HouseTops

 Here are a few photos of HouseTop quilts that people have made in my classes. Sorry, there are no credits for who made what... think of it as a journal of ideas. I'm excited to be teaching improvisational cutting and piecing to a new group of quilters, and this housetop "template" makes the process easy and fun. At the Creative Threads Conspiracy in October, I will be teaching a new improv class called Modern Crossroads. Another addictive process - there are so many colours and possibilities, making just one is always a challenge!

Bring me sunshine!

and bugs?

I googled House Of Bug (I was looking for my blog so I could share the sunshine)... 
And I got sites that help eradicate bed bugs, stink bugs and lady bugs.

The sunshine I want to share is here, in this video... See what happens when you spread the cheer? Shouldn't we all have yellow ukuleles in springtime?


House of Bug is not named after stink bugs or lady bugs.... but Lila the purple bug.

Tweed

doesn't it look like a fish skeleton?

What is tweed? I ask myself. First off, the word itself is a joy to utter.
Tweed. Tweed, tweedy tweed.

For me it conjours images of blended coloured wool, woven, knitted, just strands of nubbly yarn, dark brown with whitish flecks, or dark and light grey. I picture herringbone tweed, a twill weave with a diagonal pattern of warp and weft threads that look like the skeleton of a wee fish. I see a green tweed in my head that I have named or misnamed Donegal Tweed. This one is a plain weave, just a nice woven cloth made from green wool with flecks of other colours spun into the yarn. My mom sewed beautiful tailored suits for herself in the seventies and had a great love for tweed. Glen check, Harris tweed, houndstooth and herringbone. These are the fabrics she used to make skirts and trousers and jackets. Woolens with names full of personality.
(Now I've said the word tweed so many times it sounds weird, so I have to look it up).

tweed  

/twēd/

Noun

1. A rough-surfaced woolen cloth, typically of mixed flecked colors, originally produced in Scotland: "a tweed sports jacket".
2. Clothes made of this material.

So, my personal image bank was not too far off. I like to think of the beautiful Noro yarns with their everchanging colours as a tweed, because here and there are flecks of other colours spun in. And look at the lovely tweediness of these yarns from Brooklyn Tweed.

If I were a better knitter, I would have a lot of tweedy yarn. As it is, I am a quiltmaker, so I have a lot of fabric. I've been using cotton fabric for my quilts for a loooong time, and I wanted to try the tweed-like natural linen. I understand (and will have to do more research on the subject) that linen (flax) grows with fewer pesticides and uses less water than does cotton. One of the things that bugs me about what I do is that I use conventionally grown cotton, which is pretty harmful to the environment in its consumption of chemicals and water. (I have made a pact with myself to use organic cotton whenever I can, even though it is more expensive. My beautiful world means a lot to me, so I will spend a little more on my art.)

two colours and two weights of linen

Anyhoo... back to linen and it's tweediness ... I had a chunk of linen, and my lovely neighbour and I were discussing its use, so I split it in half and we decided we would each make a tweed log cabin quilt. I have not made a traditionally pieced quilt with repeat blocks in a long time, and making the first couple of log cabin blocks was meditative and fun, then it got to be tedious doing the same block again and again, and then I got into a rhythm of making them and it became sort of meditative again. It was good to practice that repeat thing, one step at a time - moving ever forward.

Working with the linen was good too. Its a little harder to manage than the cotton fabrics made for quilting, as it is not quite as stable. It moves about some, and its a bit stiff. Each little thread of the weave shows up seperately, unlike cotton. With this I was led to thinking about the threads that are woven together to create the fabric, and that led me backwards to the field where the flax plant grew, was harvested, retted, spun into thread to be woven into cloth! We wear clothes made of textiles all day every day. Most of us probably don't have a thought about how the clothes were made and even more rarely think about where the cloth comes from, who grew the fibre, how it got made into fabric to be sewn into clothes. Wow, a lifetime of research has appeared here...

Anyhoooo....

Here is my Big Tweed quilt top, ready to be layered and quilted. Its about 50" x 50" and meant as a quilt for a child.

enlarged herring bones!

I chose prints that I thought would appeal to a literary kid. Some alphabets, a Lonni Rossi text print with punctuation,  some drawings from the Architextures line, a tweed sock monkey or two, garden gnomes, plenty of dots and I included a favourite grey Denyse Schmidt print (from the original Flea Market Fancy line) and a naturally dyed and block printed cloth from Maiwa Handprints.

dots and drawings and sock monkeys

Now I have to think up a tweedy way to quilt it. Maybe I'll use a houndstooth or a glen check for the back!

paper on the back

 So many ideas on the interwebs! Here are some lovelies, using foundation paper to help with piecing. Have a look.

patchwork in other places   kimono silk beauty   

this beautiful silk improvisational work made me think of the simple and complicated piecework you can do with a paper foundation.........

scissors. not so simple  

flying geese - simple    


and a good technique for making curved things.    

this first patchwork of 2013

I got busy and made something bright and unlike anything else I've made, just to start this year off. Usually I am happy to see the tail end of the old year, but as this new year begins, I'm just riding the wave, enjoying what comes up, not regretting the past.  

Just another day.

October, November, December

... where did they go?
October was taken up with the first ever Creative Threads Conspiracy, a fiber art retreat and workshops. Knitting, Natural Dyeing, Needle Felting, Quiltmaking Techniques, great food and company.... it all went very well. The weekend was COLD, but we distracted ourselves with fabric and fibre and craftsmanship. And I changed jobs. No longer am I the bottle counter at the recycling center, I now work in a chocolate factory! Its closer to full time, working in a clean well lighted place with wonderful people and still right here in my chosen community.

I kept forgetting to take my camera to the Conspiracy, so here instead is a photo of the distinguished gentlemen of jazz.

November was taken up mostly with making stuff for the Christmas Craft Faire. I made simple shopping bags, some lunch bags and some quilts. I made a small quilt and sold kits to teach beginners how to sew. I made a bunch of owls. The owls all flew off to new homes, the kits all sold and I still have bags!

Ashlea's hats and soap (and Ashlea), Ken's cutting boards and my owls and stuff in our booth at the Craft Faire.

December has been a stormy month with wind and rain and snow. Sometimes the power goes out and sometimes the ferries don't run. I've been finishing up some projects that got put away while I was busy with other stuff, did some work on a quilt for my mom (tried to take it to her last weekend - but by the time we got to Nanaimo to take the ferry across, the runs were cancelled due to stormy seas), been working and sleeping! Once Christmas is over, I look forward to a week or so in my studio to start on a new project, I think I'll work with really bright colours just to get excited again.

Grateful

Ellen's Fab Bee request. So colourful and fun!

My contribution to Ellen's Hundreds and Thousands. Two blocks, no leftovers!

Whew! August rushed by! The photos are of September's Fab Bee blocks. September already!

    July seemed to lope along, but by the time August was here things were moving fast.
Stacey and I, with lots of help, prepped and hung and hosted the Quilt Forest, then the Conspiracy team got up and running again with the Creative Threads Conspiracy,  (we are giving presentations to local quilter's guilds, which seems to be better publicity than the print advertising we have been doing, but both things are getting the word out, and resulting in registrations. Live and learn!), we had some wonderful guests here, and my husband's trio had a gig at the local bistro. Our visitor and friend John sat in with them, so it was a trio of four, and the show went over well!
    We participated in the Croquet, Not Coal tournament and I brought home a trophy, (having never won a thing for an athletic (*ahem*) endeavor, I was pleased!) and funds were raised for the Denman Opposes Coal group to battle against the proposed Raven Coal Mine.
    The tomatoes in the hoop house are actually turning a colour other than green (fantastic!) and I have harvested a couple of cucumbers, plenty of potatoes, a feed or two of green beans, a trombone squash- which I should have photographed and didn't, plenty of peas off the trellis, beets, cilantro, basil, parsley, greens and kale and some carrots. That's better than last year, so we are pleased.

Miss August of the Fraser Valley Modern Quilt Guild (a lovely and talented bunch of sewists) was super complimentary toward me. It makes it all worthwhile, if even one person is changed by what I do.

First, she said "Barb Mortell’s course has made me love sewing", and then... this is how she answered question #12 in an interview...
 

"12. Who is your favourite quilt designer? And why?
Barb Mortell. Because she doesn’t care if the lines are straight! And she taught me that! I can’t thank her enough. The pressure of perfect lines has disappeared. I can just relax and sew."

And then she said "I loved my Barb Mortell quilt top! Did I mention she’s the best?"
Gosh! I am torn between blushing and swelled head! And Miss August is no slouch in the creative department.... her photographic documentation makes you want to be where she is, and be grateful that she is there with her camera and her unique eye. Thanks Carol Browne!