Julie & Lynne: Inspiration Goes Back & Forth

At the end of 2011 I was making a sample quilt for a houses class I was planning. I was making my houses quilt into a quilt of the Four Seasons. Julie was following my work. "I like your houses," she wrote, "but I want to make some barns." I told her to go for it, that they were the same basic thing.

 I suggested she draw them out first so she'd know where she was going and how she could figure out how to build them.


Well, Julie took the idea and ran with it. She made a spectacular quilt, and you can read all about it here, among many other places. Julie not only shares her story about that fabulous quilt, she shared the occasionally painful process it took her to make the quilt as special as it is.

is is my Mom and the sock kitty Millie at the AQS show in Syracuse NY in 2015.

 The quilt won awards and traveled around the country on exhibit in many AQS shows. It's Julie's story, and you can read it on her blogs, here and here. I was thrilled to have been an inspiration to her.

Julie and many other quilters had made "Low Volume Quilts". I thought they were lovely and subtle, but for me they were boring as hell. I'm pretty sure I moaned about them to Julie with alarming regularity. I didn't want to make a typical low-volume quilt. I wanted to make a quilt that would thumb my nose at the concept. I wanted to make a word quilt, and when I found the right quote, I did it.

While this was happening, I had been asked to speak and teach at Quintessential Quilts in St Louis MO in the fall of 2013. It was a busy year for me.

I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington DC that spring.

I spent a few days in California in September with my son and his then girlfriend. This was the trip where I met SewGirl, and brought the four-letter word.

Julie put a countdown clock on her blog.

I was working on my speech, my class, and the logistics of getting to Missouri with a boxful of quilts. At one point, Julie said she would attend, and drive the five hours from her house to St Louis. Since I didn't want to send my quilts halfway across the country to just anybody, it was agreed I would send them to her. She and her husband Larry would photograph them, and then she'd drive to St Louis and I'd see her at the class.

I chewed on that for a bit, and then I wrote to Julie... "What if I flew to Memphis instead of St Louis? I could stay at a hotel that night, and then you and I could drive to St Louis together? I'd get to meet you in person, and we could get to know each other on the drive up there?" Julie agreed, and said I could stay her spare bedroom.

 So on Thursday October 3, 2013, after I got off a plane at the Memphis airport, I walked outside and toward a car that had this sign on it, waiting...

Look! I'm in Memphis!

It had been over five years, and I finally met my best friend in person.

Before and After

For the last few days this has been the view into the dining room. Notice the empty walls.  I had taken the quilts down to bring to the Concord Piecemaker's Guild for my talk.

They were a great bunch of ladies and I hope we all had a good time. I talked a bit too much (sorry) and as a result the guild's show and tell did not take place. (Really sorry about that, I'dve waited, with pleasure, to see what everyone was making.)

It was an hour's drive home, but at 9:45 at night, the roads are blissfully empty. I set the cruise control and the GPS and stayed in the slow lane for the calming drive home.

At home I was too jumpy to go to bed right away, so I put my quilts back on the walls where they belong.

Yeah, that's better!

Change of Pace

A few weeks ago I wrote about retiring my sampler quilt, "Letters From Home." What I meant was I wanted to give it a rest from hanging and being exposed to light and dirt.  So I did just that. (The quilt on the bed is "Magic Happens", made by my pal Julie from all my leftover bits, and quilted by our friend Chris.)

I rolled it up around a cardboard tube, and tied it gently with fabric scraps.

It's now resting comfortably in the closet in my "spare" room.

I've hung the Four Seasons quilt in its place to enjoy. I was working on this quilt last Thanksgiving, and this year my Holiday guests will be able to enjoy it with me.

Blogger's Quilt Festival 2012

Here is my quilt for the Blogger's Quilt Festival 2012 

It's my free pieced Four Seasons quilt. I wanted a quilt that showed the four seasons as I see them throughout the year.

Four Seasons Finito!

It's finished. I never made it to my Mom's house yesterday, so I'll bring it over to her this weekend so she can enjoy it and show it off to her students next week before it travels to Quilted Threads in Henniker NH. I'll be teaching a class on making wonky houses and trees on Saturday May 5. Hope to see you there!

The finished quilt is about 44" x 60"


Now I can't wait to get back to the box quilt!

Almost

It's almost finished, but not quite. I have about 30" to sew on the right side, and I still have to add the hanging sleeve to the back.  It is quite handsome, if I do say so myself. It's amazing how much better it looks without all the extra batting hanging out. It's also nice to see choices I made for the inner border, outer border and binding were the right ones.

I'll be bringing it over to my Mom's before I go to work today, and picking it up later.

Selvage Fairy, my Mom teaches drawing.

One Stitch at a Time

I've been sewing the binding on the Four Seasons quilt.  I've been watching the Westminster Dog Show on tv while I stitch. I'm about half way around.

My Mom told me to hurry up and finish it so I could bring it to her house so she could show her students on Thursday.   Ma, I love you, but my hand hurts! I did one short side and one long side last night and I was sore!  She says, "Well you could always bring it to me NEXT week."  Sigh.

Binding!

 It's rare I have -two- quilts that need binding at the same time. The Four Seasons Quilt,

and the Red Letter Alphabet, which arrived over the weekend.

 I found a nifty app for my smartphone.  It's a collection of quilting calculators. 

 This one is from Robert Kaufmann and it's free. Obviously I know how to calculate yardage, but this is going to be handy when I'm at a quilt shop and I'm having analysis paralysis.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Four Seasons Quilt

Feast your eyes.  You can click the photo to enlarge and then click again for lots of details.  It's so interesting to compare to the finished flimsy, below.

The quilt is about 48" x 60" or so.

Winter Sneak Peek

Chris has done her magic with my Four Seasons quilt, and it will be on its way home to me soon.  She took this picture while the quilt was being quilted, and I want to share this luscious little tidbit with you all.

It's pretty awesome and I am very excited!

This, That and the Other

I finally got rid of the broken sewing machines. I put them out in the trash.  They were there in the morning when the sun came up at 7 AM, but gone by the time I left for work an hour later.  There had been no takers when I posted it on the local Freecycle.I had removed one of the machines from the cabinet, and set that out on the street by itself. It lasted an hour. Freecycle has been useful for getting rid of some other items - my artificial Christmas tree and an electric blanket, but it seems in my neighborhood just putting stuff out on the street is the fastest way to get rid of stuff.

I've got the backing ready for the Four Seasons quilt. The pattern of the fabric is larger than I expected, which is good. I like larger prints for quilt backings. I think a smaller print over a large area looks empty, and ultimately, a bit boring. I'll be sending the quilt to Chris later this week to be quilted. I've already told her to do whatever the quilt wants, which means custom quilting. I'm very excited about it.

I watched the first episode of Project Runway All-Stars the other night, and found it distincly underwhelming.  The runway isn't long enough to get a good look at the clothes, and there wasn't any drama. Not that I'm a fan of  so-called "reality" drama, but the show didn't really grab my interest. Am I the one who feels this way?

Julie has been sending me photos of her take on wonky houses.  She's doing barns, and they are coming along fabulously.  I hope she posts about them on her blog soon.  These are her first wonky houses, but you'd never know it, they're just great.

Surrounded!

I sewed the borders on to the Four Seasons quilt last night. The finished outer border won't be quite so wide, but I do think the binding will be the same batik-y blue.

With a little luck the weather will be mild enough so I can take the quilt outside and get a really decent photo.  Now I have to prepare the how-to's for the quilt-along.

Oh boy, you should see the barns that Julie is making! She's going to put me to shame!

Border Wars

That's an exaggeration, of course.  It was more like Border Auditions.  I always knew I wanted a blue around the edges of the Four Seasons quilt, to make you think of the sky that is common all over the world.  So here is the blue.  Lovely color, lovely fabric, but it's definitely lacking something.

My good friend Julie suggested a thin inner border of a darker blue.

 That didn't do anything for me either.  I thought, "It needs a purple inner border."

So I tried a reddish violet, and immediately liked the way it looked.

Here is what it will look like.  I am thinking the skinny border may be about a half inch wide, and the outer blue will be about 3-1/2" or so.  I haven't sewn anything down yet, I've just laid the strips around the flimsy to see.  Looks like I will finish this flimsy before New Year's!

It's a Bird, it's a Plane...

It's a flimsy!

I think that's my favorite quilting term.  Flimsy! 

Anyway, after avoiding the sewing room for the Christmas holiday, I finally got back in there last night and sewed up the four seasons panels into a flimsy!  It's amazing what three seams can do to fire up the creative juices.  Next up... adding the blue border all around and choosing the backing fabric!

Whee!

Four Seasons Panels

Here are the panels for my Four Seasons Quilt. They haven't been sewn together yet. The panels are about 37 - 39" wide and about 55" tall.

The quilt-a-long will begin about mid-January.  Happy Holidays!

Four Seasons Panels Complete

I have finished the four panels of my Four Seasons quilt. They aren't sewn together yet. I brought them to Quilted Threads to find a fabric for the border. Here I am auditioning a few of them.  You can see the discards at the end of the table. I did find a fabric, and it wasn't any of these.

Summer Cat

You really didn't think I wouldn't have a cat in the Summer panel, did you?

Summer House

Here's the finished Summer house.  I've had a guest visiting for the last couple of days so I haven't done any sewing. I hope to have the Summer panel done by the end of the weekend.

The Hammock

A great place to while away a lovely summer afternoon is swinging from a hammock in the shade of some trees.

The hammock is made from fabric with letterscript on it because when I think of lying in a hammock, I think of reading a good book. 

To get an idea of the size of the hammock, the space surrounding it is about two inches tall by about three inches wide.  The tree trunks are about 1/4" wide.






***As for Freecycle in this city, I signed up on Friday morning, got an automatic reply telling me to read the rules and respond. I did so Friday night, and now, three full days later, I still haven't heard one word.

The Side Porch

Here in New England (in the Northeast USA) many houses have porches.  The house I grew up in had a  screened in porch along the front side of the house. It was a great place to watch the world go by, to watch the lightning during a thunderstorm, and just so sit on the swing and do nothing.

I decided the house in my Summer panel needed a side porch.  The small white rectangles in the photo above are 1/4" x 1".