A Funny Thing Happened on my Way to a Vaccination Quilt

Here's what I just made, instead of a quilt

There are two immutable quilting laws that correspond to Murphy's law: (1) Your bobbin is low; and, (2) Anything that can look like a phallic symbol, will.

The latter law kicked in when I decided I needed to make a quilt that would encourage people to get vaccinated.  I'd been thinking a lot about about friends who struggle with needle phobia, but desperately want a vaccine. I admire their courage, and want to thank and encourage them and others.

Would it be possible to make a quilt with friendly-looking hypodermics? I started by reviewing photos online.  I did some drawings, like this one.

The vertical lines on the lower image show that I was testing whether I could turn this into a Foundation Paper Piecing (FPP) pattern. But it was way too complex. Also, ideally, I wanted a pattern that could be improvisational (I have a measuring phobia). 

I also thought it might be fun to arrange needles in a circle - which meant wedge-shaped needles.

All those thoughts led to this: 

About 30 of them could turn into something like this: 

It looked good in my graphic design program! But when I made a couple,  I wound up with...

Swords. Carrot Swords. You know, carrots with sword-shaped handles, like vegetarian Vikings used. (None were found at archeological sites, because they composted).

Back to the drawing board. Clearly, hypodermic chambers are unrecognizable when wedge-shaped. I changed the pattern to make the body a rectangle, but with long narrow background (white) wedges on both horizontal sides). I FPP'd one.

First run:

I screwed up the long white edges there - they should have been longer. Worse, with the tiny pieces, this was no fun, and I wouldn't want to make 5, let alone 30.

So forget the wedges - I was back to rectangles, simplified further.

Instead of FPP these, I measured and cut fabric strips for each piece, and chain pieced them to make these: 

I did mess up the grey placement on the handles (the dark greys should form an intact H, not a broken one.) But that was okay, I told myself - the weird handles looked kind of artsy  To solve the bigger problem of needles being too thin to piece, I planned to embroider a line of thick floss, emerging from each tip, shooting across the white rectangle.

Are you sensing where this is going? When I put this collection up on my design wall....

I'm sorry. I cannot NOT see phallic symbols here, inexplicably linked to broken letter "H"s (or "I's"), for some kind of profound statement on ego and sexuality.

Argh! I thought long and hard (no pun intended) about what I wanted to say, and then I went back to my graphics program and made the meme at the top of the page. I don't think any of the needles it depicts could be construed as X-rated unless your mind has been hopelessly sullied by reading this blog post. 

I don't know if I'll ever turn these scraps into a vaccination quilt. Maybe a Viking quilt?

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."