Shintangle Studio

The Glamour and Romance of Ranch Life, and This Year's Library Raffle Quilt

I don’t think about this very often, the glamour and romance part, partly because after 22 years I’m pretty used to it, and partly because I don’t have strong ties to the city and city friends (the people who might find my life exotic) the way I did when I was still teaching at UBC.  This is not to say that I don’t, at least once or twice a day, offer up enormous gratitude that we live here in this beautiful place and are able to choose to live the way we do because of it.  But some days I’m reminded of just how different my life is now from what it was when I was living in the city and working at the university.  A couple of weeks ago we had one of those days.  

One of the chores that has to be done each spring is to gather together all the manure that the horses have generously deposited all over the barnyard and somehow get it out onto the field where it will do some good.  And honestly, I haven’t been interested enough in the process to be able to remember how this has been done in the past.  But this year, dh was pretty excited.  He had just the right combination of equipment!  A horse-drawn manure spreader!  And a tractor!  He’s had the manure spreader for years and years but until we got the tractor last year, he had no way of getting the mountains of manure into the bed of the manure spreader unless the loader happened to be here at home rather than on the woodlot.  For the past several years, the loader hasn’t been home.  This year, all the stars aligned.

Here it is; the star of the show.  The tractor is essential, of course.  But manure spreader uses the kind of old-fashioned, ingenious, and simple technology that really gets dh’s blood pumping.  He was really eager for me to come out with the camera and record the process.

So here’s what’s happening.

My dh is on the tractor, scooping up rotten hay that we forked out of the barn throughout the winter.  Hay sometimes gets put up (meaning rolled into bales) when it’s still damp and that inevitably leads to mould and then rot.  You don’t want to feed mouldy hay to horses:  it’s really, really bad for them.  So when it appears in a bale, the bad hay gets dumped somewhere else.  Ivy and Oscar are hooked to the manure spreader, patiently waiting for the next trip out to the field.  

I love the lacklustre, somewhat ironic look in Ivy’s eye. “Right, this again,” she seems to be thinking.  Oscar just looks like his sweet self.  The horses stand easily while the manure spreader is loaded up:  this kind of activity behind them doesn’t bother them at all.  They’re old hands.

Tuffy is feeling a bit fussy and left out.

He watches as dh scoops a load of manure from down near the round pen.

Then makes himself useful by cozying up to Ivy and Oscar in the shade of the barn.

The team backs away from the barn, turning as they go.

And here they come back from the field, ready for another load.  Django joins the parade.

I particularly like the one below because all three critters are stepping forward with their left legs.

While the team rests, I come around to the back to get a clear shot of the mechanism that makes the magic happen.  I don’t know how it works, but it’s intriguing.

And here you can see that the teamster’s seat is on a spring, which makes for a somewhat smoother ride.

Django joins the horses in the shade of the barn while dh loads up with more rotten hay.

Ready to go!

Django and I sprint ahead to be in place as the crew came through the gate out into the fence.  Hmm.  I think Django needs more walks.  He’s got a bit of middle-aged spread going on.

It’s a bit of a pull up to the crest of the hill where the need for fertilizer is greatest.

Phew.  Made it.

The first pass has begun, and dh has lowered the lever that engages the mechanism to start the load moving out the back of the manure spreader.

This is the part that gets dh really excited:  “It’s so cool,” he says.  “Watch what happens!"

Yup, it flies.  It’s as if it hit a fan.  Clods and dust and gobbets all over the place.  It’s actually sort of amazing how well the machine breaks apart the chunks of material and spreads them far and wide behind the spreader.

It takes only a few minutes to empty that whole load, and back the crew goes to the barnyard for the next one, Tuffy watching intensely.

So, are you swooning with the romance and glamour of it all?  I thought so.

On a totally different note, this afternoon I helped with photographing the bed quilt, the lap quilt, and the book bag that the Greenwood Public Library raffle quilt makers have created this year.  I’m showing you these photos because raffle tickets are on sale now!  You can buy them through me (just send me an email if you have my address, or leave a comment here if you don’t) or by visiting the library.  

First, here’s the bed quilt, 96 inches square.

Not the greatest photo, but the people holding up the quilt weren’t quite tall enough to get it all up off the floor.  The pattern is a cheery mix of batiks and white.  We started with a pattern published in one of the quilt magazines but weren’t happy with the results once we’d finished all the blocks, so we totally changed everything.  The finished quilt bears very little resemblance to the original.  We particularly like the checkerboard border we dreamt up.  As she did last year, Miriam March of Whispering Pines Quilt Studio near Rock Creek quilted the large quilt for us for free.  She did a wonderful job:  you can see how well the curvy lines of the quilting play off the straight geometrics of the piecing.  Thank you Miriam!

And because we changed the design so much, we had lots of pre-cut bits left over from the parts we didn’t include.  After a couple of happy afternoons of playing around with the possibilities, we used them in the lap quilt (thanks, Myrna, for quilting it!).  And offcuts went to make the book bag (nice job, Ann!).

We have to admit we’re pretty pleased with our efforts this year.

So there you go, from rotten hay and a manure spreader to quilts.  What a great life I have.  Romance and glamour in spades.

Winter Medallion Quilt

You could be forgiven for thinking that not only have I not been here much on my blog in 2018 but that I’ve also not been in my studio much.  And it’s true that my studio time has taken a hit, what with the big time commitments I’ve taken on in the form of putting together the Fibre Arts Network newsletter each month and in piloting the good ship Greenwood Public Library as board chair.  But I’ve had SOME time out there, and as a result do have things to show you.  Some of these things I could have shown you months ago, but whether because of poor photography conditions or lack of time for blogging I haven’t.  So I’m going to start making up for that now.

My favourite project from this past winter is this one, which I’m calling Winter Medallion.  If you frequent this space regularly, you might remember the Spring Medallion quilt top that I finished last spring.  Have a look here to read about how I created that top (and the back, which is pieced).  I regret to say that the top and back are still two separate items:  I haven’t gotten around to quilting that one yet.  But in the meantime, the medallion bug infected me again.  I started another one back in the late fall, and I’m calling it “Winter Medallion."

This one had two different starting places.  The first was another bag of scraps, all trimmed-off triangles about and inch and a half on the long sides, given to me by my library raffle quilt compatriot Lynne.  From the first bag she gave me, which contained triangles in mostly whites and creams and beiges, I made my Wonky Stars quilt (it's the one up there at the top of the page in the banner photograph).  From the second one, mostly greens, I created this Aspen Leaf collage.  Even the borders are made with overlapping triangles that wrap from front to back.  

And then there's this one, Stripes and Stars, that began with a lot of triangles that were offcuts in polka dot prints from another of Lynne's quilts.

For this fourth one, I went back to wonky stars.  The prints in Lynne’s triangles were mostly soft pastels that were, or read as, feed sack prints.  I could have put them with white, but I thought that combination a little too traditional for me.  Instead, I decided to pair those pastels with rich reds.  All through the fall I’d make another few star blocks from time to time, enjoying mixing up the red backgrounds and the pastel prints as I went.  I found quite a few yellow triangles in the bag from Lynne and started to include a few of those in every block:  I found they really made the star sparkle.  

But I had no idea what I was going to do with these blocks.  Clumped together in a grid, they didn’t do much.  They just sat there, undistinguished and unenhanced by proximity to one another.  

Then I decided to dive into some blocks I’ve admired for a while in Sujata Shah’s great book “Cultural Fusion.”  I’ve had this book for a few years and I love it.  She’s a fan of improvisational, ruler-free piecing (yay!) and scrap quilts (double yay!) and has a great way with one-block quilts that deliver big-time on attractiveness and impact.  The particular block I wanted to try is called "Crossroads," and of course it turned out to be probably the most difficult block in the book to make.  I chose a palette of greens and reds, not because I wanted to make a Christmas quilt (I will probably never make a Christmas quilt) but because I was in love with red at the time and nothing makes red spark more than green, its complement.  I threw in some pinks and burgundies and rusts and even some oranges to really stretch my definition of “red,” but kept to a pretty narrow spectrum of medium and light acid greens.  Though I did wander off into the cooler yellows as well.  I concentrated on high contrast combinations of colours, values, and print scales to make the “arms” of these units stand out.  These four-pointed stars were the second starting place for this quilt.

And why are these units so difficult to make, you ask?  It’s all about those curved edges and trying to make the centre “rectangles” more or less line up with the seams in the arms.  I made one unit with 1/4 inch seams and realized that I’d have to go down to 1/8 inch seams if I wanted to be able to allow the curves to flow as I wanted them to.   And you know how cross-cutting and resewing a block eats up fabric?  Multiply that phenomenon by at least two with these curves.  I started with 6 inch squares of fabrics layered in threes and ended up with block that measure just over 4 inches.  This was wonky on steroids.

So there I was, with two completely different styles of blocks to work with, and palettes that were related but by no means the same.  I knew I wanted this quilt to be a medallion, as I’ve said, but where would these units go?

I knew I wanted some of the four-armed stars in the centre.  But I played around with the idea of an asymmetrical grid of these stars on a darkish print background.  And I also played with the idea of putting both kinds of blocks in a wide border around that centre.  AND in the photo above you can see the relationship between the palette of fabrics in the four-pointed stars and the strip-pieced segments on either side of the dark-bordered wonky stars on the right.  To be honest, many of my fabric choices for the four-pointed stars came from my determination to include, and thus to match, the fabrics in those strip-pieced units.  You may perhaps recognize them as leftovers that I made and then rejected while working on Spring Medallion.  (See the part in the blog post where I nearly took a wrong turn.)

I love this stage in planning a quilt.  I’m trying to be as out there as I can in my ideas.  I threw in odd blocks that have never found a home.  I played with the notion of reversing the pastel/red placement of fabrics in the wonky stars.  I brought in strongly-patterned prints to audition as backgrounds.  I tried to rise myself out of my tendency toward tight symmetry.  None of these ideas made it into the final quilt, but they sure helped me decide how to proceed.  And who knows where these ideas may pop up in the future?

I continued to play (no, those solids were never on the table for this quilt:  they were another idea entirely that I was musing on at the same time).  I made more and more of both kinds of blocks.

Things got pretty wild, here, with my loosey-goosey ideas about the units in borders changing in midstream.  I loved the possibilities here but didn’t feel comfortable departing quite so far from symmetry.  

With two different styles of blocks in this quilt, it seemed to me that keeping the parts separated might be a better idea.  I simplified.  

This was better, but it was now too simple.  I fussed and thought and moved things around.

Finally, I got to the point where it was time to commit to a beginning and start sewing something together.  Playing wasn’t getting me any further ahead.  In the end, I began by sewing together the square grid of the four-armed stars you see in the photo above.  Twenty-five stars arranged in a five-by-five grid.  Fine. They were so strong, those twenty-five all together, that they needed to be reined in by a strong but retiring border.  I took the idea of the narrow dark burgundy border that I’d tried out on either side of the wonky stars above and ran with it here.  I wish I’d taken a photo at that point to spin out the suspense, but I didn’t:  I just kept building.

Above you can see that the border around that centre grid is REALLY strong.  At this stage it seemed too strong.  But the thing about a medallion quilt is that any bit that doesn’t seem to be working can usually be saved if it’s repeated in a later round of borders.  So I didn’t panic at this stage.  I just kept going.

After that dark border, I wanted to bring in a strong red element as a transition to the red wonky stars.  Funnily enough, that red element started here.

My friend and former colleague Alexa gave me these half-square triangle blocks as part of a bundle of unfinished quilt bits she’d started and knew she’d never finish.  I looked at those gorgeous acid greens and realized that were I to make an equal number of half-square triangle blocks in a similar green paired with red, I’d probably have the makings of wonderful 1/4 square triangle blocks.  And I was right.

I just love how these 1/4 square triangles came out, how the red bleeds out from the dark burgundy border, how they vibrate together and add a new element just as strong as the central grid, and how they fade out in value from the reds, through the greens, and into the whites, creating the perfect foil for the next element to be added:  the red wonky stars.

I confess it was pure dumb luck that the wonky stars fitted together so well with the medallion’s dimensions at this point.  I did a little resewing, narrowing some seams here, widening others there, until the star borders fit perfectly, but I didn’t have to do much to make it work.  Amazing.  It was a pleasure to sew them in place.  Here I’m getting ready to pin the last one in place, working on my cutting table.

In the top left of the photo above, you can see that I’m beginning to plan the next three borders, starting with those strip-pieced pastel units left over from Spring Medallion that I’ve arranged along the top edge.  But you know what?  Something about them bothered me.  Was it that they were too much pastel on top of the pastels in the wonky stars?  Was it too much variety of prints on top of all the variety I already had?  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but my discomfort prompted me to start auditioning prints instead.  Hence the pale yellow leafy number on the left side.

It wasn’t right.  I tried others.

Urp.  Way too yellow.  And way too traditional and precious for this quilt.

That green batik is better.  But it’s really green.  

Hmm.  This is a very cool print, modern and abstract, a great balance of white and green.  But I didn’t have much of it.  Could I cut it carefully enough to eke out a border?  Would it work?  If I messed up even one cut I wouldn’t have enough to make this next border.  Oh the pressure!

I cut.  I auditioned.  I thought it was pretty good.  I pinned it on.

It was perfect.  Absolutely exactly the right mix of white and green, the right width, the right echo of the 1/4 square triangles on the inner side of the wonky stars.  I was thrilled.

And I pushed on.

I’d always intended to have a lot of the four-armed stars in this quilt and as I worked toward this point I had it in mind to splash a whole lot of them into a wide outer border.  So I marched ahead confidently, throwing up dozens of them around the already-sewn centre of the medallion.

Oh dear.  Can you see what’s happening?  That double row of four-armed stars has totally taken over.  My beautiful centre is getting lost.  There’s too much going on.  This is turning into a migraine of a design:  too much, too busy, too many competing elements.

Time to rethink.  I removed one of the two rows.  The sun came out and illuminated the quilt in such a way as to suggest that I was on the right track:  the centre had become central again.  (Cue angel choir.)

 

As you can see, I’m still thinking.  That red print on the right?  It might have worked.  I tried a different one.

Nope, too orange.

But I knew that that second dark burgundy stripe outside the green and white print was right.  It could stay.  It had to stay because it was the only chance I had to repeat that very strong design feature in the centre of the quilt.  If I didn’t repeat it, it would take over.  The idea of the four-armed star border began to shrink, and more red prints turned up.

 

I took down all of the four-armed stars.  But I’d spent so much time making them!  I could hardly bear to let them go!  Still, the quilt needs what the quilt needs; it’s not about how much I’ve worked on an element that turns out not to belong.  Solid red?  Ginkgos?

Ginkgos.  Absolutely the ginkgos.

See what happened when I had cut and sewn on borders of the red ginkgo?  The sun did it again.  Gave me that solar seal of approval.

Hilariously, the only reason I had this beautiful fabric was that I’d bought it to make my mother’s Christmas aprons.  I had enough left over (just) to create a border that’s exactly the right width.  And to my great joy, the dark parts of the ginkgo print provided just enough echo of that deep burgundy border to bridge the gap to my very last border and tie the whole design together.

My dear husband and I debated the last step for quite a while.  He felt that the quilt was finished with the ginkgo border.  I felt that without a repeat, the heavy burgundy border around the centre grid was too heavy and didn’t fit. 

 I auditioned the border.  He agreed.  I sewed it on.

The sun came out again.  It’s done.

I LOVE IT.  I took it along with me to a regular sewing session of the Greenwood Library raffle quilt makers and unveiled it during our break.  They loved it too.  Lynne paid me the ultimate compliment:  “It gives me shivers,” she said.  Perfect.  And it all started with a ziplock bag of leftover triangles that she gave me.

Signs of the Times

I listen to my Mum tell me about spring busting out all over in North Vancouver and, honestly, it seems as if she lives in an entirely different country.  The cherry blossoms are over, as are all the spring bulbs and the forsythia.  It’s the same in the south Okanagan:  the orchards are in full bloom, the magnolias are largely over.

Here in our frigid little frost pocket of a valley bottom, we have to look hard for signs of spring.  But they’re here.  Here, but subtle.

So subtle, in fact, that I had to rely on the macro settings on my camera to be able to show you many of them.  You won’t be able, I think, to identify many of these leaves and flowers at this stage in their emergence.  They are, in order, a Siberian cherry outside my studio, a young maple, lilac (that one was easy), mountain ash, crabapple, apple, and larch (maybe that one was easy too, since it’s the only evergreen that drops its foliage in the fall and grows new foliage in the spring).

I particularly love the larch needles, because the way they explode out of the tiny buds looks like a very slow-motion spray of water coming out of a faucet.  At this stage, the needles are a tender green, soft and pliable, feeling more like feathers than needles when brushed with a finger.  And the blossoms on the cherry and apple and crabapple trees are no more than quiet suggestions, the buds only about an eighth of an inch in diameter, with the merest hint of colour coming.  And isn’t it cool the way the newest, smallest leaves on the lilac are the same deep purple as the emerging buds?  And what’s with that hairy, downy outer coating that’s peeling back from the mountain ash leaves?  What purpose does that serve?

Despite the moments in which I envy the coast and the Okanagan for their riotous exuberance of spring in May, it’s times like these, when my camera leads me to lean in closely for a more intense look at the details, that I learn something new about the trees and flowers and shrubs that quietly go about their lives, largely ignored, as I rush about focussing on other things.

Other signs are easier to notice.

The horses are finding enough grass to make grazing worthwhile.  All of them are eating less hay and spending less time hanging around the mangers waiting for the next pitchforkfulls to appear.

The annual squabble over avian real estate is in full swing.  All of our bird boxes are receiving a lot of attention from the swallows, but this bluebird and his mate appear, today at least, to have consolidated their claim on this house near my studio.  This guy has expended a lot of energy this week in attacking his reflection in the side mirrors on my car, to the point where I had to cover the mirrors with plastic bags, partly to stop him from doing himself an injury and partly to keep as much of his guano off the car as possible.

We’re at the stage in the flood season where we’re just as happy not to live any closer to Boundary Creek than we do.  The creek is well out of its banks in many places in our little valley.  Lying in bed at night, with the windows open to the east, we can hear the roar of the creek a kilometre away and west of us.  

And further to the west, just above the hairpin bend leading west from Rock Creek on Highway 3, the highway has been undergoing some weird changes as the saturated ground above and beneath it moves.  I grabbed these photos from a posting on FB by Emcon, our local highways maintenance contractor.

One can only assume that the forest fire from 2016 that started right at over the barrier you see at the bend above stripped so much vegetation from the hillside above that there’s nothing left to slow the movement of water in the soil.  It’s been weird driving this stretch of highway in the ten days since the cracks and displacement first appeared, noticing significant changes every couple of days.  Emcon is on the spot today, trying to ditch the high side of the road, but whether this will help is anyone’s guess.  We’ll see.

In other timely news, we’re now only a few weeks away from a major event for me this year:  the National Juried Show of the Canadian Quilters’ Association.    (If you missed my giddy announcement of my acceptances, have a look at this post from early March.)  And if you happen to be in Vancouver during the show, which runs from May 31 to June 2, please consider coming to see it at the Vancouver Convention Centre.  There will be more than 400 quilts on display because the National Juried Show has some company in the form of other shows running at the same time at the same venue.

We are now in the window of time in which quilts should arrive for the show, so yesterday I packaged up my three and got them ready to go to the post office. That’s one sentence to describe what amounted to hours and hours of work yesterday.  Fortunately, I’d already located a great blog post from Amy Meissner that told me how to do pack my quilts properly.  

It went down something like a military campaign.

• All instructions about shipping quilts agree that they must not be folded.  A fold becomes a crease in transit and that crease is going to be difficult to remove and no one at the other end is going to want to try to remove it anyway.  These quilts are all large.  On the short side, one is 46 inches and the other two are 60 inches.   So I needed a shipping container at least 61 inches wide.  Do you have a handy container that size?  Me neither.  I went up to the attic, foraged for all the large boxes I could find, and came up with three that were nearly the same width.  I opened the ends of the middle one, and one end of each of the other two and slipped them into each other till I had a long box, retaining the ends to lie flat on the bottom of the box for extra strength.  With scant one-inch overlap, I had a 61 inch long box.  Enter the Tuck Tape (like packing tape but a long stronger and stickier and bright red).

 

• That done, I switched my attention to the quilts.  I knew that cat hair and lint were there.  I could see them.  I couldn’t find my lint roller, but I did have a nearly-full replacement roll, so I used that.  It’s actually fairly difficult to run one of those rolls across a quilt with the palm of one's hand rather than the roller the roll is meant to sit in.  And I had a lot of territory to cover (46x59, 60x66, and 60x82).  I laid each quilt down in turn on a clean sheet on the living room floor, did the back, and then the front, then flipped it back till it was front up again.

• I brought my pool noodles into play.  A pool noodle is a quilt’s best friend, allowing the quilt to be rolled without creases and without collapsing (a collapsed tube becomes a rectangle and that means folds and creases).  My dear husband saw me struggling to get the first quilt rolled properly onto its noodle and gave me a hand.  Then we covered the rolled quilt and its noodle in bubble wrap, and gently taped it in place with painter’s tape (using something really sticky at this stage invites the person unwrapping it to use a box cutter to open the roll.  Think about it: box cutter/quilt.  Not a good combo.)  Then dh left to do some work on the woodlot and I was on my own again.
• I went back to the box.  My box was now the right length but far too tall (at 12 inches) for the three quilts lying side by side.  They fit handily in the 16 inch width across the box, so my box needed to be only 5 or 6 inches high.  I cut off all the flaps.  And immediately realized I’d cut off too much and didn’t have enough left to create new flaps across the top of the box.  Never mind.  I’d deal with that later.
• At this stage, it occurred to me that Canada Post might have restrictions on sizes they’d be willing to accept as parcels.  Sure enough, the handy CP website told me that my parcel had to be under 2 metres long.  Good.  I was at 157 cm.  Oh, and then it went on to say that the length AND GIRTH together couldn’t be more than 3 m.  Oh.  I measured.  I did the math.  And came up with 299 cm on the INSIDE of the box.  I froze.  I didn’t even want to know what it might be on the outside of the box.  I knew it would be too much.  I sat and breathed and folded my hands in my lap and allowed my mind to drift.  Then I remeasured.  Then I redid the math.  And realized that I’d doubled one measurement twice.  My actual length + girth measurement was 260 cm.  Yay!
• Now, you’d think I was nearly done with the cardboard, right?  But no, because Amy Meissner said that to avoid having one’s quilt sliced by someone with a box cutter and not much brain matter, every bit of the box—sides, top, and bottom—needed to be two layers thick.  My box bottom was fine, already two layers because of the ends I’d folded down flat.  But I had to cut all new sides, slightly less than 6 inches high.  I didn’t realize about the “slightly less” part until I’d cut half of them.  Have you ever had to cut 1/4 of an inch of a piece of cardboard a couple of feet long?  It’s not pretty.  But I got it done and taped into place.  

• I gently scored a line on the outside of the boxes to establish a fold line and made sure that all my flaps would close properly over the inner lining.  (You can see the score line in the bottom right of the photo above).
• And went back to the quilts.  I got quilt number 2 delinted and as I began to roll it up remembered the instruction to roll the quilts face out, so that they wouldn’t get creased and wrinkled.  I did that, by myself, with this quilt.  And then realized that dh and I had rolled the first one with face in.  So I took that one apart and re-rolled it face out.  And did quilt number 3.  All of this on my aching knees on the floor, trying to keep the edges even because I knew I had no wiggle room with the length of the roll.
• I went back to the box.  I used nearly all of the Tuck Tape I had left to reinforce all the weak points and seams and wound a long bandage-like piece twice around the lengthwise circumference of the box for good measure.
• I put all three quilts into one plastic bag (essential to guard against moisture damage).  Or rather into two bags, one on each end, overlapping in the middle and taped securely in place.
• I remembered that I had to include signed forms identifying myself as the maker of the quilts.  And I remembered that I had to put in a note asking for the form that will allow me to pick up my quilts in person at the end of the show.  I popped in a copy of the mailing label just in case something happens to the one that would go on the outside of the box.
• I taped all that to the bag containing the quilts.  I covered the bag with more bubble wrap.  I laid a long strip of cardboard over the bubble wrap and taped the two ends of the flaps that didn’t quite meet in the middle to that strip.  Then I laid ANOTHER long strip of cardboard OVER the flaps and taped it down too.
• And I remembered that I had to print the mailing label on COLOURED paper as stipulated in the show requirements.  I taped the label to the top of the box. I taped on a label with my return address.
• I stepped back.  
• DONE!

Now I just need to get the box to the post office.  I thought I had another obstacle when I took the box out to the car this morning.  As you can see, the box is wider than the car.  

In the end, I pushed the passenger seat all the way back and the seat back all the way down and now it looks like it’ll have a nice nap reclining beside me while I drive it to the post office.

And then I’ll need a nice nap myself.