Pandemic Porch Quilt Show, Days 54 - 55: Hands for Grandma, Grandma's Hands

On Day 55, I hung two baby-related quilts that date back to the 1990s - and the one on the right was inspired by a quilt 140 years older than that! 

First, a nap quilt I made for my son, when I'd done very little applique, and wanted to dip my toe in the water. The flowers are raw-edge appliqued, with zigzag stitches to contain the fraying. The leaves were straight-stitch machine-appliqued, so their edges are nicely frayed.

Amazingly, the flowers and even their hand-embroidered centers have held up well over the years.  

The second quilt was made from my son's handprint, when he was about 3. It was a gift for his grandparents, who hung this quilt proudly in their home. 

The next photo shows the simple quilting. 

Don't credit me for the striking design - it was inspired by a red-and-white hand-print quilt I saw at a 1997 exhibit at Los Angeles' Gene Autry Museum, called, "Quilts in the Machine Age." That quilt, made in Kansas circa 1878, was an early machine-quilted masterpiece. Find a photo at the Kansas Historical Society archives, HERE. Warning: You will probably want to make your own version! My 2013 blog post with more info about this quilt is HERE.

DAY 55 I didn't make this quilt - it was one of my greatest thrift shop finds! I'm guessing it was made in the 40s. It's been well used-  there are threadbare spots - but it is still charming. 

The fabrics are faded but still fascinating. 

In the next photo, note that the pink/white/orange checkerboard hexagon (with puffy white flowers), just right of center, is made of two pieces of fabric joined! She must have been working from very small scraps!

The back is just as impressive, thanks to the exquisite hand quilting. (By the way, the big light splotches below are sunspots, not necessarily worn spots, though the quilt does have those, too.) 

Next installment: A lot more color! 

Pandemic Porch Quilt Show, Days 50 - 53: Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, Japan

Everyone need at least one muse, but the more, the better. Plenty of humans inspire my work, but I also have a liquid muse: Coffee! And I have the quilts to prove it! On Day 51, I hung out my first series: 

These are tessellated mugs, with 3D "prairie point" folded handles that stick out. If you're scratching your head, you're not alone; so many people have told me these don't look like mugs at all; they see fish, aliens, and/or chicken heads. Fine! Whatever! I see mugs! The ovals are not alien eyeballs, they're the coffee! My first version used solids, for a clean modern look. 

With my second, I used batiks - the borders especially looks (to me) like poured coffee. (Some people might see fish in muddy waters, though). 

And finally, a version that combines prints and solids - I call this, "Clouds in my Coffee."

But wait, there's more! On Day 52, I showed off the next four:

First, a long, tall piece with what looks like eyeballs staring out of  cups. It's black-and-white and red all over, and only required about 5 fabrics (not counting the binding or back). 

Second, (52B), a piece headline "100 Cups of Coffee on the Wall.)

Along the right-hand side, it's strung with empty cream cups and a black plastic coffee cup at the bottom....

The lettering on top was cut from  a foil supermarket coffee bag (for "100 cups".) and a genuine burlap coffee bag (for "on the wall").

Third, (52c), my good luck/good coffee amulet quilt. You need a lot of knowledge, plus all the luck you can get, to make a perfect cup. I did quite a bit of research into coffee-making modes that are also graphically pleasing! 

The red lines are genuine coffee stirrers. Here's a closeup of the Moka pot corner: 

Fourth (52d) is my "Need Coffee" wallhanging, made from batiks. It has an imaginary coffee pipeline, starting with the sun (on light blue) in the upper left corner; then the beans are green moving to the right; they turn downward, get darker and darker brown, before finally spilling into a sea of coffee down the bottom. 

Patterns and/or directions for most of these quilts are in my "Quilts for Coffee Lovers' booklet, available from my etsy shop, CathyPStudio. Click on the link HERE.  

Finally - a couple of weeks ago you saw a bunch of large quilts inspired by my residence in Japan in the early 1980s (HERE.)

Here's one more - it was made for relaxation between the larger Japan projects. I'm not sure if it's a baby quilt or an art quilt - it measures 34" x 42". 

I used improvisational curved piecing, a technique that has taken the quilt world by storm , with an interesting history. Several years back, I blogged the history, and my own tutorial, HERE. Debbie Bowles' book, "Cutting Curves from Straight Pieces," was helpful, too. 

I got plenty of quilting practice, making feathers and vines, in the red area. 

The back has many more Japanese (and Japanesque) fragments. The grey in the borders are from a traditional jacket...

The tossed doll fabric  on navy was from a furoshiki, a wrapping cloth....

And the fabric with the white x's (third strip up from the bottom), is from a yukata, a long lightweight robe that I loved wearing for many years!
More porch quilts to come! 

Quilt Your City on Pillows

Out of wall space? How about making some quilted pillows?

I might not have thought of this, if I hadn't been asked. A neighbor saw my pandemic porch quilt show (the subject of my last several blog posts), and commissioned me to make four 18" pillows, including two with scenes from our town, South Pasadena, which is part of Los Angeles. We negotiated a price and a backing color - grey - and I was off. It took about two weeks, and here they are. 

The first one in the lineup above represents the town's Gold Line MTA Train crossing. For research, I took my family on a masked Christmas Day photo safari. Action photography is not my forte; it was surprisingly challenging to catch a shot of a train in mid-intersection. But I got a few.

I also photographed our town's iconic "walking man" statue, next to the station. My daughter did a little leap for me, and she provides scale for just how tall this guy is.

The photos helped me set the scene. 

I imported a walking man photo into my CorelDraw program, and traced it, to make the statue outline. Just for fun, the client and I decided to add a small person with the same profile striding in the opposite direction.

There are two coffee shops next to the tracks, so I created a blue table with coffee and pie in the corner. The small shiny black circles on the railroad crossing pole are tiny, vintage black plastic buttons. 

On the back flap, there's a departing train. 

The second scene that the clients requested was our town's 19th century watering trough. Most of the time, it looks like this.

But on Thursday afternoons and evenings, it's surrounded by a lively farmer's market. So I circled my trough with goodies. Here's how the piece looked flat. 

The ostrich is our town's mascot - 100 years ago, South Pas. was home to an eccentric tourist-trap ostrich farm. Historians say it put  us on the map. 

(The ostriches were not purple, I just did that for fun. The farm no longer exists, which is sad for our town's economy, but happy for the ostriches, who were forced to schlep the tourists around in large wooden carriages.)

Here's the scene as a pillow. 

And I added some more food fabrics to the back. 

The two other pillows that my clients requested were a swimming pool pillow - here it is before assembly...

...and then after the pillow was inserted. 

The clients got the idea from the swimming pool quilt I blogged about a while back, with a tutorial about how I gave the pools depth with sturdy fusible interfacing and reverse applique, HERE. 

Finally, they wanted a pillow with my tessellating coffee cups design. Before stuffing, it looked like this.

....And after stuffing: 

Showing this pillow on Facebook led to a discussion in which my candid friends agreed that these look less like coffee mugs with handles (my intention), than some kind of bird or alien heads. Whatever you think it looks like, if you want to make your own version, the pattern is in my "Quilts for Coffee Lovers" PDF booklet on etsy, HERE. 

Have you made quilted pillows?

Pandemic Porch Quilt Show, Days 46-50: Sunbonnet Sue, Carlson Fish, Hashtags and Sophisticated Squares

 Porch Quilt Show, Day 46  "Sunbonnet Sue Says, 'Me Too'".

I've always enjoyed looking at other peoples' Sunbonnet Sue quilts, yet I was never tempted to make my own - the motif, which dates back to the 1800s, is too sweet for my style. 

Then, the #MeToo movement came along, I was astounded to learn that virtually all my female friends and acquaintances had been molested - many experiencing far worse than I did.

But what about our mothers? And then....what about the women who stitched all the vintage quilts and embroideries in my  collection?

I created the Sue figures from vintage fabric. I appliqued them onto a set of pre-embroidered antimacassars (small linens designed to protect furniture from hair pomade!)

The background is a white pillowcase, and along the bottom of the pillowcase are strangely crocheted female figures, with distorted bodies. 

More photos and info about this quilt is in the blog post here. 

Day 47 "Hashtag Strips," or, "After the Bleed." In 2016, I made a series of hashtag quilts. In the quilt below, batik scraps form a light hashtag in the center; the borders are scraps of fabric with text on it. 

After construction, there was a dye-bleeding accident - from which I learned a lot. Everything I learned about fixing a dye bleed is here.  

Day 48. Three Carlson Fish

I made this quilt in 2011, using the sketches in Susan Carlson's book, "Free-style Quilts." Carlson is one of the quilt world's most influential artists - her animal collage quilts, books and classes launched an entire subgenre, collaging print fabrics in surprising and delightful ways to create the texture of animal fur, scales, skin, eyes, etc. At every major quilt show I've visited for the last couple of years, there've been a bunch of quilts crediting a Carlson class for the technique. Her most astonishing piece, a 20-foot crocodile, is not to be missed. Find it here. 

Day 49 "Dresden Fans"

Here's a small Dresden Plate quilt made so long ago that I don't remember much about it. It is entirely hand-quilted - where did I find time? - and the hexagon borders are "cheater" cloth, not pieced. Most wedges are reproduction 1930s fabric, but I blithely added some wildly different wedge colors - like the orange one below.

Day 50 "Sophisticated Squares, I and II"

This is from a series of quilts made during a prolonged game of solitaire - cut a stack of squares in all colors and values, then lay them out, running up and down and all around the color and value scale. Each quilt is 30" - 40" high, so I put out two at a time. On the far left, I went wild with triangles in the borders, while in the right-hand quilt, I used restrained preppy stripes in the borders.  It's so relaxing to play with color this way, and not worry about complicated piecing!

Working with solids, and gradually changing value, makes the colors glow.

Doodling in the squares was also a lot of fun! 

More to come!