Quilting

At the suggestion of Linda, and since I seem to be at a loss for blog post ideas lately, I’m going to spend the next few weeks taking you on a tour of some of the quilts that I finished off in 2020. I figure I might as well start with the quilt from last week, as I already have a photo of it, and it’s the quilt that sparked the discussion.

The inspiration for this quilt was on the cover of Sewing With Nancy (a sewing company on line) designed by Lori Holt of Bee in My Bonnet. I love Lori’s eye for fresh, vintage inspired colors and patterns and the quilt was just so very cheerful. It showed up in early 2019, and I knew that with building the farm house and a move in my future, having a hand work project would serve me well as I was packing and unpacking the sewing room. I ordered the kit which included the pattern, the circle templates and the stack of colorful fat quarters of Lori’s fabric.

Much to my surprise when I got the pattern, the quilt was actually circles appliqué down on 108’ wide quilt back fabric. I had to laugh. My mental image of a very portable hand work project went right out the window at the though of hauling the whole queen size top everywhere with me. I was also rather skeptical about my ability to mark and sew the circles in a very regular pattern on such a large piece of fabric. To further complicate things, I couldn’t find a piece of 108” wide fabric that I liked.

I did some quick math and took a look at my stash of neutral fat quarters and decided that I would make the background very scrappy squares. That solved all my problems: the portability, getting fabric I liked, plus the quilt would have an extra dimension of shading to the background that I thought I would like. I started cutting 6” squares and got stuck in making my circles.

The project did indeed carry me through the move, I got the circles all finished up at the beginning of 2020, and pieced the quilt top early in the pandemic lockdown. I was more in love with it each time I looked at it. I think part of what I like too is there is a hint of the game Twister from when I was a kid. Vintage all around in so many ways. I quilted it with an all over Baptist Fan pattern as I did not want the quilting to take away from the visual impact of the circles on the quilt top.

When cutting out the circles, I realized that if I cut them very carefully, pushed to the edge of the fat quarter, I could then get a 2.5” strip off of the side of every fat quarter in the kit. When it came to binding I figured a scrappy quilt would be happy with a scrappy binding, so I used those strips to piece a very scrappy binding that echoed all the wonderful colors from the circles. It seemed to be the perfect finishing touch to the quilt.

This month is the first time I’ve had it on my bed. It’s a bit small to actually use as a blanket for me, I tend to cocoon myself in my covers and there’s not enough drop on the sides for my taste, so I put this one over my sleeping quilts so I still get to enjoy it on my bed. It’s very fresh and modern and just the thing for dreary winter days.

If you are still reading, I hope you enjoyed the overview. Next week I will take a closer look at a quilt that was the result of a block swap with friends. Happy Quilting in the mean time!

I think the last year is catching up to me. I’m finding myself more and more at a loss for what to write about. I have been talking to several friends who also blog, and I’m at least a little relieved to know it’s not just me. I feel like there’s a lot of been there done that going around. How do we come up with something new when we feel like there is nothing new?

I’ve been quilting for a long time. Seriously quilting for 31 years. I’ve been around long enough to see ideas that were out in the 90s, come out in the late 2010’s and are treated like it’s something brand new. Heck in the 90s, people were going back to the Kansas City Star Newspaper patterns that were published in the 20’s and 30’s so there wasn’t even much new in the 90s. We are always reinventing the craft and ourselves with it. If I step back a bit, the evolution is fascinating, even if I do get annoyed with the people who have no clue that what they are doing has already been done before.

For the longest time, I didn’t refer to myself as a quilter, I was a piecer. I made quilt tops that very rarely got turned into finished quilts. I could count on both hands, the number of quilts that got completely completed between 1990 and 2015 if I’m honest (not counting things like table runners, I mean big quilts here). All that changed in 2020.

I guess it started changing in 2018 when I upgraded the CAD system on the long arm, and gained some momentum in 2019, but 2020 I was going full steam ahead. I finished so many quilts last year. Finished a lot of UFOs and even made a couple of quilts from start to finish. Each one would get folded neatly and put into the pile on the bench in the living room. I like the pile. I can see them as I walk by and they are out where I can enjoy them.

This morning when I was making the bed it occurred to me that I now have enough quilts that I can put a different quilt on the bed probably every month this year. What a treat, I guess I didn’t realize I had gotten that far along. So today on the day when I can’t seem to figure out what to say, here’s 500 words and a quilt.

A lot of quilters have a stash. Heck my mother was a garment sewer and she had a stash. I distinctly remember a piece of turquoise velveteen that she had for a good 20 years before it became something. I have a stash, and much like my tastes, its kinda all over the place in terms of style and lengths of cuts but I have one nevertheless.

One of the fabric lines I have loved for ages is anything by Jo Morton. What she does with colors is warm and inviting to me and I literally drool when she releases anything new. For YEARS I would buy everything she put out, usually fat quarters, although I’m noticing there is yardage in there too, and I would put it in a bin “for later”. One thing moving will do for you, is show you clearly just how much “later planning” you have been doing. I moved last year and realized that my “one” bin of Jo fabric was, actually, THREE bins of Jo fabric. Ok well I’ve been busy.

I am realizing more and more that I want the things I love out where I can see them. I’ve been working on this over time, and a lot of things are on display in my house: my antique sewing machines are in a china hutch in the living room, and all my Steiff stuffed animals are in a curio cabinet in my bedroom, both allow me to see things I love while keeping them orderly and safe from the cat. I’ve been working on getting my quilts out of the UFO bin and finished to a state where I can use them and love them, and it’s time to put my Jo fabric out where I can enjoy it.

I started the hexie quilt – you have seen posts on IG about it, and I very naively thought that would take the bulk of, if not all of my Jo stash to complete. Oh, sweet summer child. That queen size quilt will maybe use 1/3 of the Jo fabric. Maybe. So I did what quilters do, and talked to some good friends and got some ideas, and I’m planning another quilt with those fabrics. More to come on that later.

The main point of all of this being that I’m really making plans this year to sew my stash and get the fabrics I love so much out where I can see them and enjoy them. I do better when I have a plan, so rather than just talking about it, I have two quilts planned. I’ll see how far that gets me through the stash. There may be some other smaller projects with what is left, but my goal is to use it all up and get it out in my house where I can enjoy it!

When it comes to ideas, I am my father’s daughter. I get an idea and I want it NOW. I have to laugh because I can hear my mother saying that exact sentence. NOW is a tricky thing especially when it comes to hand made items. I don’t have 85 hours in a day. I have a day job where I work a lot of hours, which leaves little time for my NOW. I get frustrated because I can’t make things happen over night when I get these wonderful ideas.

I am learning that slowing down actually gets more done. There are a bunch of little metaphors about this – eating the elephant one bite at a time, putting one foot in front of the other, everything in its time but what they are all talking about is getting the bigger idea done via smaller steps.

I am teaching myself that if I do a little bit every day or every week or every month or every year, I will get there. Not only will I get there, but I will get there actually faster than I might have realized when I am looking at the big picture and the NOW. I need to make a sign in my sewing room about this. Maybe I need to make an elephant mini quilt to hang up. The ideas swirl, cause I need another project to add to the list.

I need to remind myself how much I completed in 2020 – it was a banner year for me, and it was all done in small, frequent, sewing sessions, not in one or two weekend marathons. I am looking at how I am setting my goals this year. I’m not making large, sweeping goals, I am breaking apart my projects and making monthly goals that are just parts of projects, knowing that at some point, the whole project will complete. I think it was Ben Franklin who said “look after the pennies, and the dollars will look after themselves” so I am looking after my pennies.

The biggest thing I want to carry forward from 2020 is this idea to slow down to get more done. I need to incorporate this into how I work. I think it will open up a lot of really neat things. In the mean time, I’m perusing elephant patterns…. maybe I could do it with wool applique, that would go faster…..

We all know what happens at the new year. Call them resolutions or goals or intentions, the boundary of crossing from one year into the next puts a drive in just about everyone I know to look at the coming year and where would they like to be at the end of it. I know, I know, we all want to win the lottery and be able to eat brownies every day and not gain an ounce, but aside from those dreams, what are my goals for this year going to be about?

Last year I set myself a goal to quilt 2 quilts on my long arm every month for a total of 24 quilts over the year. I am taking in customer work again but the goal was just to quilt 2 things regardless if they were mine or for a customer. At the end of the year, I came out with 30 things quilted, 12 of which were for other people. They came in clumps but that averaged out over the year nicely and exceeded the goal I had set for myself. I’m pretty chuffed, and I think one of the things that helped was that I set a goal so I kept working steadily through the year.

This year, I’m going to keep the same goal – 24 quilts over the year – hopefully with a slightly higher ratio of customer quilts, but I’m trying to keep the goal flexible. The main goal is to keep working, but this has me questioning a lot of other things in my quilting life.

I read an article this past year about how there is a drive in the US that if you have some kind of hobby or thing you do, you need to turn it into a side hustle. We seem to have gotten away from the idea of creativity for the sake of creativity – everything has to become a business. That article has been churning in the back of my mind ever since. I like to teach and design, but the weight of trying to turn all that into a business is a heavy load. Dealing with the public has an ugly side. People can be downright rude even over free stuff, some of the things I’ve seen happen to other designers this past year has been both sobering and eye opening. I don’t want to deal with any of that – talk about sucking the joy out of my creativity.

I have therefore decided that my other goal for 2021 is to decide what I actually want to make out of my business and just do it. Quit waffling over whether patterns can be free downloads or if everything has to be monetized. I even thought I could change the name of my pattern company to Caveat Emptor and tell people where to go if they don’t like my fonts or drawings or anything else about the patterns but maybe that’s a tad harsh.

At the end of the day, I will never get to where I am going if I don’t know where I want to go. Decisions have to be made. I’ll take this year to map out a plan, then go from there – it sure worked well for making progress with my long arm work. Maybe it will work in other areas too.

Christmas is in a couple of days, as is my birthday, and as we all are doing, I’m finding different ways to celebrate and making new traditions. One of these that I’m enjoying more this year than ever is participating in hand made ornament swaps.

I have done exchanges over the years but have been a regular now in several and I have enjoyed them more this year than every. I have a small tree near the fireplace that has my swap ornaments on it, and every one reminds me of friends – new and old, near and far all at the same time. It represents people who took time out of their busy lives to make something specifically for me. I can feel the love and good wishes every time I look at that tree.

This is a short post – we all have stuff to do this week. We are all dealing with a holiday that isn’t what we are used to or what we might have expected. I am buoyed by the love that I feel every time I look at my swap tree. I just might keep it up into January….

I’ve had a couple of interesting discussions the past week about motivation in my crafty space. Some one online, one on a conference call, and they have all been swirling around in my head.

We all agree 2020 has been a dumpster fire of a year. I can get a Christmas ornament of a dumpster on fire to commemorate the year in just that manner. At the same time this has been the most prolific year of my quilting experience and that’s 30 years people.

On the face of it, I started by saying well I didn’t go anywhere so of course i stayed home and sewed but the more I thought about it, it was much deeper than that. There have been some days where I just sit and stare at the wall this year, so the fact that I’m at home hasn’t been the whole turn around, though it does make it more likely that I will work on something and finish it. When I finally get down to the nitty gritty, I have come to the conclusion that for me, completion is the fuel for this engine.

Early on in all of this, I got out a couple of projects that were 80-90% complete and got them done. I’m pretty sure I blogged about them here. The feeling I got from finishing those propelled me into the next project. As I kept finishing things, I kept getting propelled forward.

I’m an engineer, and I understand that perpetual motion (motion that continues without any input of energy) is one of the great myths of the world. People have been trying to get something for nothing for eons. For me it’s no different in crafting. I keep doing because I get a boost from finishing something, without a push I don’t keep moving

I want to be very clear. I have never been a finisher. I am more about process than project. I like the doing more than anything, but this year I have become a finisher and it has driven more finishing than I ever thought I could accomplish. I’ve cleared out a couple of really old projects and have finished 4 quilts that I started this year. I MEAN WHO IS THIS PERSON AND WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MARTHA????? My mother would be absolutely gobsmacked by this.

I don’t know what 2021 is going to bring. I’m sure life will evolve and I will start traveling so I won’t be at home every weekend to sew, but I think I’ve learned not to schedule so much time away from home. I don’t think I have somehow made a switch from being a process person to a project person, I am still much more drawn to the doing than I am to finishing and I will NEVER be the person who works on one project at a time, finishing each before starting the next. What I do think, is that I’m learning how to keep my creative engine going using finishing as a fuel, and just like with perpetual motion, that fuel only lasts a finite amount of time so I have to keep putting fuel on the fire, I need to keep finishing to keep this thing going.

Well I finally decided on what I want to do for my next hand piecing project, and it combines two things I dearly love – hexagon pieces and my treasured stash of Jo Morton fabrics. I want a quilt for my bed that is flowers made out of hexagons, 1″ hexagons to be precise, so that’s a lot of hexagons, but that’s ok because I have a lot of Jo Morton fabric. I’m going to use English Paper Piecing as the mechanism, it is fast and I enjoy it for hexagons very much.

I cut some tentative pieces and made a few flowers and they went together really fast. I can easily make 3 in the evening after work and chores are all done which is pretty spiffy. In no time at all I had a stack of 30 flowers and started evaluating putting them together. I figured at 3 a night, I could have enough for the bed sized quilt in 4 months, and I distinctly remember telling Jack that estimate and being rather disappointed that the effort would only take 4 months. I really wanted this project to last at least a year in the making. More on that in a minute.

Hexagons are tricky little buggers. They will go neatly in a row as individuals, but when you put 7 together in a flower (6 around a center), they don’t like to line up, they prefer more to wander off, leaning distinctly in one direction. So that means that to put all my little flowers together I had two choices: 1) always have a bed quilt that leans to one side which would drive me absolutely bonkers or 2) throw in the odd single hexagon so that I could put the flowers together in regular rows that marched neatly and evenly across the bed. Ok, I can do the odd single hexagon so that’s good. I laid it out on the computer to make sure I understood the repeat of the pattern and printed that off.

I sat down this weekend, with my stack of 30 flowers and my printout and thought well I’ll start assembling these and see how many flowers it takes to get the whole way across the bed with a drop. I got stuck in on that effort Sunday and last night I realized that my piddling little 4 month estimate was wildly inaccurate. While it might take only 4 months to make the individual flowers, it is going to take exponentially longer than that to put them all together into the quilt top.

I had quite a laugh at myself, thinking that I had been so disappointed that this project would only last six months. HA. I’ll be lucky if I get the top pieced in a year and six months now that I understand what I’m doing. So much for my miscalculations. It’s all going to be ok. I wanted this project to be my hand piecing project for a decent chunk of time, and it looks like despite the initial inaccuracies in my estimations, it will indeed take at least a year to accomplish and I’m ok with that. I’m also really happy with how this first row is shaping up, and I’m glad I finally have a project worthy of my Jo stash.

I’ll periodically give some updates here on the blog. Especially at the 4 month mark. That will be a special update. I might even have a handle on exactly how many flowers it will take to cover the bed. I don’t want to take a stab at estimating that yet…..

I’ve been struggling to feel productive lately. It’s not that I haven’t been doing stuff, it’s just not stuff that makes me feel productive. I started talking about that with some friends, and they rapidly made me realize something. I don’t tend to count stuff that I want to be doing as ‘productive’ time. Productive time is time spent at work or on chores or on the mile long to do list at the farm. Productive time sewing is when I’m doing work for other people. Sewing on things I want to do somehow is considered a luxury in my head and is not productive.

Well. I need to change that attitude right now! What was I doing this weekend, you ask? I was actually quilting my Hexies Pandemic quilt. Quilting AND binding my hexies quilt to be precise. Yep folks, I started this one back over the summer some time, I got it completely hand pieced, added the borders by machine, and this weekend it got quilted and bound and it is DONE. I really do think that’s being pretty darned productive. Maybe I should have put this on my to do list. Either way, I’m thrilled with how it turned out. This one was kind of a freebie. Most of the fabric in this was gifted to me by someone else. She had finished her 1930’s quilt and didn’t want to ever see that kind of fabric again, so she gave me the left overs. I used probably 90% of that bin in this quilt. Enough of the bin that it is now empty and the remaining few pieces have moved to other bins. That’s pretty exciting too, productivity wise.

The quilting itself is a milestone. This was the 24th quilt on the long arm this year. It’s November and I have reached the goal of 24 quilts. I might hit 25 or 26 by year end if I keep at it. I’m stoked. This is very productive.

How interesting that a change in the lens through which I view all this activity and I go from being a slug to being productive. How many other things in my life can I alter by changing my perspective. In this time of things over which I have absolutely no control, it seems glorious to find something that I CAN control.

This week I’m going to retool my to do list a bit, and add some of the things on it that are just for me. I’m doing this to help trick my eye into seeing more productivity in those things. I’m going to remind myself that all the stuff I’m doing is worth while. Ok most everything. Vacuuming just seems like a never ending annoying task but I guess it’s worth while in its own way. I’m busy and I’m productive. I need to say that out loud. Are you short changing yourself on what you are doing these days? Let’s be better to ourselves, shall we?

No I didn’t post last week. Didn’t have much to say for the blog. Felt like everyone’s attention was elsewhere. My life has been exceptionally hectic lately. When work should be slowing down, 2020 continues to be a wild aberration, and I’m busier at work now than I have been the last 10 months. Go Figure. 2020 is going to be unique all the way til the end.

In another way 2020 is unique; I actually finished the Knitted Star quilt in the duration of the quilt along. Let me say that again. I finished the WHOLE QUILT. Not just the top, didn’t just add something to the binding pile, the whole thing is done. Never in the 30 years have I been quilting, have I actually finished any kind of quilt along during the duration of the project.

I’ve come close, mind you. I’ve finished some tops during the class or the quilt along, but in typical 80% fashion, I still have those tops and they haven’t become quilts. I feel like I have broken through some kind of giant barrier with this. I am WILDLY patting myself on the back. I went into it thinking I might do the lap size, despite really wanting the bed size. Once I got started, I realized I wanted to push myself and I could do it. You all saw the blog post about honing my process to knock out the 18 blocks.

It assembled much faster than I thought it would, helped along by a wonderful program of Julie Walters taking great coastal train journeys in the UK. Lovely scenery and she has a delightful sense of humor. All of a sudden I had a quilt top. Quilting on the long arm has been getting better and better, so I decided to just load it and go for it. I have a lovely aqua paisley on the back (I love aqua and red together) and knocked it out two weekends ago. This weekend I got the binding cut and attached and here we are, talking about a finished quilt.

2020 has had plenty of challenges but I’m also seeing this year as a chance to change some of my patterns and go at things a different way. I have a lovely finished quilt on my bed and I’m very pleased with it. Pleased to the point where I’m actually pondering another one, heaven help me. I hope you take the chance, as 2020 winds down, to look at some of your own patterns that you’d like to change. No better time than in a year that has already broken the mold in so many ways, let’s do some positive breaking too…….