Welcome

 

 

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Welcome to the journal of my work.  I’m looking forward to chronicling both the old and the new. Ideas, inspirations, mistakes, and progress will all be celebrated.

 

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Fabric postcards and a quilt

I finally found a large enough block of time to work on a group of fabric postcards for the EBHQ Voices in Cloth 2014 quilt show.   And could there be a motif more fun for some postcards than the amazing Star Wars !

And some more

Plus just one that was inspired by some relatives of mine   !!!

These cards are lots of fun to make.  Since the design area is compact, the work needs to be simple—a whole new challenge.  As I work through this process and find other ones that I feel are successful, I will post them here.

And now, here’s another vintage quilt story. . . .

The Sunflower Quilt

Let me say right away that I do not know for sure why I love this quilt.  I puzzle over it every time I hang it up for display.  But I did fall in love with this sunflower quilt top when I purchased it the first time I went to the quilt show in Houston (Hi, Edy!!).

Because this quilt seems unusually busy for its time, I wonder why it never got quilted.  Perhaps the maker had one of those what-was-I-thinking moments when she saw the overall effect of the background fabric she had chosen.  The sunflowers fade in and out of that fabric, sometimes making parts of them disappear.  I think this quilt’s background fabrics is one of the reasons I like it so much.

Here are details of two of the blocks, showing how wonderfully complex they are.  Note how different the same light orange fabric looks in each of these blocks.

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Having decided to have this top hand-quilted, I was so happy to have it returned from the quilter, until I opened the box.  The quilting was irregular, and not the usual high quality that I was accustomed to seeing.

When I asked about my options, knowing that I wanted it quilted properly, I was told that they offered to  re-quilt it if I sent it back, meaning, of course, that I would have to take out the first stitching if I wanted it replaced.  My quilt mini-group at the time volunteered to help, and we held a unique, day-long event–an Unquilting Bee.  (Lily, did you help with this?)  Now quilted beautifully, the Sunflower Quilt is a fine addition to my collection.

One more item, to follow up on the Postage Stamp quilt post of two weeks ago:

I did not crop myself out of the picture of the newly finished quilt and my daughter Maggie;  I just wasn’t in that shot, so I dug around and found another view, posted here just for the fun of it.  Twenty years—-wow.

The Laundry Girl

Following the example of vintage squares as seen  in the most recent post, The Laundry Girl is also full of fabulous squares, but is a much more recent creation.

I wanted to experiment with the medallion format for quilts, which focuses on  a central motif, surrounded by different borders, usually made from varying sewing techniques.  When I started working in this form with a few fellow quilters, we found that adding these additional borders was not as simple as we had originally anticipated.

For this quilt, I cut apart an unused, vintage laundry bag found in an antique store and used  it for the center of the quilt.  The image and the writing were printed on the muslin, as was the pattern for hand embroidery.  I completed the embroidery, and chose the fabrics for the first border.  All the fabrics are from my vintage collection.

As soon as I put on the third border, the blue floral with patchworked corners, my original ideas for the remainder of the quilt no longer worked.  This medallion technique has been wonderfully challenging every step of the way, and it’s so much fun that I now have at least two new medallions in progress currently.

The Laundry Girl, 2013                57″ x 63.5″                 Photography by Sibila Savage

Here is a close-up of the charming laundress.

The Laundry Girl, detail 1

Here is a close view of some of these wonderful vintage fabrics.  I think these are great fun to look at.

The Laundry Girl, detail 2

In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that there is one fabric in Detail 2 above that is not a vintage fabric.  Can you find it???   (Hint: it appears twice.)

Postage Stamp Quilt

Finally got around to getting photographs of some more of the quilts/quilt tops I have collected.  Here is one of the very early ones.  Now, as I see the photos of these collected quilts all in a digital file, I begin to see how much many of these works influenced my journey as an artist.

Postage Stamp Quilt           70.5″ x 87.5″       Photography by Sibila Savage

The year is 1991.  I had first seen this quilt top in the display window of Sharks, a used clothing store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.  It was part of a Christmas display, and was tagged “Not For Sale.”  In May, the quilt top was on the store’s shelf of linens for sale, and I jumped at it, probably overpaying at $85.  Didn’t seem to matter, since I thought it was marvelous.  According to my journal, I “ran home with it and put it on the wall to stare at it.”

Then began an exercise that I can hardly begin to comprehend now:  I started hand quilting it, using an Aunt Grace fabric for the backing and 100% cotton batting.  This quilting took at least two years, and  I was approaching the time when I would begin machine quilting, having taken a beginning class at Cotton Patch, a fabric store in Lafayette.

See the detail below for the tedious way I decided to quilt this beauty.  Perhaps this labor was why I was warming to the idea of machine quilting.

Postage Stamp, detail

And, as if hand quilting wasn’t enough for me to take on, I decided to bind this quilt without squaring it up (and using coarse feed sack fabric) JUST BECAUSE I KNEW HOW TO DO IT.  A true what-was-I-thinking moment ! ! !  It took forever.

Actually, the choices were either whack off the entire outside row of triangles, or hand sew a new row of squares all the way around that I would be willing to cut in half, or bind it like this. This whole project was finished in 1993.

Headless Susan and daughter Maggie (age 4), posing with the finished quilt

Click here to see how I used this same pattern, using larger squares and putting the patches on point.

The Happy Quilt

Now known as The Happy Quilt because it made me happy every time I worked on or looked at it, is finally quilted and photographed. This is the quilt I started while taking a class at ThimbleCreek Quilt Shop taught by the wonderful Freddy Moran last November, the quilt top being finished shortly after the class ended.

The Happy Quilt, 2013       69.25″ x 69.25″           Photography by Sibila Savage

What took the longest was the quilting.  Since all three of the judges at International Quilt Festival Houston had commented that my Redwork Revisited quilt should  (I would have said “could”)  have had more quilting , I decided that I would spend extra time in the quilting phase of this project.  It was a ton of extra work, and I think I like how it turned out.

Here are a couple of details of the quilting motifs, lots of happy fun.

Two new quilt projects using these clear bright colors along with the bold blacks and whites are in progress now, and I’m already finding that they are making me equally happy.  Guess this is a new series.

I’m always trying to decide between this wild wacky part of my brain and the other, perhaps older, part that still loves the vintage.  Seems as though these two styles might have difficulty living in the same creative space, but it works for me.

More fun with fabrics

Here are a two more quilts in the “inspired by the fabric” family.

I was fascinated with this wacky retro fabric because it reminded me of the Formica counter tops in our 50′s kitchen in Illinois, and only a very bold solid could stand out next to it.

Twirling  Ninepatches, 2009      40″ x 47.5″    Photography by Paul Hennessey

The challenge for this fabric was finding a quilting pattern that coordinated with the off-centered design of the block.  I finally decided to make even more Formica designs in the border, which I tried to show in the detail.  It was interesting for me just to start sewing, not planning ahead of time where the next line of stitching would go. 

Twirling Ninepatches, detail

After the Twirling Ninepatches was finished, I still had more of the border fabric leftover, so I decided to try the Disappearing Ninepatch quilt, a pattern that Deanna Davis had found online in a DIY tutorial.

Fifties Fun, 2009          35″ x 42″         Photography by Paul Hennessey

I think it is interesting to see how this very active fabric in the borders of both quilts looks slightly different with the turquoise binding, as opposed to the self-binding in the first quilt.

My vintage feed sack stars

I made this small quilt in hopes of its inclusion in Mary Mashuta’s book Cotton Candy Quilts, her book of quilts with a depression-era focus, and I was very pleased when she selected it for the book.

Eight-Pointed Star Lattice, 2000          34″ x 34″       Photography by Sharon Risedorph

For this quilt I used the same feed sack for the large squares, and the same vintage fabrics for the burgundy red stars at the posts.  However, there is a lot of  variety in the choices of the blues for the shapes in the sashing.

AND

since I still had plenty of the blue patches left over from making the first quilt, I later made this next quilt, using for the large squares and rectangles all the wonderful feed sacks from my collection that had some blues and pinks on light backgrounds.

Feedsack Stars, 2009                      43.5″ x 43.5″             Photography by Paul Hennessey

The prints are really fascinating up close (see detail below).  The burgundy stars here are all made from one feed sack.

Feedsack Stars, detail

For this second quilt, I loved designing an interesting quilting pattern for the feed sack squares.  I feel this added a little something extra to the piece.

The Latest News:     Just two days ago I got into Sibila’s studio for another photo shoot, so more, newer (and some much older) quilt stories will be coming soon.

Red Triangles-a vintage quilt

Purchased in 1991, this vintage quilt top was a favorite of mine for a long time, and was one of the first few I sent away to Quilting Plus for hand-quilting, since I thought it deserved such care and respect.  It was such a favorite mainly because staring at and studying it helped to inform the work that I do today.

Red Triangles, date unknown            76″ x 83″       Photography by Sibila Savage

The center of the quilt is a beehive of pinwheels, with the red the only repeated patch.  Since the red is not always in the same position within the pinwheel block, it is hard for the eye to tell where one pinwheel ends and another begins.  Also, the sprinkling of the dark navy triangles near and in the borders seems to frame the brighter center.

Red Triangles, detail 1

These two final borders (one, turquoise rectangles and broken dishes blocks and the other, squares on point)  visually hold all this activity in place.  The construction of  borders is exactly what Freddy Moran mentioned in her Parts Department class:  the quilter made the borders, applied them to all the sides, and, when the border was in place, simply chopped off any remaining fabric, regardless of any block pattern disruptions.

Red Triangles, detail 2

Nothing too fussy or fancy here, just simple shapes and tons of fabric scraps combined in many wonderful ways.

I know this much chaos in one work is not for everyone, but I love it.