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!

Almost Ancient: English Paper Pieced Mosaics with Cheryl Lynch's New Fabric

My newest finished piece!

It's a tabletopper or wallhanging, about 20" across, made up of seven English Paper Pieced (EPP) blocks. The faux mosaic fabric - those little pieces aren't separate, they're printed - are from a fascinating new collection by my friend, quilt designer Cheryl Lynch. 

In recent years, Cheryl's been designing mosaic quilt patterns, made by cutting fabrics into small pieces. But even more recently, she designed fabric with the look of complex mosaics - but you can finish in a fraction of the time. 

Cheryl gifted me with these FQs.

First I cut out a bunch of 3.75" equilateral triangles, and moved them around.

For the next test, I pulled a purple floral print from my stash. 

Etcetera. I liked all the options - Facebook and Instagram polls of my friends resulted in no clear winner - so I put those triangles aside and decided to see what this fabric would look like in the smaller, more complicated stars in my EPP book, "Hexagon Star Quilts".

I started by printing seven patterns from the book onto my newest notion, water-soluble "Hugs'n Kisses Applique Paper," by Helen Stubbings. (No affiliation). In the past, when planning to do EPP by machine, I printed designs onto Decor Bond (by Pellon), a medium-weight fusible interfacing, which remains in the project. But I was eager to see how the applique paper would work. Here's one  page printed onto the applique paper - I cut out Star 5 from this page.  

With EPP, each piece is fused to a slighly larger piece of fabric; the fabric is wrapped around it; then everything is sewn together by hand or machine - I used the latter. Here's more or less what Star #5 looked like finished.

I made six more blocks (all 6" high), including the next one which is the centerpiece. This green fabric isn't one of Cheryl's - it's from my stash, and I stitched the white lines to give it a mosaic look. 

The stars surrounding the center include Star 39, below, with the addition of a gold-brown print from my stash:  

Next, Star 56, with my violet print added: 

Star 65: 

Star 28

And last, Star 15

The results are in the photos on top of this post, and the bottom. How did I like the applique paper? Compared to Decor Bond, it's not quite as stiff, and therefore more challenging to fold small sharp-angled pieces accurately.

But I discovered that when I scored the fabric with a sharp-edged piece of plastic - like a credit card - next to the interfacing, it made accurate folding and basting more achievable. The big advantage of applique paper over Decor Bond is that the former will dissolve in the wash, presumably leaving a softer project than the latter. 

Here's the back after all the pieces were sewn together. 

From a distance:

I laid it on batting, traced around the top (with a water soluble marker), then cut out the batting inside the traced line. This results in a slightly smaller piece of batting than the top. 

Next I placed the top on my backing fabric, and cut out the backing fabric about 3/8" larger than the top all the way around. All the concave angles must be clipped, in order to get them to turn under.

Make a sandwich: Backing fabric on the table,  wrong side up;  batting on top of that; and the pieced top on top, right side up. Pin or clamp the edges every few inches. Do a hand whipstitch, stitching the outer folds on the top piece to new folds you create as you go, on the backing fabric. Finally, I stitched around the edges with a machine straight stitch.  You can't see the hand whipstitches in this photo from the back, but you can see the machine straight stitching. 

The entire back:

And the front, all quilted, this time on a white background. 

Very European, esta bien? And thanks to Cheryl's fabric, it took a lot less time to make than, say, Gaudi's Parc Guell in Barcelona. See more of this fabric, and projects made from it, in this excellent new article. It is now available in quilt shops. More information about my EPP book is here. 

Pandemic Porch Quilt Show Days 25-28 : Over Japan

 Day #25: Tokyo Life

I made this quilt in 1999, a cathartic project working through memories of living in Japan for a year and a half, in the early 1980s.

Tokyo was indescribably dense, and everything seemed tinier than in the US - cars, furniture, cups, plates, clothes, and especially the people. Most of the women and many of the men were smaller than me - I felt like a massive Barney the Dinosaur, especially when perched on ludicrously petite chairs. Each day, I lumbered through a fascinating shopping street, decorated with strings of artificial flowers. The novelty fabric in the center of this quilt reminded me of those places, and launched me on this quilt.

I added Elvis, plus a couple of more traditional figures. I think the flowers are there to advertise the noisy pachinko (gambling machine) parlors. 

Sometimes, Tokyo's density was intoxicating; but over many months, it became exhausting. I couldn't even begin to wrap my mind around where structures and alleys began and ended. 

There was also an abundance of plastic food in glass cases in front of  tiny restaurants....

And there was as much going on underground as above - not just the subways, but more restaurants, more shops, more vendors, more pedestrian hallways. 

Tokyo's infinite above-ground and below-ground worlds were connected by endless stairs and escalators.

Every scrap of space in Tokyo was occupied. Not one inch  was wasted - and it was also extremely clean. 

Overall, I loved Tokyo. It made NYC feel like a wide-open prairie. So much to learn, see and taste, and above all, endlessly kind, thoughtful and interesting people who did their best to make me feel at home.  

Porch Quilt Show, Day #27.

In the early 90s, I returned to Japan, after an absence of ten years, because my husband had a conference there. In Kyoto, we stopped in a little shop called Aizenkobo.

We found a group of men sitting around; they asked us if we'd like to see a demonstration (or at least I thought that was what they asked), and of course, we said yes. They got busy, dunking and dipping and twisting fabric in massive indigo dye pots. It was just wonderful, right up until the moment that they selected seven pieces of fabric for us, folded them into a little bag, and handed it to us with a bill for I think about $100 US.

I was mortified, but figured I must have agreed to it, so we paid. Those indigo pieces sat in the bag, in my cabinet, for 30 years, until I became an empty nester and had gathered the time and courage to use them. I tried to cut off as little as possible - I may have taken an inch off each piece with this design. Find closeup photos of the Aizenkobo indigos, and other interesting and upcycled details in this quilt, in my blog post here. Below, when I took apart a red polyester kimono in my collection - that's the long rectangle on the far right - I found softer, aged cotton fabric with a gorgeous crane (with purple wing tips), hiding inside (that's the fabric in the middle panel). The blue-and-white panel on the far left is from a light Japanese yukata robe.

Day #26: The Wave

The front of this next quilt was supposed to be the back of the previous quilt. (That's why I put #27 before #26). But I liked it so much that I made it a separate quilt! Along the bottom and toward the top, I created log cabin block reflections of the iconic "Great Wave of Kanagawa" woodblock print by Hokusai, printed on the central banner. Find more photos and information about this quilt in my blog post here.

Day #28: More Japanese Culture

This quilt measures 96" x 75" It features more commercial banners and door curtains. I pieced the vertical side borders from scraps - I especially like the quarter-hexagon design on the left.

Of all the banners on this quilt, the one illustrating sumo positions is my favorite. 

See much more of the vivid Japanese graphics in this quilt in my blog post here. 

More from my pandemic porch quilt show is coming soon!