Huge Challenge: Making a Whole from the Parts

In the previous posts, you've seen the individual blocks I've been making, 61 of them, for my Travel Diary 2014 quilt. Each block is quilted, bound, and embellished... each a mini-quilt. The difficult challenge was how to put them all together into a whole piece.

This is one of the 61 blocks.

My original thought was to stitch them together into a wall hanging, something like the arrangement below:

No way! As I played with the arrangement, it was obvious that the results were "muddy," confusing, and "busy" from close up... and boring from a distance.

So then, I spaced them apart, like in a photo album, not touching, something like this:

Nope. That didn't work either... still too busy, muddy, and boring from a distance. Akkk, what to do???? Sleep on it!

Next morning, the solution came to me upon waking! Sew them together in clusters, and mount the clusters on a back-quilt!

To see how the idea would work, I grouped the blocks on a piece of fabric from my stash, each cluster representing a whole (or segment of a) trip. This is how it looked:

The idea of clustering worked! Yay! Instead of 61 different things to view, there were now only a dozen or so. And from a distance, the shapes of the clusters against the pathway of background color made an interesting pattern.

What color would the back-quilt be, and how would the clusters be attached, I wondered? After stitching the clusters together, I took them to the quilt shops in Anacortes to find the a fabric for the back-quilt.  It had to be a read-as-solid print, one that wouldn't distract from the clusters, in a color  that contrasted in value with the over-all value of the clusters. I soon found that either too much or too little value contrast was not good. Two green prints and a light coral print came home with me as possibilities.

That evening, after trying all three of them, I decided to go with one of the green prints. The clusters seemed to "pop" nicely on it!

However, the next morning, when I viewed it in daylight, the green seemed just too cool. My travels were warm (at heart) and wonderful...  I wanted the quilt to have visual warmth. Back to the drawing board. I made a "help!" call to Lunnette, my quilting friend and travel companion on one of the trips, who came over and agreed that the green was good... except for the important consideration of "warmth." While trying various possible fabrics, she happened to mention that red is sometimes considered a neutral color, which made me look at the red/rose fabrics in my stash with a different eye. When we put the clusters on a piece of medium-rose batik, we both knew instantly we had found the back-quilt fabric!!! Whooo-hooo!

Next was the matter of how to construct the back-quilt and how to attach the clusters. I made all the mini-decisions on an "as needed" basis. Here they are in order:

1. quilt the names of the people I spent time with on these travels on the back-quilt (picture shows one quilted line, and two lines written in chalk to be quilted)
   
   
2. use the same color thread as the fabric to quilt the names, so they are there, but do not distract the viewer from the clusters of blocks
3. make the edges of the back-quilt irregular
4. bind the back-quilt edges, and then whip stitch the binding with pearl cotton, the same as the individual blocks
   
5. sew the clusters onto the back-quilt on the top edge only, allowing the cluster to be lifted to see the backs of the blocks (all different fabrics, carefully chosen for the subject of each block), and giving a place to sew a label identifying the location, people, etc. in the photos of that cluster
6. use a double row of hand-stitching along the top of each cluster to support the weight
7. make a small identifying label for each cluster
   
8. sew a small, and very personal, embellishment on the back of each cluster, something I know is there but that most people won't see (or know the meaning of if they did see it)

And here is the finished quilt. It's 37" wide by 43" tall. Even if you click-to-enlarge, this picture does not do the quilt justice... So, if you'd like to really SEE it, come to the La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum during April (April 1 - May 3), when it and 29 other of my beaded objects and quilts will be exhibited!

What did I learned making this quilt? Whew... probably more than you'd want to read... The most important thing was a reinforcement of the "just do it" approach to original art, an approach that works so well for me with my bead embroidery. Not stressing over all the decisions, not needing to have all the answers in hand before starting, is a hugely enabling gift to the creative process!

Finished Making 61 Quilt Blocks!

For 23 days straight I've been making, quilting, and embellishing blocks for my 2014 Travel Diary quilt. Today I finally finished all 61 of them!!! Here's the stack:

The next, and quite challenging, job is to figure out how to put them together to make a wall quilt. I'll write another post about that process later. For now, it will be fun just to show you a few more of the individual blocks. You can scroll back a few posts to see some of the others, and the inspiration for this quilt.

This one is a beautiful slab of rock with the route of the Dinkel River in eastern Holland carved on it. The dots are small towns, including Oldenzaal, where my friend, Lies Koster lives.

I've just ridden Lies' electric bicycle (a Swiss Flyer) 15 miles to the Bentheim Castle, across the Dutch border in Germany. I love that bike... most comfortable and still a decent workout, even with the electric assist. I want one!

Oh goodness, a giant chick visited the Emtinghousen windmill in Germany while I was there with Sabine Keichel!!!! Do you think we screamed and ran away or shared our lunch sandwiches with it?

Jan Knol, partner with Lies Koster, is demonstrating the Christmas and wintertime tradition of horn blowing in the Netherlands.

This is Jan's house and yard. A bird-lover, vegetable and flower gardener, Jan's runs a bed and breakfast place in his home in Denekamp, eastern Holland, where I stayed for a week. Lovely place, great breakfasts, happy memories!!!

In Germany, I spent an afternoon walking around the grounds of Kloster Wienhausen, a serene and beautiful abbey, a secluded and safe place where widowed women, women who need a home, women of the church, can go to live.

I've had this old pendant or charm for such a long time, I don't remember where I got it. It's the perfect embellishment for the abbey block, simple yet elegant.

My friend, Joska, in Sunderborg, Denmark has built a grape arbor in his backyard, with several varieties of grapes growing in large, healthy clusters. Although the bees had found the grapes, we managed to pick as many as we could eat.

 

The museums in Budapest are all housed in magnificent, old buildings, well maintained, striking examples of architecture. This is a bit of the mosaic floor in the entrance to the Museum of Applied Arts. I embellished the photo with a wool felt heart embroidered with a bouquet of roses because I love being in Budapest.

The above blocks are are pictures from my trip to Europe last October. Now we'll travel backward in time to June, when I took a month-long road trip, stopping at various national and state parks, attending my 50th college reunion, and visiting family in MN.

My brother, Matt, and his wife, Karen, are super flower gardeners! One of my favorite times in MN was sitting on their back yard deck, with Benny, the cat, on my lap, my mind calmed and refreshed by the lovely flowers and birds in the yard. These iris bloomed while I was there!

Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis was in full flow in June, with enough water pouring down its 53-foot drop to raise a continuous, gigantic splash as it hit the pool at the bottom.

Heading westward again, I stopped at St. John's University, where I found this lovely surprise, a towering sculpture made of woven willow and ironwood branches, five "huts" all leaning on each other. The artist, Patrick Dougherty, named it Lean On Me. Here's a really cool youtube video showing how it was made.

A week in Yellowstone National Park was just not long enough to take in all the beautiful wildflowers, the animals, and the rock formations. This June I'm headed back there again for more!

Entering Glacier National Park on Hwy. 2 from the East, one has a panoramic view of the formerly glacier-covered peaks behind rolling plains where once bison roamed freely. Stopping along the highway to take this photo, I felt the presence of wild buffalo. Remembering that feeling, I tried to find a way to convey the experience on this block.

Guess that's enough blocks for this post. You can see more of them by scrolling through the previous 3 posts. In the next post, I'll cover the process of assembling these blocks, ranging in size from half of a playing card to larger than a greeting card. As I look at the stack of finished blocks, it feels like a daunting challenge to figure out how to put them together in a way that will look good as a whole. Wish me luck!

Travel Diary Quilt - More Blocks Complete!

Day 14 of work on my 2014 Travel Diary quilt.. and still loving it!!! I have completed 32 of 57 pillows (or blocks, the traditional quilting name for a component of a quilt top), most of them the easy ones, the ones I have a quick sense of how to embellish them. The remaining blocks are bit more challenging, forcing me to remember what I always tell my bead embroidery students:

 When you get stuck,

pick up a bead or a doo-dad you love,

and sew it on your piece.

Here are a few recently finished blocks... The one above is my God-daughter, Emese, with her husband, Jacob, ready to drive me to Sonderborg, Denmark. Since just prior to departure for Europe, I had been in a one-day workshop with Sue Spargo (waaaay fun), I took my wool applique with me on the trip. In Denmark, I had a number of happy stitching hours, and the interest of Emese, Jacob, and their kids to keep me going. So, of course, I had to put a chick on this block.

Generally the pictures are about 3-4" x 4-5", but the close-up pictures of people, I generally printed smaller, about 2" x 2.5".  These were challenging to embellish, because there isn't much room to tell a story with the beads. Here are four of them grouped together. You may recall, I made an "I Spy" quilt for Emese's daughter, Olivia (below, top right).

I had a great time with Sabine in Bremen, Germany (above, top left). In the block below, I am standing by the Four Town Musicians of Bremen, the donkey, dog, cat, and rooster. As the myth has it, I have my hand on the donkey's hoof, and am making a wish. Although I dare not tell the exact wish, it did have something to do with Donkey-oti, my dear donkey friend back home.

You see the adorable donkey, bead embellishment? I must tell you about it!

I guess you can get an idea of the size! It was made by Shelly at Ginko 305, who makes and sells miniature animals on Etsy. Although she had not made them as beads previously, when I messaged her with the request, she readily agreed. Now she's thinking she'll make more of her animals in bead versions!  I've got to have more of them... a reindeer will be the next one.

The above blocks are grouped together, because they are all at Anna Feher's home in Felsöpakony, Hungary (except the selfie of her and me taken on the train from Budapest). When I'm with Anna, my friend and best bead companion for 25 years, I feel totally at home, and as her chalk sign says, totally welcome. We beaded and talked beads and got together with other beady friends for a whole week... pure heaven!!! With her husband, Attila (lower right), I share a love of Hungarian folk and American blues music, so we found time for that too!

I also had a great week with Lies Koster, above. We share love of beading, quilting, folding paper, and full moons, among other things.

In closing, here is another block from last summer's road trip, from the northern unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where we saw perfectly round boulders, 3 feet in diameter, and wild horses (although not together at the same time, as the embellishment suggests). There were only a few humans in the park that day. Shhh, don't tell anybody what an exquisite place it is...

You can see what I will do with these quilted blocks here, and view a few more of the finished blocks here.

Travel Diary Quilt - A Few Finished "Pillows"

I'm working like a madwoman to get this quilt finished in time for a show at the La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum during the month of April (a one-room exhibition of my work)!!!

Fifty-seven "pillows" in all. Thought you might like to see a few of the ones I've finished in the past couple of days.

These are my favorite tigers at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, WA. Dumai (top) and Berani, raised together (as non-biological brothers) by zoo-keepers, are now just over 2 years old.

Roland, a knight of Bremen, Germany, is a central figure in the annual Freimaak (free market) celebration. The lucky penny was given to me by a very tall, handsome chimney sweep. I used thread embroidery to decorate the cookie and added threads to represent the strings on the balloons.

These two are both from my visit last June to Yellowstone National Park. The hiking and the animal sightings were fabulous at that time of year!

I had a wonderful time exploring the Bentheim Castle, a large, early medieval, hill-top castle in NW Germany, definitely recommended if you are ever in the area!

My bead-sister, Anna Fehér, in Hungary, took me to several really great bead shops in Budapest, including a shop that mostly sold beautiful, finished necklaces patterned after traditional folk designs. This was the window display at the shop. While there, I purchased a pattern for one of the necklaces, which I used to embellish this "pillow". The beads are size 15s.

By the way, looooong ago, Anna is the one who gave me the 2 tiger kitten, the peacock, and the 2 rucksack stamped-metal charms I used in three of the above "pillows." Thank you, Anna!!!


It's waaaaay fun to embellish each of these preserved memories. The embellishment part goes fairly quickly, taking about 2-3 hours each for most of them. Let me know if you like seeing them... If so, I'll post more as I go along.

Travel Diary Quilt - Getting Started

The idea for my new quilt project is inspired by the above wall quilt created by Sabine Keichel, a dear friend in Germany.

It's made by stitching a bunch of separately made "pillows", stuffing them with batting, whip stitching around the edges, and adding embellishment and/or quilting stitches, then sewing them all together. Her quilt is full of play and fun and memories. I love it, and want to see if I can do something similar.

Mine will be about travels in 2014...

•  Feb - southern CA to visit my sister (Redland's area)
• June - road trip, with long stops at parks (Yellowstone, Itasca, Roosevelt, Glacier, Yakima R. Canyon, etc.) and college class reunion in MN - 1 month on the road
• Oct - visiting friends and meeting internet beaders in Europe (Denmark, Germany, Holland, Hungary) -1 month
• Nov - Columbia River Gorge and Portland area
• Dec - Tacoma, WA (tigers at Pt. Defiance Zoo, visit bead friends)

Took over 8,000 photos along the way, and collected stuff (seed pods, fabric, ribbon, thread, rocks, charms, beads, coins, etc.) in all these places.

Decided to make a wall quilt to tell the story, preserving the photos and ephemera collected and saved along the way. Working title is: 2014 Travel Diary. 

I began by going through all my photos, selecting a few (57 as it turned out) that represent the moments I absolutely do not want to forget, ever. These I sized to +/- 4 inches at 200 resolution. In MS Publisher, I arranged the photos, 4 per page, giving each a 1/2 inch colored border, as shown above, creating print-ready layouts.

I printed the photos, on inkjet printable fabric, "Printed Treasures" by Dritz. It's a decent quality, 100% cotton poplin, white. After printing, let the fabric dry for a couple of minutes, and then separate the paper backing, pulling it apart from the fabric, allow to dry further, then rinse and air dry. Cut the images apart, and they're ready to sew.

Digging into my rather substantial scrap bin (and mighty happy to have found a use for some of it), I selected a backing fabric for each photo. I chose on the basis of personality, subject matter, and color. This step was waaaaay fun!

After cutting the backing fabric about 3/16" larger all the way around than the photo, I cut a piece of cotton batting to just a tad smaller than the photo (not including border), made a photo fabric-batting-backing sandwich, and stitched around the photo area to create each pillow. (The batting does not extend beyond the stitching.)

The next step takes some time! Turning under the edges, I whip-stitch around the pillows using #8 pearl cotton thread. I've gotten better and faster at this step with practice, thank goodness.

After whipping the edges, the next step is really fun... to embellish and quilt each of the pillows! Here are a few I've done so far.

And here's an idea of what they will look like when they are sewn together. Of course, I will finish all 57 pillows before arranging them and stitching them together.

A few things I've learned so far:

• When you pull the paper backing off the inkjet printable fabric, a considerable amount of the bonding glue sticks to the fabric. It doesn't wash off. Bummer. It's really hard to hand stitch through the printed fabric.... requires a needle puller.
• Adding a color-matching border around the photos was a really good idea, because when I whip-stitch the edges there won't be little slices of white showing if the stitches are short of the edge of the photo.
• I'm having a difficult time beading on the photos, especially doing anything improvisational or where the embellishment takes over the photo.
• I'd like it to be more "funky"... more playful and fun, less like a photo album on the wall. It's a struggle, but I'm working on it.
• If I ever do this again, I will make larger pillows with smaller photos, piecing around the photos with fabric scraps. That way, the photo can remain plain, the embellishments on the surrounding fabrics.
• If I ever do this again, I will stuff the pillows with loose batting (such as you would to make stuffed dolls) rather than flat quilt batting. 

One more thing:

You might like to know that Sabine (my inspiration for this project) got her inspiration from Teesha Moore's set of 4 tutorial videos about making the pillows (in her unique way,) and using them as covers for her journals!  They are definitely worth a "look see!"