Update

My digital camera is on the fritz right now - I got it wet accidentally, I think I may have killed it - but I got EQ for Christmas, so I can show you quilt designs instead! I got blocks similar to the ones below for a door prize last month, and I think I'm going to give that quilt for that retirement gift I've been talking about, instead of the string quilt. They aren't exactly like that, the centers are different, but as far as the layout goes, those will work. (The centers are samplers - each one is a different miniature block.) I think I'm going to do a set with sashing rather than just setting them plain. I'll post a picture of my setting, too.

Mom still can't do her applique but she is sewing on the sewing machine, and when I was over there Monday, she was figuring out how to use the rotary cutter left-handed. She picked it up pretty fast, too. (She also figured out that for some reason she can do counted cross-stitch pretty well, even with a weak hand, so she is doing that for her handwork in the evenings for now.)

Oh, and the quilt guild speaker this month was Hollis Chatelain. She was excellent; she made me sorry I didn't take the class.

Ohio Star blocks

Frank Lloyd Wright panel

My mother's, c.2000
(see below)

Frank Lloyd Wright

Columbine's rant about Frank Lloyd Wright reminded me that I have an unfinished FLW quilt someplace. I started it when I took a Jackie Robinson workshop several years ago - it's one of only a couple of long-term unfinished projects I've got. (I say "long-term" because I don't even want to discuss my unfinished projects from this past year!) My mother finished hers - of course - but I never went back and worked on mine at all. I think I have a picture of hers around someplace, I'll have to dig it out. Mom's was shades of blue and mine was green, so theoretically mine would look similar to the one at the top center of that Jackie Robinson page I linked to above. I've seen all the pieces of it fairly recently, I need to dig them out too - and find out if there's really enough of it there to finish it. That would be a very good idea. We did the hard part of it in class anyway - the part with the funky angles - so it wouldn't be that hard to finish. And after all, I liked them enough that I even bought the book!

(In response to Col: no, I wouldn't want to live in one of FLW's houses either, even though I'm well under 5'8" - but the man was still a genius, just the same.)

Learning applique the nonconsensual way

My mother brought her applique with her to the hospital, but since she can't use her right hand too well, she hasn't been able to do much. She tried doing it left-handed, but I guess she didn't get far. So Saturday when I was there, she decided that I should do it for her. I have only done a tiny bit of hand applique and I really don't have much desire to do more - it just doesn't appeal to me. By which I mean that doing it doesn't appeal to me; I like looking at other people's finished products just fine. For some reason, however - I guess because she likes doing it - she thinks that if I would just learn how, I would like doing it too. And she thinks that maneuvering me into doing hers for her is the way to get me to learn. But the thing is, even if I did, what I do at night is fiddle around on the computer, and if I didn't I would probably read, so I'm not looking for anything to keep my hands busy at night. I did start her block for her, and it looks pretty decent, and I really didn't even mind doing it, but I can't say I've been seized with the desire to do more. (And really? The best part of it was, I got to say to the visitors who came in while I was doing it, "She's forcing me to do applique!")

Update

There's not a lot of quilting going on in my (extended) household right now. My mom had her surgery on Wednesday, and while it went well, she is very weak and I don't think she's going to be doing a lot of applique in the hospital like she did before Thanksgiving. And I'm sure I will be going to the hospital again tomorrow rather than quilting. (She is holding out hope that she will get out this weekend, but from what I saw yesterday I would say it's going to be Monday, at least. Maybe she will surprise me and make rapid progress, though - I would be happy to be wrong.) I did set my sewing machine - the Jem, that is - up in my living room, though, and maybe I will get some done this weekend on the triangle quilt.

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