The Fam Celebrates

 

My brother and his climbing partner were the keynote speakers at the American Alpine Club's Annual Benefit Gala which was held in Colorado this past weekend. My Mom and her guy traveled out to the Gala to attend. Here is my niece, my brother, my mom and M. (That's three generations up there.)

The AAC streamed the event, so I was able to watch from my home in New England. Of course, Colorado is two time zones away, so it didn't get started until almost midnight. By that time I was curled up in bed with my iPad balanced on my knees. You can watch my brother's presentation at the link above. It starts at about 2 hours 45 minutes in.

In the meantime, here's another bird for you to enjoy.

You can make your own birds too. You can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

Wavelength, Quilted

The Wavelength quilt is quilted and as you can see it is stunning. I'm in the process of adding the binding to the quilt, because I have to ship it out to LA next week.

Somebody commented that my brother wasn't as crazy as their brother. I doubt it. This is my brother in a portaledge on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

And this is the view down below him. Yes, that is about a quarter of a mile down. My brother is a rock climber, and a well known one. He has climbed El Cap at least two dozen times.

Where the Box Lives

When my brother first proposed doing a swap for one of his boxes, my first thought was, where am I going to put it? Horizontal space is limited at my house.  But I had this table in my bedroom that partly covered a full length mirror I hated. Yes, Julie, that is one of your quilts.

 So the box lives there.

As soon as I saw the box in Colorado this past summer, I knew what I'd put in it.

Jewelry.  What else? I put some of my most favorite pieces in it. I covered the bottom of the box with a silk scarf so the interior wouldn't get scratched.

The top lift out tray has my high school class ring, an engraved silver thimble that belonged to my grandmother, some vintage pins from the 50's and 60's that were my Mom's, a much older vintage pin that belonged to my grandmother, a locket containing my goddaughter Violette's photo, some of my favorite one-of-a-kind pins, and yes, there's a five dollar bill in there too. For some reason I think a jewelry box always has to have some money in it.

My Colorado brother came over for dinner last night with my Mom and had to check it out. Here he is sniffing it to see if he can still smell the scent of the California Nutmeg that makes the box's bottom.

"It's funny," he said, "I've never seen it with anything in it."

The Box and The Shirt

The Box from my brother and sister-in-law, not surprisingly, arrived in a bigger box.

Removing the crushed paper and extra cardboard, I uncovered this. The box was wrapped in one of my brother's old corduroy shirts.

 Really. Notice the buttons on the shirt are all buttoned up!

I actually had to unbutton the shirt to get the box out. I texted my brother "You are too funny by half."

His reply? "You can keep the shirt."

I DON'T THINK SO!

Like I told one of my colleagues later, "I'm going to send the quilt to them wrapped in his shirt."

"Oh no," she replied. "You send it to them wrapped in one of YOUR shirts."

"Oooo... what a good idea!" I told her, "That's EVEN BETTER!!!" (Gee, I hope I have a shirt big enough to wrap around the quilt...)




Oh, you want to see pictures of the box itself? Sorry, gonna have to wait on that. I have some binding to sew.

The Box

This is the handmade box my brother P is trading me for the Colorado Quilt.

This is the inside. Isn't it lovely? I told you he made it, didn't I?

Here's a detail of the beautiful dovetails in one corner.

I already know where I am going to put it when it arrives. Since the quilt has to be quilted before I send it to Colorado, it will be a while before this makes the trip across the country.

I can be patient.

Update from my brother:
"The box is made with Mahogany, the bottom is California Nutmeg and the lid is Eastern Walnut. All the joinery is cut by hand with a small hand saw and chisel. When possible everything has a hand planed finish. There you have it."

A Door Diversion

I've told you all how I only work on one thing at a time.

I guess I must be a bit tired, because before I went to bed the other night, I got to thinking about my brother's barn.  I went into the studio and started throwing fabrics around, looking for the right fabrics to build this barn in fabric. There were a couple of issues. Here's the front view of the barn...

and here's the side view. It's apparent the grey on the front is because that part of the barn has weathered. So which color is the barn? How do I want to interpret it?

I have to start with the doors anyway, because the size of the doors determine the size of the barn.

Here are the fabrics I pulled:

Here are some light browns and grays.

Here are some warm browns and golds.

Here are some dark browns and some greens.

Here is a batik black, some greys and a light, cold blue. That metal bar across the top of the doors is the track for the doors and it is so bright, I think a blue would work as well as a silvery gray.

I will start with the windows in the door. There isn't any glass in those two rows of "windows" in the doors. They are simply openings. I like those "windows," and I want to include them. I'll have to keep them very tiny.

As I usually do, I will strip piece the windows. This is a strip of 1-1/4" black sewn to a 1-1/4" strip of yellow gold fabric. I want the finished width of the window frames to be 1/8", so I've trimmed this yelllow gold down to 3/8".

I've sewn another black strip to the other side, and pressed the yellow open on the back.  Now I'll cut the strip crosswise into 10 pieces.

I'm sewing the black and gold pieces to a long strip of the yellow gold.

Next I trimmed that yellow piece down to 3/8".

Now I'm sewing the window pieces together.

 I have to remove the yellow piece on the far left so I can make that edge of the window frame larger.
(Note: later I made the window bigger by adding another pair of windows. The real barn has two rows of seven windows across, but that would make my barn block way too big, so I made an executive decision.)

 Here's one of the finished windows. Notice the top and bottom strips are not in the original fabric pull. I decided I needed some subtle contrast in those parts of the windows, and went rummaging through my scrap bins.

Since I didn't have a lot of the gold fabric I planned to use as the body of the door, I made a test door with the X reinforcements out of scrap fabric to work out the size and angle of the X. I had to do this twice until I got it right, so working from scraps to solve this issue was a good idea.

Attaching the window piece to the door with the X reinforcement was fussy at best. I needed to make sure I had space for the 1/4" seam allowance on each side.

Here are the two doors with a bit of edging added to each.

Here are the finished doors. I've made a few modifications, but that's to be expected. I'm really happy with them.

Now that my curiosity is satisfied, I can go back to the Dark Majesty quilt, but don't worry, I'll bring you along when I build the rest of this barn.

My Brother the Barn Builder

 My brother has been a carpenter for 27 years and he is also a fine furniture maker. Here he is in front of his cabinet of planes and chisels in his workshop.

He built the shop, of course. It's a post and beam building, just like the barn. The tax guys in the town where he lives call this a "detached garage." I gather this means it's taxed differently. My brother says they chuckle when they say it.

This is his shed. A shed isn't taxed as a building if it is less than 200 square feet. This one is 192 square feet, or 12' x 16'. I asked what was in the shed. "All the stuff that keeps my workshop clean."

This is the barn. It really is a barn.

It houses his & his wife's horse,

their chickens,

and a whole lot of hay. The barn is a post and beam building. It won't collapse in this century, or probably even the next. My brother said he wanted his barn to be low.

It's funny, he was managing a lumber yard when he built the barn. "I couldn't afford the material I used to build it if I had to build it now," he said. "I got terrific prices from our vendors, like the skylights in the roof."

What I find so interesting about these three buildings is how they reflect each other. You can tell the same person designed and built them.

So what's the big deal about this barn? When my brother received the family calendar I sent for Christmas which featured the quilts I made in the last two years, he and my SIL asked if they could trade a small piece of his woodwork for the Flight of Fancy quilt. I don't want to give that quilt away, so I suggested that instead I make a bird quilt based the things around Colorado where they live. This trip provided me with a great opportunity to "scope things out" and get ideas for their bird quilt. I'll make a lot of birds for this quilt, but I also want to add my brother's barn.

Barns on the Brain

Julie, maker of the incredibly, fabulously awesome quilt, See Rock City, and I have been talking  about barns lately. Mostly she's laughing at me. All the while she was making See Rock City, I was telling her there weren't that many barns around here.

Of course, that was when I lived in the city. Now I live out in the "boonies" (actually I'm less than five miles from the old place),  I see them all over the place. This purple one is less than a mile from my new home.

And then there's this one, on the way to work.

and this one is across the street from Quilted Threads. The last time I went to QT, I took the "back way" instead of the highway, and passed at least a dozen barns.

 I stopped to take a picture of this one. So I'm eating a lot of crow!

Julie wrote a book about making "improvisationally pieced barns," based on things we see in real barns. It's coming out in April of 2016. Julie and I have had a lot of conversations about it, and now I wanna make a barn.

Or two.

Or three.

This is my brother (the fine furniture maker)'s workshop. It looks like a barn. This photo was taken last May.

He built it (naturally), and I think this might be a good place to start. (This photo was taken last week. My brother and his wife live in the high desert in Colorado, where they already have snow on the ground.)

This is the inside of my brother's workshop. We all like to see each other's sewing studios, so I thought you might like a peek inside. Here's what he had to say about it when he sent me these pictures: "The barn is forty feet wide. The shop is heaven!!"

 (sigh)


Yup, I'm between projects and can't think of another "normal" quilt to make, so I'm gonna try my hand at making a barn.