Extended Summer, and a Reveal

After three weeks of cool, wet, even stormy weather, summer has suddenly returned to our neck of the woods and I couldn't be happier.  I'm not a fan of very hot weather, but it's hard to welcome autumn when summer dribbles away in a stream of unpleasantly wet days.  It's great to be back in shorts and a T-shirt for most of the day, even if a fire in the woodstove is a welcome start to the morning routine.  The temperature is hovering around freezing first thing in the day, so the spuds have had it, of course, but judiciously draped sheets are protecting the containers full of flowers overnight, and it still looks like summer here.  Well, that's not exactly true.  Normally at this time of the year, the prevailing palette outside is shades of yellow and tan, as weeks of baking weather turn the grass the colours of a lion's hide.  Not this year, though.  It's amazingly green for September and what a lovely reprieve we got from the annual worries about forest fires.  Our neighbours across the line in the States were not so lucky:  fires there took an appalling toll on homes and forests in eastern Washington and we can only sympathize and be glad that the worst appears to be over for them.

It has been a fairly productive summer, despite travel and visitors and camping, and I want to show you some of the things that I can move from the "in-progress" list to the "finished!" list.  Here's what I want to show you today, with a bit of preamble (thanks for bearing with me).

One of the things I got around to this spring was to take what felt to me like a big step and send two of my quilts out to be quilted.  For years I've belonged to the school of thought that I can't consider a quilt my work unless I do everything myself, including design and quilting.  But I've been having wretched luck with free-motion quilting on my dedicated machine quilting machine and despite a fair bit of research and trips out of town (at no little expense) to have the machine serviced, nothing has helped.  And no, it's not about the thread.  I know that my machine hates variegated thread, as do many machines, so I never use it.  The problem is the take-up of the bobbin thread:  quite a lot of the time (especially, who knows why, when I'm moving the quilt from left to right under the needle), the top thread simply doesn't catch the bobbin thread, and I'm left with skips.  And a skip of more than a stitch or two means I have to stop, cut threads, backtrack to have enough thread to bury with a needle later, and start again.  When this happens every few minutes, or even after mere inches of quilting, I'm about ready to explode with frustration.  I've played with different needles.  For years I did all my stitching, both quilting and piecing, with a topstitch needle as recommended by many quilting instructors, but for the past year or so a topstitch needle simply doesn't catch the bobbin thread when I'm free-motion quilting:  the eye is too long.  And the last servicing apparently involved lowering the needle column, which logic would suggest should have solved the problem, but no luck.  Frankly, it's been such a headache that I've wondered whether quilting is really the medium for me.  Fortunately, I don't have these problems when straight stitching, so piecing is easy and a walking foot makes straight-line quilting easy too.  But thread painting?  Forget it.  Any kind of free-motion quilting?  Not going to happen.  So sending my quilts out to be quilted started to seem like a reasonable thing to do.

Fortunately, I had heard good things about a local long-arm quilter and last summer I had the chance to see some of her work at a local quilt shop.  And I was impressed.  A quilt is so much work just to get to the finished top stage that the idea of entrusting the quilting to someone else is pretty daunting, but I was reassured by the quality of the work I saw.  So last spring I took two quilts to Miriam March, who runs Whispering Pines Quilts Studio at her home outside Rock Creek.  She's in hot demand and my quilts were scheduled to be quilted three months later, but she completed them on time, or even slightly earlier, and I have to say I was very pleased with what she did.  I chose fairly simple patterns for both quilts because they are intended to be bed quilts rather than wall quilts, and dense quilting makes a quilt rather stiff and not very cosy.

There, with all that out of the way, here's the first quilt.

 

As you can see, it's made up of wonky or free-form stars, pieced with the goal of asymmetry both in the length and placement of star points and in the placement of the star blocks amongst the pieced sashing.  I have to say I'm really happy with how this one turned out.  I thoroughly enjoyed the piecing process and loved diving into my scrap bins for the greyed-out and true blues in the background, augmented by deep reds and rusts.  To me this quilt has a happy cartoonish quality because of the wild angles of the star parts.  I thought of calling it "KaPOW!" because of the stars' resemblance to impact and explosion stars in comic books.

I had two points of inspiration for this quilt.  One spark was Gwen Marston, whose books Liberated Quiltmaking and Liberated Quiltmaking II offer several variations on the idea of an improvised pieced star.  I used some of her ideas and added some of my own.  Here's a closeup showing various stars.  The centre one and the right-hand one in the top row were made according to Marston's instructions.  All the star parts are cream, the nine parts to the block are all the same square dimensions, and the background fabrics are either blues or reds.  And here you can see the pattern of stars that Miriam used to quilt this piece.

The upper left star shows one variation that Marston offers:  this nine-patch is made of different rectangles rather than squares, creating an even more wildly wonky star.  And several stars in this group use a background fabric as the star centre, another variation Marston suggests.  But the ones I'm really proud of, because they were my own idea, are the three stars that use angled seam lines:  the centre and right stars in the middle row and the left-hand star in the bottom row.  Skewing the seam lines from the vertical and horizontal to something quite a bit more energetic in turn gives the stars a lot more energy.  They look even more explosive than the one in the top left.  And in this photo you can also see that I began to mix things up with my colour choices as well:  some of the backgrounds stray from simply red or blue and begin to borrow from one another.  Once again, this was a strategy toward increasing the visual energy of the blocks.

I have to admit that those angled seams made the piecing process quite a bit more difficult:  it was easy to get confused and mess up the placement of the pieces!  In the end I had to lay out each block separately, with all its pieces in their proper places.  Then I placed a pin in the outer edges of the background pieces so that I would be sure to orient them properly when it came time to sew.  Despite all this care I made mistakes, but I think the finished products justified the extra fiddliness.

So, am I pleased with this one, you ask?  Yes, indeed.  It was complete fun to make, not least because the design decisions were ongoing.  I didn't know what it was going to look like until it was nearly done.  You may be able to see that I added an extra layer of asymmetry with the pieced sashing, which I added to two sides of each block as I made them.  Rather than drop the blocks into a regular grid, separated by equal widths of sashing vertically and horizontally, I turned some blocks 90 degrees and others 180 degrees so that the stars appear to be spattered across the quilt rather than placed neatly.  Here's another shot so you can see what I mean.  See that upper row of stars and how one of them, third from the right, jumps up higher than the rest?  You'll find lots of that sort of variation if you look, especially in the third column from the right.

This quilt was fun to photograph.  Here we have stars and clouds.

And here, stars and wind.

And the wind gave me a handy glimpse of the tan floral backing fabric.

As I say, I had a couple of sources of inspiration for this quilt, one being Gwen Marston's improvised stars.  The other was a collection of scraps given to me by a friend in my little quilting group that creates raffle quilts to support the Greenwood Public Library.  One day a couple of years ago, knowing my willingness to accept any scraps offered, Lynne handed me a bag of small triangles in creams, whites, and tans, and it is these that form the points of the stars.  The bag was bulging when she gave it to me, and this is all that's left.  As you can see, these are fairly small pieces, most of them half-square triangles cut from two-inch squares.  They were absolutely perfect for this project and gave me just the prod I needed to try out the techniques and make this quilt.  Thank you, Lynne!

I was blessed with the weather yesterday.  The sky, especially, was very cooperative in its colouring.

And I had the usual support crew to help, of course.  Soop wasn't at all sure about the quilt on the gate:  she's used to being able to use the fence and gate rails as her own private highway around the yard but she decided not to get any closer than this.  Of course, an open gate is no use to her at all because it doesn't get her from one fence to the next.

And the dogs were in evidence as well, of course.  Sass had her own ideas about how I should be spending my time.

And Django was jealous of the photographic attention being paid to Sass and neatly ruined my next shot of her by trotting through the frame just as I pressed the shutter.

He stuck close after that, and made sure he was as much of an obstacle in front of the studio door as possible.

 

The other animal event of the day was courtesy of my dear husband, who is in the throes of getting Oscar and Ivy ready for the fall fair in Rock Creek this coming weekend.  They've been doing nothing more strenuous all summer than drifting from one grazing spot in the pasture to another, so they need some time in harness to get into shape for the fair.  One of the events at the fair is driving the team hitched to a wagon (I ride shotgun beside dh) which dh has to negotiate through a prescribed course of slalom driving around cones, tight turns, backing, backing and turning, turning in place, and stopping exactly at a prescribed spot.  So the horses need to reacclimatize both to the wagon and to what they'll be asked to do.  Here they come back through the front gate after a jaunt down the road.  Ivy is feeling dramatic (she pranced most of the way up and down the road, which made her rather difficult to drive).

Time to put their heads down for some grazing time so dh can figure out why one wagon wheel is so squeaky.

They still don't like the camera, but with their blinders on they can't see me or the camera so they aren't really bothered by the click of the shutter.  See how intently they're listening, though?  Look at those ears, cranked back as far as they'll go.

I hope to have lots of photos of the fair to show you next weekend.  And if it's nearly the fall fair, it must nearly be fall.  Around the yard, the first signs are appearing.  The dried remains of the iris make lovely patterns when backlit by the early evening sun, and I love the weird sculpture of the dried blossoms.

And the apples and crabapples are starting to colour up.

I love the sense of being underwater when I stand inside the tent of deeply-weighted boughs looking out into the light.

The vegetable garden is changing, too.  The rhubarb leaves are turning spectacular colours.

And while this shot shows how vigorously the grasshoppers have been feeding on my Red Russian kale this summer, it also shows the beautiful contrast of the green leaves with the purple stems.

And the strawberries keep on giving!  But there too the foliage is changing, adding its own beauty to the last weeks of garden productivity.

At least I still have some blooms in this container by the front gate.  The frost will do them in soon, I know, but I can enjoy them in the meantime.

And so the seasons are turning, but with any luck summer will hang on for a few weeks and I'll do my very best to extract every ounce of enjoyment from it while it lasts.  Next week, as well as the fair, I'll show you the second quilt that Miriam quilted for me.  Happy September.

Comments

[steph]

what a piece of art! the quilt is lovely! (you haven't by any chance ever ventured to Paducah for the AQS quilt show??? My hometown! The quilt museum is worth a trip in and of itself, but the show is rather mindboggling.)

[Anne at Shintangle Studio]

Thanks for the praise, Steph! You've warmed my heart again. No, I've never been to Paducah, never been further east in the US than Colorado. I'd love, LOVE, to see the AQS show sometime. How lucky you are (though you'd be luckier if you were a quilter) to have the show and museum in your back yard, so to speak.

[Dad]

Hi, Kid --

Good, good blog! Lots of great visuals, and with considerable variety: a truly stunning quilt (eye popping, actually); dogs (and cat) I know; horses and a dh I know; autumn colours - several edible, but not rhubarb leaves, right?

You've had better weather than out here on the coast, although today did finally turn nice. Mum hasn't seen the blog yet, being preoccupied with prep for the Goffs, who come tomorrow for five days. They'll be off to the mission in Mexico shortly.

I see your spellcheck doesn't like my "colour"; I say, "Get used to it, spellcheck!

Much love to both of you, as well as the beasts. Dad

[Anne at Shintangle Studio]

Thanks for your praise, Dad! I fixed the problems with your comment, and am glad to have it to publish. Too bad you won't see us at the fall fair, but previous commitments come first, of course.

Love, Anne