Nightingale, Redux

 

This is the original black quilt, that started me writing the tutorial for what I came to call the Nightingale quilts. You can go read the whole story here. You actually should go read it, then come back. I'll wait.

I'd always known the quilt was different, but I often wondered if others might like to make one. When at the end of 2024 I decided to make another one, my friend Susan jumped right on the bandwagon, and made one of her own. She has some terrific insights here, and you can go read that too, if you want.

What really stuck with me however, was her comment that "you could be blind and make this quilt and it would still be beautiful."

I think she's right, and I kind of want to go back to that thought, because I have another idea. (You knew that was coming, didn't you?)

I think the reason these Nightingale Quilts work is because they are all about color and pattern, and not patchwork. The unifying thing is the black background. It's consistent, and colors really pop when surrounded by black. This is. because the light that hits the quilt reflects the colors back to your eyes, but the light that hits the black doesn't reflect back at you, it is instead absorbed. This allows the brighter colors to really shine and show off.

In this quilt, what you see first is the COLORS, and THEN you see that the quilt is made of many different fabrics, and THEN you realize the thing is PATCHWORK, and there is no obvious pattern. The patchwork is subordinate. The quilt is actually made of squares and rectangles, and it doesn't matter one bit if the corners of each block line up or not. How radical is THAT?

I wrote in the tutorial that I think it is the easiest quilt on the planet to make - all you need to do is use fabrics that have colors on a black background. IN THEORY, you could do this with fabrics with a consistent color as a background, but in REALITY, it is very difficult to find a lot of colored fabrics with (for example) THE SAME blue background. Or red, or yellow, or whatever other color. The effect would be slightly different with a color in the background as colors are affected by the colors that surround them. Black shows them off to great advantage, other colors, not so much. 

Susan and I were talking recently and she says that everybody who sees her Nightingale quilt "goes nuts, they love it so much," and she can't understand why the tutorial is not flying out of my Etsy shop, the way Lynne's Liberated Birds does.

Well, I was thinking along the same lines. The original black nightingale quilt (above) lives on my bed, and I've been sleeping under it for over 20 years. The quilt is made the way my grandmother made them, with no batting. It is tied, not quilted. On my bed it lives on top of the top sheet and under the wool blanket, so nobody ever sees it but me. One day recently as I was making the bed I noticed some of the edges were wearing. Maybe I should make another one?

But you know me, I like to push ideas around.

What if I made a white one? It isn't as easy as it looks. Sometimes you can get away with a slightly off white background, and sometimes a fabric looks like one thing online and then in real life it's different.

So I searched through my stash, and then did a bit of shopping. The fabrics arrived yesterday and they all took a trip through the washer and dryer, then I ironed them.

I love the dragonflies, but there seems to be too much gray in the background. I'm not sure about the butterflies in the upper right either.

Three of these seem to be out, one might be back in, but I'll bet it's not the one you think.

I originally thought the big print at the bottom wouldn't make the cut, but I am not sure. The second one from the right at the top is out. Too much gray in the background, although it looks fine in the photo.

These all fit the brief, but the bright blocks at the bottom left don't really "read" as print on white. Since I don't want any one fabric to jump out and grab your attention, this may not make the cut, but only time will tell.

These will all be in the quilt, and since this is a quilt that benefits from MORE fabrics rather then fewer, I've got another half dozen or so on order. And I haven't cut the ones I am on the fence about.

Remember, what I want is a "party of color," or a happy colorful dance of color across the surface of the quilt. I do NOT want to emphasize the patchwork or even the individual fabrics themselves.

In Drawing we call two adjacent shapes that share the same color or value along their shared edge to have "lost and found edges." In traditional patchwork you do not want that, because you want the edges to define the shape, like the difference between one block and another. In this quilt, I very much want those "lost and found" edges, because the colors will blend from one block to another and carry the viewer's eye across the surface, discovering things to look at, and to bring delight.

My goal is to surprise and delight the viewer.

Stay tuned.

Visual Weight

There's a thing called "visual weight" and we all know what it is even if we haven't got a term for it. Sometimes we need to look at things a different way ("reframing the problem") to see it.

Last week Cherie wrote to me off line and said she had a hard time "reading" the a in PAPER because some of the colored dots in the background fabric made the letter look like a figure 8. I disagreed, but the busy background bothered me more in those gold letters than in any other part of the quilt, and I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was that bothered me.

Actually part of me knew the problem was that those letters didn't have the visual weight of the letters higher up in the quilt. Was it because they were lighter in value or because they were lower case? Or because they were thinner. I had too much on my mind to worry about it.

On Saturday, during my letters class my pal Julie texted me and expressed her concern about the gold letters. Before I left QT that day, I bought a bunch of green fabrics (the row across the top).

The other night I made a green P.

This picture tells the story. I am not sure the other letters will be lower case as well, because I think they don't have the visual weight as the rest of the quilt and it will look top heavy if I don't. But I think the green is already an improvement.

Adapt, Improvise, Overcome. And never settle.


If you want to make your own free pieced letters (without paper piecing, patterns or templates) you can get my tutorial, here on Etsy. It's an instant download so you can get started right away.

When It Isn't Working...

I tell my students that we all know when it's working, and we generally know when it isn't. Usually it's when we're not sure that we get into trouble. The most important thing is to recognize it isn't working. Sometimes a great idea doesn't work out. You have to get your ego out of the way and we willing to change.

I liked the lady for the letter i, and thought the sunburst around her head would "read" as the dot of the i, but alas, every time I looked at it, I just saw a blob. It looked more like a letter l than an i. If  you can't "read" the word, it's wrong. So I had to switch gears and think.

So I went through my stash and pulled fabrics that could be possibilities for the letter and the dot on the i.

I liked the ruler fabric, partly because it was a ruler and partly because the color matched the rest of the letters. I also liked the red flower as the dot of the i.

I made the letter i as a straight rectangle and a square as the dot, and it didn't look all that great, so I tapered the shape of the letter, and made the dot a diamond.

This is much better.

This is much better.





If you want to make your own free pieced letters without patterns, templates or paper piecing, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download so you can get started right away.

Yes, It's Ugly.

Yes, It's ugly.

There.

I said it.

This is the result of the most recent tinkering. I haven't cut more fabric yet.

Did you think I didn't know? Did you think I couldn't tell?

Did you think, "Oh look, she's human. She screwed up." 

Did you wonder "HOW is she gonna make this look good?"

Did you think, "Even she can't redeem THIS?"

(And before you tell me it might not be THAT BAD, the answer is, yeah, I know that too. But "Good Enough" has never been my working motto, and this sure as hell won't be an exception to that.)

Would you believe me if I said I can agree to most of them? Because I know I can fix it. How do I know?

Well, see, I went to Art School and I studied design and color, so I know the rules. I've been sewing for over 50 years and I made my first quilt over 40 years ago. So I kinda have experience. I've been there, and I've done that. I have been getting myself into and out of creative pickles for years, so this one isn't going to stop me.

And I live for this sh*t stuff. There's nothing more I like than a puzzle, and this is nothing more than a big creative puzzle.

So let's look at the stuff I don't like.

This is a detail of the very first picture in yesterday's post. What I don't like are the way the dark bars connect from the yellow to the pink and into the blue. And right next to that, the violet and blue bars do the same thing.

I actually LIKE the flip-flip-flip of the light and dark values, and the way the diagonals make this thing look like the blinking lights on a marquee. It's VERY ENERGETIC, and that's a Positive way of looking at it. Some people think IT'S TOO BUSY, which is a Negative way of looking at it. My friend Allison says her eyes go cuckoo when she looks at some of my quilts. I actually wrote to her yesterday and apologized for what I was doing to her.  "SUCH A PAL!" she wrote back. "I've been looking at the pics with squinty eyes."

Actually, in this case it really is TOO MUCH, and I have to calm it down a bit. But I won't shut that flip-flip-flip down entirely, because that's one of the things I like best about this design.

This is from the second photo in yesterday's post. I made the picture smallish so you could see it on your screen without having to scroll up and down. There is way too much dark clumped here. If you're a regular reader you know I go harping on and on about distributing your values (lights and darks) throughout a quilt. This version has too many darks on the right side. But look again, The top right diamond has the darks on the right, and the lower one has them on the left. If you look at it the right way, you can see a wave effect, or a backwards S curve. In this particular quilt, I do not want to emphasize that shape, but this is a perfect example of a goof gone good. Had I not MADE that mistake I would never have SEEN that shape. That's the kind of thing I will file away for later use. It's why making mistakes can often be a very good thing, because they make you see stuff that you wouldn't see otherwise.

This was at the very bottom of the last picture in yesterday's post, and IN THEORY there's nothing wrong with it. The light fabric in the purple/swirl purple block is placed correctly. HOWEVER, because that swirly purple is a darker VALUE than the light around it (and it is actually an EQUAL value to the blue right next to it), this fabric pair fails in this quilt.

This presents an interesting conundrum. If I make ALL the fabric pairs with a very high contrast of light and dark, then the flip flip flip will look like FLIP FLIP FLIP, Allison will go cuckoo, and it will just be too much too look at. (Although I think the so-called design concept of "giving the eye a place to rest" is a bunch of malarkey. But that's a different discussion....)

However is is precisely this that makes this current iteration of the design fail. There is too much high-contrast and it isn't evenly distributed to move your eye around in a pleasing way.

And THIS doesn't do me any favors either. In real life, it's a very pretty combination, but up on the design wall if looks greyish, and muddy.  Gotta go.

So what have we learned? That in order to rescue this quilt, I have to tame the FLIP FLIP FLIP by reducing the number of blocks with a strong LIGHT/DARK contrast, distribute the values better overall and remove the blocks with a limited contrast in each pair. I also have to add more color. There is too much cream and white. But remember, this whole thing started because I was getting stuff out of my stash I wasn't happy with.

Like I said to Julie before I went to bed last night, "Can you imagine this quilt with fabrics I actually love?"

And right there, bingo, X marks the spot, is the biggest reason for the failure of this version. I am not really being true to myself. How can I make a quilt a magnificent symphony if I'm using fabrics that don't sing?

No More Same Old

OK.

Looking at that wall of black and white triangles just reminded me of the black and white triangle quilts I made last year. I thought, Damn it! Been There. Done That.  No More.

So I dug out the light blue accessory bin and ironed everything in it.

One of the things that came to me as I was working on the layout for Treasure Trove, with the long horizontal diamonds, was that if I swapped the values (light diamonds, dark background) I could get clouds.

Except that isn't what it ends up looking like. Any time you use a pair of colors with strong contrast (and black and white is the strongest contrast you can get), what happens is the two create a strong pattern that stays flat on the picture plane. It means you get a strong pattern where both the light and dark are right up front. One value does not sink backward into the distance, especially if the shapes are visually the same size. They fight. Actually they dance, but they dance TOGETHER. Both are stars. Both are equals.

I remember being at a quilt shop once where a woman was buying fabric for her first quilt. She picked a simple design, a square with two opposing triangles, so four blocks put together would make an X shape. She picked a very wimpy pale fabric for the triangles in the corners, and a darker subdued purple for the big diagonal strip. But she had colored out her pattern, and said to the shop owner, "I don't want this purple to take over. I want this pale fabric to be the focus."

I had to walk away to prevent myself from saying aloud "Well, that will never happen. If you want a wimpy fabric to be the star of the show, you have to make everything else around it a lot wimpier. Your purple commands a lot more attention than your pale print." It didn't help that she wanted to make the blocks 12" square.

So if I want to have long horizontal diamonds look like clouds floating, I have to make the background seem to float backward. I have to pick something that doesn't fight as much. So, duh, white clouds, blue sky... light blue scraps.

In drawing or painting, there are techniques, or tricks, to use to make things sink backward and other things pop forward. Generally it is how you handle your edges, but you have to pay attention to everything so that what's close is more in focus (or sharper) than what is farther away.

I'm not really interested in making my diamonds literally float forward and create a 3-D picture space. If I wanted to do that I'd make a painting, which I am perfectly capable of doing. What I like best about quilts is their very strong graphic quality, where the design is very much on a flat plane. I want to create a LITTLE push pull forward backward space. Not a big one. Yes, I do want to play with your head, making you see one thing while I am doing something else.

So I will experiment and see where it leads me. Because I am all about seeing what happens in front of me as I work, not replicating anything I've seen someplace else, because that would be, like, boring.

The Alto

Young British designer Sarah Dickins has designed a sewing machine to encourage "making." This machine is just a prototype, it isn't in production, but it's quite the most elegant sewing machine I have ever seen. This machine has been shortlisted for this year's Dyson Award.   You can read more about this machine here, on Fast Company.

Thoughts on the Rules

Not those rules. The rules I mentioned in yesterday's post. They were the rules of real houses.

Obviously fabric houses are different, but as Julie observed, it's really a conscious effort to do something deliberately askew.  ("Can you ever," she asked me recently, "make your letters really wonky? Uneven, irregular, symmetrical?")  The answer was... not without conscious, deliberate, effort.

One of the lessons in learning to draw is the ability to measure visually; to relate.  It's always asking, is this thing I am trying to reproduce higher, lower, lighter, darker, bigger, smaller, thinner, thicker.. whatever... and then putting it down that way.

It isn't simply the ability to draw the "thing" that makes it appear real on the page. It's the ability to draw accurately the spaces and objects around the thing. That requires the ability to measure and compare visually. (You know how you've seen artists hold a pencil out at arm's length?  They're measuring something.)

It's the ability to look at an object and tell whether I want to make it exactly the way it looks or if I want to make it more significant, or less so. If I want you to really see it, I'll pump up the contrast.  If I want it to disappear, I'll make it blend in with whatever else is nearby. 

It's the ability to look at a series of (for example) blue fabrics and tell at a glance which are lighter, bluer, cooler, warmer, more yellow (greener) warmer, brighter, less intense, more intense, more "true blue", etc. In short, I can tell instantly whether they will "work" together or not. More importantly, though, I know why they would or wouldn't work.

I have to restrain myself at the quilt shop from commenting on the fabric selections of other customers.  Frequently I have to walk away from a selection of colors I think is monotonous, dull, lacking in contrast or verve, or just plain predictable. (On the other hand, it makes watching their reactions to my color choices all the more amusing.)

I do it all without thinking, and because I've done it for so many years, I do it very, very quickly.  I'm rarely aware I'm doing it. It's so intuitive, and so much of a habit, I'll be sewing merrily along, and then look at what I'm working on and think, "oh hell, it's too damn perfect" when I wanted it wonky.  To make it wonky, I have to concentrate on NOT sewing on auto-pilot.

So what does this all have to do with making wonky houses and trees?  A lot, actually.  If you want to make a house look like it's in the middle of a cold landscape, you have to follow some rules. Where I live, in New England, it gets cold in winter (for my pals in Oz, that means 0 degrees C, or the temperature at which water freezes.)  In that weather, the trees lose their leaves and we get snow on the ground.  Your breath freezes the air, the cold wind hurts your face, and your car doesn't always start on command!

Putting colorful flowers near a winter house wouldn't make it look cold, even though that would be a good example of wonkiness, or rule-breaking.

I made my little winter cabin the way I did because I wanted it to look cold.  I wanted you to feel the cold. So the house is shorter, the body of the house is timber, like a log cabin. The fabric I used for the roof looks like the asphalt roofing material used around here (and it's black to hold in the heat and help the snow melt).  I made the doors and windows blue - cool blues. I wanted the house to look like it was huddled against the cold. I made the ground black and white, to look like the snow.  The only warm element in the house is the red chimney.

It's all a juggling act.  More tomorrow.

Harder Than it Looks

So I am trying to duplicate the repeat design I did in college and finding it rather tricky. (I can't quite figure out how I did it the first time.) I'm close, but the proportions don't look quite right. I'll get there eventually, because the idea of having fabric printed in the design is very appealing!

To all the Red Letter Quilt-Alongers... I've sewn up my letters into rows, and will post about that soon!

Planning

This is a future quilt project in the works. I'm nowhere near ready to start sewing. First, I have to settle on a way to organize the words in this quote.

I have turned my wonky free pieced letters on their sides, making them wider than they are tall. (Most of them, anyway.) As usual, I draw my letters out first, experimenting, then when I get some ideas I think I will like, I color them in with black permanent marker, make photocopies, then start cutting and rearranging the letters until I get a layout that pleases me.

Here are two arrangements. There are seven things that are different from one to the other. Do not consider the word spacing -- that won't happen until the letters are sewn together. There are two red herrings - which is to say two things you ought to be able to see right away. Some of the differences are very subtle.

This isn't a contest, there is no prize, no bragging rights. It's just a way to share my thought process, and to show how sometimes the littlest things really do make a difference.

I've left the photos quite large. You can click them, then click them again to enlarge so you can see a lot of detail.

Have fun!



To my Very Best Friend: Happy Birthday!

What do you do when...

What do you do when you're lying in the dentist's chair for a two hour appointment in which you are getting a crown on one of your back teeth?

You don't think of them drilling, you don't think of the chips flying all over your face, you don't think of the icky smells, you don't think of the light in your eyes. You don't listen to the dentist ask for this tool or that one, or say to his assistant, "hold her tongue out of the way." You don't poke your tongue (well, if you could feel it, you sure wouldn't) in the tooth they are working on, and you don't wring your hands.

You go someplace else.

I designed a quilt in my head.

I was so far away that more than once the dentist had to repeat his instructions to me to do something, because I wasn't listening.

The Blue Tape

I want my scrappy quilts to look spontaneous, but they are very much planned. I do not just grab one piece and sew it to another, so I need a big work area to lay out the pieces and look at them.I don't have a big design wall on which to plan my quilts, and I think working on the wall would be a bit rough - I'm only five feet tall, and pinning something to a wall means getting up and down off a step stool, and that's just a lot of work. Besides, I want to be able to look at it from a distance.So I design my scrappy quilts on the floor. Since I hate measuring (and if I measure, I usually forget the measurement in about five minutes) I just make an outline of the top of the desired bed size on the floor using blue low-tack painter's tape. My apartment is in an old building, and it has a "vintage, mid-century" linoleum floor. It's nice and smooth, and it's rather tough. So the tape goes on, and comes off, easily. This outline (top picture above) is for a twin bed, with the extra bit at the bottom the dimension for a "long twin."
As you can see, it's rather useful.

Here my sister and I did the same thing when we assembled the quilt for Cassie.
And I don't just use it on the floor. Here it is stuck to my design table marked off to help me make 20" blocks.To make the outline on the floor, I have a 48" long metal ruler, and a large 45-45-90 triangle I use to make the shape a proper rectangle with 90-degree corners,and low tack painter's tape. I just happen to have it 2" wide, but you can use any size you have.I've left it down as long as two months, but I pull the tape up after each quilt.

The only disadvantage is that my cat loves to play "Slip and Slide."