No quilts today

Here's a list of places taking donations for Southeast Asia relief, with ratings. Maybe later we can make quilts, but for now they need food and clean water and medicine. So donate, if you're able.

Quiltin' the night away

After work today, I drove up to the mainland and collected my mother (who isn't allowed to drive right now) and we went to the quilt guild Christmas party. They changed it up this year - in the past it has been sort of a pot-luck thing, and it was always a zoo and there was a ton of food and sometimes some sort of entertainment. (The best of the past entertainment was Ricky Tims, who we've had a couple of times. He is a lot of fun. If it was up to me, I'd have him every year. Although I suppose that would get old eventually.)

This year, they decided to dispense with pot-luck and have the dinner catered. The guild has plenty of money, quite frankly, so they paid about half and the members had to pay the other half. (A big $7.) It was very nice, I thought. There were a lot of people there but it didn't seem as chaotic as it usually does. Maybe because people weren't worrying about their food that they brought, I don't know. The food was mostly just finger-food but it was good. They had meatballs and stuffed jalapenos and mini-cheese-balls and chocolate fondue with stuff to dip in it, and fruits and vegetables, and more stuff that I'm forgetting, including several desserts. And they had harpists playing, a whole troop of them, which was lovely although it was hard to hear them over the sound of 200 women all talking at once. (There were a few men there. They may have been talking, too, but they were so outnumbered you couldn't hear them.)

After the food, we had the actual meeting, which isn't much to talk about. They installed officers and had some little presentations by representatives of organizations we've donated money and quilts to (which was more interesting than I would have expected, actually) and they gave out door prizes, and we actually won one! Mom and I had sort of mixed up our tickets so it's not really clear which one of us won it, but since most of our quilt stuff other than fabric is all mixed together anyway, it doesn't much matter who it belongs to. The prize was a full set of blocks of the month - Ohio Stars - complete with fabric, so that is a pretty nice prize. Mom says she doesn't want to do it so I guess that means I will. Somehow I'm sort of in the mood to do something more structured, anyway.

Weekly report

I did work on the string quilt last week. What I need in the end is 20 12" blocks (which are really sets of 4 6" blocks) - I think I have six or seven right now, plus some loose small blocks. I did figure out that the recipient is still going to be around after January anyway - she's retiring, officially, in January but she's going to work part-time after that - so if I miss my deadline it's not that big of a deal.

Mom has a new project that's part broderie perse and part regular applique, but I haven't gotten a picture of it yet. She was also working on her blocks-of-the-month, the santas and the angels. I think some of those will be done before too terribly long.

In news about her health - she may have to have another surgery. She will find out tomorrow, I think. Surely they won't want to do it before Christmas, but if they do, she said it's fine with her because she wants to get it over with. I'll let y'all know about that.

I am planning to quilt on Saturday, although if it's like last Saturday, we spent half the afternoon Christmas shopping so I didn't get a whole lot done. I have the whole week off between Christmas and New Year's, so hopefully I can get in some extra quilting then!

About toile

Remember a while back when I was talking about how I needed to look up the definition of toile, because I was confused? Well, I never did remember to do that, but these nice people did it for me.

The term toile is French for cotton fabric printed by any process. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the word became the generic term for the cottons printed with engraved metal plates, and later, rollers. The printing technique was begun near Dublin, Ireland, by Francis Nixon in the early 1750s and was further imporved upon by the French in the 1770s. At Jouy-en-Josas near Paris, the Oberkampf factory established an international reputation for fine toiles know as Toiles de Jouy. Printing ceased at Oberkampf in 1843.

Generally there were two categories of designs: people and places (ladies and gentlemen, children playing, pastoral scenes) and flora and fauna. These prints were only briefly popular for women's dresses (circa 1790) but were used for furnishings, bed and window coverings, pillows and quilts.

Early design elements were very large. The etched plates were often three feet square and the figures could be a foot high while entire scenes filled the plate. When the process moved to copper rollers rather than plates, the designs became "squashed" in order to fit onto the rollers.

Printed toiles were often one color. The copper plates were not inked but had finely ground mordants in the etched lines of the plates. The mordant was transferred to the surface of fabric. The length of the 'printed' fabric was then run through a madder dye bath. Depending on the mordant used, the design was red, violet, pink or brown/tan on an off-white or cream ground. A very finely ground indigo mixture produced a blue or green print on the light colored ground.

Once again, toiles became popular decorating fabrics early in the twentieth century during the Colonial Revival. Today toiles are used extensively for quilts, duvet covers, pillows, curtains, and handbags and once again for garments!

Triple Four-Patch

I'm on the oldies-but-goodies this week. This is my triple-four-patch, which was an exchange we started in 2000, and it took me until 2003 to finish the quilt. Those are 6" blocks, but there's an awful lot of them (224 blocks, I think) so it's a big quilt. I machine-quilted it myself, too.

Blast from the past

log cabin I made for my mother-in-law in 2001

Mom's project of the week

the latest Santa block (not quite finished) - she worked on this one while she was back in the hospital last week!

Last week's project

toile quilt (the one I mentioned in my last entry)

Weekly report

I didn't get much quilting done this weekend. Heck, I haven't gotten much quilting done in the last month or so! But the reasons were pretty unavoidable so I guess I shouldn't feel bad. We are going to Ohio (for Thanksgiving with the in-laws) on Sunday but I'm still going to try to get some quilting done on Saturday, between bouts of packing madness. And I'll be back on Friday so hopefully I will manage some quilting Thanksgiving weekend, too.

Mom is back in form; unfortunately I forgot my camera so no picture of the quilt-of-the-week. It's nothing fancy, anyway, but it's very pretty. It's a pattern that shows off a toile she found.

I did get a few more blocks done on the string quilt. I ought to take it home and work on it more so I won't be trying to finish at the last minute. I also started sewing some blocks together in 4's (so into 12" blocks, basically) because of the way I'm matching up the colors. If you want to see what I'm talking about, look in last month's archives; I know I put up a picture of the first few sets.

(Off-topic) The reason I didn't get too much done was because of early Christmas shopping madness - we have a new Marshall's "Megastore" near us and we went to check it out. You would not believe the traffic. And it's already been open several weeks so it's not like it's the grand opening or anything!

Texas Traditional Treasures

Box of Chocolates, Jo Lynn O'Neil

This quilt and the following one were from an exhibit of Texas quilts. As I understand it, various guilds around the state were asked to submit entries. Jo Lynn's quilt (above) was one of my guild's entries.

Ring of Friendship - Glenda Teaff

A few quilts from the judged show

Bouganvillae - Barbara Swinea, North Carolina

Folkart Sundae - Sandi McMillan, Nebraska

Radical Joy

Caroline Madden and the Chiskale Quilters, California

This is a really beautiful crazy quilt, but it had problems around the border - it was velvet and it didn't lay flat at all. Is that a recurring problem with crazies? (I have made some blocks for a crazy quilt but I haven't finished anything, so I don't really know.)

Red Hats

Marilyn Fallert, St. Louis

I really sort of hate the whole "red hat lady" phenomenon (sorry, if you are one!) but this is cute.

Windshield Visions

When Steve Took Advantage of Gloria at the Starlight Drive In Theater in 1969 - Linda Reuss Bens

There was a whole group of quilts with this odd "windshield" shape - I don't know if you can really tell, but the top is smaller than the bottom, approximating the shape of a windshield. A lot of these quilts were terrific but this was my favorite. (And unfortunately, I came across this exhibit late in the day and I was running out of memory on the camera by that point, so I only got pictures of a couple of them.)

A Moda Challenge quilt

A Whole Load-a-Moda to Meet da Quota - Lynn Droege

Link to more pictures

My Webshots album with the rest of the quilt show pictures is here. They are mostly labelled now. I'm still planning to gradually put some more of them over here, but I'm sure I won't put all of them since there are nearly 200!

Symbol Quilt

By Chuck Nohara

This quilt is HUGE

Best of Show

Here's Hollis Chatelain showing the back of her quilt Precious Water, which won Best of Show.

Quilt festival blues

The only thing "blue" about the quilt festival is that I'm still tired from yesterday and I'm going back tomorrow. The good news is that Mom thinks she's going to feel like going, which is very good indeed. She just got out of the hospital (again) on Wednesday.

Anyway, the pictures are up in my Webshots albums - user name mel77c - mostly unlabelled, right now, and completely out of any order, but they're there. I'll put some of them up over here, but while you're waiting, here are a couple of Hoffman challenge quilts.

(During trip 1 to the Festival, I bought NO fabric, can you believe it? I did, however, buy Electric Quilt. And a big package of Thangles, and several of those scissors fobs from ByMolly.com, which I am utterly addicted to, for some reason. So I spent plenty of money.)

Hoffman Challenge

Hoffman Challenge quilt - On a Wing and a Prayer, Debby L Sharp

Hoffman Challenge quilt - Crazy About Butterflies, Patricia Rambo

No report to report

No Quilt of the Week from my mom this week: she has been in the hospital. She should be out and quilting in a couple of days. I'm tired and not feeling up to explaining the whole thing, but the gist is that we don't exactly know what's going on anyway. When I know more I'll post more. In the meantime, think good thoughts for her!

(I'm posting a Random Quilt Picture below. If I have time, I'll throw up a couple more this week.)

Random quilt picture

This is a picture from the Woodlands quilt show.

Strings

Weekly report

I've started working on the string quilt, finally. I did a little bit on this last week, although I don't think I remembered to mention it. I have a photo of 16 blocks I'll put up later. I actually have 18 blocks done, which sounds good except that this is 6" blocks so I'm going to have to make a good many - I'm thinking 80 blocks, which would make a 48x60" quilt. This is the first time I've tried making a string quilt with a common fabric, and so far I really like it. I also made my last one without a foundation, but I'm using one this time. It's much easier. (I think last time I just starched the crap out of it hoping that would help the bias edge problem, and it worked ok, but I'm really trying to avoid using a ton of starch on things these days.)

If you're wondering about the autumn leaf quilt, well, it's obviously not going to be finished this autumn anyway - and for that matter I said from the beginning that it probably wouldn't. I'll probably come back to it pretty soon but I'm not in any particular hurry about finishing it. The string quilt is a gift and thus has a deadline.

I didn't ever post to say that I skipped quilt guild last week - I didn't feel well at all that day, my allergies have really flared up in the last week or so. I hear the speaker was good, though.

And I keep thinking the quilt show (i.e., Houston) is this week, but it's not, darnit. I guess Market starts a week from tomorrow. I'm taking the Thursday and Friday of next week off - the 4th and 5th, I think? I can't wait.

Cowgirl Rose

Believe it or not, my mother didn't have anything new to photograph this week, so here's one that's a few months old - it's been in my Webshots album but I'm going on the assumption that everybody doesn't go look at that. This is a Moda panel, but I really like the way she set it.

(Oh, and I got the info for the pattern for that one from last week, for whoever was asking - I'll put it in the comments.)

Last week's quilt

Here's the 9-patch/snowball of my mom's that I didn't get a picture of last week. She used a couple of toile-type fabrics* and a couple of florals. I really like this.

* I need to look up the definition of "toile" because I have a search that runs every day on eBay for toiles and I see some things called toiles that I don't consider to be, personally. (Which isn't unusual on eBay, when it comes right down to it.) What I really think of as toiles are the one-color pictorial fabrics, but I've never checked into this. I'll have to check and see what the actual definition is and report back. Anyway, these are in multiple colors but they definitely are in a toile-type style.

199 leaves

Apparently I miscounted. (See the space on the bottom left?) You can't really see them in the picture, but I have the 4 blocks for the corners done. I'm just missing that one red block, darnit.

Now I'm trying to decide if I need to do any more rearranging - what do y'all think, does everything look pretty balanced? Some of the lighter background fabrics show up more than others, that's the thing that's bothering me most. I think there's a couple of blocks I could move around to work on that a little bit. But I don't think it'd look bad if I put it together exactly as it is.

Mom's quilt of the week

She was cutting out the fabric for this the last time I was there sewing (week before last), but I don't think she started it until this week. She's quilting on it now, but she's not finished yet.

(I don't remember where this pattern came from. As always, if you really want to know, say so in the comments and I'll try to remember to ask her!)

Pretty colors!

block for Mom's bee (I think it's going to be a Lopsided Logs block) - the cat is machine-embroidered.

Random quilt picture

One of my older quilts. This was a graduation present for my friend Ryan. (He requested "Yankee blue" and dark green.) If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't use that blue and white check, which I think is somewhat distracting up close, but from a distance it looks great. Really this is my favorite of all my log cabins.

We interrupt this program

NLDS game 3, 10-9-2004 (or, the reason I don't have a quilt report this week)

My mother did have a project of the week - a 9-patch/snowball variation in toiles, it's very cute. She's been sick all week and she made this quilt from start to finish while she was sitting at home. However, I don't have a picture because the batteries in my camera decided to play out. I'll get one next week.

Bonus quilt picture

I thought I would just start throwing up a random quilt picture when I have nothing else to say.


Here's the quilt Karen and I made for Beth and Jeremy last spring. (This is before it was quilted.) There are lots and lots more pictures of it - including detail pictures of all the photographs - in Karen's gallery.

I also want to throw up my standard disclaimer about this quilt: whatever Karen may tell you, she did most of the work on this quilt. I made some of the units and did share equally in the assembly process, but she did all the rest, including printing all of those photos, which had to have been a whole lot of work! (I keep saying this because she has a habit of making it sound like I did as much work as she did, and I'm really really certain that that's not true.)

Playing with leaves

I don't have a whole lot to say about Saturday, really. My mom was gone part of the time, and while she was gone I raided her stash because I needed greens, and I forgot to bring any (it's certainly not that I am lacking in greens, believe me - it's just that I'm ADD girl and I forget everything) - I couldn't find her main box of green but I found the Christmas fabric, which had enough usable greens to do the job. All it takes to make a leaf block is one strip - 2x12" will do - of colored fabric. (And an equal amount of background. But I have plenty of background.) When my mom got back she said that most of her greens were in a box under the daybed - I had looked under there but apparently it was in the back and I didn't dig deep enough. And of course she didn't mind me taking the fabric; I knew that or I wouldn't have taken it in the first place. She ended up giving me a couple of strips from the fabric she's using to make the table runner, too - I didn't touch that because I didn't know for sure that she didn't need all of it.

I also washed fabric while she was gone - the bee where we're doing the batik trade is this week and I needed to cut it and before that it needed to be washed. So while I was at it I washed all the fabric I'd bought lately from the retreat and eBay and the Painted Pony trip last week.

I needed 20 blocks (16 for the body of the quilt and the 4 for the corners of the border) and I wasted enough time looking for fabric and washing and ironing that I didn't get all 20 done. I did 13, most of which are green. I rearranged a little and double-checked, and what's left to do is 1 orange and 6 reds. That's it.

Right now the four corner blocks are green. I was thinking that I could change that, if I cared to, but I have to make up my mind before I start sewing all those blocks together. The way the colors radiate out from the center, the inner diamond (yellow) has 4 blocks, the 2nd row (greens) has 8 and the one after that has 12, and so on. (It keeps going until you get to the edge of the quilt and then it starts diminishing again until you get out to 8 and then 4 again at the corners. I had to count to be sure this was right, but it is.) So if I changed the 2nd row with the 3rd row - which I think is red - I would need 12 and I could use up those extra 4 greens for that, and then I'd have 4 reds left for the corners instead. I may try it to see how it looks. The reason I'm not sure I want green leaves in the corners is because I don't know yet what color the borders are going to be. I should have decided all this before I made the 4 extra green blocks, but obviously I didn't. Anyway, that gives me 2 choices and I'm pretty sure one of them will be fine. (It's also possible that I could do some further exchanging and end up with extra orange instead, or even yellow. I haven't done the mental gymnastics to be sure that would work, though.)

Mom's project of the week

This table-runner is from a commercial pattern she bought in Brenham.

(Incidentally, I think "Mom's Project of the Week" is going to be a regular feature. I really just started calling it that to be funny, but the fact is, she almost always has something new going. So if she does, I'll try to get a picture.)

Oops.

I'm pretty sure the link in the post below is wrong. I'm about to fix it.

old quilt festival pictures

I'm not going to post all of these, but I found a whole bunch of pictures from the 2000 Houston Quilt Festival, and they're in a Webshots album if anybody wants to look.

Borders

I asked the Livejournal quilting group (the link is a couple of entries down, in the list) about the border issue and they have been a font of opinions, which is exactly what I was looking for. The consensus seems to be, something fairly simple, like a narrow border and then a wide border, and 4 leaf blocks in the corners. I like that a lot and it hadn't occurred to me (the part about the leaves in the corners, I mean). There is not much consensus on what should be in the wide part of the border - some people think background fabric, but others disagree. Chinese coins were mentioned. I'm still thinking that part over, myself.

Only a little bit more to go! (Hey, if anybody has any brilliant ideas about a border, I'm all ears.)

Saturday

We went to Painted Pony yesterday, to take my mom's Janome in to be worked on. (It just quit running. No idea why.) Of course I bought a bunch of fabric - and there's a picture of it below. The pale colored batik I had an actual reason to buy, it's for the batik swap we're doing. (I think I already talked about that in the entry about the retreat.) We're on the 3rd month of it. We did cool colors the first month, and warm colors last month. This month is multicolors. I bought a fabric for that already, from my favorite eBay seller. Next month is neutrals and backgrounds, that's what the pale batik is for. I really love that fabric, so I bought a little more than I really have to have so I'll be sure to have some left. Anyway, the rest of it is just stuff I liked. I've used up a lot of background fabric on the leaf quilt, so I was thinking about replenishing those. And I've been working on getting more greens for a while now; I've done several quilts that have really used a lot of greens.

Anyway, it was 3:00 by the time we got back to Mom's, but I still got another 11 blocks made, which isn't bad. (I'm doing them 6 at a time, so it should have been 12, but I messed one up and I didn't have the patience to fix it, I just tossed it out.) I'll post the latest picture. Only 16 blocks to go!

Mom has her 3rd Santa block (see below for the first two), so she worked on cutting out the pieces for that. She has a light table and she was tracing the pieces she needed onto fabric.

(I thought that Blogger had lost this post, but it didn't - which is great because I don't have the energy to rewrite it right now. Whew!)

Here's the fabric I bought at Painted Pony.

Links galore

I went looking for quilting weblogs & journals, to supplement the two I already knew of. I didn't exactly find a million of them, but I did find some. So here's my very imperfect list. Some of these are completely about quilting and some are only occasionally about quilting, so I decided to categorize accordingly.

All (or at least mostly) about quilts:
All Too Quilty
Frequently Wrong But Never In Doubt (a crazy-quilter)
Hip To Piece Squares
In a Minute Ago - Sharon is a fabulous crazy-quilter - I was already knew her work but had no idea she had a weblog!
LiveJournal's Quilting Community - sort of a mass blog
Mayflower Quilt Guild - a quilt guild with a blog!
Quilt Reflections
Quilting and other Stuff

I don't really think of Susan Druding's little piece of about.com as a weblog, but it is set up in weblog format, and it's an excellent quilting resource if you're not familiar with it.

Often about quilts:
Hat On Top, Coat Below (my friend Karen, who recently wrote about getting rejected by the Hoffman Challenge*)
Layers of Meaning - art quilts and other embellish-y stuff
Stitch Witch

Occasionally about quilts:
Arrrgh!
Girlreaction
Ceridwen's Cauldron (bonus: all sorts of interesting stuff about Wicca)
Crafty Blog
Dan's (sometimes) Daily Musings

needlecase.net has a list of weblogs you can sort by field of interest. So does Globe of Blogs.

(I based the categories and my descriptions on recent posts, so if people have gotten off on an unusual tangent lately, that may be why they seem to be in the wrong place. The descriptions, what there are of them, are entirely my own.)

Note: I don't know how to put links on the sidebar or I would. If somebody wants to try to show me how, I'll give it a shot, but keep in mind that I'm severely html-challenged, ok?

*I love Karen's Hoffman Challenge entry. What were those people thinking?

Mom's weekly project

Laurel Burch "Christmas card" quilt - it's a panel so all she really did was add the borders and quilt it. (I want a Christmas card with that moon in the bottom corner. You think they make those?)

Sue's Santas

Here are the Sue Garman Santas in their "normal" colors, courtesy of my mother.

My mother is on an absolute block-of-the-month tear right now, which is why I can't keep up with all of them! I think she's doing four, including two of Sue's. (See below for the angels.)

It's not a very good picture, but I said I'd post it, so here are Sue Garman's Santas in neutral colors. I think this pattern is already available, isn't it? She just changed the colors.

Self-promotion

Remember what I said about how somebody's going to complain no matter what? My mother e-mailed me today and said, regarding the guild meeting: "You know, all Shar Jorgenson was really doing was selling her stuff." Well, that's true, really. That's how she makes a living, selling templates and patterns and things, not really on giving lectures. Almost everybody who speaks at the guild is basically the same way. She was definitely not the most subtle person about it, but she probably wasn't the least subtle I've ever seen, either.

Quilt guild

Shar Jorgensen was our speaker last night. She was really good and had some gorgeous quilts, but boy, did she talk for a long time. Although I ended up getting home at 10:15, which wasn't too horribly late. She said she didn't even bring all of the quilts she wanted to bring, so I guess it could have been longer! I believe she brought every single quilt on this page, though. (Bonus: if you're doing the October Shop Hop, you know where the bunny is now!) The people behind me were grumbling about their butts being sore - but nobody got up and left. I think that's the mark of a good presentation, because, honestly, somebody is going to grumble no matter what. I've been an officer in the guild and I've learned that for a fact.

In other quilt-guild-related news, there are finally pictures from our quilt show up! And, well, here's mine. (This one is mine, also, but the picture is sort of muddy, and the first one is my pride and joy, anyway.) And this one is my mother's, and so is this one.

Autumn Leaves

Here they are, all 169 of them - if I'm counting right. Actually I didn't count the blocks at all, I counted blank spaces backwards from 196, if that makes any sense.

It looks huge, doesn't it? But it's only going to be 42" when it's put together. And I guess I'll put some sort of border on it, but I haven't made any decisions about what that's going to be.

Center of the leaf quilt, as I've got the blocks arranged currently. I doubt that I'm going to change it a whole lot.

Another Saturday night

I got a whopping 11 blocks done today on the leaf quilt - I'll post the pictures in a few minutes. Actually that's about the same speed I've been going; I've made approximately 168 blocks so I've gotten awfully efficient. I don't think I'm going to get much faster. Less than 30 blocks to go!

I also did some rearranging of all the "rows" outside the 2nd brown one. What I'm calling a row is actually sort of a circle, or a diamond to be more precise. If you look at the pictures you'll see what I mean. I started with yellow in the center, then green (oops, I left that one out at first!), then red, orange, brown, red again & brown again. That gets you out to the edge of the quilt. Up to now I've just been making blocks more or less randomly, as far as the colors. So today I had to figure out what I'm going to put in the corners, and make the rest of the blocks accordingly.

My mom worked on connecting the quilt-as-you-go angel blocks she's been doing. (Actually, they are just a normal block-of-the-month. She just decided to do them quilt-as-you-go.) She has six of them done now, all hand-pieced and hand-quilted. (These are a Sue Garman pattern, which reminds me that I didn't post a picture of the Santa quilt in neutral colors that Sue had at the retreat. I'll have to be sure and do that, because I liked it a lot.)

So the pictures below are several of my mom's quilts. Have I said that my mom is amazingly (and sort of disgustingly) productive?

diamond quilt from this month's Fons & Porter magazine (she changed the colors a tiny bit)
Posted by Hello

detail of diamonds quilt
Posted by Hello

Sue Garman angels (in progress) 

Christmas boots quilt 

(By the way, if anybody is just crazy about this quilt and has to have it, let me know because I'm pretty sure this one is going to be for sale. Of course, it's not finished right now, but knowing my mom it'll be done by the end of the week.)

Mom's scrap quilt (#1) 

back of Mom's scrap quilt 

#2 of 2 scrap quilts that my mom is working on 

Retreat pictures start here

(See below for explanation)


exchange blocks in fall fabrics 

pickle dish cats (note the tails on some of them!)