Pandemic Porch Quilt Show, Days 29 - 33: Flamingos and Hashtags and Adverbs, Oh My!

Day 29: Flamingo Carrom 

This was made in the early 2000's, when my kids, my fabric stash, and I were so young! Also, I was obsessed with Marilyn Doheney's wedge rulers. Despite the frenetic color, and, lordy, the gold lame in the center (what was I thinking?)....

...I still sort of love it. Flamingos and zebras and tigers, oh my! 

Day 30: Frankenquilt! 

The previous project left me a bunch of extra wedges, which I stuffed into my UFO cabinet. About 15 years later, I pulled them out and made the central circle and inner border of this quilt: 

 

The outer borders were more recent experiments in modern hashtag blocks.

I tried to come up with different ways to make hashtags.

This time, I had the sense not to put gold lame in the middle. Just a  nice soothing solid yellow. 

Read more about this quilt in my blog post here.

Day 31: New York State of Mind 

This was my first cityscape quilt, made in 2018, and it happened completely by accident. I was trying to make improv modern ladders. When I offset the tops, skyscrapers appeared! 

I used my trusty Doheney wedge ruler to make the top portion.  The circles and triangles over the wedges create something that looks like a group of diverse people. All happy accidents! The quilting was then inspired by NYC's iconic Chrysler Building. 

More photos in this blog post. The intentional city quilts that followed this quilt are blogged here.

Day 32: "The Road to Hell is Paved with Adverbs"

The quotation is from writer Stephen King, and it's so true! In researching this quilt, I plowed through (adverb) an exhausting yet non-comprehensive list of 3732 adverbs.  

I rubber stamped the adverbs I abuse most, onto pieces of fabric, before piecing and appliqueing everything together.  A closer look is in my earlier blog post, here. 

DAY #33: Seven Sisters Potential Wedding Canopy (Chuppah)

This quilt was made in the '90s, using the technique in the book "Magic Stack and Whack Quilts" by Bethany Reynolds, which was was all the rage - for good reason! Start with large scale print; stack layers, matching printed motifs precisely.

Then rotary cut diamonds - you wind up with multiple sets of 6 identical pieces. When you sew them together, they kaleidoscope, and non-quilting friends declare you a genius! You humbly say, "Aw, shucks," but you and your guild know the truth - even relative beginners can follow this book, have a blast with it, and come up with something spectacular.

The simple-looking bias tape border took MUCH longer (and more skill) than the center.

(There's a "Chai," the Hebrew word for "Life," quilted in gold thread in the corner, but it's hard to see.) I think this quilt would make an excellent, dignified wedding canopy, but no one has asked, so it's still a wedding virgin.

More porch show quilts coming soon!

Celebrate Catastrophe! Turn UFO's into FrankenQuilts!

Presenting my new FrankenQuilt! 

Yes, sort of like that, except in fabric!

It's stitched together from old body parts stashed in my UFO* cupboard, a freakin' scary place. Said cupboard contains 25 years worth of aesthetic outrages, piling up since I started quilting.

I normally avoid this cupboard, to preserve my sanity and self-esteem. Occasionally I squint my eyes and shove things in, slamming the door shut quickly so nothing escapes.

But the demise of my computer forced a confrontation. The computer was behaving so badly that my DH had to send it to a computer meditation retreat, where it contemplated the ways it had wronged me, and gradually repented.

Without my computer, endless hours yawned ahead. I was in the middle of several writing projects that I couldn't do on my phone. I was creatively stuck on a major quilt.  I tried, how you call it, "vacuuming the house," but that only took a half hour.

So I was forced to the cupboard. Among the better offerings was this top. (Pretend it's not quilted).

It's made up entirely of wedge-shaped pieces, cut circa 2001, when I was obsessed with Marilyn Doheney's wedge rulers. My kids were little and I made a bunch of hyperactive medallion quilts for gifts and our preschool's auctions. Here's one I donated:

The medallion includes chopped flamingos, tigers, zebras, alligators, manatees, and polka dots....

I liked that so much I made another one to keep....

When these and others like them were done, I had a thick stack of leftover wedges, like this: 

They sat on the UFO shelf for many years. Somewhat recently - maybe within the last three years - I sewed them into another medallion, 

and raw-edge zigzagged that onto a teal background fabric....(pretend this isn't quilted)....

...plus made four borders out of strip-pieced wedges and solid fabric wedges....

 ...And then restuffed this whole thing back into the cupboard....

...where I found it last week.  Also in the UFO cupboard, I also found a stack of blocks from my much-more-recent hashtag obsession. (i.e. earlier this year).

My tutorial about how to make these blocks is in this blog post.

I decided to lay my spanking new hashtag blocks around my spanking old wedge medallion.  Although the colors didn't match, I kind of liked the effect!  There weren't quite enough hashtag blocks, so I whipped up some more...




...below, a half a hashtag is better (and faster) than none....

Plus some of my original hashtag blocks were insanely boring, so I shattered them....

....and surgically enhanced  others: 

 The border quilting, as you saw in the shots above, was straight-line quilting. The corner blocks were quilted with curly loops. I quilted a sun in the middle....

...and did a whole lot of freemotion wiggling on the teal background....

I think the uneven wedges look like the stitching on Frankenstein's neck! With or without wedges, you can make a Frankenquilt too! Just follow this simple tutorial:

 1. Await a mild catastrophe that forces you away from as many electronic devices as possible. At the very least, your PC should crash. It would also help if your Kindle, cable, and cellphone goes down. However, if your electricity goes down, this won't work, unless you own a hand-crank.

2. Go to your UFO cupboard, grit your teeth, and pull stuff out. Find things that are remotely related, and sew them together. If common sense tries to stop you, explain to it that you are making a charity quilt, or an ottoman quilt, or something that honors the kooky spirit of Young Frankenstein! When it's over, you'll be exhausted but happy!

* UFO=Unfinished Objects. A more euphemistic/positive term is "Works in Process."

My Wedding Canopy Article in Machine Quilting Unlimited Magazine

Extreme excitement: My 7-page article about making a commissioned wedding canopy is in the new January 2016 issue of Machine Quilting Unlimited magazine.  Here's the cover of the issue, with a glorious animal portrait quilt by Susan Carlson, on of my quilting idols.

Here's the first page of my article: 

It's a step-by-step description of my collaboration with the bride, and the technicalities of making this kind of medallion quilt (way easier than it looks.) 

MQU is a beautiful magazine that I only became aware of recently.  By "machine quilter", they don't just mean longarmers - the articles are for anyone who does any part of any quilt with any kind of machine. You could be a hand worker and still love the editorial. 

The same issue has an article about one of my quilt heroes, Susan Carlson, who makes intoxicating animal portraits; Lisa Walton's insanely intricate wholecloth painted quilts inspired by Spanish tiles; a stupendous labyrinth quilt by Sarah Ann Smith; exquisite new versions of antique Baltimore Album quilts; and so much more. It covers the broad territory from traditional to cutting-edge art quilts, and they make it all look gorgeous!

 If your LQS doesn't carry this magazine, they should - tell them about it! Meanwhile, you can buy the January 2016 issue, or back issues, here. 

My Big Jewish Quilted Wedding Canopy

You get a call asking if you can do an assignment that would normally take nine months. It sounds like a great gig, and you're excited. So when's the deadline? 

Two months. Uh oh.

That's how I felt when an imminent bride contacted me after seeing the sushi chuppah (wedding canopy) on my Judaiquilt website. She wanted something like it, including sushi fabric; a shining gold star in the middle; and fabrics related to herself, her fiance, and their children's many activities and passions. They will have a sunset beach wedding. 

It was a dream commission. But the timing was tight - the call was in early June and the wedding's in mid-August! That sushi chuppah had taken me maybe nine months! 

Yet the more she told me about her fiance and herself and their children, the more I fell in love with her and the possibilities. Their avocations and passion ran the gamut from country music to Chanukah to tequila to skiing.  

So I said "yes." Then I sent her directly to equilter.com (no financial affiliation). It's not that equilter has the best fabrics or prices - they're comparable to other high-quality quilt fabric sites - but equilter organizes the novelty fabrics better, by topic, which is ideal if you're making a quilts representing someone's interests. She gave me a long list of favorite fabrics from the site. 

She also gave me a sense of  favorite colors - teal and pink, cream and gold - and I used those to send her images of fabrics from my LQS or my stash that might work for the central circle. 

With her approval on most fabrics, I constructed the central medallion. I created strip sets, then used a Marilyn Doheney 9 degree wedge-shaped ruler. Here's the view from the back. I often find I like the back as much as the front! 

I set the circle in the middle of the chuppah, against a sunset fabric, and the novelty fabrics in rectangles in the borders around the center. Without further ado, here is the finished quilt. It's about 63" square. 

Below is the center of the circle. The central star is gold lame - it's surrounded by floating seashells. That's on top of musical note fabric, followed by sushi fabric, and followed by a whole constellation of fabrics evocative of  beach, ocean, and sky/stars. There are 14 fabric in all in this circle (and about 55 in the entire quilt.)

Here are some of the novelty fabrics in the borders. Below, cowboy hat fabric with fabric transferred  photos of the bride and groom (I blurred them in this photo for privacy purposes) along with travel fabric,  Chanukah and Rosh Hashana fabric: 

Next, record albums, crackers, Hostess cupcakes, fortune cookies, New York style pretzels: 

Motorboating (with an appliqued photo of the family in kayaks), beach with an appliqued country music star's photo (that's Kenny Chesney, in his blue rocking chair), donuts:

Winter sports, light house,

 Same country music star, guitars:

Salad, s'mores, bagels, donuts, tequila....

(And yes, they asked for shrimp on their chuppah. Who am I to argue?)

Grilled cheese sandwiches, black-and-white cookies, hot peppers, record albums (remember those?) I added the pomegranates as a symbol of fertility and Torah. (To counterbalance the shrimp). 

Pets, football, lacrosse, soccer.

Each corner had fans made from leftover wedges from the central strip set, and in the lower right corner I put a phototransfer of the wedding invitation. 

The back features bigger pieces of the novelty fabrics for people to enjoy. 

I put the label on the lower left corner, on one of the strip sets that made up the central medallion. 

I had a wonderful time, worked night and day, and finished early! It was a joyful collaboration with a delightful client and fun fabrics, and I loved every minute of it! 

(To see more of my chuppot, go here.)