dreaming@echonyc.com

adapted from eleanor burns' quilt in a day: star log cabin. a day? one freakin' day?

as if, eleanor. as if.

i thought i'd be working on this forever. realistically, it only felt like forever because i had to snatch an hour here and hour there instead of devoting longer stretches of time to just plowing through it. but now it's finished, ready to be sent off to its new home, having raised $1000 as a raffle quilt.

not bad for fifty years' work.

here you can see the full quilt, a close-up of a few blocks, the little patch i made to repair a tiny tear in one of the blocks that was incurred after quilting, and the label on the back.

it's finished. it's leaving today. i'm happy and ready. onward!

Posted by dreaming at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

...went into this quilt.

hahahahahahahahahahahaha. ohhhhh.

i started this quilt months ago, and in fact it's has been finished for quite some time, though only today did i box it up for mailing. it's for the baby of a friend of mine. hope she likes olive green, magenta — i certainly don't in general, but i'm happy with the way this turned out, an experiment in working with colors outside of my comfort zone.

super-duper technical quilty bits: the center panel is composed of three blocks called memory. i adapted the block a bit to simplify the piecing, leaving me with several square-in-a-square units instead of the more difficult to match flying geese. those blocks are quilted with straight-line echo quilting in variegated thread (pink, magenta, tan, and olive) and a tiny bit of stippling here and there in orchid. the sides are simple chinese coin strips quilted with a zigzag pattern in variegated olive and magenta thread.

• full view
• center
• block detail

i always say boxing up a finished project is the hardest part. now let's see how long it takes for me to finally mail it.

Posted by dreaming at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (51)

yet another friend is having a baby, and the baby shower that goes with it. because she has an older child, she already has most of the necessary paraphernalia, so she instructed everyone that she wanted only onesies.

hurrah! an excuse to get elbow-deep in dye, thought i.

i took a little bit of license; these aren't all onesies. and they're not all newborn sizes, because i wanted her daughter to spend most of her childhood in tie-dye. some of the items are more successful than others; some of them will make my friend sigh in relief when her daughter outgrows them at last.

• x-ray suit. this one, in light and dark blue, reminds me of an x-ray of someone's rib cage.
  
• halloween costume. "what are you dressed as?" "a walking bruise."
  
• hippie chick. who doesn't love a rainbow spiral?
  
• sharpie. i should have taken some permanent markers or something and colored in some of that white space. but i didn't. look, it's going to be worn by a three-month-old. cut me some slack.
  
• lava my life. i had to work orange in there somewhere...
  
• relatively subdued, all things considered. this is a larger t-shirt for my friend's three-year-old son, so he won't feel left out of the fun. since i had such fun, after all, so should everyone else.

Posted by dreaming at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (40)

i sent the sushi quilt out to trixie last week and it arrived just in time for dinner — just in time to make the cutest baby maki you ever did see.

here's a full view of the finished quilt, and a close-up of the blocks.

when not posing cutely as sushi, trixie has adventures and looks adorable.

Posted by dreaming at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (43)

another quilt completed!

i started this one months and months ago. the holidays intervened, and it's been sitting in my workroom waiting for me to finish the binding for the last few weeks. i took advantage of sunday's law and order-a-thon and spent several hours putting the finishing touches on it. done and done.

• full view
• single block close-up
• corner including pieced border
• star quilting motif, which appears in the center of each block and at every intersection in the main body
• label, including a backing so busy it makes my vision blur

mailing it tomorrow, though it breaks my heart to see it go.

Posted by dreaming at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (40)

look, i've never been a fan of china's one-child policy, but i'm starting to think it's a damn good idea. people i know are having babies at such an alarming rate that i just can't keep up.

i have three baby quilts in varying stages of completion at the moment. if you are of childbearing age and a close enough acquaintance that you have any reason to hope you might merit a quilt, please do not make plans to reproduce until you've gotten the all-clear from me.

it's really better that way. (to get bigguh pictures, as matt would say, click the puny ones, as tom would say.)

Posted by dreaming at 05:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (8)

hey, quilters: do y'all know about this site, quiltshops.com?

it's a good way to do price comparisons if there's a particular fabric line you're looking for (try searching for exotic garden, for example -- be sure to click "thumbnails" so you can see the pictures).

i like to use it to supplement my local purchases. if i've bought a focus fabric and suspect there might be coordinates that my shop doesn't carry, i can look it up there.

it's also a handy tool if you're looking for fabric with, say, sushi on it. just plug in your term and sift through the results.

what i really like to do, though, is go through the categories at equilter and copy the name of the fabric line — then i use the quiltshops.com search to see if i can get it anywhere for cheaper.

Posted by dreaming at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

here's the barbie quilt i made for emily.

i'd had it finished six months ago, but wanted to give it to her in person. because i'm a spacker, i didn't take a picture of it before it was wrapped. because terry is a spacker, she nearly killed herself taking this photo.

truly a labor of love, because i hate the colors and the barbie patches were a bitch to work with — they're made out of really cheesy polyester that shrinks when you iron it and they're not regular in size. the back is this nasty coarse polyester fabric bearing retchworthy images of the disney princesses. but for emily i held my nose and finished it off.

Posted by dreaming at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (24)

here are the things i worked on yesterday. i was intrigued by the possibility of dyeing white-on-white and black-on-white fabrics instead of the plain old solid whites i'd been doing. theoretically the inks used should provide a kind of resist, allowing the dye to settle in only on the unprinted areas.

so into each color i put three pieces: a plain white one, a white-on-white, and a black-on-white. i did a color wheel, two pieces for each color (high intensity and low).

here's the color wheel on just plain white fabric:

...and here it is on the white-on-white, which was printed with tiny bubbles:

...and here it is on the black-and-white, my new favorite fabric, printed with random scraps of calligraphy:

a closeup of the writing:

there's such a difference in value between the plain, the white-on-white, and the black-on-white, though they were all in the same dye bath. on the left are the pieces from the dark blue bath; on the right, from the light:

the effect was even more striking when i interleaved the blues in value order rather than according to which bath they came from:

although i did a purple run, i'm leaving those out of the photos because they're truly vomitrocious. i think i've invented a new color: bruise.

finally, this piece is fairly ugly, but it serves as proof-of-concept: you can also dye white-on-black. i'll be going back for more of this fabric for sure.

Posted by dreaming at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (4)

here's what came out of the dye baths today:

this should have been more fuschia, and i'm not really sure what went wrong. i'm going to overdye it with pink to see if i can get it to be closer to what i had in mind.

i'm pretty happy with this run, except that there's a pretty big step between the lightest two colors on the gradient.

these last three were made rather haphazardly — i just scrunched or folded each piece differently, then crammed it down into the of a plastic cup, then poured the leftover dye stock over each one.

Posted by dreaming at 06:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

i didn't want to waste the dregs of the dye from the rainbow project, so i put a single length of fabric in a dishpan and poured the colors over it. then i let it stew for a good 36 hours. what finally emerged is so ugly that i don't think even the stinkiest of hippies would like it:

Posted by dreaming at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (28)

the fruits of yesterday's labors over the dye vat:

i tried to convince paul that it was more fun than snorkeling, but he didn't believe me.

Posted by dreaming at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (35)

this weekend, lunch helped me make a quilt top for a wall hanging, about 18" x 24".

Posted by dreaming at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

if i saw a thousand quilts in paducah (and who knows how many there actually were?), there were maybe twenty i wish i'd made. these might be the top three. click on the tiny image to get a bigger picture.

crescendo, by carol taylor, pittsford, ny

this one interested me mostly because of the intricacy of the background. each little square in the background is, oh, about an inch square, if that. and every place you see a square or a circle in the background, that's appliqued on. the wavy lines are couched — colorful cording held in place by zigzag stitching. i also really like the gradients in the quilt from dark to light and back again.

spangled star banner by susan k. cleveland, west concord, mn

this one is incredibly precise in its workmanship. what the picture doesn't really reveal is the exactitude of the piecing; the feathered star in the detail picture is probably about 6 inches and perfect. the binding has several very thin strips of piping in it, the appliqued circles are about the size of a quarter and absolutely round, and even the machine quilting is utterly controlled. i was surprised by how much i liked the muted color scheme. every color in it is sort of off (rusty red, murky teal), while i tend to prefer clear primaries.

wildlife, by ellen highsmith silver, rye, ny

i don't have a picture of the entire quilt, which is okay — the charm of this one is really in its details. it's an appliqued quilt featuring dozens of amusing little animals, done in a folk art style. every time i looked at it, i found something new to smile at. although it didn't win a ribbon, this quilt constantly had people around it, taking pictures and saying, "oh! look in the corner...!" i particularly liked the mother opossum carrying her babies, the mother bird feeding her babies, the red-winged blackbird among the cattails, and the quail and oreo cows (yes, oreo cows).

Posted by dreaming at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

i am so often a spacker that it's worth noting on the rare occasions that i'm not. this time i actually remembered to mark my quilt top before sandwiching it with the batting and backing.

Posted by dreaming at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

finally finished america the beautiful and packed it off for its journey to its new home, wherever that will be. i learned a lot making this quilt. moreover, it's the first quilt i've made where the quilting was a significant feature of the finished product. i also stitched the binding down in record time with a breathtaking lack of complaint. now i shall sprinkle the sewing room with gasoline, drop a lit match, and consider my work here done.

Posted by dreaming at 07:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

powerful forces were at work to keep me from finishing this quilt, but finish it i did. it's all in plaid flannels in the star log cabin pattern, and will be a birthday gift for my grandfather. the whiskery bits are ties that hold the three quilt layers together -- normally i machine quilt, but the wow is on the blink again and i needed to get this finished.

here's a single block, or you can see the entire quilt, or you can look at some of my other quilts.

Posted by dreaming at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

a picture of the wow system, with which i have come to a beautiful rapprochement:

Posted by dreaming at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

the wow works now, thanks entirely to paul's gentle noodging. his suggestion was that i lower the needle bar even farther, so that it plunged as deeply into the bobbin case as possible without actually scraping metal. that has done the trick, and my stitch quality is as good as can be expected with a spacker like me behind the wheel.

last night i did a row of a fairly detailed pantograph. it looks good! the only places there were skipped stitches were in spots where i knew i was moving the machine too fast, even as i did it.

all hail paul!

Posted by dreaming at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i am locked in a battle to the death with my wow machine. it's winning.

the wow is a sewing machine whose neck has been stretched to allow you to get a big quilt under it easily. in theory, it's a big improvement over other home sewing machines, especially in conjunction with systems like the handiquilter or the superquilter. in theory, it allows you to stitch bigger patterns with a greater range of motion than a traditional sewing machine allows.

these machines are heavily in demand, because so far there's no good alternative for home machine quilters (though i'm hearing there's one on the horizon from the people at handiquilter -- i am heartsick that i didn't wait). i got it in november, after being on the waiting list for eight months. i expected a learning curve, and after ruining two charity quilt tops on it, i resigned myself to spending several more months mastering the machine.

it's taken some tinkering. most recently, the machine wasn't forming stitches at all, so i had to lower the needle bar, which hadn't been plunging deeply enough to let the needle enter the bobbin case properly. that fix seemed to work.

however, now the problem i'm seeing is even stranger, and still has to do with stitch quality. i can get the machine to make very nice stitches in two directions (toward me and from left to right, both from the needle end of the machine). the stitch quality goes promptly to hell, though, when i push the machine away from me or try to move it right to left.

operator error, you'd think, right? my first thought was that i was moving the machine faster in certain directions than in others, but when paul watched me he furrowed his brow and said, "i don't think it's that. you're moving like a robot."

i'm taking a machine quilting class at quilt university, and the suggestion i got when i asked about this was to try rethreading. i will try it again, and a new needle, and cleaning out the bobbin case, and sacrificing a goat, and reading the entrails of the chickadee currently on the bird feeder.

Posted by dreaming at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. don't.

it's a giant pain in the ass. unless you cut everything perfectly on-grain, you will be in a heap of trouble before you know it. and because flannel is so stretchy, trying to match up the lines in adjacent patches, especially on a bias edge, will drive you to drink. and swear. loudly.

Posted by dreaming at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)