Eleanor's Legacy

I am so very blessed to have long time friends in my life. Celebrating 50 years of friendship is so very amazing! One of those friends is Jane, with whom I shared Brownies and Girl Scouts, and grade school and high school. This winter, she asked me to make a quilt for their family compound at Big Cedar Lake WI. The home has been in the family for several generations and is a very special place for the whole clan. So off we went through the design process, fabric selection, and for me, a marathon of sewing... but I met the deadline and the quilt is now on its way to her in Milwaukee.

Based on the traditional square in a square, I did some of my usual wonkiness that created a diamond more than a square, and then by changing directions, gave the quilt some movement. Jane had chosen a delightful small scale red print as the focus, and by adding a variety of other harmonizing reds, the quilt came alive (click on image for a larger version and see all the fabrics). Machine quilted by a professional longarm quilter. It is named for the matriarch of the family, Eleanor, and for the legacy she left for her daughters and granddaughters.

View from My Window (um... front door this AM)

Yes, its May 13. Friday the 13th came on a Tuesday this month, and it's snowing. Huh? Mother's Day has come and gone and it's snowing. Huh? These pix were taken from the front door at 615 AM. My radio comes on at 610, and I heard the local DJ's say there was a 2 hr school delay!

Yesterday I was wearing capris and sandals. Now where did I put my boots?

The deck thermometer is reading 40 degrees already, so it won't last long, thank goodness. Life in the mountains.....

Fast Friday Challenges - Kano Isa

For the past year (almost and a half), I've been involved with an online challenge group called the Fast Friday Challenge. On the last Friday of the month, we get information about the month's challenge (theme, technique, whatever the hostess decided) and have one week and a day to get a piece done and posted on a Yahoo group. We also have a blog at http://fastfridayquilts.blogspot.com/ for public viewing. It's been a great exercise in stretching talents and imaginations!

This month, the challenge was FIRE or ICE... to interpret the emotions and sensations of those two words..... and this month's submissions were especially wonderful!

I decided to do some improv piecing and came up with Kano Isa, which is named for the Runes for Fire and Ice. The characters also mean "forward movement" and "standstill" which I find interesting! I thought of the glaciers we saw in Alaska, how the ice appears to be still but there is underlying movement, which is not always visible from the surface. I placed the fire under the ice for this quilt, knowing that sometimes we need a fire lit beneath us to create that forward movement. The layers of meaning are still being revealed.

At any rate, I'm pleased with the results and have entered the quilt in the state show for March. Fingers crossed!

2006 Hoffman

Bamboo-zled: Suduko was my entry for the 2006 Hoffman Challenge. I started with a original design foundation-pieced block that had 9 pieces. Each of the 81 blocks in the quilt is a variation of that block, but with from 1-9 pieces of fabric representing the nine numbers in a suduko puzzle. As I was sorting the blocks on the design wall (and yes, it is a true, solved suduko puzzle), the diagonal pattern began to emerge. And I finally got a decent picture of it, finished! It's only taken a year or so.... it was out on tour with the collection and just came home in September.

Hoffman Challenge 2007

OK, I admit it, I'm hooked on the Hoffman Challenges. I first participated in the early days of my current quilting era, 1999, used a pattern (*gasp*) and didn't win anything (no surprise) and the quilt came home. Lesson learned: get original.

I next ventured in 2006 and decided to do something original (I'll post that one in the next blog, gotta take a decent picture of it first!), and lo and behold, I made it in to the traveling show. Lesson learned: do something that has nothing to do with the print selected as the challenge fabric.

When the 2007 fabric was announced, I honestly realized I would walk on by if I saw it in the quilt shop. Flowers, sunflowers, butterflies. But hey, that's the challenge. So with the above lessons learned, I started paying attention to shapes and concepts. And during that observation period, I started talking with my massage therapist about walking a labyrinth. Hmmmmm, a labyrinth. And that's where it started.

This design is from the Amiens Labyrinth in France, an 800 year old design, paved in the floor of the noted cathedral. Like the Chartes labyrinth, this is an 11 circuit labyrinth, but with straight paths instead of curves. With assistance from the Labyrinth Company http://www.labyrinthcompany.com/, I drafted the pattern for foundation piecing. The center features a machine embroidered asian lily. Machine pieced and free motion quilted.

I'm very grateful that the Hoffman Challenge has chosen my quilt, Caerdroia: Castle of Turns, as part of their traveling exhibit in Trunk A, which will show at Houston this year.

Fractured Quilt Challenge

There is an internet culture of quilters who participate in challenges. Anyone can host, rules are determined, and we go for it. I just completed the Fractured Quilt Challenge, where we each got a photograph of a pink daisy (photo on bottom). It was separated into 4 uneven segments and we each replicated the segments in fabric. We sent them back to the moderator who "shuffled the deck" and sent 4 quadrants (made by 4 different people) to the participants. I did my quadrants in applique, then beaded and even added crystals. But I was very disappointed in what I received in return. One quandrant, especially, looked like a total afterthought and that the maker just slammed it together. The centers were way off and the colors clashed. I tried transparent fabric paint to dull some of the colors, but as it was, there was no way I would finish it as it was. So after a few weeks of really looking at it and listening to it, I decided to cut it up. After all, there were no restrictions on how to finish it, we only agreed to finish it. The result is There's No Place Like Om, a lotus floating in a starry night. I looked at some of lotus images on line and drew a fairly symmetric lotus and appliqued the petals (cut from the pieces I had received) with a variety of rayon threads. The OM is also appliqued on the top. Due to the variation of fabrics used by the challenge participants, some kind of shrunk with the heat of the steam iron, but I like the puckering that resulted). The sky is bobbin quilted with blue metallic and the base with variegated green rayon.

And the funny thing that happened on the way to finishing it: I had originally intended for the blue to be the bottom, but I placed the OM upside down.... so now the foreground is the background, and a lotus at night is a lovely thing to behold.

Journal Quilt 2007

The final year of the Journal Quilt Project will premier at the Houston International Quilt Festival in late October. Our assignment was to create one piece, 17 x 22", using techniques from the compliation of the previous years work, Creative Quilting: The Journal Quilt Project, edited by Karey Patterson Bresenhan. My Entry "I Hope You Dance" is a fabric weaving with encrusted beadwork and applique. It is dedicated to the memory of Hazel Raines, who died in July after a valient struggle with cancer. I was working on the weaving during her final days and realized that she had danced into this piece.

In the Artist Statement I wrote: At her memorial service, a dear friend spoke to her love of music and dance and ended his comments with the words of a LeeAnn Womack song: "And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance, I hope you dance." In that moment, I realized that my friend had danced into the quilt, and I dedicate it to her memory. The dancing figure is adapted from "Sophia," original art by Lynn Rae Lowe of Tucson AZ (http://www.lynnraelowe.com/) and used with the permission of the artist.