Walk Ancient Paths, Brainstorm Modern Quilts

Last week, my husband had a teaching gig in the French Alps, so of course I tagged along (devouring cheese). Afterward, we took a train to nearby Lausanne, Switzerland, where we had about a day to see the sights, before flying home. 

I was never someone who constantly takes pictures - not until this vacation. But now I have a new cell phone that hold its charge well. So I took many more photos than usual, and back home, I picked some favorites, to trace and mine for piecing and quilting ideas. 

The first sight we explored was the 13th century San Francois church. It has many doors, and took us a while to find one that opened - one that didn't open had this: 

 That's a quilt, for sure! 

A little color to prove my point:  

I can rest my case! But no, I'll keep going. Inside, the church is mostly grey stone, so the warm brown wooden furnishings glowed. I loved this:  

Tracing it helped me understand why it caught my eye...

...The contrast between curvy and straight, long and compact shapes. I rearranged the elements into an architectural octagon. 

The church's organ is heavenly, but far above my pay grade to replicate in fabric. 

It's held up by these two: 

 I traced and simplified them, painted their violin turquoise, et voila!

They'd make a nice quilting design for corners and other triangles on quilts: 

 

The design painted on the ceiling has proven its triangle-filling potential.

From overhead to underfoot, the streets are paved with more quilt brainstorming gold. Like this...

Traced: 

Another one: 

Made up of tiny octagons, with squares in their centers. 

There are wave after wave of squarish paving stones, set in scallops: 

...with the occasional drain for counterpoint:  

Below, a radiating circle with surrounding arcs: 

The next design is a tessellation. I think it looks like vertebrae. I bet it could be English Paper Pieced. It could also serve as a filler quilting design, though I'd have to mark it first - no way I could stitch this accurately freehand. 

Another stop on our walking tour was the Palais de Rumine, an Italianate building from the late 1800's. It houses five different museums - none of which was open on the day we were there! Dang! We were, however, allowed to run up and down the stairs and take pictures of the floor. The tile motifs were awesome:

Simplified: 

The next one would make an excellent quilt border: 

And here's an all purpose design:

 Traced, with a little simplification....

Looking closely, I discovered that the artisans did the tile equivalent of "echo quilting" - a couple rounds of tiles surrounding and echoing the shape of the motif, then straight rows. In the next photo, for example, look above the head of the lion on the left - there are 4 or 5 rounds of echo tiling between the lion and the (sword? stick?). But over the the head of the lion on the right, it's just one row of echo tiling.

The Lausanne Cathedral was built around the same time as the Francois Church, but it's much more elaborate. The pillars are adorned with intricate, judgmental folk:

(The guy on the left looks familiar. Moses? Is that you?) Here's the church's famed Rose Window. Most of the glass dates to 1230. 

Tracing it in my computer program, I discovered that the artist had welded and broken apart a great many circles:  

The formations made me think of fluffy clouds....

...which isn't far from its original intent. "In medieval times, large rose windows were often a representation of the universe," this informative website explains. "Thus Lausanne's large rose contains images representing the four seasons, four elements, four winds, four rivers of paradise, as well as the twelve labours of the month and the signs of the zodiac." (An even more detailed study of the window is here.)

And speaking of circles...We strolled along Lake Geneva, and popped our heads into what must be the fanciest hotel in town. if not the country, the Palais Beau-Rivage. Through glass doors, I photographed some of the chandeliers, or rather, the circular formations from whence the chandeliers dangled....

When I simplified this one, I wound up with something that looks very much like an African fabric motif! 

The next one...

I like the almost-haphazard "slats" with angled tops that emerge from the center. 

Another useful idea on top of a ballroom door....

...It would also make a nice filler for an arc-shaped quilt expanse

Some of my favorite designs were found in the Hotel Victoria, the  elegant little inn where we stayed, around the corner from the train station. Their decor combined 17th and 18th century European art with modern abstract art, plus sculptures from Africa and Asia.  Below is the huge woven tapestry that hangs in the entrance - it  knocked me out. I'm pretty sure this is contemporary (but the clerk couldn't tell me anything about it, and there was no label)...

Closer: 

Another wallhanging the same size, about ten feet wide, and I'm guessing done by the same artist/workshop:

...and a third (and check out the whimsical wrought-iron rail in front of it)...

...The fourth one is so minimalist that you might expect to see it at Quiltcon (if it were a quilt and not a weaving).

The white parts are woven in, not gaps. I was also entranced by the hotels' tile floors, which peeped out between rugs.

Figuring out the arrangements in different areas was a lot of fun....

We did a LOT of walking. So we granted ourselves other sensory rewards. Like this afternoon cappucino....

...and the following dinner salad adorned with puffs of chevre, goat cheese, on toast. 

The chevre was the exact consistency of a perfectly roasted marshmallow, with a slight skin and warm melty center - divine. DH ordered that dish in the distance, a chanterelle tagliatelle. OMG! (acronym for "Oh My, Gluten!")

More quilting inspiration from ancient streets to come....

Quel Fromage! This Quilt Is Cheesy!

There are many stacks in my sewing room, and one is comprised of potential handmade gifts: small quilts, brooches, fiber necklaces, and of course, UFO's - unfinished objects.

When planning a visit with an old (or new) friend who has admired my creations, I go through the pile, searching for something they might like; if necessary, I finish and personalize it for them.

It's a challenge if I don't know the person well and/or have never seen their home. What's their style? Minimalist? Flea market clutter? Black-and-white? Rainbow?

So I often bring choices. We recently headed for a week in the French Alps - my DH to teach, while I would be gloriously free all day to do this:

...Plus, on one day, have lunch with a friend from grad school who I hadn't seen in 30+ years. He's an American expat living in France, a writer, erudite, sophisticated and kind, all of which I detected from being Facebook friends with him for several years now.

I pondered what quilt to bring him and his wife. I had this small striped quilt from my Ann Brauer experiment days.

Sophisticated, but perhaps lacking personality.  I have a natural horor vacui, an allergy to unoccupied space. So I sewed a button on it. One button led to another and I sewed 13 on it. (Some are stacked.)

I may have overdone it. As a counter-offer, I brought this small eclipse quilt, mundanely named Eclipse #4.

(In real life, the colors are more muted than in this photo). I would let my friend decide.

The first clue to his taste was his suggestion from the menu items. He recommended the tartiflete.

What, you may ask, is a tartiflete? The word, which rhymes with "hearty PET," trips poetically off the tongue, sounding to me like someone who is a combination of a tart and flirt: O Tartiflete, ma petit chou, tu me tuer! ("Oh Tartiflete, my little cabbage, you are killing me!" according to my high school French.)

But a tartiflete is no cabbage - it is a Savoy regional food made with potatoes, onions, cream, butter, and a whole lot of, OMG, Internet recipes are showing me massive hunks of bacon LARD being chopped into little bits and thrown in! Now I have to apologize to my doctor AND my rabbi!

(Here's a public domain picture from Wikipedia:

Ours wasn't quite as bumpy.)

What makes the dish fabulous is its crusty brown goo of reblochon, a French cheese that Wikipedia says is "smear-ripened," which is not only something that happens on Twitter; in cheese the smearing is done with bacteria or fungi "which...gives them a stronger flavor as the cheese matures," says Wikipedia.

And if that's not intense enough, "reblochon" comes from the French verb "reblocher," which means "to pinch a cow's udder again..." Ouch?

"This refers to the practice of holding back some of the milk from the first milking. During the 14th century, the landowners would tax the mountain farmers according to the amount of milk their herds produced. The farmers would therefore not fully milk the cows until after the landowner had measured the yield. The milk that remains is much richer, and was traditionally used by the dairymaids to make their own cheese." 

The US government considers reblechon too dangerously unpasteurized to permit into the national arteries -  but, Wikipedia comforts us, there's a tasty and legal substitute for it called Delice du Jura.

Back to our luncheon - as you might expect, the tartiflette was delicious - how could it not be? Only my friend's fine continental manners kept me from licking my plate clean.

On top of that, he presented me and my husband with a weighty hunk of a DIFFERENT delightful cheese, tomme crayeuse, also unpasteurized, similarly covered in white mold with tantalizing fungal smears. Here it is (after I'd downed a few slabs):

So, back to our choices: now that you know him a bit, which quilt do you think my friend choose after our luncheon?

Yup, he immediately went for the quilt on the left, the quilt that displays what I had intended as a sunny slice of the sky with forebodings of eclipse, but which I now recognize as cheese. It even has moldy golden veins.

(Disregard that the orange is closer to the color of Cheez Whiz.)

The circles surrounding the cheese on that quilt are no longer moons and planets  - they're mold spores whizzing around in excited adoration. I am even giving this quilt a new name: "Tartiflete," bien sur.

Remaining questions that burn in my newly-smear-ripened soul: 

1. Shall I now make an intentional cheese quilt?

2. Shall I include the wrapper from my amazing gift cheese, so my cheese quilt can have a scratch-and-sniff component?

3. Or should I forget cheese and just make quilts about the amazing Alpine view?

(...which is not cheesy at all.)

P.S. I just discovered many textile artists inspired by cheese at Spoonflower, the custom fabric printing company (no financial affiliation). They sent me a notice for a BOGO fat quarter sale this weekend (through Monday), so just for the heck of it, I entered "cheese" in their search engine. Lots of choices came up, including this tasty design by Charlotte Winter here:

...More from Becka Griffen, here:

And finally, because woman cannot live by tartiflete alone,"Happy Macarons," by youdesignme, sold here.

Yum!

Judaica, Old and New, With and Without Charlton Heston

Judaic studies professor Jodi Eichler-Levine wrote a beautiful essay about Judaica and "riffing on tradition," published in the Association of Jewish Studies' magazine, here. I'm beyond honored to be mentioned. Here's he full matzoh cover that she discusses.

And the detail that caught her eye:

Doesn't everyone put Charlton Heston on their matzoh covers? I blogged about it several years back, halfway down the page. Thank you, Jodi. It's amazing to be understood

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In tallit news: One disadvantage of being an empty nester is that my kids, who used to serve as fresh, unpaid supermodels, are no longer available. Fortunately, my fresh, unpaid supermodel husband steps in, if I plead and promise to maintain his anonymity. So here is an anonymous person modelling a tallit for a girl who chose the colors. the batik fabric, and the design, specifying that the stripes be uneven widths and uneven distances from each other. 

And here it is a few weeks later, on the actual gorgeous girl! (With her gorgeous family, also unevenly distributed.)

It's much more difficult to make stripes uneven than the same size. Closeup:

I outlined the letters with silver metallic thread, using freemotion techniques. The method is explained toward the bottom of this page. The Hebrew blessing for donning the tallit is made easily with my "atarah on a roll" pdf pattern, which you can download for free here. The quilted case, with the bat mitzvah's Hebrew name, is below.

Opened, from the back:

The matching kippah is very simple....

...and reversible....

(My not-quite-free book on how to make plain as well as complicated reversible kippot is here. )

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And speaking of complicated: Tallit-and-kippah maker extraordinaire Marilyn Levy used a pattern from my book to make this kippah, with the extensive machine embroidery that she does so beautifully: 

Find more of Marilyn's exquisite creations, including kippot and tallitot, at her website, here.

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And finally, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, I must sheepishly admit that I do occasionally get commissions for bark mitzvah hats - yep, canine kippot. Meet Cody (and a feline photobomber): 

(What kind of a Jewish name is Cody? I forgot to ask his Hebrew name). I got a little fancy with fussy-cutting the four panels of Cody's headgear, for a kaleidoscopic effect: 

And the inside: 

It has a gold lame binding - what dog doesn't love bling? - and can double as an eyepatch. Not recommended for cats. The pattern is also in my book, here.

Artistic Protest Postcards and Signs for People with Bad Handwriting

My husband and I marched for refugees last weekend. We had to do something. We also came up with the sign below. I so appreciate and enjoy the creative, funny, heartrending, sincere signs people carry to marches for good causes. I was determined to do one for this march. My handwriting is terrible, but one thing I've learned from quilting is that anyone can cut out presentable, even enjoyable, lettering.

Before the march, when the news story of the separation of babies from their parents first broke, I sent money to a consortium of refugee assistance agencies, here.  Then I made five attention-seeking 4" x 6" postcards, from fabric, batting, and cardstock. In this case, a set of rubber alphabet stamps solved my bad handwriting problem.

I sent them to my lawmakers and Melania Trump (the day before she visited them wearing her "I don't care" coat - if I'd seen that first, I might not have bothered).




The large letters are individually rubber stamped. I did the entire phrase "Reunite families" in one stroke, thanks to my handy-dandy rubber stamp that looks like this.

These are dark times. When I heard the President describe immigrants as an "infestation," I heard the loud echoes of Nazis. As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor,  I am cautious about comparing things to Nazis. But this dehumanization of innocent immigrants and kidnapping their children is as cruel as any US government policy I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. My mother never recovered from the trauma of losing her parents and siblings, when she was in her teens.

My scientist son just informed me that separation of young lab animals from mothers is banned in science because of overwhelming evidence of the profound stress it causes. What dark souls cooked this up as something to do to human beings?

Want to make your own postcards? There's a tutorial at the bottom of this post.