. Apparently, this is considered 'thin' in the guidance area & outright hostile by anyone on the receiving end...

But the shelter has an arm that provides for in-house employment. Specifically, making grocery-type totes, holiday cards & other small items. The original mission was to prepare the residents for 'real' jobs: how to show up on time, accepting that you cannot always do what you want when you want to, etc. This has changed dramatically over the past year. Because I am not the biggest fan of where it is heading, I have changed what I do to a more behind the scenes, fund raising role. & so this past fall we ran our first (& possibly last) class for the general public. It was the absurdly simple quilt top we use to teach new residents how to use their sewing machines.

To make the blocks, you take leftover strings (old jelly rolls, unused pieces of binding, anything else that may have been cut into strips) & sew them along the long edge. This creates large solid pieces of striped fabric. It does not matter if the seams are not exactly straight or the depths vary; in the end it will all lay flat.

Once you have a piece 'of size', you use the 45degree angle on your ruler & cut them into squares. I find that the best size to cut is the width of my ruler (I have a 6.5" ruler if you are curious). You should use the width of your ruler. It really is just easier to remember.

The only tricky bit about this quilt is storing these blocks while you make as many as you need. The edges are on the bias & will stretch easily. I keep mine in an unused pizza box, but any box that lets them lay flay without too much wiggle room will do.

How many blocks you will need depends on what you do with them. In the beginner class, we assemble them into 4-squares, that is two-blocks x two-blocks. Using my 6.5" ruler as a width-guide, I made three rows of three of these two-by-two blocks (that is 4 x 3 x 3 or 36 original blocks)

The sashing is what I call "reconciling the disparate' from Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpe sagas, if you are curios (start with Ordinary Jack & work your way through). I use it whenever I have blocks that are slightly irregular but need to go together. Take a strip (I like to use old bindings) & sew it to one edge. Take a strip of the same fabric, sew it to one of the adjacent sides. You have just done one half of a log cabin block. Stop now, you are done.

Put the sashed blocks together, alternating the sashing (i.e. the first block has sashing to the left & the top, the next to the left & the bottom, repeat, etc.). In this way you will never need to match seams until you assemble the actual rows. & even then, a screw-up will not show. Much.

If you would like the actual class handouts, leave a comment & I will send them on. I swear I have made 10-15 of these, but I cannot seem to find any pictures except these!