Have been slamming away on a quilt, so not too much to report or share.  I did manage to read a novel by Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty.

The book is well written, and is about the art and gallery scene in New York City.   It makes me very glad I have nothing to do with it!  I learned a good bit, including that the main character, Lacey Yeager, is utterly unsympathetic.  As a result, I can’t say I’d recommend reading this book, mostly because I can’t imagine writing an entire book about such a “yuck” person.

On the other hand, the writing was quite good—Steve Martin is turning into one of my heroes:  funny, good actor, musician, author, multi-talented, hard working, always exploring…these are things that bump people up in my estimation! (think Paul Simon and Paul McCartney!).  Anyway, I’d gladly read another book my Martin–hopefully one with a nicer main character.

However, one quote made the entire book worth it.  At the end of chapter 61, on p. 271, is this exchange between Lacey and her sort-of-beau, an FBI agent specializing in art fraud, about a painting by a Russian of a moonlit night, with the light reflecting on the water of the harbor:

“Tell me why you like it.”

“Well, it’s pretty.  Kind of lonely looking.  And it’s symbolic don’t you think?”

“Symbolic?”

“That’s where something in the picture stands for something else.  Like truth or something.”

“Thank you.  So what’s symbolic about it?”

“Remember, this is not my best subject.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Well, the water, to me, represents the earth and all the things that happen on the earth, reality.  And the moonlight represents our dreams and our minds.”

“And…”

“And the reflection…well, I guess the reflection represents art.  It’s what lies between our dreams and reality.”

WOW…. “art…it’s what lies between our dreams and reality”…how amazing is that?   That is SO IT!  Thank you, Mr. Martin!

And the birthday:  today is the 112th anniversary of my dear old Daddio-o-o-o-o’s birth in 1899.  He lived until 1995, and died two days before I was scheduled to arrive for a visit.  He hadn’t been in the nursing home for four weeks.  Mama said he asked every time she went to visit when he would come home.  After about two weeks, he stopped asking.  I think he realized he wasn’t going home, and he just gave up.  He lived an amazing, generous, long and interesting life.  Think of it…he was born literally during the reign of Queen Victoria, in the era of gas lights and horse and buggy.  When he died, man had landed on the moon and computers were on the rise.  Wow.  I hope I live long too, then that I get to see him and my brothers (his sons from a first marriage, and both gone) again and we can re-live it all.  Happy Birthday, Daddy.

This blogpost continues my work on a quilt inspired by Kathy Schmidt’s Cell Block Blues pattern from her bestselling Rule-Breaking Quilts book.  (Check here for my book review.) At first I thought all my blocks (and I had no idea how many I would make or how large this quilt might be) would have bright hand-dyeds (all made by me!) as the stems and veins.  As the quilt took shape, though, I decided a bit of subtle would be a good think and make a good transition to the outer edges of the quilt which, in my mind, would be the remaining squares and rectangles from the original ten fat quarters of batik.

Another set of blocks, adding some blues to the bright mix

At this point, the design wall was getting crowded, so I removed the other “stuff” so I could spread out my blocks into what might become the final quilt.  It is fairly unusual for me not to have a final image inside my head before I begin, so I was enjoying working this way for a change.  It definitely won’t become my “new favorite” way, but I sure had fun with this one.  You’ll notice in the photo above that there are blobs of white-white fabric and dark-dark, and it got tricky getting the direction of the stems correct and preventing same-fabric from touching the same-fabric in another block! In this case, contrast is good.

The quilt grew and grew; finally, I decided I had enough blocks.

By this point, I had as many blocks as I thought I needed.  My design wall is 6 feet wide at the widest point, and I had just about reached that size, which I decided was plenty large.  As the blocks went up, I scattered the colors and the direction of the blocks as if they were swirling upwards in an autumn gust.  The bright colors are clustered in the center with the blue-vein blocks on the edges.  Now it was time to fill in the pieces.  To my dismay, I didn’t take in-process photos until after the whole thing was sewn together.

Filling it in to become a rectangle

The top is now about 40×60 inches.  This is what is left of the initial ten fat quarters, with a 6×12 inch ruler for scale:

what's left out of 2 1/2 yards of fabric (ten fat quarters)

Not much!   Seven of the ten original fabrics are pictured here.  The rest is totally used!  The white one on the right and the dark blue on the left were purchased for value-range (i.e. light-light and dark-dark) and were essential, but they really grab your eye almost too much so I stuck to the medium-dark to medium to medium-light fabrics for most of the work.

When I went to the Batiks by Design website it appeared some of the fabrics I used were sold out, so I called the store and thankfully they still had some of them, so my outer border and binding will not have to feature prints not used in the center.  I’m so glad they were willing to custom cut some pieces for me to match what I already had. Here’s to good quilty service…thanks ladies!  I’m planning on a narrow inner border of the bright colors all the way around the top shown above (probably a finished 3/8 or 1/2″ wide multicolored strip), with a wider (3-5 inches?) of squares and rectangles of the blues, with a slightly darker blue batik for the binding.  What do you think?  Suggestions?  I’m thinking maybe some of those larger rectangles on the outer edge need to get sliced up with some of the medium-value pieces set into them.  Maybe with some angles? Let me know what you think!

OH MY is my face red!  I thought I had reviewed Kathy Schmidt’s Rule-Breaking Quilts book EONS ago (available online from AQS here and from Amazon here), and I can’t find a trace of a review on my blog!  Hanging my head in embarrassment!   This is a great, fun book, with wonderful improvisational piecing techniques and a brilliant discussion of fabric choices, and somehow my insane teaching schedule and life ran away with me.  So, to do what I should have done about seven months ago when I think I was the very first person to order her hot-off-the-press book from her, let me give a ringing review of this book:

There are many books out there with various takes on how to do improvisational or contemporary piecing, but this one does it so well.  Kathy begins with laying the groundwork for her quilts, which are made with fat quarters and don’t take a ton of time or materials, discussing color, fabric choices, and design.

The first quilts use a stack-and-slash cutting technique and only straight seam piecing, which means they are accessible to true beginning quilters.  As you read through the book, the projects progress to intermediate level work.   Now…about the names:  this book is all about “escaping the quilt police,” you know—those people who say “you can only do it this way, precisely, exactly.”  Phhht!   As you know, I believe in understanding what rules are, WHY they are, and what will happen if you break them (for example, sewing a bias edge to a bias edge can lead to a stretched seam….if you can sew bias to straight grain, the seam will be more stable, but sometimes your fabric design doesn’t run the direction you’d like if you fussy cut a piece).  Here’s the colorful Table of Contents:

Sorry about the blurry photo…it was that or glare, so I chose slighty blurry.

Kathy’s projects throughout the book plays humorously with the theme with  titles like JayWalking, Disturbing the Piece, Moving Violations, The Frame Up, Organized Crime and so on. I’ve been thinking of a future book, and Janome America has been generous with me yet again and provided me with a Horizon 7700 sewing machine.  I thought as a real treat to myself, I would make my first new quilt (not just a class sample) on the new machine be one from Kathy’s book.  I’ve always liked improvisational curved piecing, so chose Cell-Block blues to try.

Here’s what the quilt looks like that Kathy made:

Cell Block Blues features improvisational curved piecing with gentle curves

In looking at the diagrams, I thought the cuts looked like the stem and veins of a leaf, so I decided I’d try splicing a color into the seams (sigh…I can NEVER do anything easy!). Believe it or not, the quilt above and the one pictured below are from the same general pattern, which gives you an idea of just how versatile this book is!  Here are the first few blocks I made:

I’ll do future posts on my process and the results, but I have to say I’m thrilled!

And I will admit it right here:  I am so proud of Kathy and how well her book is doing!  Back when I was working on writing my book, Kathy (who is on a Yahoo group for our Janome sewing machines that I’m on also) wrote to ask about how I approached AQS, what I was doing, and so on.  As I went along, I shared with her what was happening, she’d ask questions of me, and we are happily moving forward with a bestseller each!  So yes, I’m biased…. but I think there is good reason!  And even more fun, Kathy took a class from me at the NQA show in Ohio this summer and we got to eat dinner together and gab; here’s a link to the blogpost and a link to Kathy’s Blog.  I can’t wait to share more of my quilt; thank you Kathy for this wonderful book!

Patsy Thompson is a quilter, author and DVD maven (with seemingly unlimited energy sources!) who loves quilted feathers…the more of them, the more intricate and hyperquilted, the better!  She recently shared her book Feather Adventures! with me:

The book is aptly subtitled:  The Machine Quilter’s Guide to Creating Stunning and Innovative Free Motion Feather Designs, and tantalizingly adds “Volume One”  (that’s hidden in the glare of the camera flash…sorry ’bout that).     The information in this book is good for machine quilters using both home and longarm (on a track) quilters…it’s all about design and building or creating your colorful feathers.

The book is organized into the following chapters:

1. The Basic Freeform Feather
2. Feathers with Stitched Spines
3. Start Thinking Outside the Box!
4. Hyperquilting!
5. Hyperquilting Special Effects
6. Epilogue

Patsy proceeds from an intro-level feather to increasingly complex variations on the theme, guiding you one step at a time.  The designs at the back at first might appear to be overwhelmingly complex, but as you follow Patsy’s clearly laid out process, you can see that these seemingly-complicated designs are a fairly simple, straightforward process.   As I was flipping through the book when it arrived, I had my first “smack-self-upside-head” moment:  use a flexible ruler to create the spine, then flip it over to mirror image the design OR simple move the curved ruler to repeat the motif.  DUH!   Why didn’t I think of that?  Thank you, Patsy!  (Read more about how on pages 14-15.)

As you read and play around with designs through the chapters, you can see how Patsy has used different variations to come up with feathers that while structurally the same look quite different.   It is up to you to decide how much is just right for your quilt!

The Stitched Spines are some of my favorite variations…. I can see using these ideas as a jumping off point for using feathers creatively in my quilting.  Even though I tend to make pictorial art quilts, I’ve already begun incorporating traditional quilting motifs.  In the quilt of my son playing his guitar (final post with finished quilt here) , I used several large feathered vines to quilt the background, and think with the inspiration of Patsy’s variations, I’ll be using them even more.

I really liked the curlicues in the photo above, too…. this particular wreath has traditional feathers on the outside, a decoratively stitched spine, and the curlicues on the inside…way cool!

Then Patsy goes over the top with a term I think she coined, Hyperquilting!  Although this might be a bit too much on many quilts (and would get lost on print fabric!), it is sure a fun idea, and may spark new ideas in how to use thread in your quilting beyond just feathers (yes, Patsy….. we all love feathers, but there are other things too!).  The only thing I wish for is more photos (of course?  what quilter doesn’t want more pictures?), especially of the entire quilt pictures.  The detail shots are perfect for achieving the aim of this book:  to teach us how.  But I’d love to see some inset photos that show the entire quilt to the edges so we can get the overall picture.   I’ll look forward to future volumes!

The book is available in a number of places, including from Patsy, here.  While you’re visiting her site, check out her blog…she has LOTS of great information there, too!

WOWIE ZOWIE!  See these?

Those are probably my two favorite magazines in quilting, ever:  Quilter’s Newsletter and Quilting Arts. And they BOTH gave my book great reviews!

When I first found quilting in 1988, I found Quilters Newsletter Magazine shortly thereafter.  I promptly subscribed, and ordered every back issue I could get, and have read ever issue since cover to cover.  That is 1984 to 2010 and still going.

Back in 2001, I went into the grocery store in Friday Harbor (San Juan Island, Wash., where I used to live) and discovered the second issue of Quilting Arts magazine.  I went home, called the phone number, ended up speaking with the editor Pokey Bolton (and discovered we both went to San Domenico School, albeit about 14 years apart, when we were kids) and subscribed.  I have read every issue of that one cover to cover.

Whooda thunk it…. BOTH my favorite magazines have not only reviewed my book, ThreadWork Unraveled, but given it GREAT reviews.  THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

In Quilters’ Newsletter (April 2010 issue), there is a four-page article on Staff Picks…and guess what number ONE is?  MY BOOK!

Here’s a closer picture:

To say that I am dancing a major Snoopy Dance understates things in such a major way!

And here’s p. 82, the Book Review section in Quilting Arts magazine, April/May 2010 issue:

And again, a closer view:

It is so wonderful when you worked hard to do your best, and then have others think you’ve done well.  Thanks so much… and Pippa, the managing editor of Quilting Arts, said the nicest thing… that I am at my best when encouraging others:  “the book’s most inspirational sections encourage quilters to use a needle and thread as they would a paintbrush and paint, creating fine nuances of shading and detail that can’t be captured solely with cloth.  Her advice ranges from the technical to the theoretical as she guides the reader through design considerations such as light source and coloring.  Five stitching projects are included, but Smith encourages quilters to experiment,”  Wearing my teacher hat, it doesn’t get much better than that!
WOOOOHOOOOOO….that shaking in the upper Northeast is not an earthquake, that’s me Snoopy Dancing and being happy all over again!