Little Allie Bay

Here is another quilt at my brother and sister-in-law's house, made for them in the late 1990's towards the end of my landscape phase.
It's yet another Lake Michigan quilt, where I tried to capture how magical the place was to me as a child (hence the title.)

It is about 18" X 45".  Do click on it!

It's raw edge applique....Had I to do it over I would heavily quilt that sky....but you know how that is....

Sewing Room ReDo...Old Work Discovered

After the epic dual shelf collapse in July from which I found no time to properly recover, my sewing room got so bad that it became literally unusable.  Finally my schedule opened up so that I could take the three days required to dig to the very bottoms of the piles, the backs of the drawers, purchase new shelving and bins, and generally do an archeological dig through my sewing life of the last 17 years.

I thought I would show some of my old work that predates my blogging and crazy quilting.  I found a bunch of color copies in the bottom of a cabinet....this from the Age Before Jpegs....
So come on along, setting the Way Back Machine to the mid 1990's or so....   ;-)

I was into Broderie Perse, at least my own take on it, in a big way for many years.  You will notice the flowers were as much in evidence back then as they are now; I must have cut out a jillion of them from commercial quilt fabric.  This piece is 8" X 11".  I probably made 35 of these little "sayings quilts", as I called them.
Here's another one:

This was for a friend, using her chosen phrase and favorite flower, the iris, and bug, the dragonfly.
I was into cutting out a lot of letters back then, too.

This is skipping ahead to early CQ days, but the letters and flowers are still there.  It was for a friend's doctor's office.

She's a gynecologist. ;-)

From there the stained glass quilt phase began.  I found a picture of one that I had totally forgotten about making.

I think this must have been for a church Christmas bazaar.

Then the fabric collages veered into landscapes.  I miss doing them and may have to circle back to them one of these days.  (There is a small one in my book, though.)

I remember being very inspired by that birch bark fabric, and using up every inch of it.

Pale winter sunlight....   This was for my oldest brother who likes it c-o-l-d.

Maybe my strangest piece, this is a collage (a work in progress shot) rendering of one of my Uncle Bill's kachina dolls.  He hung this in his fancy office when he was the head of the F.D.I.C. in Washington, DC, which made me very proud.  In exchange for it, he gave me his mother's oak workroom chair, which I am sitting in as I type this.

I read every single one of the 20 Brother Cadfael mysteries during those years, and decided to make a fantasy rendering of what I thought it might look like in the old England of the books...

This was large, very detailed, and kind of burned me out on landscape collage!
The next piece is a small embroidered wool landscape that I loved doing very much, for my friend Cindy Thury-Smith.  She fulled the wool in it.

Cindy loves lavender, so I used a Van Gogh painting of lavender fields as my inspiration.  Notice that the trees are needlepunched? 

Sometimes it feels good strolling down Memory Lane... But now, everything is re-organized, slightly rearranged, and ready for new work.

This view is looking into the room....
 

...and this view is looking out, back toward the rest of the house.
But what is that on the table?
In the foreground are the contents of an envelope of goodies my friend Tracey Brookshier sent to me.  On the end of the table is this....

A UFO!  This is when I was using all vintage cottons, I was just in love with them.  I had bought some rubber stamps for the precision "paper" piecing, except that the guidelines were stamped on muslin.
I really like this and will have to finish it...someday....

I've got lots of threads I can use....   

Love by the Moon...Day 2

I'm so glad you will join me for this project as it goes along this week!

Andy is also the funniest kid in the family. A typical Andy move...
For his graduation from h.s., each graduate was to choose a short quotation or dedication for the school principal to read aloud as the graduate walked solo down the aisle to get the diploma. Nice idea, isn't it?
Have you ever tried to say "Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat..." twenty times in a row, really fast? Try it.
That's what Andy had his principal read as he danced down the aisle....

I got the basic beach scene laid out and sewn down yesterday, after studying many pages of ''moonlit beach'' on Google Images....

This is about 8'' X 11''.

But then I just had to go shopping for beads and ribbons for the borders and writing. I mean, this has to be just right!
The Button Emporium in Portland is my favorite store and I just love Marvis, who owns it with her husband. They have the best selection of Hanna silk ribbons around, also wired edge ribbon, which is getting hard to find in good colors. I got some fancy silver seed beads from Dava Bead and Trade on my way into downtown. A most pleasant excursion it was.

Now I am set up for Day 3's work. I do have to get the sunshine in there too....so that's the challenge, to evoke both the sun and the moon in this small space here.

I'm really going to try not to put any flowers in this but there are no guarantees....

Little Felted Landscape

Thank you so much for your lovely comments about my Spring CQ!

Always after finishing a long term project, I need to play around a little with different techniques, just for the fun of it and to get myself thinking in new ways.

My Babylock Embellisher and all the pretty rovings I've collected have been ignored for way too long, so I decided to do a little landscape of the view out my sewing room window.

I started with a square of black poly felt. I have the sky fabric there because I can't stand having texture in the skies of any textile project.
Texture brings the surface "forward", and skies are supposed to be in the deep background. I never like seeing them quilted (except for well executed trapunto clouds), or in this case, fuzzy. So I just fused that sky right on there.

Those overlapping planes of hills out the window actually reflect the twisty-turny course of the Washougal River below. I thought I would try and catch that....

Well, try....
Those soft pastel pencils are there to help me add a wee bit more definition to the sky.

Nothing like adding an element in the foreground to make the background look better! I used sock weight yarn and felted it in place.

This is where I am as of this morning....
Lots of detached chain stitching is in my immediate future.....

Cottage CQ...Embellishment Begun

I've been happily working away all week-end, listening to just the greatest radio event...I have to tell you about it.
KINK is my Portland FM station of choice. It's been on the air for 40 years this Christmas, so to celebrate they are devoting each day between now and then to a year of music, counting down from their beginnings to the present on Christmas day. Today is the third day in the series, 1970, and I have been wallowing, reveling, and grinning in nostalgia, dancing and singing along as I've been sewing.
It's amazing, hearing this great music from the past in large chronological doses. Boy does it take you back. Some of the albums were Layla, Workingman's Dead, Tea for the Tillerman, Moondance, Sweet Baby James....Get the idea? Paul McCartney's and George Harrison's first solo albums came out that year, there were protest songs by CSNY, the Temptations and others...and don't forget "Baby I'm A Want You" by Bread (every schoolgirl's fantasy), "Lola" by the Kinks, "Mr. Customs Man" by Arlo Guthrie ("don't check my bags if you please..."), "Feelin'
Alright" by Joe Cocker (the piano is so DOWN!), "Child's Song" by Tom Rush....the list goes on and on....
KINK is streaming this live on the internet, so you can join in here at KINK.fm. I am looking forward to 1971 tomorrow, and of course, the year I graduated high school, 1972, on Tuesday.

The music sent me delving through the archives and I found my yearbook from East Grand Rapids High School, 1970.

A little heavy on the mascara there, and no, my hairstyle hasn't changed since then!

The only other picture of me in the yearbook was with the dance team...each class had a girls' dance group that did pom pom routines at football games, Christmas Assembly performances, etc. (The dance team was in reality some kind of inhumane and wretched popularity contest. For some of us this was a matter of psychic survival. *sigh* If only we'd known better....)

We were so straight, so conformist! The Revolution came late to Grand Rapids, I can tell you that. Still, those were innocent times and I remember so much of it fondly...
Remember those Peter Pan collars, circle pins, cable sweaters and matching knee socks, ladies?


So if you can do it, check out KINK and take a great cruise down memory lane....

OK, on to the cottage.
I got the quilt squared up and trimmed so I could see it as a whole, and then took a deep breath and dove in with my first embellishment.

I am building some trees along the seams on either side of the cottage. "Seam driven motifs" is what I call them.
I'm eager to get some more traditional CQ like seam treatments on there to see how they combine with the more landscape-like stuff.
The beach area is really bugging me so that may go through some changes...but meanwhile, it's back to 1970 for me!!!

Printing Fabrics for the Cottage CQ

Fabric printing is always a bit nerve-wracking for me because I am never sure if the colors will be right, the fabric will feed into the printers properly (I use two different printers and many different fabrics), if the print will actually be a good one, etc.
However, once I got into the groove I spent about five hours today printing up images of Michillinda for my landscape CQ....which I will call the "Cottage CQ" from here on. For the most part things went well and I got lots of imagery on fabric to work with.

These images will be cut up and pieced in a crazy quilt style along with some standard CQ type fabrics...you can see some of those piled up under the pictures.
The cottage in the center will be embroidered over...that's a technique I really enjoy, and will work well here.
It's going to be quite the challenge to integrate the representational with the abstract...and have the whole read as a cohesive and harmonious composition. But I've been thinking about this quilt--and taking hundreds of photos for it--for about three years, so I am ready to take it on at last!

*********EDIT*********
Diane asked how I get the images on fabric.
Here is a tutorial on the subject from awhile back...

CQ Landscape...A Warm-Up, Part 3

Well, things got very swirly.
This piece is starting to look like Kate Bush's music...that song "The Big Sky" comes to mind. She goes so wild and chaotic at the end of the song, just raving and reveling in her freedom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C88yb-OVNmw&feature=related
The visuals are distracting in this video (and dated)...the music is what I mean...

And I let things go wild in my little quilt here, too....just kind of let 'er rip!!!

There's not much more to add, although I think a dark border would make a big difference here. I'll give it one more day's work... ;-)

CQ Landscape...A Warm-Up, Part 2

I added another "layer" of work on this little experiment, some stitching over the felted on leaves. I used the Kreinik Soi Noppe that I love so much. They don't make it anymore... ;-( or I would give a link on where to buy some.

Also, thanks to Leonie's most welcome critique in an email, I've covered up some of the visually distracting dark patches "behind" the branch with more leaves. There is some more filling in to do, too, as I go along. And lots more detail on the branches.
Working with the Babylock embellisher is such an immediate process! I love how fast it is.

Here's a detail shot. I've added the barest seam treatments along the patch edges on the left there. So far that element seems unintegrated with the rest of the piece, so I'll be addressing that issue next...

Also...I want to make sure you all know that Pam Kellogg is again posting on her blog! She is changing the emphasis a little bit...there is still absolutely gorgeous stitching going on, but her approach is now more personal and inspirational. Have a look! Welcome back, Pam...we missed you!

CQ Landscape...A Warm-Up

For the past year I have been mulling over how make a crazy landscape quilt.....I'm finally starting to get a handle on it so have been playing with a practice piece to get things rolling.
Newer readers might like to check out these pages of my website. They show a good sample of my landscape "phase" as a sane quilter.

I know that I definitely want to combine printed photos on fabric with more traditional CQ type fancy fabrics, soI dug into a small pile of "reject" prints that went into the mix below. This little piece is about the fall trees...and the wind that gets the leaves blowing across the sky....

This measures 16" X 24".
"Om Tat Sat" is Sanskrit and can be translated as "Supreme Absolute Truth". I always feel God in the sky. There is a wonderful saying, "I drink Thy power from the mighty cup of the wind..."
It's been really windy around here, too!

Those brown limbs are a fabulous chenille yarn that has been felted in place with the Babylock Embellisher. Thanks, Leonie, for that great yarn!

Then I used the embellisher to "felt applique" the leaves down...except for the shiny ones. Those are holographic lame that have been fused in place.
I've embroidered some finer detail on some of the branches, and am trying out some simple stitches along the seams in the bottom right section.
I just want to see how to combine these different elements.

Oh, and just for fun, here is basically the same quilt from 1997...

It is 16" X 19".
I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same...

Embellisher Experiment #8: Lurid Sunrise

Today I was free to play with the Embellisher again after too long a hiatus!
I have always been fascinated by clouds and have tried many times to capture them in fabric. This time I went for a sunrise, using some hand-dyed silk fibers and polyester sheers over a hand-dyed cotton background fabric.
The hills in the foreground are simply felt-appliqued.

This was a quick composition, taking not much more than an hour. I wanted to explore how the fabrics and fibers would behave. Next I will see what kind of detail I can add with some hand stitching...
This piece measures 10 1/2" X 11".

Meanwhile, the funky knitting project is growing....

I had forgotten how seductive knitting can be. It is hard to put down.

Marne's Landscape, Finished

This has been much more of an emotional project than I anticipated. Concentrating on this image of my early years at Michillinda and the days of living next door to Marne and her family--and near the other cottagers in our summer "colony"--has ended up being a long meditation on my own mother, who has been gone for over 30 years now.
Her presence is still so strong there, as that place exists almost outside of time. And Marne was one of her friends. When I visit with Marne, she can still tell me new stories about my mom, which is a miracle, really! So my work on this Michillinda portrait for Marne of course ended up being a surrogate gift to my own mother, representing my longing for her still, and my gratitude at still being connected to her through her old friend.

Once the landscape was completed, I pinned it to a piece of acid-free foam core. The pinning was to keep it in place while I stretched it, as I had to be absolutely sure that that horizon line on the front was going to be perfectly horizontal.

The front has been stretched nice and snug, as you can see here.

This is the back of the backing. The white stuff is Pellon fusible fleece...It has a bit of body and stiffness that gives a nice finish to the backside of the mounted landscape.

Here is the backing pinned into place. The photograph is of Marne's family dining room table at the cottage, with a further table in the addition beyond it. (She has a very large family.) The lace rose motif belonged to Marne's grandmother and dates from the Civil War; the inscription speaks for itself.

The front, all done. I had to add a little more embroidery to the left foreground...
I have another painting by my Uncle Hal that shows our cottage to better effect...I may enlarge upon this idea and make another Michillinda portrait for my family...
But before I leave this subject..., I can't write about Marne without mentioning Sallie, who lived on the other side of us along the row and at 92, is the other icon of Michillinda. She too was my mother's friend...this is the first year she hasn't been at the lake; she's got some health issues keeping her home, but no doubt she is battling them with her usual fierce energy. I got to see her last year, though.

Sallie is a force to reckon with, and I remember many an evening my mom would storm home from her cottage saying, "That Sallie makes me so Damn Mad!!!!"
But Sallie is the one who has an old photo of my mom pinned to the door of her bedroom at Michillinda, because she still misses her so much.
I love her for that.

She let me take a quick snap of it....and there is my mother, gazing out at the lake as we all do, disappearing into the light.