penny-studionotes-2

The feeling of engagement in the process of quilting and the pleasure in (some of) the finished products are entirely sufficient motivations to keep me going in quilting. But it's nice to get external validation occasionally as well. My little " Waves " wall hanging recently brought in $250 at the Brockton Family & Community Services raffle. (Detail above, to show quilting.) And " Loss " has been accepted into the 2009 Sacred Threads show. (Mary Beth has had two quilts accepted into the show also.) I'm not inclined to enter juried shows, but the special nature of Sacred Threads made it a venue in which I could imagine sharing "Loss" with a larger audience.

After a couple of years of making countless small sketches and maquettes with different combinations of curves for my "Shelter" quilt, I made the leap recently to a full-sized pattern. It has turned out to be larger than I had been thinking of—this is 58x70 (instead of about 34x40)—David's suggestion and a good idea. The width was determined by how far my hand could sweep a line without me taking a step. (For other views of the plan for the quilt, go to this earlier post .) I've been making progress with doing sets of curved strip-piecing with the fabric I've collected in turquoise, cobalt, rusty red, and black. The next photo shows which color I'm thinking of for which part of the quilt. There will be many panels joined up in each swatch of color, with a variety of angles. Reading Vikki Pignatelli's Quilting by Improvisation has given me very helpful ideas for how I'll stitch them together—basically, an improvised appliqué technique. Here you can ...

Deciding on the quilting of the quilt is one of the most challenging aspects of quilting for me. Here's a small hanging (20 x 27) I worked on last week. I sometimes think that putting more stitching on a top is ruining it. Here's the top before stitching: When I showed Mary Beth this top along with another one with small rectangles, she suggested trying out some decorative stitching in the black borders. I was putting off trying something out, but then Kay asked if I would donate something for a raffle at her place of work, Brockton Family and Community Services , and I offered this quilt. Knowing now that "Waves" would be in a raffle, and so would go to someone I don't know, I was freed up to experiment. I tried out some hand embroidery with a lovely, heavy silk thread. First I did some a traditional "open cretan" stitch in turquoise and green. Then I decided to try out something wavy in the borders. I let some thread fall onto the black, and ...

I was in Phoenix this past weekend visiting my sister, and we went to three quilt shops, looking for more fabric to fill in the palette for "Shelter." I was able to find a large range of turquoise/aqua fabrics, a fair amount of cobalt/royal blue and rusty red. I found just a couple of black batiks, with the rest silk and polyesters. I've include some non-cotton in each color, looking to add a little shimmer to the curved strip-piecing that I'll be doing for each swath of color. Here's the thinking behind this quilt, from a description I wrote to Mary Beth in January 2006: The shelter quilt is a sequel to the "Loss" quilt that I started at Design Camp in 2005. That quilt was about David's and my experience of loss--of the brightness of Jeremy's life in ours and then the stark emptiness of our future without him. (Photo here .) As I worked through this expression of our experience of loss, I found myself thinking something like: Our future is...

For many years, this desk was the focal point of my study, the place where I wrote books , where I did my scholarship. The laptop sat on the pull-out typing return, at the perfect height for a short person like me. This desk held current notes and drafts of my research projects. Another skinny desk went off in an "el," to the right of the typing return; this second desk held materials related to the classes I was teaching, as well as bills and letters. The room was filled with books and files connected to my job, to my professional life. It was a good place to work. After my son's death in 2004, the study no longer pulled me in. The part of my life connected to research fell away. In the midst of a quilting design workshop I took in June 2005, an idea took shape: I could turn my study into a studio. Talking with Amy D. at breakfast, I tentatively told her about this idea. "Penny, that's huge!" I was so grateful for her understanding of what the sh...

One of the things I've liked about quilting is working on many projects at once. In knitting, I generally work on one project at a time, maybe two. The choice is just whether to knit or not. In contrast, I have many quilt projects in process at the same time, and the different types of projects and the different stages they're in give me the pleasure of working on whatever I may feel like at the moment: needle-turn appliqué, machine piecing, designing, machine quilting, hand-quilting—with more than one project going in each category. But I'm now feeling that I have too many projects in the air, and that the frequent switching back and forth means that a long time can pass before any one thing is completed, depriving me of the pleasure and satsifaction of seeing the work done. And if I'm flitting from quilt to quilt, it's especially difficult to make progress with the quilts that are of my own design, the ones in which I'm working out thoughts, ideas, feelin...

Today I needed some #4 double-pointed needles to finish the neck on a sweater, and then I needed a #13 circular needle for knitting a string bag. No problem—I had them at hand, along with about every size of regular needles and crochet hooks too. Pulling out this stash of needles floods me with memories of my mother. These are her needles, accumulated over a long life of knitting. My mother always had something on her needles, alongside other projects she did over the years: macramé, beading (flowers, necklaces, earrings), rug hooking, needlepoint (including the chair backs and seats above). Those projects came and went, but knitting was constant. I don't know what she made with the teensy crochet hooks—perhaps doilies that were around the house, made earlier in life than I knew her. Or maybe she inherited them from her mother, Annie Schine, as I have inherited them from her. My mother made sweaters and afghans for the whole family; later on there were babies to make gifts f...