My Garden Growing

I thought it was about time for a Grandmother's Flower Garden Update. I'm happy to see that I have accomplished quite a bit in the last months - as it should be, since this is the only project I really work on consistently. I'm also happy to find that I like it pretty well - all along I've been worried that I would end up hating the color scheme since it's not my usual thing. According to "math" I have enough flowers done to make it twin size (about 60 x 80), although it didn't really look that big to me laid out. Regardless, I want it to be double size, so I can either make nine more flowers or do a border. I like the idea of doing more flowers, even though it's more time consuming, however I am out of suitable fabric - both in my stash and mom's stash (I'm pretty sure I exhausted the options on the last trip home).



So to do more flowers I could either purchase nine more fabrics ( a quarter or an eighth is really enough) or try to swap for them, which might be more satisfying, but also logistically more complicated. All the fabrics I've used so far are good quality quilting cottons. All the blessed hours of handwork that are going into this make me think of it as somewhat of an heirloom, and that makes me want to stick with quality fabrics. The other option is that I could forget 9 more flowers and just do a border. I feel like GFG quilts often (or "usually"?) don't have borders, and I also like the idea of an all over design. However a border would probably be easier than more flowers. I don't know; I'll be mulling it over for a while...



I've been meaning to blog about the four seasons tree quilt seen in this post. I was really struck by it, because it's soooo much like a quilt idea I've had in my idea book for at least the last 7 years. I scribbled a VERY similar tree on an order pad one night at work way back when I worked for Steak 'n Shake. I had the idea that I would do it as a four block "four seasons" quilt. I tucked the page from the order pad into my idea binder where it still is to this day. No one else ever saw it or knew about it. It just amazes me that two human brains could independently come up with the same thing like that, although there's absolutely no other explanation. (I know it's not the most complicated or unusual idea in the world, but still...) I suppose it's possible that we somehow both saw the same something that inspired us, although I don't even remember any particular inspiration. But maybe this kind of thing really happens all the time? Anyway, there's not much point to this except to say that I'm fascinated by it. Makes me wonder about the times when people get up in arms about having their idea "copied". I'm sure some people really do copy sometimes, and that sucks. But this proves to me that it is possible to independently have the same idea...

Thanks Cheri!

Many thanks to Cheri for mentioning my salvage baby quilt in her excellent blog jovaliquilts. If by some chance you are reading this and you don't know Cheri, swing 'round and check it out. I especially love what she's doing with fungly.

I have to admit that I really love the fungly craze and can't wait to jump on the band wagon as soon as I'm anywhere near my stash. Another of my favorite fungly projects can be seen here.

In the meantime my work with salvage fabric continues. Today I was working on one of the pillow case quilts that was inspired by the great linen closest clean out. It's the first one I've attempted, and today I decided...that I dislike it enough to abandon the project. That's right, abandon it completely. That's saying a lot for a person who usually thrives on the challenge of "saving" wayward projects. But this one is just not inspiring me AT ALL, and my sewing time is WAY too limited to spend it on something I don't like. I was working on this particular project because I intended it for a friend here, but she recently made some comments about really preferring wild and crazy quilts and this one was super subdued yellows and tans. Now I think I can release myself from it and move on to other projects that I think I can actually get interested in...

In the meantime, I am once again trying to plot the course for the next phase of my life. First of all I'm trying to decide if I'll commit to staying here for six additional months or leave in October when my original commitment is up. Then I have to make some kind of decision about what I want the next step to be...probably more experimenting with different jobs/experiences till I hit on the right thing. But of all the possible options what will I choose to do next??? I told my mom I wanted to teach quilting to disadvantaged women...anyone know where I can get a full time job doing that? Speaking of Mom, she is taking a week long class with Carol Taylor on an island in Lake Superior this week...what a life!

Oh one last thing about the salvage baby quilt...the woman I was hoping to give it to had her baby two months early...and it was a boy! Oh well...

Vacation Show and Tell

Wait, what's that??

Could it be...?

It is! A quilt!





I know it looks pretty much just like the pictures of the finished top...but the point is, it's not! It's actually a 100% finished quilt, ready to be put in a box and mailed to my newlywed friends. I'm really pleased with it. I basically completely hated the quilting when I was doing it; I felt it was very "beginner". Which makes sense, as I am still very much a beginner when it comes to this whole "machine quilting" thing. But once it was bound, washed, and fluffed up nicely I found it didn't really look bad at all. It just looks like a quilt. (The back, to be fair, still does not look great. But it's not really about the back...)

I feel so great to have it done - that's at least one finish for the year 2008, and at least one finish for my time spent in Texas. And it's done within one month of the wedding it's a gift for...my best finish time ever on a wedding gift. (I'm about to start quilting a quilt that I intended to be a wedding present for a wedding in 2005!!! I'm still going to give it to them, if it ever actually gets done.)

And amazingly that's not the only thing I've accomplished this week. (Well, I have been holed up in a house talking to no one...this is my vacation!) I also finished a baby quilt top out of all salvage fabrics. This used to be a sheet, three blouses, and a pair of pajama pants:





Design wise it's super simple, but it's sweet and soft and will make a nice blanket for a baby girl. (I have one expectant mother in mind...I'm convinced it will be a girl, but we don't actually know yet.) I'm finding it hard to photograph because the colors are pretty subtle...here's a close up:



It's about 30"x30". I hope I will finish it soon rather than letting it languish in the "top" stage. I'm a little bit torn about whether I should use salvage material as batting, thereby making it a 100% recycled quilt, or go ahead and use the fusible batting that I have tons of right now. I think I might as well use the fusible. The only reason I can think of to use salvage (besides doing it on principle) is that I would probably use a flannel sheet and that would make it more lightweight. And that might be good?? I'm not sure. Decisions, decisions.

Today is the last day of vacation, and although I have a lot to do today, I hope to do some rotary cutting so I can have some things "ready to sew" for the limited craft time that I do get back at the house. I think I will be more likely to work on something if a lot of the "thinking" is already done...

All my best to the blogosphere! I've had a great time catching up on quilt blogs and discovering new ones this week...although now it's back to fully neglecting them...

Charm Squares

I did some sewing so I am checking back in here. It is the same project I was working on a couple posts ago, but I actually assembled the top finally and put a border on so it is ready to be basted and quilted.



A friend who I was close to in college got married over the weekend - actually the groom was a friend of mine, too, in college. I did not have the means to make it to Washington DC for the wedding, but I decided that I wanted to finish this quilt for them - ideally within the month. I ordered my favorite fusible bat to speed the process along, so hopefully when it gets here I'll be able to move forward with basting and quilting and get it in the mail soonish.



With the border it is 60"x70".

I have another week of vacation available to me whenever I decide to take it now, so I'm trying to figure out a plan that would allow me to get some sewing in. I've been thinking very quilty but not actually doing much - but at least I finally got my machine out!

Wrapped In Tradition

Last week or two weeks ago or something I saw a really cool exhibit at the local art museum. The exhibit was American Indian Trade Blankets from the collection of Dale Chihuly and glass works of his inspired by the blankets. The glass was not that exciting to me, but the blankets were gorgeous. The color combinations and patterns were really unusual and fascinating and gave me more than a few ideas for potential quilts. Sadly photography was not permitted, but I found an online slide show of selected blankets from the collection that you can check out here.

Linen Closet

I always have this feeling like I can't post here if I don't have any pictures to post. I know pictures are crucial to a quilt blog, but I guess that doesn't mean EVERY post has to have them, right??

I'm back in Texas and life is busy, but good. I do feel refreshed by my vacation and much cheerfuller about things in general. The difficulties and intensities of life here surely haven't gone away, so I know I will continue to struggle with that to a certain extent. Ultimately, however, life is good!

My sewing machine did come back from Illinois with me, but in the week since I've been back it hasn't made it out of the case yet! Things really have been busy, and this next week will actually be worse. But I'm glad to know that it's here whenever I do get around to it.

The day after I arrived back in Tejas we had what is affectionately known as a "gran limpieza" in the shelter - a.k.a. a day long festival of deep cleaning. I skillfully managed to get myself switched from the guest kitchen cucaracha den (blek!) to the linen closet. The linen closet was, seriously, way too fun. First of all, pillowcases. We had about 400 pillowcases (literally) for our shelter with capacity of 60. That's obviously not including the ones that are currently on people's pillows. We pared it down to about 100 to stay in the linen closet, the rest to be donated elsewhere. About a hundred of the funnest ones with cool vintage patterns etc. got set aside for a series of "pillow case quilts" that I instantly started planning. My co-worker was also fairly insistent that weed out all the flannel sheets as being inappropriate for our desert climate, so I naturally took all of those. I love flannel sheets as backing, and also as a lightweight batting. So I see that as a major score. Add to all that a few particularly interesting non-flannel sheets and a wool blanket or two, and I am suddenly the proud owner of a MASSIVE amount of salvage fabric. So I really hope I find the time to get sewing soon, b/c it is all taking up too much room in my tiny shoe box of a bedroom. I do, however, love it.

Ok, hope to be back kind of soonish, but in the meantime...happy quilting.

Quilt Family

So my vacay (love that word) has almost come to an end - I head back to Tejas the day after tomorrow. I do have something to show for myself, however. Behold, Broken Dishes:



It's roughly 36" x 50". Don't mind all those lumps in the border - my parents floor is just buckled in a lot of places. Kidding! Kidding! That, friends, is just an example of a hastily and poorly applied border. I wanted to get the border on it just so I could say I completed a quilt top on my vacation, so I did a haphazard job of it. But, I'm not going to fix it until some far distant day when I'm actually going to quilt this top, so I decided to share the picture anyway. You still get the overall visual affect, just imagine it with a flat border. (I think normally I'd be too embarrassed to show it, but whatevs. We're all friends here.)

When I made this quilt:



I created a huge stack of leftover half square triangle units. When I made flying geese units for the star points I used the quick piecing method that involves starting with a rectangle and two squares and cutting of the corners eventually. At the time I went ahead and added an extra seam before cutting so that the part I cut off was a completely HST unit and not just two renegade triangles. I put all those extra HST units in a box, not trimmed or pressed, and saved them for someday.

My first day of vacation last Friday I began poking through my stash for a project to play with and came across said HSTs. Fun to play with? Not exactly, but I didn't realize that until I'd already put so much time into it that I wasn't going to back out. But yeah - I had to spend hours trimming and pressing before I could even start sewing. The more hours of chain piece, trim, press, repeat. No worries, though, because I really love the final product.

This is actually the second top I've completed from the scraps of the blue stars quilt. The first was this one:



Now I think of them as a quilt family. Cute, right?

Alternatives

I have been reminded that sometimes there is nothing like your own whiny blog post to inspire you to have a better attitude. In more than three years of blogging (the majority of it over at Rejoice Always) this has happened to me at least a few times. Since writing my previous post I have decided to focus on the positive and make the best out of this situation that I can. My sewing machine most likely WILL be coming back with me from my vacation (which starts next week!!!!!). I may change my mind...ya never know...but I figure it's not doing anyone any good at home. This whole thing would be easier for me to conceptualize if I had any idea what I was going to do in October when my one year commitment here is up. I worry about the difficulty of having more stuff to move out than I can fit in two suitcases, etc. But in reality, I have no idea what's to come after this...so I might as well live in the moment. I'm 25 (almost 26) and I have no idea where my life is going...there, I said it! And really, it's fine...it just makes planning a little harder.

In addition to the Grandmother's Flower Garden, I've thought of a few other quilt-related activities to keep me occupied.

Stash building, for example! No, I haven't spent a cent on fabric in at least six months. But I finally got around to spending some time sorting through clothing donations with an eye toward usable fabric. Sorting clothing donations is not my official "job" here, but anyone can do it when they have a free minute or two. So far I've limited myself to 100% natural fibers - cotton, linen, or wool. I've tried to only grab things that are old enough, ugly enough, ripped enough, worn enough, dated enough, etc. that no one would really want them any more. Sometimes things are borderline, but I just really want them. We get more than enough clothes donated anyway, so I'm definitely not taking the shirt off anyone's back. At this point I'm not going to over think it.

Here are the cottons I've accumulated so far. There's a nice little red/pink/orange color scheme going...



There was an article in the Jan/Feb (I think) Quilter's Newsletter about quilting with linen. I was really inspired by it and am interested in trying it, so I'm also collecting those. (Did I mention that I got a QN subscription for Christmas.) I'm also grabbing every felted wool sweater that comes through. Yes, the vast majority are "pre-felted" so the work is done for me. I suppose smaller people could technically still use those, but I'm taking them anyway. I'm not sure it's ever cold enough here to warrant wool sweaters, but that's coming from a Midwesterner.

Another activity? Quilt books! I'm in a new place with a new library, which means a whole new selection of quilt books to peruse. Somehow that thought just occurred to me out of nowhere (not sure why it hadn't before) and I headed to the library and got my first selections. Fun.

I also discovered that we have some quilts in our linen closet. They are all hardcore utility quilts that were donated by someone at some point in the last thirty years. Our linens get REALLY hard use, and wear out quickly, so quilts aren't the most logical choice. However, seeing them here does brighten MY spirits. I've decided to do some photo documentation. Here's the first specimen: fleece scraps tied to some sort of woven backing. I can't identify the backing, but it's really gauzy. I think you can see a little in this picture how much wear this quilt has gotten.



Anyway...yeah, I'm having fun. And I think on the whole that things are going better around here, which obviously helps me to feel better about everything. The situation here is pretty complex for me right now - I'm turning it over in my brain a LOT. But at the end of the day it is what it is and I have no other recourse than to enjoy the ride...!

PS, about the Grandmother's Flower Garden - the more I work on it the more I realize how long it's going to take! Has anyone out there in the blogosphere actually finished one of these??? Oh well...I look forward to the day I finish the top and can say that I actually hand pieced an entire quilt. I expect that day to coincide roughly with the birth of my first grandchild, hence the name of the pattern.

Grandmother's Flower Garden

'K so as promised (I think) here are a couple of progress pics of my Grandmother's Flower Garden. Here's a few flowers laid out with some of the background...



And here's the rest of the flowers. I don't have enough muslin hexagons basted yet to lay them all out. I can never bring myself to do the muslin ones because they're so comparatively boring, but I need to get cracking on that.



My color scheme is HUGELY inspired by the one I discovered a while back at Astrid Knits Her Way Out. This is the closest I have ever come to straight up copy-catting someone else's quilt but I love it that much...

Things are going fine down here in Tejas. Not great, not terrible. I'm hovering right around the six month mark and definitely feeling like I'm in a mid-year slump. Part of me deeply deeply loves what I'm doing here - I love being of service, even if in the most menial of ways. I love working with immigrants and refugees, and I love sharing their lives in such a deep way. But it's all also very intense - I live at the same shelter I work at, and as expected not being able to "go home" at the end of the day really ups the intensity level. I work around 50-60 hours a week (depending on the week) and it can all get pretty exhausting. Plus, at times I find myself dealing with some REALLY emotionally intense situations, including abusive parents, families divided by deportation, people struggling with mental illness, etc. etc.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about how I need to take care of myself to keep up with this kind of lifestyle. I spend a lot of time in prayer/meditation, and I write in my journal a lot. I try to keep up with family and friends and spend time chilling with new friends here. But I really do miss quilting as a form of self-care and really just wish I had a sewing machine to sit down and do mindless piecing at. I'm still questing for a sewing machine. One option is to get the one I have at the house fixed - but since its a $100 Singer, I'm not really sure it's worth investing in.

There's another option. Technically I have a week of vacation coming up in April. I could fly home with a big empty suitcase and pack my machine into it. I have wanted to avoid spending my vacation at home. Mainly because I spent my week off in January at home and it was a really mixed experience. As great as it was to see my family and friends, it was emotionally difficult, because leaving to go back to Texas again was almost as hard as leaving the first time had been. For lots of reasons...not because I don't love it here, but, well...for lots of reasons. But maybe it would be for the best, especially if getting my machine here meant improving my quality of life for the next six months.

This whole sewing machine quandary really highlights how bad I am at actually making stuff happen at times - thinking about it, wishing for it, sure. But making it happen? Not always my strong suit. Getting my hands on a functional sewing machine shouldn't be THAT hard, but I make it hard somehow...

Anyway, I knew this was going to be an issue going into this whole experience. I guess, though, that I wasn't sure HOW MUCH of an issue it would be. When I studied abroad in Mexico about three years ago I left quilting behind for five months. I missed it then, but not nearly this much. But I guess things are different now - either because quilting has become more important to me in the last three years or because the experience I'm having now is just of really different nature. Now don't get me wrong...I'm not sorry I made the decision to come here. Not at all. Even if I barely do any sewing for the next six months I'll still feel like coming here was the right decision. But it will for sure make me think long and hard about the next phase of my life and the need to make my stash a part of it ;)

ANYWAY, that was a lot of text and no worries if you didn't read it :o) I sound pretty whiny to myself, but it was good for me to get it out.

Many many thanks and greetings to those who are still stopping by!

Quilty Quilts Again

Well well well. I'm tickled pink to finally have some content for this blog!! Not so much just for the sake of blogging, but because it means I actually did some sewing...yeah!!!

I've been on a quest for a sewing machine. I could have mine shipped down here, I guess, but I think it would be SUPER pricey, so I wanted to investigate all other options first. Come to find out that the organization I'm working for actually has FIVE sewing machines. That seemed like good news, until I actually tried them out and discovered that two don't work and the other three are missing the throat plate. (I think that's what it's called...the big flat surface around the needle? (Not the little shiny part but the bigger part where the project rests before sewing? Doesn't seem like you can do much without it...) So I've kind of been in limbo - not sure if it's worth paying to have one of those two machines repaired or if I would be better off buying an inexpensive/used machine or having mine shipped down here. I've also been kind of in limbo due to being broke (although thanks to my income tax refund as of today that is no longer the main issue.)

Well anyway, the other day I was pretty darn sick of waiting, so I went over to a woman's organization where a friend works and borrowed one of their machines. They were VERY gracious and let me sew away happily in their conference room all afternoon...

I had a set of charm squares cut from scraps that I brought from home - 120 squares, enough for a 20x30 layout. I had them in a little pile and had no idea how they were going to go together and no real way to lay them out, so I just started sewing them in to four-patches by color. Because I didn't have a plan while cutting them (surprise surprise) I didn't think I'd be able to get them to all work together as four-patches, but actually they pretty much did. I got all thirty four-patches sewn together in the one afternoon, then took them home to press and work on layout.

Here's my little make shift pressing station:



I was worried about layout because my scraps were really heavy on the blue (because my stash and previous quilts are all super heavy on blue, of course). But this is almost exactly how I laid it out at first go and I actually love it. I only switched two blocks from the original to get here:





So now I just have to find time to get back to the women's center to assemble, or else resolve the sewing machine issue. But no worries whatsoever...I'm so happy to have sewn!!