The Coco Chanel/Old McDonald Quilt

 I was three-quarters finished with this peace/love/fashion quilt for a friend when she posted on facebook that her nearly 18-month-old daughter knows a kazillion animal sounds.  My compadre thought it really important that the animals representing the sounds show up on the quilt.

 Laramie, my Chihuahua, totally loved making this quilt. She's been indifferent to others but persisted in spreading out loooonng-ways across this one whenever I worked on it.

 Is that a happy cow or what?  I have the same design in pink but the blue just worked better . . .

 especially once I added the blue slithering snakes ("ssssssss").  The kitty, by the way, is orange for a reason:

because it's the same color as my friend's kitty.

We too the quilt/blankie over this evening, and it was so much fun thinking about how excited the toddler will be when she sees it (she was asleep when we got there), and how much fun she and her mom will have cuddling under it, with one of them thinking admiring the dresses and shoes while the other offers a background chorus of sssss, ribbit, meow, woof, moo, baa, roar, and more.  Ah, friendship; just another word for joy.

Stylin' and Profilin' with Old McDonald

 

Here are some of the fabrics for  the new picnic blanket (a. k. a. pieced quilt) I started this week for a friend.

I was zooming along with the construction when my compadre asked if I'd seen the friend's latest post on facebook. Turns out she'd told her daughter's adoring public about all of the animal sounds the toddler can make now.

My compadre contained himself until the next morning, and then he couldn't stand it any longer. He said, "You ought to put the animals on the quilt."

The what?  Yes, I'd heard correctly. He thought I should put all of the animals the little girl knows onto her mom's quilt.

"They'll look really good," he said.  He didn't need to add that my friend would be doubly delighted.

As an act of friendship, he was bang-on right.  From a design perspective, though, I had to rearrange my idea of what I was making.  See those pretty fabrics above?  The one with the black background shows up in a number of places on the quilt, as does another fabric with a black background.  The motifs for that one are fabulously outlandish boots and purses. It's a styling and profiling quilt balanced by a range of pinks and a few very small rectangles that reflect the presence of a little girl.

Adding animals?  How would that work?  More smoothly than you might think, considering the fabrics I added:

Believe it or not, I had all of these fabrics except the lion (green background, top center) and the snake (Slither slither on the right side, with the white background).

The majority of the piecing was complete, but I was able to substitute good-sized chunks of animal fabric here and there.  The rest of them I fused down slap in the middle of my carefully chosen and organized pinks and peace signs, alleviating the potential boredom that never existed because it was wonderful to begin with.

And now?  What is it now?  I'll post a photo when I get the thing completely finished so you can judge for yourself, but I've got to say that sometimes dumping your original concept when a new one comes along can be a brilliant move.  Already I love thinking about how much fun my friend will have with her daughter, the two of them discovering animals here and there and giggling as they baaa and moooo and ssssss and oo oo ah ah (that's a monkey sound) and ribbit and roar with their blankie wrapped around them.

The Saint Snidely Quilt

 I finished this quilt for my nephew a few days ago.  It's title is "The Saint Snidely Sidewinder and the Unrepentant Uke Boys."

Saint Snidely is the patron saint of ukuleles, vegetarians, mustaches, and the A-Team.

My nephew plays in a ukulele band, and their logo is the mustache on the lower left in the mustache portion of this photo.

Here's the long shot.  I favor just enough quilting to keep the batting where it belongs.  In the case of the cotton batting I used, that means stitching can be 10 inches apart, which is still a little closer than I like.  Even so - this is a picnic blankie and is sure to turn up in the parks and environs of Spartanburg, SC, when Snidely and the gang hit the stage.

The Art of Not Finishing Too Soon

I've been quilting most of the day.  I intended to use purple thread throughout but got bored enough three hours ago to switch to turquoise.  I'm hand-stitching, which is my preferred method, except I'm pretty sure the next few sewn pieces I make are going to feature machine-stitching, period.

I like the presence that hand-stitching gives, but the weekend is over, and tomorrow we're back to my compadre's physical therapy calendar and phone calls to verify other doctor's appointments (we have the date and address for one this week but not a single notation about what time we're to be there) and I suppose I should see if I've left any bills unpaid, like, say, my phone bill - and then to pay them.

Less time to stitch, in other words -- and then there are the variables regarding whether I'll make it to Indianapolis for the EEWC conference this coming weekend, which includes a memorial service for Dr. Nancy A. Hardesty on Saturday night.

How can I decide if I'll be able to go when I can't reach a decision about binding this quilt? I want to use Christmas cookie fabric with a red background and gingerbreadcookie-colored cookies and white icing -- fabric that coordinates not at all with the rest of this piece.

I've thought a lot today about what is lost when someone dies.  In Nancy's case, the records of her books and other publications, of the organizations she founded and took part in, the students she taught and writers she encouraged (I'm one; my first book came to be because she called and told me I was ready to write a book) -- all of the official things she did are recorded and listed and will be known in perpetuity. What most people won't know, though, is that she loved picking blueberries and strawberries; that she made jams and jellies every year; that she was the best cookie decorator who ever hung out at my  kitchen table over the Christmas holidays, and that through his friendship with her my late husband learned how to love more broadly than he'd ever dreamed was possible.

So I'm going to keep on stitching, and this throw quilt and I either will or won't get to Indianapolis this year. In any case, the slow stitching has allowed me time to treasure the ordinary moments that illuminated three decades of friendship.  As a friend reminded me, care for the living takes precedence over honoring the dead, but sometimes the two are happening simultaneously.

Textile Arts (Notes to Myself)

Source of photo:  Paddling Experts blog

Silverfish love spray starch so if you want to prolong the life of any textiles, forego the spray starch.

Photo from Gadgetrivia

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I took a class with internationally recognized quilt designer Kathleen Loomis a few years back. She taught us how to do free-hand cutting, saying she used a template twice and didn't like it.  Here are her two rules regarding textile art:
1.  Work on a design wall.
2.  Press well.  (If you can't get a seam to lie perfectly flat, rip it out and re-sew it, because otherwise you'll have permanent bubbles and bumps.)  An item can only stand one serious pressing, for which you must have a hard surface underneath.  The floor will do and has the advantage of being always available.
Incidentally, Kathleen Loomis has a website as well as a brilliant blog, which is always a pleasure to wander through.
Also incidentally, I have two irons, a Black & Decker Digital Evolution, which is weighty and works really well on seams, and a Panasonic NI-C78SR, which is my favorite iron ever.  It offers the technology irons have needed ever since steam was invented:  a removable water tank.  Rather than bringing the spouted cup to the iron and spilling water all over the ironing board, one pushes a button, lifts off the water tank, and takes it to the faucet to be filled.  Brilliant.  I don't know why every iron doesn't include this feature.
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