Posy Pinwheel Quilt

 

I only really paid attention to this tree for the first time today, and I can't believe I haven't noticed it before. I loved it so much that when I came home to look through my photos after our little shoot this afternoon, I didn't have any close-ups of this quilt. I just kept wanting to fit more of the tree in. Isn't she beautiful?

In fact even as I sit here to write, I'm drawn to say more about our incredible country side. Perhaps because after a week of being inside with a house full of colds, it was just so good to be out in the sun and the warm Autumn air. So good. To frame a finished quilt and a beautiful old tree in a photograph, to focus in, to make the parts align, to remember again I have so much to be thankful for... this did more for my poor old head than Panadol and Vicks have all week.  

My Posy Pinwheels had been sitting, quilted and waiting for a big tidy up on my cutting table so I could trim the wadding and back, and bind it. Set aside first for my Flock of Stars quilt, and then for two more quilts for Free Spirit's Quilt Market Booth, I was finally this week able to give her (and my messy studio) my attention again.
I English Paper Pieced this quilt from 2" jewels and 1" hexagons. I love these sized shapes because they easily fit along a 2.5" strip of fabric. So I went through my Loominous scraps from my Fair Isla quilt, cutting off a strip of each print and basting them into petals. I think it would also make a nice quilt to use up a jelly roll.
EPP is very close up, very intimate, very, very slow. So it was a completely different experience, a little like seeing the world from a plane, or up a tree, or like going outside when you've spent the week in, to take photos today and feel the movement I was hoping for. And I was kind of thinking it would feel like a birthday party or country fair, but today with all that long grass and prickles and darting insects, it felt a whole lot more like an ecosystem. It felt like fresh air and wildflowers and swooping birds. 
They say laughter is the best medicine. But I would have to argue for colour.

Flock of Stars Quilt

It's such a joy to stitch in company. I had been waiting for my Cotton + Steel Bluebird bundle to arrive for two and a half weeks, when it came the same day as my visitors. The plan had been to get as much stitching done before they came so that I was freed up to give them a local holiday, while still hopefully getting this quilt done in time to enter Rachel's Bluebird Sew Off. I'd even basted half the diamonds in left over blues and whites from my Free Spirit quilt to try and get a head start. But the postman drove in only an hour or two before my old bridesmaid and her family. It looked like I might just have to let it go.

But as we sat around the dining table drinking tea, and we talked about the kinds of things that could happen this week, I mentioned this quilt, and how, if it was possible, I'd love to get it done by Monday (Sunday night NC time). And my dear friend Jenny completely embraced the idea as the perfect way to spend time together this past week. And though I quite agree with her, I was still surprised. I'm sure many of my quilting friends would attest, we don't often have people lining up to help us hand sew little diamonds together. But Jenny is warm and generous and confident. She'd sewn a button, and maybe a pouch before. How hard to could it be? It sounded fun! And so, we have spent the last four beautiful days together, stitching stars while we watched the kids play, while we snacked on lunch, and while we called out to the husbands to change the dirty nappies please, because we were on a very important mission. It has been the perfect catalyst for many a good conversation after several years living so far away. What a blessing.

I finished the quilt last night, so glad to have it done, full of rich memories, but admittedly a little disappointed that I sewed up the last stitches as the light was dying. I had planned to write this blog post in the evening after the kids were asleep. And then this morning we dragged ourselves out of bed at 5:30 to catch the Canowindra Balloon Festival Key Grab. I quickly grabbed the quilt on the way out the door hoping there'd be an opportunity for a few photos. Then, as we were crossing the river into town, we saw the 4WDs and their trailers lined up on the flat next to the water. They were getting ready to launch! We quickly pulled over, and walked onto the flat.

I can't even begin to tell you what a score this was. Pilots decide that morning from where they'll launch depending on the wind direction. So to stumble upon these beautiful balloons rather than wait an hour or so vying for a good spot at the Key, and to have the flat to ourselves, was a wonderful gift. The pilots were warm and generous, inviting us to take a closer look and answering the kids' questions about the flame and flying.

It felt strange photographing such a small quilt, after all the big ones I've been making. Almost like it was out of proportion. Tim's legs look awfully long! And now that we're home, I can see that I just kept being drawn the interesting patchwork shapes of the balloons. It's a rare treat to have the wide open sky as a backdrop.

After they has all drifted off, we drove around to the Key, a large pole sticking out of the ground with a bright key attached. The pilots have to try and maneuver their balloons to reach and get the key. We stood in the crowd for a while, enjoying the floating colours above us, and also glad for the chance to see them so close earlier. After a while I decided to go back to this fence and grab a couple of shots while we waited. It wasn't until after I was going through these later that I realised that I'd photographed the winning balloon swooping in to collect the key!

These Bluebird blues have been a lovely colour to work with this week. In all the long days of stitching, I have not tired of them. But of course, I couldn't help but throw in some specks of pink and red and burnt orange and I'm so glad for the autumnal feel they give it. I decided to machine quilt, focusing around a single star, and I love the movement it's added to the already sparkling stars. Sparkle is usually created with light, and I've enjoyed the challenge to use colour to the same effect.

I've decided to give this quilt to my visitors as a memento of their stay here, and a thank you gift for embracing my hopes for the week. The joy of that generousity will stay with me for a long time.

Be sure to head over to Stitched in Color's Bluebird Sew Off for more beautiful blue!

Free Spirit Quilt Finish

My Free Spirit quilt has traveled from the lucerne flats of country NSW, to the cubicle offices of Free Spirit in Charlotte, NC, and is now, finally, hanging in the Free Spirit Booth at Quilt Con in Pasedena! If you're at Quilt Con this weekend, please take a picture for me and share it on Instagram!

On the day I finished the quilt, we were just coming to the end of three days of rain, and I was contemplating not getting a photo at all before I shipped it off to Charlotte, for fear of it being dragged through the mud. But it turns out my brother Josh has a camera drone! We rounded up another three friends and carefully held the quilt together, walking down to the Lucerne paddock.

As luck, (or lack thereof) would have it, the storms had created a black out, and the drone wasn't fully charged when we went out for photos, so Josh snapped a few before trying out the video function.  The videos show our beautiful countryside, but not the quilt so much. It makes me so eager to finish my next quilt so we can try again!

I'm so glad to be able to finally share these with you! Glad for great neighbours who have embraced by quilt photography adventures. And really, really glad my Free Spirit Quilt has arrived safely in California!

Red Sky at Night Quilt

When I first embarked on a quilt history adventure, I expected to find a tonne of resources on the internet. I heard snippets of interesting stories from blocks, slaves rescued, quilts donated, stories of war and weddings, that I figured it would be easy to dig up others. But just like we ordinary women make quilts in the present, as a gift, or for the sake of design, without much thought as to how it fits into a wider narrative, or what future generations will want to know about us, the million old quilts out there are often silent. I've written here before, while men's history is The History, the history of politics and war and civilisation, the history of women is often more like archaeology. We dig around and make inferences based on the tools they used, the magazines they read and the quilts they made.
But this escapade has not been in vane. While we may not have learned many women's names, not been able to read their diaries, or have their stories passed down through generations, we have gleaned beautiful things about them.



We know that when the sewing machine was first invented during the industrial revolution, around the 1850s, that women flocked to it, having previously spent up to 12 hours a day sewing and quilting. We know that quilt blocks became popular in America around this time, as an alternative to British medallion quilts, possibly because they were easier to sew in quilting groups, or because the repetition made them faster to come together. Quilting was a community endeavour, the space where women shared themselves and were known.
We know that quilts were the significant way women contributed to war efforts throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. They were sent to soldiers, they made political statements, they commemorated victories and losses. They were stitched from extremely limited resources, and yet still made immensely beautiful. 
We know that women made quilts to celebrate birth, birthdays, engagements, weddings, leaving West, and to commemorate a death. Quilts became a family's way to tell their story.
As pioneers settled across the country, quilt blocks were shared and altered, often without names. It was the introduction of published patterns in journals and newspapers in the 1890s that canonised quilt block names across the country. It was a time of great depression, and quilting boomed as women made do ever so artistically with old sheets, flour sacks, and dress scraps.
Quilts were art as well as necessity, and they carried both titles beautifully and equally. They reflected everyday life, nature, history and literature, as well as political and social concerns. They celebrated the mundane churn dash, and cups and saucers, and riled against slavery and alcoholism. And in a simple mix of squares and triangles, they created several thousand variations of design. They were generous and they were genius.

RED SKY AT NIGHT QUILT TOP CONSTRUCTION:

You will need:

Red: Sixty 1.5" squares, two 9.5" squares cut in half diagonally for the corners, Four 18" squares cut into quarters diagonally for the side triangles.

White: One hundred 12.5" x 1.5" strips.

1. Lay out your quilt on point. Your quilt will have 41 blocks of 5 blocks across the top and 5 down the side. The extras will fill the spaces in between. Take note of blocks with more dark or light colour, and spread them evenly.

2. Starting in one corner, sew a white strip to the left and right side of your block. Press away from the block.

3. Take another white strip and sew two red 1.5" squares to each end. Sew it to another side of the block. This will be the corner. Press.

4. Sew a corner triangle to this white strip. Press.

5. Sew a side triangle to the white strips on the side. Press.

6. Take 3 white strips and sew red squares between them, end to end to make a line of sashing. Add to the first row.

7. You will now repeat these steps in diagonal rows through the quilt. First sewing strips between the blocks, then sewing red squares between lines of strips, then side triangles, before adding another row of sashing. I sewed these in rows as below before sewing my quilt top together.

I used Carolyn Friedlander's Doe Wide for the backing, and handquilted through the sashing, and in a simple echo of each block. I find hand-quilting easier with a queen size, though obviously much slower. I like the look of the thick, chunky perle on the red, but I also wonder if a simple cross hatch design on the machine would have worked well too. Washing it made some parts puffy rather than giving it an even crinkle, which I love. You can see in the picture above that there's a little overhang with the triangles. I trimmed the top before basting, but you could also wait till after. I washed the quilt three times with colour catchers before I felt safe giving it to my mum. There was lots of pink in those babies, and a little bleeding after the first wash, but it was gone by the third.

I made a single Dresden Plate for a side corner and considered making more, but I worried it would be too busy. I think it's sweet there on it's own.

It's a humbling thing for a Quilt Along to be a huge learning experience, rather than a raving 'success'. For me it's been a fumbling, scrounging, eye-opener, not a neat, organised package. But I'm not sure I could have come to quilt history any other way. And it's made me all the more certain of the need to tell stories through quilts and about them. It's been a winding path, but the next leg of the journey feels clearer because of it.

Thank you, thank you for your following, encouragement, and allowing the freedom to grow and fail and learn in this experience. Right back at the very beginning, I noted one of my reasons for doing this was to shake that quiet, persistent voice that quilting was an extravagant waste of time. If there is one great success in this, it is that. I never hear that voice now. And it's why I believe so passionately in understanding our story. Quilt making is not an excess or a passing phase, it is an old art form, once so highly regarded, and deemed necessary, and now pushed to the side as a hobby. I for one am honoured to be passing on the tradition. This Quilt Along has moved quilting in my mind from a bit of a sanity keeper, perhaps even a distraction from real life, to a calling. 

An InLinkz Link-up

This link up is open internationally!

The Orphanage Quilt

If old WIPs make a satisfying finish, imagine all the good feelings brought on by finishing six at once! This quilt has been on my mind for along time, back when I asked my Do Good Stitches bee back in February to send me some scrappy improvised blocks. And then as they arrived, I added them to my orphan block pile, wondering when I was finally going to take the plunge and sew this thing together. To say it made me nervous was an understatement. This is not usually how I quilt. It's not a pile of squares sitting next to the machine and sewn together at random and it's not carefully laid out blocks that need concentration and working out. It sits somewhere in the middle, not in a happy medium kind of way, but in a road-less-travelled, throw-the-rule-book kind of way.

My orphan block box is a scraggly mix of leftovers from finished projects and abandoned quilts that started with a bright future but quickly resulted in disillusionment. It is a place of discomfort and guilt, bereft of inspiration.What else do you do with leftover blocks? It's times like this I realise that in my quilting life, more than anywhere else, I am a hoarder.

And it's a good thing I am, don't you think? I used only about half of my leftovers, but with the ones that made their way back to the box, I now feel a sense of peace and purpose. One day I'll do this again. Maybe it can be a yearly ritual. Like a jubilee. Setting those old expectations and dreams and "I don't know what to do with this so you can go here" into a quilt to start afresh with new projects and a little less guilt.

As I was showing my progress on Instagram, a few folks asked me to explain my progress, so I took lots of photos to give you an idea here. Like I said, there's no rules in improvisation. I went mostly by feel.

There's no way I could have achieved this without my design wall. I laid out the blocks, keeping in mind that I want to sew them together without going around corners. So I made them into bigger blocks of 2-4 pieces. Coincidentally, most of these were divisible by 3. That means they were 3", 6", 9", 12", etc, so a little mindful arranging made them fit together easily. When they didn't, I had strips and strips of leftover half-rectangle triangles from my Tent City quilt that I added to anything that was too small, and then trimmed back down if I needed to without worrying about keeping my points intact.

I sewed those bigger blocks into 3 large slabs and was almost going to sew those together when I realised I was out of wadding. This actually felt a lot like providence because I did have long, wide strips of wadding, leftover from other quilts mostly the perfect size for my slabs. The one that was too narrow, I sewed to another and pressed the seams open so it would fit.

I used a Quilt-as-you-go method I first came across on Maureen's blog, which I had only ever used with smaller blocks. I spray basted the quilt top slab to one side of the wadding and then quilted lightly over the two layers. Then I trimmed all the way around the excess wadding. And then I did the same with the other two slabs.

I trimmed the whole quilt a little again, just where there was uneven edges. Then using a 1/4" and my walking foot, I sewed the quilted slabs right sides together. I lay out my backing fabric and taped it to the floor so it would stay taut, sprayed and laid out the quilted top.

I then went back to my machine and first quilted either side of the thick seams to hold them down. Then I used a straight, meandering stitch, basically zig-zagging my way around the quilt. I wanted to try something different and more improvised than straight line quilting, but now that I'm done, I wish I'd stuck with my favourite! I used a mix of hand-quilting, thick variegated Aurifil thread, and my go-to white. It was a fun experiment, trying to keep with the improv theme, but I think simple, horizontal lines would have held it together more.

Undoubtedly, the very best part of quilt-as-you-go is when you suddenly remember that you can use you backing as your binding! I simply trimmed around the backing 1" from the quilt top edge. I then folded it in half towards the quilt, then over the edge of the quilt again, and top stitched. When I came to a corner, I folded the overhanging pieces to the left to make a little triangle. The I folded the same method, folding the fabric in half and then over again to make a neat mitered corner.

I'm not sure if I would usually use a binding this dark, I generally pick out a colour somewhere in the middle, but I love how this all hangs together. In a quilt with a lot more low volume than I usually try in scrappy quilts, I think it makes the darker tones shout out happily.

There is much joy in this quilt, in the trying something new, using something old, freeing myself of quilts hanging over my head, some for years. Some were hard to let go, like my Penny Sampler. I would love to make that quilt again someday! But for now, the colours stumped me, I was never sure about them. Other blocks were a relief to use, like the Ohio Stars and the leaves. The leaves were generously made for me by an old bee and the colours just didn't go together like I hoped. Oh, it's good to see how much I've learned about colour over the last five years! I also love the contrast and interest the lovely flowers add, but I was sad when they arrived late, lost in transit for weeks before getting here. I'm glad they finally have a home!

All in all, this quilt was made by about 20 people from about 15 old quilts! Because half were for do. Good Stitches, it'll be heading to a charity next. A quilt of previously hope-less blocks for someone struggling for hope. Gosh I love long-coming finishes! I love new starts, renewed confidence, and stories with happy endings.

Bigger

Every so often, you have a sudden realisation that your kids are growing up. This week has been one of those moments. It's never anything earth shattering, maybe just overhearing their conversation about their day while in the bath, or that they get through their morning chores without cajoling, or they can start to help out with quilt photos, rather that me needing to work creatively around them. But somewhere in there you look at them and think, "Listen to you! Look at you! You're bigger!"

I'm not the kind of person to mourn this change. I love grown up conversation, help with the washing, wee in the toilet. This is the stage I've been waiting for. The one where we know we are done having more, and we just sit back (in a figurative sense) and enjoy the ride. No more cesareans, no more morning sickness, no more stopping every 2 hours in car trips to pull over and breastfeed.
I have friends with teenagers and I know there's still some stuff ahead of me, but right now, I have a big boy that I can still beat in a wrestle, and a little girl who I can still beat trying to escape under the front gate, and one in between who doesn't like to wrestle or escape (yet). Right now it's nice.

This quilt was pulled from my Works in Progress box already sewn into quarter-square triangles. I cut those up diagonally and sewed them back together without too much thought or design. I think it's good to do that with WIPs sometimes. I thought a little about how to make it bigger, or add some white or grey for interest, and in the end, I had two spare blocks, and could have cut some more to make an extra row, but I just kept making that decision to keep it simple. I sewed the finished blocks together, spray basted, quilted and bound it in a long afternoon. I have other quilts I want to throw my creativity and thoughtfulness at. I could just let this one be a happy, scrappy gift for a friend.

I started this blog almost 5 years ago because things weren't all that nice. Because I wanted to take photos and tell stories that processed what was hard, but mostly recognised what was good. Today, taking photos of these sweet kids, and a quilt I didn't have to fight to finish, it felt good to stop and say, "Hey, look where we are! How good is this?" Life is chaotic and interrupted and full and it's easy to find things I want to change, to think, I can't wait till we're nappy-free or till Tim finishes his Masters, or the kids are old enough to leave for an evening. But right now, in this moment, I am surrounded by beauty. I have much to be thankful for.