Bad Batting, Bad

I had a hard time choosing what kind of quilting pattern to do for Joy. My initial thought was to mimic all the plaid lines and do some kind of straight lines on the quilt. You can see the problems I ran into trying to mark lines. Pokey, Pokey, Pokey.

I quilted a partial line and realized that no, that just wasn't going to work - too many straight lines. Maybe a crosshatch would be better, but since I want to minimize crossing seams that wasn't going to help much. So then I tried my old standby of freehand fans. Quickly realized that wasn't doing anything since most of the fans would disappear amidst all the busy fabric.

In the purple border I decided to do a fun spirally pattern that I learned from Gwen Marston. I've never seen it in one of her books, but she used it on the adorable purple Christmas Tree quilt in Ladies' Circle Patchwork and Quilting sometime in the early '90s. There are spirals growing out of a center vine - I like how it looks. This is 3 strands of embroidery floss and a honking big needle:

Now one thing complicating matters is that I bought a quilting batt that I'd never used before. My LQS had run out of Quilter's Dream Request so I thought, could the Quilter's Dream Select be all that different? It's a 70% cotton blend rather than pure cotton but shouldn't that make it even easier to quilt through? HA!

For hand quilting, the Select is horrific. Never, ever will I do this again. It hurts to pull the needle through and I'm too stubborn to just stab stitch. I was having such a hard time pulling the needle through that I bought balloons to help grab onto the needle. I just cut one in half and stuck the top end on my thumb. Homemade finger cot. 

It's actually very hard to take a photo one-handed esp when using your non-dominant hand. 

Anyway, you can also use a whole balloon as a needle grabber. Putting it on my thumb just saves effort. I'm also wearing one of my beloved Handeze gloves, which work great at reducing wrist fatigue. You can get them at JoAnn's and Michaels over with the embroidery floss.

I'm going to tack the rest of the quilt, haven't decided exactly how yet. 

Pokey and Bibi were both making me nuts this morning while I was trying to quilt. It's hard to be a single catmom.

Switching over to geekiness. Did ya'all watch the 4th episode of Dollhouse? I thought it was a big improvement and the series has gotten much more interesting. Though of course there are those niggling questions. Why would you ever get a Doll to be a midwife? Unless there was some kind of unmentioned skullduggery, it seems rather pointless not to mention overly expensive. So I'd rather that episode a B. Maybe with a minus. Really looking forward to the next couple of episodes.

I really need to stop reading TV By the Numbers. It depresses the hell out of me. Dollhouse may make it through one season but is doubtful for pickup next year, Terminator: Sarah Connor is doing terribly in the ratings and is likely to be cancelled. And why is it that Chuck is even in danger of not getting renewed? That is such a fun show, why would the network cancel it?

So speaking of tv, I am going to give Castle a try tonight. It sounds completely unoriginal, but hey, I do love mysteries and Nathan Fillion (Firefly's Capt Mal Reynolds) is a hoot, so what the heck. Here's a review of the first episode by Televisionary.

What's in a Name?

Another wonderful mail day yesterday. Kathie B sent me her name (which she fears is huge, but it really isn't) and a leftover wish plus some other goodies. Mary C from Spokane sent me these wonderful free-pieced candy jars (I love the red M&M jar) and some orphan squares. Thank you both so much.

I decided to lay out all your names together to see how they look. I know this is a wonky picture, but I idiotically put the blocks directly in front of a down staircase, so not only could I not get up high, I was in peril of tumbling. I stood on the couch and leaned way over to get this:

Isn't it fabulous? Your personalities really come out - I LOVE the variations in size and fabrics. All of it. This is going to be such a fun quilt. I do so love free-pieced letters - if everyone was using the same measurement to make their names it would be a much less interesting quilt.

Pokey joined the fun - this gives you a chance to see how Kathie B pieced the background together for her name - very fun. All of these pics should blow up bigger when you click on them so you can see details.

Too bad you can't actually see Pokey rolling and squirming, begging for a belly rub:

I finished hand quilting Raspberry Rumspringa yesterday, woohoo! I can't believe how freaked out I get when I don't have a project ready for quilting - it really makes me nuts. Luckily Joy is now basted - I think I'm going with big green fans for the quilting on it. I'll use 3-strands of embroidery floss. I'd prefer to use perle cotton size 8 but don't have any here and I refuse to buy any. My sweet husband is throwing perles into the mail for me though - what a sweetie he is. 

Amsterdam Flower Market

I'm digging into the archives to bring you unblogged photos from my trip to Amsterdam back in December. I'm having a hard time remember what I've blogged and what I haven't - so much for my memory.

So you read Flower Market and think there will be lots of photos of flowers. No, sorry, this is the only one. That just isn't what interests me...

Tacky souvenirs? Now that's more like it. Lots of miniature wooden shoes:

Wooden shoe magnets. I can see great quilt inspiration here:

Canal house magnets:

Seriously tacky tacky souvenir magnets, featuring the red light district and cannabis:

Speaking of cannabis, I did find it surprising to see it so publicly available even though I know it's legal there:

Love the shutters on this house:

And even the mailboxes are beautiful:

Not much to tell about goings on here. I've been hand quilting like crazy and am almost done with my current project - woohoo. I keep running into difficulties with Pokey and Habibi wanting to be on my lap and spending time with me. Sigh. I know, cute sweet loving cats, what a rough problem. Speaking of which, go check out the darling in Kate's life.

Album Quilts of Ohio's Miami Valley

I have a book to recommend to you: Album Quilts of Ohio's Miami Valley by Sue C. Cummings. "From 1888 to 1918, a community of Miami Valley farm families who were neighbors and relatives made album presentation quilts to celebrate life passages. Their sharing of designs and construction techniques led to the development of a distinctive regional quilt style that has never been duplicated in any other region of the state or country." 

This is one of the liveliest, most wonderful quilts I've ever seen pictured here on the cover. It's the Jesse Arnett Quilt, dated February 4, 1912.

The blocks were made in different sizes. To put them together, blocks were either cut down (look in the bottom left corner - the Pineapple block and whatever that one is beneath it were just whacked off - no splitting it in half or trying to make it look symmetrical) or spacer bars were added when needed.

Can you imagine how hard that would be to do without the rotary cutter and ruler? Now it's relatively easy...

Admittedly, not all the quilts featured in the book were made exactly like that, but my favorites definitely were. If you go to the publisher's website and look at the image gallery here, you can see more examples.

When Gwen Marston says that Liberated Quiltmaking is nothing new - she gets so many ideas from antique quilts - she's not kidding. Inaccurate wonky piecing is just ANOTHER way to make quilts.

The book is told as a detective story as Sue Cummings finds her first quilt with the Miami Eagle and then begins to track down more of them. There's admittedly more genealogy than I needed, but I can certainly see its value to historians.

There are loads of wonderful quilts pictured and the photos are fabulous. The publisher got a grant from Robert and Ardis James to help cover the cost. So the price is actually very slim for all that you get in the book. 

There are other bloggers out there who love this book, check out reviews by: Craft Lust, and Inspired by Antique Quilts.

One other thing you may discover in this book is how horrible polyester batting is. Truly. Compare the barely quilted quilts that have the dreaded poly with the heavily quilted beauties from years earlier. They're just sad - the poly quilts. Oh, that's another thing to recommend this book - the beautiful hand quilting. In many of the quilts it was done block by block so there's a fun variety of motifs.

So get the book, it's fabulous.

Green Spaces

While out walking yesterday I discovered a publicly accessible green space. It's a combination of pine flats and swampy bits.

I didn't see a single person while I was there and that was heaven. But what disturbed me was the lack of wildlife. I didn't see any birds, no fish in the water, none of the gopher tortoises that are supposed to inhabit the area. While I think it's wonderful that this area has been set up as a haven, seems like making the greenway long and narrow, divided by highways and allowing people in rather ruin it for that purpose.

The mail brought me more presents yesterday. Heidi doesn't have a blog, but she's participated in several of my online classes. Check out the wonderful house quilt she's working on right now. I love the way she made the dots of the i smaller than the rest of the letter.

Joyce sent me the letters, word and her name there on the bottom row. That "purple" looks like it fell out of Cheri's Stroop Quilt - it will be really fun for me to use. I like that chunk out of the top of the M - gives it quite the rakish air.