My Friend Kathy French

This is me with my friend Kathy French when she visited me in November 2015. We met online somewhere in early 2012 when she was working on her quilt, Roses for Rosita. It's original, and all free pieced. She didn't use any templates or patterns. I was blown away and we became friends pretty quick.

Kathy visited me in August 2012 and we spent our time talking quilts for two days. This is one of the incredible free pieced houses she made. You can read about this visit here. 

Kathy was deaf, but she wore hearing aids and could read lips. When she talked, she had the flat, distinctive sound of a deaf person talking. I had to pay attention to face her when I talked, and speak distinctly. When I told her I hoped the noise of my busy street wouldn't keep her awake at night, she replied that it didn't matter, because she couldn't hear it anyway.

Kathy and I kept in touch by email (she couldn't speak on the phone, obviously) and when my friend Julie Sefton asked me about quilters who might be interested in testing her process notes for her book, Build-a-Barn, and join the Secret Society of Barn Builders, I immediately suggested Kathy.

 This is Kathy's barn. It's the barn attached to her house in Belfast Maine.

 I visited Kathy in the summer of 2015 and spent four days with her. We had a blast, as you can see. We walked all around her town of Belfast, talked quilts, looked at quilts, took pictures of quilts, cooked, shopped, ate ice cream, drove around looking at barns, got lost, got found, and laughed some more.

One morning I woke up early and explored Kathy's studio. This is the drawing she made before she made her barn block.

This is the real barn. Yeah. Kathy was GOOD!

In 2016 Kathy visited me Thanksgiving weekend. We barely had any time together, but we took the photo at the top of this post. It was the last time we were together. Last June she wrote that she had developed Stage 4 lung cancer that spread into organs, bones, and brain. The cancer was so aggressive that radiation, chemotherapy, and other treatments failed to stop or slow down the spreading. Kathy had never smoked.

Late last September I wrote to Kathy and asked how she was. I wished her happy birthday and told her I missed her and loved her. She told me had stopped treatment because it was getting worse with the Chemo, not better.

I waited to hear from her again, and when I heard nothing, I wrote again last week. Her husband replied that she died peacefully on November 1.

I'm sad, and I'm pissed. I lost a great friend, and I miss her. I learned a lot from her and was amazed by her work ethic and how hard she worked to learn what she didn't know.

But I'm really glad I got to know her.



Kathy blogged here, Quilted Under the Influence.

Happy Birthday Valerie!

This is one of my best pals, Valerie. She is a blogger from Nova Scotia Canada and is a charter member of the SSOBB (Secret Society of Barn Builders). It's her birthday today.

Happy Birthday pal! Hope you have a great day!

Busy Weekend

This is my pal Kathy French, one of the SSOBB members, who visited me on Saturday. She and her husband stopped by on their way home from Vermont. We had a nice visit. Isn't the color of her jacket terrific?

I sewed a few of my scrappy triangle blocks together. The bottom photo is back side of the block.  All the backs of my quilts look like this. Neat, with no straggly threads.

My sewing machine has to go back to the shop. It doesn't cut the threads consistently and it makes a noise when I sew like two pieces of metal are banging against each other. Bummer. The guy opens and closes within my normal work day and isn't open any evenings, so it means a Saturday visit and a week without my machine. Argh.


I spent a lot of the rest of the weekend organizing a calendar of my quilts for 2017, doing a bit of online shopping, paying bills and reconciling the checkbook. I've been neglecting the avalanche of paper on my desk, and at least now I've made a dent in it. The shredder will be getting a workout soon.

Oh, and whoever asked about making "slabs," here's a link to a blog post where I talk about how I do it.

Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner!

My quilt, Too Much Chicken has placed at AQS Chattanooga.

Update: I won an Honorable Mention in the Wall Quilts, Long Arm Quilted Category.

I don't know what it's won, but It is certainly something I never expected. I made the quilt on a lark as the result of an funny dinner conversation and never expected it to be anything more than a couch quilt. But Gerald Roy told me to submit it to AQS Paducah, and it was accepted there, to my astonishment. From there it went to Syracuse and Grand Rapids, now Chattanooga and will soon be shown in Des Moines.

My quilt isn't quilted to within an inch of its life, as many show quilts are. In fact, when my Mom told me "You're going to win a prize one of these days," when we were at AQS Syracuse last year, I said "No, Ma. My quilts aren't quilted enough." So it was a lot of fun to hear her say, "I told you so!" when I told her about the win yesterday.

The list of winners will be here: http://www.quiltweek.com/past-winners after 9 AM Central time on Wednesday September 14, 2016. The quit will be on display from Sept 14 through the 17th.

So again, if anybody is going to the AQS show in Chattanooga, keep an eye out for the Chicken quilt and take a selfie with it and send it to me at patcherymenagerie AT gmail DOT com.

AND... I've got two small barn quilts on exhibit in a special show at AQS Chattanooga and AQS Des Moines. You can see the Henniker Barn and the Pig Farm Barn quilts there.

Hot Diggity!

PS: Thanks Rebecca for the updated blog post title!

Round and Round I Sew

I've sewn the binding down on one a bit more than half the quilt. I'm up to the Numbers bird. I sew right to left, so I have to so the rest of that side and then all the way across the top to finish the binding. Then I have to sew to the hanging sleeve to the back of the quilt. I should deliver this quilt to the Quilted Threads quilt shop in Henniker NH on Saturday in advance of the class next week. That class is full, but I will teach another so if you are interested give them a call.

While there isn't much going on here, please go over to Brenda Suderman's blog, and see the barn she built for the Secret Society of Barn Builders.  Brenda's barn is in Manitoba Canada, and is completely different from the barns I built. Brenda has a giveaway of Julie Sefton's book, Build-a-Barn for our Canadian friends. 

Every week a SSOBB member will reveal the barn she made for Julie's book, and they are all very different. I enjoyed being a part of the SSOBB and seeing the barns come to life. Each of these blog posts will delve into further detail of the quilter's thought process of barn building, so please visit each one as they are posted. You can see the entire schedule here.

Judy in Michigan, who won last week's giveaway, asked if I could sign her book in addition to Julie, so Julie sent the book to me and I did. Now it's on its way to Michigan. Enjoy, Judy!

New Hampshire Barns

I never realized barns were different all around the country until I saw the quilts from the SSOBB.   Reading the comments on my two barn posts, this fact was raised again and again.  Many of you have never seen barns connected to houses.  Which, naturally, I find very interesting, because they are all over the place around here.

When I drive to Quilted Threads "the back way," I pass through the towns of Goffstown, Weare, Dunbarton and Henniker NH.
 

These are some of the houses with attached barns I pass along the way. These photos are from Google Maps.

 Here are more NH barns...

This is the back of the Quilted Threads quilt shop in Henniker NH.

This is the pig farm barn with its attached house.

Many commenters mentioned the barns looked like houses. I don't think they do. Now you can decide for yourself.


PS, the giveaway is still on. On Saturday I will pick a name at random from the comments on Monday's post. 

SSOBB Blog Hop - Pig Farm Barn

This is part two of my contribution to the Secret Society of Barn Builders Blog Hop for Julie Sefton's book, Build-a-Barn.

Now, you have to know that Julie is my best friend. I love her to bits, which means I have no reservations about telling her exactly what I think. And while she was on her barn binge I kept telling her that I rarely saw barns where I lived in Southern NH.

It was only partly true. I lived in Manchester, NH's biggest city, for over 50 years. There aren't many barns left in the city proper. But the real story is I wasn't looking. I wasn't paying attention. Take this barn, above.

Sure, it looks creepy. The photo is from Google Maps and was taken on a cold gray day in mid-winter. This barn is located a half mile away from my mother's house. She lived on this road for twenty years and for twenty years whenever I visited my mother I drove by this barn. It wasn't like I could ignore it. It was a pig farm and it stank to high heaven. My son would hold his breath while we drove by.

Yet somehow I persisted in my ignorance of barns in the area where I lived.

Two months before Julie created the SSOBB, I bought my Mother's house. When Julie asked if I would build a barn, I thought of the Henniker barn. I was working on that barn when I drove by the pig farm barn and TAH DAH, it hit me. O HOLY CRAP, THERE'S A BARN A HALF MILE FROM MY HOUSE.

And... DAMMIT, IT'S PURPLE!

Inspiration hit.

I texted Julie, "Right down the road is a PURPLE barn -- gotta photograph that! The purple is asphalt siding and it looks greenish in the sunlight. It used to be a pig farm."

Julie texted back almost immediately, “No way re purple barn with pigs… The surprise barn I pulled fabrics for is a purple stripe with green/pink swirls for barnyard with pink flying pigs sky fabric… WHAT a coincidence!”

That did it. I simply HAD to make a purple barn.

 It went together so quick I don't have in process photos of it. The doors were the most distinctive part of this barn, so I took great care to try to indicate how fussy they really were. Many of the windows were broken, so I used a grey to indicate that one pane of glass was still intact.

Since the Google photo was taken, the barn has been renovated. Modern windows have replaced the old ones, and a new metal roof has been installed. The purple siding has been removed on all but the front of the barn's facade.

I decided to build the barn of my memory, and not to include the attached house. (The overwhelming majority of barns in New England are attached to houses via "outbuildings." These are great for comfort, because getting from the house to the barn in winter is very cold, but it also meant that if a barn burned down, the house often went with it.)

Since I had removed the house from the barn, I needed to set it in space, so I added a fence on both sides.

For the stockade fence surrounding the barn, I used a novelty fabric of rulers. Partly because I was lazy, but mostly because, hell, if you've got something in your stash that's so damn perfect, you USE IT! The green fabric was cut and then resewn together into "made fabric" to suggest the mountains in the far distance.

You don't see a lot of red barns in New Hampshire. Most of them are white, and yellow barns are common. But I've never seen another purple one anywhere.


You can read a bit more about these two barns here.

The entire SSOBB Blog Hop schedule can be found here. 


PS, the giveaway is still on. I will pick a name at random from the comments on Monday's post. 

SSOBB Blog Hop - The Henniker Barn

I am delighted to kick off the Free Pieced Barn Project's Blog Hop of members of the SSOBB - the Secret Society of Barn Builders - created by Julie Sefton to test her process notes for her book, Build-A-Barn.

You can see the complete Blog Hop Schedule here.   

When Julie asked if I would build a barn for the Gallery section of her book, Build-a-Barn,  I knew exactly which barn I would represent in fabric.  I didn't quite remember exactly when this barn began to attract my attention, so I had to go back through my photos to find out.

Although I had been a regular customer of Quilted Threads since 2009, it wasn't until November of 2011 when I was pulling out of a parking space at Quilted Threads (located in Henniker NH) that I looked up and saw - really saw - this house across the street. I looked around to make sure nobody was behind me, put the car in park and took this photo. At the time I was interested in the house, as I was in the process of making my Four Seasons quilt which is pictured in Julie's book on page 9.

This is amazing on so many levels. The Four Seasons quilt is the quilt that inspired Julie to make a "house" quilt, except not with houses, with barns.  When she told me, I said, "They're the same basic construction. Go for it." And go she did.

But I digress.

Every time I'd visit Quilted Threads (and they are still my absolute all time favorite quilt shop and the best quilt shop I have ever seen anywhere), I'd check out the house across the street. When Julie visited NH in 2014, we took a trip to QT and Julie, unsurprisingly, took this photo of the barn.

Now, I was involved with Julie's book right from the start. We discussed the whole plan, the concept, the how-to of it, and everything else. When Julie asked if I would be willing to build a barn using her process notes to test them out, I agreed without hesitation.

The Henniker barn had several beautiful elements: the lovely proportions of the barn itself, the graceful cupola with the curved roof topped with the running horse weathervane, the nine birdhouses built into the peak, and the typical New England coloring - white with gray.               

When, a week later after my company's holiday party, I got half a day off and a fifty dollar gift card, I knew just what to do. I drove out to Henniker to take photos of the barn and buy fabric.

I mean, what else would I do? I bought a heavily printed WOW with a strong rectilinear design to use as the siding, some gray and brown fabrics for the roofs, granite and dirt ramp, and some blue for the sky. From my stash I chose a dark blue batik for the windows, and then sewed a quarter inch grid over it with grey thread to indicate the window sashing.

To indicate the separate barn doors, I sewed a thin strip of gray between the two blue doors. Every barn I've seen in New Hampshire has that row of windows above the door, and the doors usually slide open.

The barn has a large dirt ramp to the big front door, supported on either side by huge granite blocks.  When Julie was in NH she couldn't believe the curbstones here are solid granite. "Well," I explained, "the snowplows would destroy them otherwise..."

You really have to think about how you're going to join pieces together when you make a barn, or any building in a setting. I had to add the lone pine tree on the left, under the eaves, before I added the sky fabric. As you can see, I printed a large photo of the real barn to use as reference.

Julie hadn't asked the SSOBB to recreate real barns in fabric, but that's what many of us did. These barns seemed to speak to us, and link us to our heritage and history of the areas where we live.

I had to determine how much of the adjoining house to add on the right and I had to figure out a way to indicate the mass of leafless trees behind the house. I used a Seminole patchwork technique to build them.

The cupola also required a lot of thought. I selected a fabric with letterscript to represent the louvers on the cupola, and as you can see I used four thin strips of fabric to indicate the roofline and the shadow it created on the facade of the barn itself.

 I didn't know how to indicate the birdhouse holes, and considered using these small wire dress hooks, but they didn't look good, so I ended up using an eyelet stitch on my sewing machine.

The finished Henniker barn block.

Chris quilted it beautifully. I sent her photos of the real barn so she could incorporate elements from it: the horizontal siding, the diagonal slats on the barn doors, and the vertical siding on the lower door. She included the breezy winter winds in the sky.

Here you can see that Chris filled in the eyelet holes I made for the birdhouses, and you can see the threadlines to indicate the windowpanes in the traditional nine-over-six windows commonly found throughout houses in New England built at that time.

 I thought I had noticed everything about this barn, but I missed something really interesting.

The barn's west wall is red.

I actually made TWO barns for Julie. I'll tell you about the second one on Wednesday. Stay tuned.

Now the fun begins. I'm having a giveaway of Julie's book, "Build-a-Barn". If you are interested in a copy, leave a comment on THIS POST! I will select a winner at random on Saturday April 30, and announce the winner on Sunday May 1.

Build-a-Barn Is Here!

I can keep a secret like the next person, but DAMN, this was a hard one. Julie's book is published and I've got one! You can get one through her site, or from AQS or Amazon, or many other places, I am sure.

I was in on this right from the start, when Julie started the quilt See Rock City, and later when the book idea was just an idea. Not only am I a charter member of the Secret Society of Barn Builders, but I'm proud to say that as a friend of Julie's I was one of those who proofread the book, so it was somewhat of a surprise (but not really) when I opened the book and saw this.

That's my quilt, The Four Seasons, over on the right. On the left, that's Julie and Chris holding up my Letters From Home quilt from back in 2009, and below that, when I first met Julie in person in 2013 and we were off to St Louis for my class and speech at Quintessential Quilts 2013.

Holy Quilting, Batman!

The book is awesome. Julie tells the story about how the quilt came to be, my small part of it, (and Chris's) and she shows you how to make your own barns. The book, as an object itself, is beautiful too. The pictures are great, and the layout is lovely. There are several beautiful touches, like the strip of blue that runs throughout (you are gonna have to get the book to know what that is).

I am so excited, and so very very proud of my best pal Julie. She has done a terrific job. Get this book!