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If Only: A Wedding Quilt for Jeremy, 61 x 92", hand-dyed cotton It's been two and a half months since my last post, where I reported on the decision I'd made about quilting Jeremy's wedding quilt. Since then, I went to the annual quilting retreat for Quilters by Design in the second week of March, just before everything closed in. I was able to show the quilting I'd done, and get thoughts on binding, so when I got home I was ready to finish the quilt. This included ripping out about half the quilting, as I hadn't pinned the layers carefully enough and there was rippling in the bottom half of the quilt.  In the photos below, the left shows a section of the bottom, with rippling, and the right shows a section higher in the quilt, which is smooth, as intended! I think you can see it was worth the work to re-do the quilting.     The next photo shows the back of the quilt. if you click on the photo, you can enlarge it, and you'll be able to see the very simple s...

I've spent a few days doing trials of quilting, both machine and hand stitching, on both felt and 80/20 cotton/poly backing. Thanks much to Beth Berman, who reminded me about the possibility of felt, which I had ruled out because I thought I would end up with hand stitching. (I've used felt once before, where I was machine quilting and wanted it to be as flat as possible.) Beth reassured me that felt was easily workable for hand quilting as well.   For the trials, I stitched in the ditch, in the horizontal seams that go across the width of the quilt. These rows are 10" apart.  Then I quilted vertical lines where blocks were seamed together. These are usually diagonal seams, and vary from about 4" to 12" apart. I'm a little wary about quilting this far apart (should usually be no more than 4-5" apart), but since I won't be using/washing this quilt (it will be a wall-hanging), this should be OK.   The felt definitely kept a very flat look, more so than...

detail of Jeremy's wedding quilt I haven't posted for four months, since late September. At that point, I had taken a break from working on Jeremy's wedding quilt to prepare for a printing workshop, and after that, I was prepping hand-sewing projects to take with me on a camping/stitching trip to Utah. After the trip, I followed up on those projects for a while, only coming back to the wedding quilt in mid-December.  Even though I was working steadily on one project or another, I wanted to wait to write a blog post until I could report that the top of the wedding quilt was done. Since it's been a while, here's a link to my first post about the quilt , where I explain why I started the quilt and how I came up with the design. Below is a photo of how it looked in its "rest period" between August and December. The note I've written in the middle indicates the row in which only a few of the colored bits are actually pieced in; most are just sitting on top ...

I really like working on just two projects at a time--one main project that involves significant brain power, and one that is easier.  Earlier this year, my focus for several months was  Jeremy's wedding quilt , and the work felt very good. But as I got closer to finalizing that design, I felt I needed a break from it, and it happened that I needed to prepare for a workshop I was doing for several friends in late August. So I turned my attention to preparing samples of monoprinting and screen printing and writing up instructions for the several processes we'd be doing. Here's a photo of some of the monoprinting samples. Unfortunately, I didn't take photos of the work people created at the workshop, which was stunning. Once the workshop was done, I took two different directions--finishing up assorted small quilting projects, and starting two new hand-stitching projects.  The hand-stitching projects took precedence over a return to the wedding quilt, because in mid-Octobe...

I'll be writing a post or two before long on several small and a couple of large new projects that have been occupying me in the last month or so, but in the meantime, here's a post about music for the studio.  Some years back, I took a workshop with Katie Pasquini Masopust , who suggested that having music playing in the studio could be a help in generating a creative flow, so long as it was music without words. I don't have music on all the time, but I do find it helpful in the way she suggested. I like using Pandora for this background music, as I can select a "station" based on a particular musician, and then get a stream of that musician plus others who are similar. My favorite stations, in approximate order of how often I choose them are: Keith Jarrett, Eric Satie, Bill Evans, Tord Gustavsen Trio, Federico Mompou, Ken Bonfield, Sandy Bull, Dave Bruebeck, Leo Kottke, Taylor Eigsti (a new find, through one of my jazz stations on Pandora). There are other time...

I recently trimmed off the edges on some fabric I'd printed up for napkins. Put the strips in the wastebasket, but then pulled them out. Cut some 1.5" squares and made up a 4" coaster.  I've made coasters like this before from commercial fabric I have on hand. Not surprisingly, the coaster made from screen-printed leftovers is even nicer. . .

My goal is to spend mornings in the studio, leaving other things for the afternoons (errands, desk/computer stuff). Working on the intricate piecing in Jeremy's wedding quilt is very demanding, so I've limited it to the making of one block a day, which can take me anywhere from 1-2 hours. That leaves me time for other sewing, something simpler.  For the last month or so, that time has been spent working with daiwabo fabrics, a Japanese style of fabric I've used in some other projects, for example the placemats in this post, and the dresser cover here . I love the subtle range of taupes/tans/browns, even though I am not drawn to brown as a color either in other commercial fabrics or in hand-dyeing my own. My friend Kathy decided that she was never going to use the large collection of daiwabo fabric that she had collected. I told her that if she would like to have someone else work with it, I would be happy to take on her collection. So, a sizable bin of these beautiful fabr...