From Class Experiment UFO to Bed Quilt for Someone Who Really Needs It

A new UFO finish! Twelve years in the making! It flew to Kentucky last week to someone who lost their possessions in last summer's devastating floods. 

A couple of weeks ago, I read on Facebook that the Breathitt Museum in Jackson, Kentucky is distributing handmade bed quilts to flood victims. 

They've given many quilts to children, but now they need twin- or full-size quilts for teens and seniors. Their Facebook page has moving pictures of people beaming with their new quilts.

A search of my UFO cabinet didn't turn up anything large that was close to finished - but I did find this 25" x 40" rectangle.

It's been awaiting its destiny since 2010. That's when I took an online class taught by Kenyan quilter Dena Dale Crain, called "Structured Fabrics." (Dena's webpage is https://www.denadalecrain.com).  

I started with a large-scale print featuring vintage fashionable women. I bought it in the 90s because it reminded me of my Mom, plus it was a so campy; but I never did anything with it. It seemed perfect to experiment with.  

It's a border stripe, so there were also lines of automobiles, poodles and fashion accessories. 

Crain had us cut our main print into strips, then weave the pieces back together atop a layer of fusible interfacing. From there, we did more slicing, rearranging, and inserting, plus zigzagging things on top, including lines of bias, cord, and/or ribbon. Here's a closer look at one of the "structured" areas. 

I added at least four more fabrics - a brown Indonesian print, in an attempt to cut the sweetness; an abstract hot pink fabric with multicolored lightening bolts (to amp the sweetness again); a flamingo fabric; and a solid teal. 

I had no idea what to do with the results. So this unusual rectangle, a couple more structured areas, and the remaining uncut fabric, went into my UFO cabinet for a lengthy stay.

When I pulled it out a couple of weeks ago, and considered using it in a bed quilt, my concern was that there were raw edges would not stand up to heavy use and laundering.

So I laid purple tulle on top of each constructed panel, and stitched it in place closely - every 3/4" or so, vertically and horizontally, with invisible monofilament thread and a multistep zigzag, to trap and freeze as much as possible. I added even more lines of stitching when it came time to quilt it. 

Below is another constructed section completely covered with tulle and close stitching and quilting Even looking at it closeup, the tulle is hard to see - you have to know it's there.  

I surrounded the structured areas with gorgeous (and sturdy) new Asian-themed floral fabrics that my friend/fabric scout Marian recently shared with me. None of the surrounding area required tulle. 

Along the top and bottom, I added patchwork panels of squares leftover from a different quilt. 

 On the back, to make the quilt extra cozy, I used colorful flannels....

Including one of the funniest statement fabrics I've ever met: 

(The text reads "Dream Date," or "Nick and Nora," the brand name, but to me the statement is: Love whoever!)

 

I finished it in record time, machine washed and dried it, and shipped it off to Kentucky. And then the museum posted a picture of a happy looking teen showing off the back! It made me so happy! (I hope she likes the front, too. I didn't make the wonderful quilt on the right, held by a senior.) 

If you'd like to donate a quilt to this very good cause, find the information here. They are still in need of quilts for teens and seniors.

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."

Watching Blockbuster Skies, Brainstorming Eclipse Art

Nature put on two high-altitude shows last week, one astronomically stupendous, and the other meteorologically harrowing. We are all worried about people in the path of devastating tropical storm Harvey - they don't need quilts, but we can donate funds to a variety of helpful agencies. 

For those of you in need of a distraction from the storm news, let's discuss the eclipse. How was yours?  Here in Los Angeles, I felt a bit let down. At 62% coverage, the world didn't look any darker. Birds didn't flock, dogs didn't bark, everything seemed normal. 

But as an opportunity to commune with humanity, it was a blast! I rendezvoused with my DH at Cal Tech in Pasadena, where he works. This campus is normally so quiet that you rarely see more than one person at a time walking its shady paths. But on eclipse morning, it was thronged with joyful crowds. I had to park a half mile away, and hike in. The event sponsors ran out of viewing glasses long before I arrived. Fortunately, my DH had obtained some in advance.

Gazing through the glasses, I kept thinking: A little smiley face in heaven!

More thrilling were contraptions people made or enlisted into the effort to watch safely. There were welding helmets, and cereal boxes with aluminum foil patches. And I especially loved these two physics students' clever colander contraption:

Closer:

Now I am trying to figure out what kind of fabric art piece this inspires. NASA people to share their eclipse-inspired art, as I explained in my blog post last week. The deadline is September 15, and the rules are at go.nasa.gov/2qoqTis. (I am assuming that an art quilt fits into their "mixed media" category.)

My friend Anne Finkleman witnessed the eclipse from Atlanta, where they had 98% totality. Here are some pictures she took outside of her office building of the eclipse's shadows coming through tree leaves, which act like a giant colander. I think I'm going to base my NASA quilt on her very cool images (I have her permission!) That brick pattern is so similar to log cabin piecing.

 Here's another image she took of a different sidewalk. This sidewalk has squares on point.

That is a lot of smiles. Which brings us to the question: how to render this kind of image effectively. Applique? Thread painting? Last week, I mentioned bleach discharge as a way to get a spacey effect. 

Since then, I dug out and photographed this experimental piece made a decade ago, as a failed attempt at an astronomy-themed prayer shawl for my son's bar mitzvah. I ended up going in a different direction, but I still have it, made with Decoularant on black fabric (safer than bleach, no toxic fumes, no financial affiliation). It's over 2 yards long: 

It's based on this famous NASA photo of a spiral galaxy: 

I just painted on the Decoularant, did a little overspraying with more from a spray bottle, ironed and washed, and the results were pretty cool. Here's the front, center. 

And the back, center: 

 The back is even better, right? Below, the back, from a distance....

 Some cool blobs from the front:

And the back:

So you can see where discharge has potential for eclipse art! As does paint. Here's a Rosh Hashana postcard I made years ago with rubber stamps and white acrylic paint. 

That planet on the lower left? It's stamped with a foam circle in white paint.   Here are a couple more experimental foam circles made with paint for a different postcard (Just don't ask me why I put mah jongg tiles in space. I was young.)

More eclipse art: Oregon State University held a quilt show in honor of the event. The Quilt Show showed off some great images of art made BEFORE the big event, here.

If you need more inspiration for eclipse art, photos collected from private citizens as well as NASA scientists are on Flickr, here. If the photo is taken by a private citizen, you will need their permission to use it. If you want to view (and possibly use) NASA photos only, there's a wealth of images starting on this page. For example, here's a wonderful time lapse image taken for NASA by Aubrey Gemignani:

And below is another NASA image taken over Madras, Oregon. 

NASA's generous image terms of use are explained here. 

Finally, don't throw away your eclipse glasses. Donate them to Astronomers without Borders so needy young people can use them in the future!  Find the information here.
For those of you in Harvey territory: Stay safe.