Category — Sewing

Raizl Makes Music, 24 inches x 28 inches

Here’s the completed quilt, entitled “Raizl Makes Music”. I finished sewing on the label tonight. Raizl’s mother C will be here in about half an hour to pick it up. I’m excited for the big “reveal”, and I’m hoping that she’s as pleased with it as I am.

Here are a couple detail shots of the quilting.

Quilting Detail

More Quilting Detail

I stippled the background pretty tightly, mostly to make it recede. I wanted each section of quilting to stand further forward from the background, to suggest depth. Raizl’s face and hands have the least quilting, since they are the furthest forward.

I’m very happy with how this piece came out, though I’m still a little nervous about it, since it is a commission project. Maybe if I butter C up with a little champagne and strawberries?

Raizl playing her cello

Raizl is about to have her bat mitzvah.  She’s a fun and funky thirteen year old, and she’s done some odd jobs for us, like watering our plants when we’ve been out of town.  She’s a very polite girl, and she’s starting to come into her own.  When her mother approached me about making a quilt for her bat mitzvah gift, I was slightly overwhelmed, particularly when I found out that Raizl had asked for it specifically.  Not just a quilt, but one made by me.

When C (her mother) and I met to discuss it, we spoke a bit about size and price, and the kind of quilt Raizl would like.  I was pleased that a wallhanging was desired, since that is what I am most comfortable with.  Traditional block-based quilts are not what I am used to making, so I began to relax a bit.  We then went on to discuss color and theme.  C mentioned the color scheme of the other quilt Raizl has (her baby quilt), and how some of the same colors would be incorporated into the invitations to the event, which have a stylized striped prayer shawl on their border.  These were suggestions to me, and as C said, I had free reign to interpret them.  I liked the idea of incorporating symbolic textiles, but I wasn’t sure what direction to take them in.

I spent a month or two mulling these ideas in my head, as I tried to figure out how to match the colors and subject with the girl I know.  I decided I needed to talk to Raizl herself, and take a few pictures, to see what became of it.  Raizl and her parents have two dogs (a dachsund, and a Boston terrier).  She’s also a swimmer (much like my niece, K, who’s of similar age), and she plays the cello.  I took pictures of her swim trophy from this year (Most Improved), her dogs, Raizl with the cello, and with a large fluffy scarf, to see if any of these things would suggest good quilt images.

Raizl's Bobblehead Swim Trophy

 

Raizl with a linen scarf, to suggest ideas

First Tracing of the photo

Tracing enlarged 200% with gridding

My next step is what I learned from Ruth B. McDowell, an amazing quilt artist from Massachusetts, and also an MIT grad, for trivia fans. Not only do I love the way she works, I love that she can explain technical details of piecing clearly in print. 

The next step is to alter the picture to make it pieceable.  I decided that it would be best, given my time constraints, to make this image with straight seam piecing, since they are quicker to put together than curved seams.  I used another layer of tracing paper over the image, and used a ruler to simplify the main lines of the image, and divide the image into sections that are pieceable.  For more details on how this is done, refer to one of Ruth’s books, which can explain it much better than I ever could.

After determining the pieceing lines,  it’s time to make templates.  Using freezer paper shiny side up, I duplicated the lines from the tracing paper onto the freezer paper with a fine tip Sharpie marker.

Creating the Freezer Paper Templates

After tracing the design lines, I labeled the pieces on the rough side of the paper with a pencil. This is also the time to mark any connection points or lines to match pieces together. I labeled the pieces with letters, to represent the features of the picture (one letter for background, one letter for skin, one letter for shirt, one letter for sleeves, one letter for the wood part of the cello, etc.) before cutting the templates apart. I also marked major sections on the original tracing for piecing sections. Then I cut the templates apart.

Next came the most creative part of the process- auditioning the fabrics for each piece, before sewing them together. This is a major reason I love this technique for piecing, besides the fact that you are assured to get an accurately sized top when it’s all together!

Auditioning fabrics before sewing

Auditioning Fabrics, again

 I ironed the template pieces to fabric, and added seam allowance around the template with a small rotary cutter, and then pin the fabric to its position on the original tracing, which I have placed on a piece of foam core.  After I’ve selected fabrics, I look at the piece through my color filters (clear red plexiglass and clear green plexiglass) to make sure the values are correct,  in case I want to make adjustments.  There’s a little waste if I have to recut a piece to get the right colors to come forward or move back visually, but it’s a small amount, considering the size of the pieces, and the advantages of auditioning more than one possibility.

Once I have all the fabrics selected, pieces cut, and pinned to the foamcore,  I start sewing the pieces together.  With straight seams, I can usually leave the freezer paper in place, which adds some stability, and visual cues of what goes together.

Sewing the sections together

After I sew a section, I pin it back on the foamcore, mostly to show the progress, partly to make sure I’m not missing something. Again, this process is easier with straight seam piecing than curved, because the pieces fit together quite easily.    This had eight or nine major sections, with the neck of the cello being the divider down the middle.  Once the sections were together, I sewed the left side to the neck of the cello, and the right side to the neck of the cello, and the top was togther.

Raizl Sewn Together, approximately 18 x 24

At this point, I had very little to trim to square this up.  I could have finished this without borders, which I often do for pictorial quilts, but in this case, I wanted to incorporate a reference to the striped prayer shawl, and have a few more colors that C had mentioned in the piece.  I had pieced together some stripes of different fabrics earlier, before I had decided on using the cello picture, and it worked out well to cut those stripes into sections for a border.

With The Striped Borders

With the borders, the piece is about 22 x 25.

Here are a couple of detail shots of the hands and face to show the piecing. 

Piecing Detail of Hand

Cello Neck Detail

We’ve started a new round of Friendship Circle projects, and this time, we’ve simplified the process.  Each hostess gets to choose a block that she’d like members of the group to make, for at least a portion of a quilt.  As an example, I might decide to make a Baltimore Album quilt, and farm out a block to each member of the Friendship Circle, and give them pieces of two fabrics which must be used, so that all blocks have some common themes.  The following month, when we meet, we turn in the blocks to the previous hostess, and get a new project to work on.

(Fear not, if any of the Friendship Circle is a reader, I am unlikely to choose a Baltimore Album. Though that might not be too difficult for the applique whizzes in the group.)

This month’s block is called Mississippi Wheel of Fortune, and we got two fabrics- one red, one yellow.  I still have a sashing piece that is paper pieced sawteeth, but I’ve finished a pinwheel setting square and the big Wheel of Fortune block.

Mississippi Wheel of Fortune Block

This involved curved piecing, and paper piecing.  I hadn’t done any paper piecing in years, so I needed to re-learn.  I found some videos on YouTube about it, some which didn’t show much of the actual technique.  This one is a good tutorial.  And this one is a scream.  Of course, I didn’t find the first one until now, when I’m writing about it.  The second one was fun, and enough to jog my memory.  I don’t remember the folding bit when I first learned, but in my experience this time, the folding helps a lot.

I like the sharp points you get with paper piecing.  But it does take a while, and you can’t be stingy with your fabric pieces.  The curved piecing was easy, since I used Ruth B. McDowell’s technique with freezer paper templates.  That’s my wheelhouse, as they say.  I can’t wait to see what the others look like.

Photo credit to DH, copyright 2009

I am the type of person who would like to move to Emilia Romagna for a month to have some elderly woman teach me the proper way to make homemade fresh pasta by hand, and to spend a month or so making it at least once a day to be sure I can actually do it correctly.  While I have a passport, and can speak Italian, the likelihood of this happening soon in my life is remote.

I do, however, have good cookbooks, access to eBay, and some lovely KitchenAid appliances at my disposal.

First, the cookbook:  Marcella Says…, by Marcella Hazan.  Marcella has made a career teaching Italian cooking to Americans and others, in the USA and in Italy.  This book is one of the first cookbooks I bought when I moved to the midwest.  I read through Marcella’s description of making homemade pasta, and I read that she herself, in her advanced age, no longer uses the hand crank pasta machines one often sees.  She uses the pasta roller and cutter attachments made in Italy for Kitchen Aid.  So, the pasta attachments became a wish-list item for me.

Five Years Later….

I was  perusing eBay looking for a used ice cream maker (thanks to a wonderful visit with Adelia and Burt in Stillwater, OK), and ended up bidding on the KitchenAid pasta rollers.  I’m pleased to say I won the auction, and got them for less than retail.

Pasta Roller on Mixer

This weekend, I took the lovely rollers out of their box, and checked it all out.  It was time to refer back to Marcella for the basic recipe.  She doesn’t tell you how easy it is, as Jamie Oliver does, and show you how much fun it is to energetically mix it with your hands.  She’s much more direct.  I will paraphrase/embellish the directions here.  For enough pasta for 2-4 people (2 as a generous main dish or 4  primi piatti (first course), IMHO):

1. Put your metal blade in your food processor.  Add a heaping cup of all-purpose flour and two eggs.  Process until it clumps together.  If it’s sticky, add flour by the tablespoon, pulsing between until it isn’t sticky.  If it’s too dry, add water by the tablespoon until it comes together in big clumps.
2. Gather the dough into a ball and knead it for one minute, pushing it away with the heel of your hand against the worksurface.  Turn, fold, and repeat.  The heat of your hands and the pressure will make the dough smooth.  Cover the dough with plastic wrap or foil and let rest (15 min. to 1 hr.)
3. Roll and cut with the pasta roller and cutter, according to the manufacturer’s directions.  Either cook the pasta immediately in boiling water (2-4 minutes), or let the pasta air dry on tea towels, and store for later.

Doesn't this dough look well rested?

Okay, so there’s none of the romance of making it completely by hand, of a special skill gained learning to roll the pasta with a dowel.  But it is fast, easy, and delicious in the way that dried pasta can never be.  It’s tender, tasty, and has a texture all it’s own.  You can understand why this has a special place in the hearts of Italians by taste alone.  The fact that it’s made with love by mamma, well, books have been written about that.

We made this pasta twice this weekend.  (First to try out the tools and a quick sauce recipe, and the second time to avoid the mistakes of our first effort, cutting too-sticky pasta by hand. And to use up the sauce.  And because we were hungry.)

Roller in Action

Honestly, it IS possible to go from eggs and flour to cooked pasta in about 35 minutes (15 min. of resting time) with the food processor and the KitchenAid pasta roller and cutter. If you add another 20 minutes on the front making a quick tomato sauce, in an hour it’s a really great dinner.  OK, we’re aided by some sophisticated machinery.  But it does pass Michael Pollan’s test for real food.  We can identify all ingredients, and we combined them together at home.  And Michael Pollan never said sophisticated cooking machinery was not allowed. (Imagine the backlash…)

I can see why this might be too much effort for some people.  But I am pretty sure this is not a flash in the pan gadget for us.  Tonight, while we were cooking the pasta pictured here, DH mentioned that this might be a great first course at a dinner we’re cooking for a silent auction.  Or that we might want to do this at another dinner party.  Marcella would be proud.  I’ve introduced another person to the joys of homemade pasta all’uova, and he can tell how good it is.

I feel horribly that I don’t have more photos of each person’s work, or enough to do a whole post for each participant.  But I was doing a little sewing, too.  I’m still working on the “stop and take some pictures” thing.  I usually forget I have a camera.  This is why photojournalism is NOT my career.

Warning - Quilters Working

This is a pretty good shot of the room we worked in.  Each person had a large table, and there are lots of windows in this octagonal building.  We had lots of room to spread out and to move blocks around, etc.

Here is one of Nancy’s projects.  Nancy’s got a recognizable style and color palette.

Nancy's project, cut

This was early on Saturday morning, I think.

Nancy's project, all pieced

This was probably on Saturday afternoon, possibly Sunday morning.  It takes a good eye to arrange such subtle colors and patterns so that your eye moves all around the piece.  I think Nancy did a very good job placing the yellows, which tend to attract the eye.

The picture below is a close-up, so you can see some of the fabrics better.

Detail of Nancy's quilt top

For those who like to see process pictures, there were a lot of different kinds of projects being worked on. Here are some of them, in no particular order.

Sandy's Pieces Ready for Sewing

Here are Sandy’s cut pieces ready to be assembled together.  Sandy wore a bright purple sweatshirt stating “I’m on a High Fabric Diet”.  She’s got lots of sewing and costuming experience, so we can certainly agree that she gets her fiber fix.

Sue's latest black and white adventure

Sue, who is our doyenne of tiny pieces, bright colors, and high contrast, was working on (another) black and white quilt for her son.  I want to do one of these. I hope she’ll see my imitation as  flattery and not as me being a copycat.

A row of Mary Ann's blocks

While Mary Ann wasn’t sweating over the repair of an old antique quilt for a dear friend, she did manage to make some *NEW* blocks for a baby quilt.  This is one of four rows.  We saw two rows together before she had to leave.

Bob's "GUY" quilt in progress

Here are the blocks arranged for the flannel quilt Kathy was making for her husband, Bob.  This top got pieced together in the course of the weekend, leaving Kathy time to also work on some beautiful machine quilting. (No photo, sorry.)

Melissa's Pink Batik Top

Here are the Morris sisters, holding up Melissa’s pink and orange batik piece.  She says that this was the result of a couple years of collecting pink and orange batiks.  I’m gobsmacked by all the little pieces in these blocks.  Definitely not a pattern for the block-phobic. (i.e. ME)

Here are some pictures of what Candy was working on during the retreat.   You can see more of her work here.  Candy absolutely hates to have her picture taken, preferring to be on the other side of the camera.  She does not, however, mind if we take pictures of what she makes.

Candy enjoys a lot of different techniques in sewing and quilting, and particularly likes hand applique and embroidery.  She’s pretty fearless when it comes to trying new techniques, and is always up for a challenge.  I’m not sure I could pinpoint a signature style in Candy’s work, as she likes to try lots of different things, and varies her color palette from piece to piece.

Candy's Geranium Quilt

Here is a quilt that Candy had started on a previous WAQG retreat.  Orange is an unusual color for Candy, but I think her use of the different orange batiks is an example of how fearless she can be to go outside her comfort zone.  This quilt is pieced, and then the geraniums are added by machine applique.  (Candy’s very good at traditional applique, so this was a conscious choice to do otherwise.  Below is a closeup view of the applique and quilting.  For those who are less knowledgeable about flora and fauna (real or stylized), Candy machine quilted the leaves with the distinctive veining of geraniums.

Closeup of Geraniums

In the upper right of this picture you can see that she repeated the “veins” of the leaves in the rest of her quilting in this area.  Pretty impressive to me, who really can only meander in my machine quilting.   I believe Candy intended to add some beading to the quilt as well, but I’m not sure whether that happened in the course of the weekend.

Candy worked on two other projects.  One is a Spring/Easter themed wall hanging, with bunnies and carrots, with machine piecing and fusible applique.  There will also be embellishments, and possibly embroidery, for the centers of the flowers, the eyes of the rabbits, etc.

Candy's Bunnies

And another detail shot:

Closeup of Piecing and Applique

In case you haven’t noticed,  Candy likes doing hand work, and mixing techniques in a single piece.  She was also working on a little wool placemat that you can use for a cupcake to celebrate a birthday.  This will also have beading and embroidery on it when it’s complete.   This mat is approximately 6 inches in diameter.

Candy's Wool Cake Mat, in Progress

Isn’t this cute?  It would be perfect for a surprise for a co-worker, or if you don’t want to have a whole cake around at home when you celebrate birthdays.

This weekend was our guild’s annual quilt retreat in Frontenac, MN.  We all arrived on Friday afternoon, and stayed until Sunday- morning for some, afternoon for others.  Again, I am reminded what a great group of people I know, and how much fun it is for us to be together with lots of unstructured time for sewing, eating, and being together in a great place.  I have a lot of pictures and stories I could tell from this trip, so I am going to spread them out in more than one post.

When I first met Deb, her voice seemed quiet (compared to my loud one), and a bit reserved.  I am pleased to say that her work is not. 

Deb spent a lot of the weekend working on a baby quilt.  I did not get the details as to whom it was for (perhaps a relative?), but I will beg her for details when I next see her, so I can keep my readers up to date.  (Or maybe you can inform me????)

Here’s a photo I took early on in the retreat, possibly on Saturday morning.

Deb's Block Pieces Cut

After a few hours elapsed, we now can see Deb’s blocks, along with a shot of the pattern in a magazine.  I’m sorry, I don’t have a citation for you. (Can  you help here, dear readers?)

Deb's Blocks

I think the name of the pattern is Baby’s Breath, but I could be wrong.  If you know of my phobia of complicated block patterns and my fear of bias growth,  you’re certain that this is a quilt I’ll admire from a distance, and it is VERY unlikely to ever grace the pages of this blog as one I will make.

Deb's Blocks, Arranged for Sewing

After another undetermined lapse of time, we see Deb’s blocks have been arranged in a group.  I’m not positive this is the final arrangement.

Deb and her Baby Quilt Top

Here is Deb, with her completed quilt top.  I think the two slim borders resemble a mat when a picture is framed.  This photo was taken around 1:30 on Sunday afternoon.    Great work, Deb!  I hope you had as much fun this weekend as I did.

Candy's Fracture

Here’s one of the smaller fracture quilts we did as a group.  Candy came up with this image based on a photograph of some relatives.  From what I remember, each of our pieces was about 12-14 inches long, and between 5 and 8 inches tall.  We all had a good laugh when we realized that her cousin’s head was separated from her body when the picture was fractured.  I was the one who got her head, while Kathy got her body.  I made the head, but left it as a separate piece to fuse on, since I didn’t want to put it in the wrong spot.

Candy sent me this photo this morning, and I’m pleased to see the head lines up with the body.

As you can see,  there were lots of ways that we approached the leaves and branches.  In the detail shot below, I tried to capture some of the different ways we did this.  (It’s a cropped section of Candy’s original photo)

Closeup of detail in Candy's Fracture

You can see that Candy has couched on some thread for the gunwales of the canoe, and you can see that we used different approaches to representing leaves.  This shot shows how five different sections came together, and you can see piecing, applique, and lots of leaf treatments.  I used colored netting to hold my leaf snippets down, and then I used stitching in green thread to hold them in place. (not pictured)
Beautiful, Candy!

Sunday Dinner Apron

Here’s a different apron from Vanilla House Designs- the Sunday Dinner Apron.  This is a bit less revealing than the Friday Night Apron, and thus uses slightly more fabric.  The walking foot on my sewing machine made this easier when the bias binding was added, as it was easier to sew through the layers.

I can still use some work on my photography/Photoshop skills to improve my pictures, but this should give you an idea.  There are two pockets on this apron, with the teardrop shaped holes to get things in and out.

pocket detail

Here’s a closeup of the pocket detail- the light blue batik which is the pocket lining is the same large piece that is the lining of the apron skirt.  There is a seam (you can see a bit of it on the left side of the photo, near the edge) which goes around he pocket, sewing the fabric front an lining together, forming the pockets.

I think I will send this apron to my sister as her birthday present, with the pattern (I bought 3 copies), in case she’d like to make another one.

This week at our Friendship Circle meeting, we got to see Jo’s fracture quilt completed.  Thanks to Mary for taking this photo for me, as I forgot my camera.  DOH!

Jo's Fracture Quilt

Jo took the original photograph for her quilt in her garden.  We didn’t really know what the background was, as she brought a black & white photo, and said  that the ground was covered with “chips” or “mulch”, or some other not very descriptive phrase, so that we wouldn’t be too literal. I like the fact that there are different backgrounds, and yet, the fractured flowers all come together as foreground anyway.

We also discussed options for a group project this year, and it looks like we’re going for something a bit simpler, partly because the group is growing, and partly because of the time commitments the fractures took  (“You panic for the first week, then you start to get some ideas, then you have to go buy fabric, and finally do what came into your head…. it can be pressure!”)  Ok. that’s a combination of many comments into one big sentence, but it COULD have been a quote.

I still think this group is GREAT.