penny-studionotes-2

Work on this quilt has been going slowly, but I have been making progress. The photo below shows the quilt top, batting and backing layered on and pinned into the carpeted floor in our large guest room. This is where I'm basting the layers together in preparation for quilting. The silvery line at the bottom of the photo is the piece of straight metal I bought some years ago to help me mark quilting lines. This time I used it to help me get the inner black border pinned down in straight lines. Below you can see the basting stitches I've been putting in. These big red stitches will hold the layers in place as I do the machine quilting, and then will be pulled out. (I would usually baste with safety pins when doing machine quilting, but I didn't want to add further weight and bulk to this large quilt.) In a method learned from Suzanne Marshall, I sit on the floor and put in the lines of stitching. I only do about an hour a day, listening to music. I've been at it for a cou...

It's over five months since my last post. For the first 2-3 months, it was because on intensive work I was doing on a capital campaign for my synagogue, and all my writing energy was taken up with drafting campaign materials, and then--happily--thank you letters. When I was able to get back into the studio, I needed something simple, that didn't involve much thinking, so I finished up a couple of baby quilts that I'd started a while ago, and started a 4-patch posie quilt with some fabric on hand. At that point, it became clear to me that I wasn't just taking a break, but that I was actively avoiding getting back to the quilt I was in the middle of last summer, my second " Homage to Ellsworth Kelly ." The last time you saw this project, I had completed 82 blocks of a projected 195 (for a queen-sized quilt), and I did a dozen more after this photo was taken. I finally realized that I wasn't up to making another 101 blocks. I had really enjoyed making the blo...

The finished blanket is two layers only, sewn together with a "pillowcase binding," no quilting. I had dyed up a length of linen the same charcoal color I used for the top, thinking I would line the blanket with that. But I kept thinking about how I liked the feel of the fleece throw I've been using for naps. Fleece would be too heavy for a second layer on this, but then I thought of " minky ," which is similar to fleece but thinner and even softer. I found a nice gold color, available in a wide enough piece that I didn't have to seam it together. Done!  For the story of this blanket and its making, click on this post .  

Back on April 23rd I promised posts on three projects in progress. Other things in life have held back progress on the third project, and I wanted to be closer to completion before writing about it. With the backing for this piece now being dyed, I'm ready to describe it. A detail shot is above, and below is what the full top looks like, laid out on the floor, edges not yet trimmed; it's about 52x67."  This piece is in memory of my mother, Helen Schine Gold, a kind of color portrait of her and my feelings about her. I started thinking about doing a quilt in memory of her many years ago (she died in 2003, a year before Jeremy), and started actively working on it in about 2010. The initial thinking was something that would convey the comfort of my mother's presence and of her care and concern for me, embodied in this story:  When I was a sophomore in college, I came down with a serious case of mononucleosis, and wasn't eating. My mother flew to Chicago from New Have...

Back in 2013, I made a small quilt,  "Homage to Ellsworth Kelly," working from his paintings of colorful squares. You can see an example of one of Kelly's such paintings in the top row of the stamps put out not long ago by USPS--wish I had purchased more! After studying a number of Kelly's  paintings of squares , I decided to use multiple bright colors, along with both white and black, and to place the squares so that value contrasts dominate, but to also have some places where two adjacent squares are close in value. Here's the quilt I made, 36"x36." For quite a while, I've had a photocopied image of another piece by Kelly on my bulletin board, "Brushstrokes Cut into Forty-Nine Squares and Arranged by Chance."  Recently it occurred to me that I had on hand some fabric that might work well for a quilt based on this idea. I had dyed a couple of yards of cotton/linen blend in dark charcoal, but it came out less mottled than I wanted it, so ha...

I'm working on three different projects at the moment, and thought I'd give you a look at each one, over a few posts.  This first one was the last begun but the first finished. I was thinking I would intersperse working on it with the others, but it created such a mess that it took over the studio, so I just kept at it until it was done. This is from a pattern by Rachel Hauser of Stitched in Color , "Confetti." For a background fabric, I dyed some Nature's Way muslin in a pale gray that I like very much. (The color shows a little better in the detail shots below.) I have made two "confetti" quilts long before I saw this pattern, with both of mine done improvisationally. The first was a wedding quilt made for a friend , and the second used the same idea to make "If Only," a wedding quilt for Jeremy . In contrast, Rachel Hauser's pattern utilizes paperpiecing, which pre-determines the position of scraps. I don't think I'd ever do this...