Fiber and Pulp

Catching Up?

The last time I posted to this blog, I was in the middle of telling about my visit to the International Quilt Study Center in Lincoln,NE. The coverlet above was one of the oldest textiles on display (made in 1816 in New England) and captured my attention. The background fabric is hand-woven brown twill and the embroidery was worked on it whole cloth. The design style seems very reminiscent of Deerfield embroidery - no surprise as that was also developed in colonial New England.

Other favorites in the antique quilts exhibit include this extravagently quilted and trapuntoed whole cloth quilt. About this time I got excited telling Steph about all the things we were looking at and forgot to take more pics of the antiques. 🙂

The next exhibit we toured was food-themed quilts by a Japanese maker Eiko Okano.  I _really_ like this work and think it would be fun to make a series of small quilts in this style. 🙂 

I was surprised that Steph liked this work, too. She prefers brightly colored energetic works much as I do. 

There were a lot of examples of patchwork and quilted textiles from other cultures on exhibit. This one is a pleated cotton skirt with extensive pieced and embroidered fabrics worked into the lower border. I think it was part of native Miao woman’s dress from southeast Asia. 

Here are more photos of antique quilts:

This is a famous Temperance quilt. I was captured by the very ‘modern’ looking patchwork alphabet on the border  🙂

The red and white quilt above was interesting for its piecing. Sort of a log cabin, it looks like it might be fun to reproduce.  

There was a small gallery display of crazy quilts but I found myself mostly focusing on the stitches. 

The last exhibit was recent works by Velda Newman. I was in such awe, I spent the whole time roaming from one piece to the next and took NO pics. Sigh.

The museum’s gift shop was enticing. I picked up a couple of gifts for friends there. Well worth a trip!

 

The next day (Monday), Steph and I decided to take our own local shop hop in Lincoln. Many of the area shops are closed on Mondays but we managed to find two quilt shops, a yarn shop and a scrapbooking store for our visiting list.

The first shop we visited was on the north side of town:

The Cosmic Cow - what a great store! Most of the fabrics were ‘modern’ (including my first in-person view of Kathy Doughty’s new fabric collection). I bought a few goodies, kind of randomly as it was so hard to choose!!

That Cori Dantini panel in the middle has three different Fiber Girls on it. Steph bought a few bits, too, including a Tula Pink fox print. 

The next shop we visited turned out to have all the rest of the stores on our list in the same strip mall shopping area. Calico House - a large sized and well-stocked shop with a much less friendly staff (to be fair, it was pretty busy with many customers). 

Stephie was deliriously excited when she found the stuffed Fifi Fox sample (and then pattern). She bought all the makings to create her own - including the signature TP fox print she got at our first stop. 🙂 

The last shopping stop we made was at a boutique combining upscale casual clothing and scrapbooking. The proprietor was a friendly, chatty outgoing woman who clearly loves her paper hobbies. I bought the templates above to make a mini-album. 

Was a great day out!!

I left Lincoln on Wednesday in the early afternoon to drive the 3.5 hours south and east to Olathe, Kansas. Passed through the rural corners of Iowa and Missouri to get there. My sister and two of my nieces live in Olathe along with my youngest brother, Kevin.

Since I’ve been here it has been a whirlwind of family visits, shopping, movie-going (Black Panther and Pacific Rim 2, so far with Avengers: Infinity War coming). More awaits. 

🙂 Linda

Weekend Adventures

Saturday I drove from Madison, WI to Lincoln, NE. I left Madison around 11a.m. And arrived at my niece’s house on the southwest side of Lincoln around 7:30 p.m.  There was still snow on the ground in Madison but the sun had melted it off my car, leaving little sand and ash riverbeds on the hood (photo above). The town stopped using salt on the roads yesrs ago.

The weather was heavily overcast most of the way - I did see a half hour of sunshine and briefly blue sky near Cedar Rapids, but not anywhere else. I was surprised that I did not hit any rain. Traffic was very light by my midAtlantic/east coast standards ... maybe double the number of cars I used to see in southeastern Ohio. The scenery was mostly pleasant - rural, with gently rolling land. 

My niece, Stephanie, and her husband Christian just moved to Lincoln last month. Christian is an air traffic controller at the city airport. They bought their first house and are enjoying settling in. 

Sunday afternoon Stephie and I drove across town to visit the International Quilt Study Museum. Such a fascinating place! I took lots of random photos. 🙂 

The first gallery we entered had an exhibit of quilts from India. Precious remnants of old saris - complete with embroidery and beading - are restitched onto quilt sized surfaces with couched lines covering the raw edges. Lots of beautiful sparkles! I have a small piece like this that my friend Barbara brought back several years ago from a tour of India she took with Jinny Beyer. I spent some time in the gallery enjoying the handwork.

The second exhibit we saw literally took my breath away. An incredibly skilled worker named Molly Anderson from somewhere here in Nebraska does exquisite handwork. The backgrounds are usually pieced hexies overlain with applique, embroidery and beading. The color work was awesome, too. We spent a lot of time enjoying the dozen or so small but intricate quilts in her exhibit. Pictures do not do them justice. 

This is a dress circa 1850 or so, made with a lovely roller-printed stripe. I took a photo to share with my daughter who enjoys historical costumes - and because I liked the way the maker cut the sleeves on the bias and decorated them with that narrow understated ruffle. 

I will continue sharing in my next post as Typepad and my iPhone are getting grumpy with one another. 

🙂 Linda

Another Week, Another Storm

Sunday was indeed snowy all day with six or eight inches of accumulation. On Wednesday we had the THIRD storm of the month with four to six inches more. Clearly Spring has _not_ arrived in Madison just yet. Little O sure had fun helping his Dad shovel snow and build snow piles. 😊

On Tuesday Eva and I sewed for a while. She had admired the Sweetpea Pod I use to contain my charging chords and earbuds and was interested in learning how to create two zippers from one. We had purchased extra zipper pull tabs earlier so we were all set. Here is what I made:

We started with 10” squares for these pods. The dotted-baby animal one has no interlining/batting. I wanted to see how that felt and performed. It is, of course, much softer and more collapsible. I gave it to O for carrying his tiniest toys so I am quite sure its durability will be tested to destruction. 😊

The pod made with the scissors print has fusible fleece interlining and so has more crush-resistance and holds its shape better. I prefer that structure so will have to remember to use fleece in all the rest I sew. I did forget exactly how the zipper is inserted so both my pods came out reversed from my plans beforehand (which no one else knows, shh!). 

Late Tuesday afternoon Eva and I escaped childcare duty (thanks to my wonderful SIL) and met her good friend Katie at The Great Dane for dinner and lengthy chat. Katie is recovering from a nasty concussion so Eva had not seen her for a while (besides the whole giving birth event:). At one time Katie and her ex-husband lived near me in Maryland and she worked at my shop. Some of my former staff and customers might remember her (sorry, no photo - I didn’t think to take one). The food was delicious and we had rousing conversation, with Eva and Katie catching up on recent events. 

While it snowed Wednesday (and during nap time) I cut out Eva’s apron. I finished sewing it on Thursday. I am pleased with how both of them turned out. Happily, so are Eva and Alan. 😊

I am thinking that I will make myself one of these when I get home. Anything that encourages me to actually _cook_ is good, eh?  😂 

Most of my month so far has been occupied with these sweet people:

Tomorrow I plan to (reluctantly) leave Madison, driving across Iowa to visit my niece Stephanie in Her new house in Lincoln, Nebraska. Wish me safe passage?

😊 Linda

Ice Storm

Baby Theo is growing apace. He stays awake for a half hour or so after eating now - looking around and checking out every face nearby. 🙂 Mega cute!  Otto seems to be doing pretty well with all the changes, too.

Yesterday was warmish for here at about 60 degrees (F). Today however started out with cold rain, then snow, hail and more snow ... blustery wind. Nasty! Supposed to continue until tomorrow evening. Won’t be going out!

I have done very little sewing. I have managed a tiny bit of progress on my EPP project:

I decided that I want some kind of background/sky print so I went back to The Blue Bar on Thursday afternoon while O was at his other grandparents' house. The rules of the Riley Blake challenge say that I can only use their fabrics. Sadly, the shop does not stock _any_ RB fabric. That did not keep me from picking up a couple prints from other manufacturers. 🙂

Maybe I’ll get a chance to sew tomorrow. Or even knit?

🙂 Linda

Conversing

Isn’t this guy hysterically cute? Well, yes, I am easy to please. 🙂 Yesterday my daughter and I took a child-care break and visited her favorite garden center to find a pot and saucer to hold the lovely purple Canterbury Bells flowering plant that her in-laws gifted to her. I had some happy giggles while admiring a display of garden ornaments.

 

I have pretty much been playing with my grandson, Otto, while I’m here and taking that burden off the new parents (still sleep deprived). Here he is playing Explore the Cave Box with his Dad’s flashlight. 

He is doing pretty well with getting used to his little brother (though we supervise very carefully). 

I did manage to spend some nap time with Eva - working on measuring her and Alan, grading a pattern for each of them and then cutting out his apron yesterday. 

As you can see at the upper left, I had some questionable help from Una, one of Eva’s Siberian Forest cats. 🙂

Today I joined the Slow Stitching Sunday movement by working on my EPP project for a couple of hours. I sewed the last stripey star and made a ‘clamshell’ of ‘sandy beach with wave froth’ prints. Onward!

🙂 Linda

PS Linking with Slow Sunday Stitching.

Snowy Sunshine

This was the view out Eva’s hospital window on Sunday afternoon. That tall building in the middle distance is where she and my son-in-law work (the Space Sciences Lab). I don’t know offhand what kind of tree those branches belong to but I found its shape kind of Halloween-esque. 🙂

Eva and Theo came home on Monday afternoon and we have all been resettling since then. Like many newborns he still has his diurnal cycle reversed. For the sake of his parents and their sleep patterns, I hope he adjusts soon. 🙂

We had a snow storm on Tuesday into Wednesday that was very pretty and made me grateful to be indoors. Over the twenty four hours or so, we got four or five inches of new snow. 

This was in the early stage of the storm. 

Yesterday the three (no, four) of us went out to lunch while Otto was at school. We ate at a nice American diner-style place called Hubbards. I had a delicious chicken bbq wrap and sweet potato fries. Yum!! 🙂

Because Eva’s car has space for only two non-baby passengers (not one but two child carseats in back), I drove to the eatery in my car as well. On the way back, I took a side trip to visit another shop called The Electric Needle. Its a sewing machine dealership that has expanded into a full-service quilt shop.

Quite a nice place! Lovely fabrics - lots of batiks, novelties and modern prints ... a good selection of patterns but not many new books ... and oodles of notions including threads and stabilizers (as you would expect from sewing machine sellers).

I found a great Star Wars print to make into pillowcases and two cute sewing tools fabrics for pouch making. One of the things I was specifically looking for was zipper pulls. I was expecting to have to buy a package of assorted colors but, unlike any other shop I’ve been in, they had a basket of  pick-and-choose pulls for 50 cents each so I could choose the colors I want. I don’t know how that price per pull compares to the random assortment price, but it seemed like a smart marketing ploy to me. 🙂 

I also bought some waterproofing glop that purports to create laminate-type finishes on any chosen fabric. I have been thinking about making cosmetic travel bags for a while and want to experiment with this stuff to see if it will help with waterproofing the linings. 

I have been carrying on with my EPP experiment during my hand sewing sessions, too. I found the clear packing tape I carry with me in the car and decided to try using that to hold the side-by-side templates in place (being just too lazy to go out shopping/searching for an alternative).

I am pretty chuffed with the results! Here is how I placed the templates on a small (3” square?) section of tape:

and from the back aka stitching side:

Using the tape (vs Clover clips) allowed me to fold back the dog ears more easily as well as keeping the segments more reliably aligned. I found that the most important stitch detail was to have my needle exit and enter the seam allowance folds as close as possible:

I hope this photo makes sense of what I am trying to explain - I apologize for the slight blur. I was pushing the focal distance of my phone camers’s lens. I was completely satisfied with the stitch invisibility of this method. I did go back to using my 50 weight thread once I was sure the stitches would _not_ show. 

I think I have one more stripey star to make. Then I will have to start thinking about how to color and make their surroundings. 

🙂 Linda

Glory!

I am thrilled to announce the arrival of our newest family member. 🙂 Say a big welcome to baby Theo! I have been enjoying his company for four days now - every wonderful minute of it. 🙂

Side effect of this is that I have done very little handwork since Wednesday. I spent a fair bit of time experimenting with English Paper Piecing that day - which I will record here. Recently, The esteemed quilt historian Barbara Brackman observed that she thinks contemporary sewists are putting together EPP designs in a much different way than 19th century workers.  

Brackman posited that sewists back then lined up their templates side-by-side and face down ... then stitched them together. It seemed to me that this approach might result in much less visible joining stitches so I decided to try it. I have done a LOT of EPP in my day but have never been happy with how much my stitches show. 

I think I mentioned that I am working on an EPP design for my Riley Blake fabric challenge piece? I got out my pile of prepared fabric pieces, two different threads and a fine needle (John James #11 Sharp) and began to sew. 

First I tried sewing two diamonds as Brackman suggested - sides together, wrong side up, sewn with a whip stitch on the back sude seam allowances. Here’s how it looked from the front afterwards:

As you can see, no stitches show at all and the stripes are matched reasonably well. Here’s how it looks on the back:

Pretty messy stitching by comparison to my more-usual method. Still - invisible. I had a lot of trouble keeping the templates aligned. I used Clover clips to hold the two pieces together at the unsewn end. I think a good sized strip of washi tape on the front side might work better but I didn’t have any on hand. I also had trouble keeping the dog ears of the seam allowances out of my stitching.

Here is what my more usual pieces look like after sewing (templates right side facing together, whip stitch through the edge fold only):

This seam was sewn with 50 weight Aurifil cotton thread. I don’t like how those stitches show! I have tried sewing with a ladder stitch in the past with little success. I am not able to make my stitches close enough with ladder stitching to satisfy my standards for good construction. Sigh. 

I happen to have a spool of Aurifil 80 weight cotton thread with me. It seems not very strong to me in a tensile sense - I don’t think I would feel comfortable using this thread on a bed quilt ... but since my project will be a wall hanging, I drcided to see if a finer thread would make me happier with my stitches. 

The seam on the left was sewn with 50 wt. thread ... the one on the right with 80 wt.  Clearly  a difference there!

Here are two of my completed stars (I’ve made eight so far):

The seams on which no stitches show are the ones I joined flat, side by side. 

I have more stars to sew ... so I am going to hunt down some suitable tape and try side by side again. Assuming that I can manage to tear myself away from grandchild snuggling. 

🙂 Linda

PS. Linking up to Let’s Bee Social. 🙂