Sweet spot

Finally, a gorgeous day off, when I’m not feeling ill, don’t have work projects or family affairs to tend to, and didn’t have a lot of errands to run. I stayed home and worked in my garden and hung out on my patio, surrounded by happy plants, neighborhood cats, tons of bees, and the occasional hummingbird. A friend joined me on the patio for awhile, for lazy conversation about plant mutations, planned obsolescence in garden tools, and various edible things in my garden that I didn’t know I could eat. (Borage flowers, anyone?)

It’s been a lovely day. I had pizza and a salad (and some chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream) for dinner, and now I am about to have a cup of tea.

From my seat on the white chair in the corner of the sitting room, I can see the ‘Swanson’s Gold’ daylilies that I transplanted from the brick planter to the north garden bed last month. That is one tough plant – not only did it survive the transplant, it has been blooming nonstop since shortly after it went in. I can also see the red bee balm (‘Jacob Kline’?) and the ‘Lucifer’ crocosmia that’s in front of the zebra grass. Last time I was at Emerald City Gardens, Jay jokingly made the comment that in Seattle “July is the new June” and that’s indeed what this feels like – that sweet spot in the year for which I put up with the rest of Seattle’s pathetic weather.

My garden tasks for the day were to get the last of the topsoil delivery off the driveway, weed the strip of garden south of the driveway, and clear the weeds from the south end of the parking strip. At one point I was trying to dig out some fennel, and I found myself thinking “I have no one but myself to blame for this.” Aside from the wants-to-take-over-the-house shrub rose and a few volunteers, everything that I am struggling to manage is here because I brought it to this particular 5000 square feet of land. There’s lots that I would not do if I had it to do over. (Cam, you were right about the lemon balm.) But on the plus side – in the garden right now I can see all of these flowers:

• Scarlet runner bean
• Centranthus
• Yellow California poppy
• White California poppy
• Red oriental poppy
• Red pompom poppy
• Calendula
• Alyssum
• Foxglove
• Pink toad flax
• Purple toad flax
• Three kinds of blue hardy geranium
• Two kinds of purple hardy geranium
• Pink yarrow
• Hot pink yarrow
• Coral yarrow
• Red helianthemum
• White helianthemum
• Cerinthe
• Borage
• Red bee balm
• Raspberry pink bee balm
• Red mini petunias
• White mini petunias
• Orange mini petunias
• Pink/white dianthus
• Pink Artemisia
• Pink ornamental oregano
• Hot pink ornamental oregano
• Deep gold day lilies
• Bright yellow day lilies
• Purple agastache
• Three kinds of melon/orange agastache
• Two kinds of cat mint
• Hot pink penstemon
• Lavender
• Yellow alstromeria
• Feverfew
• Shasta daisies
• Orange coneflower
• Light purple coneflower
• White day lilies
• Pink day lilies
• Mock orange
• Deep red salvia
• Two kinds of snapdragons
• Purple buddleia
• Heliotrope
  

I may have made a lot of work for myself in this garden in terms of plants to maintain and weeds to manage, but I’ve made a lot of happiness for myself as well.

Year of Scraps, so far

I have a not-very-rigid goal of making two tops a month out of my scraps. By the end of January I had two tops complete, made entirely from scraps:

Year of Scraps no. 2 - 3 3/4" log cabin blocks, cool colors group

Year of Scraps no. 3 - 3 3/4" log cabins blocks, warm colors group

Next up - tackling a big box of 2" squares that I've accumulated over time. I pulled out the pinks, yellows, and orange squares and started out making these units:

I was originally planning to lay them out as shown above, but decided that I liked the idea of columns of color rather than chunks of color, so now that I've got some of the rectangular units pieced, they are getting laid out like this:

I quickly ran out of squares from the 2" squares box, and moved on to pulling larger scraps and remnants and cutting 2" squares from those. I'll be able to get all the pink and yellow I need for a nap quilt out of the scrap bins and boxes, but for orange I will have to add pieces from yardage. I thought about just making this a project that I work on over time, as more scraps get generated, but decided that the goal of the year is to use up scraps, not to make tops that are made exclusively from scraps. So tonight I will pull some orange prints from the yardage shelves and cut 2" strips off them to get more orange squares to work with.

I want it to look as though the patches are going into the segments randomly, but I'm actually laying out each 24-patch segment quite carefully to make sure I get colors/scales of prints somewhat balanced... which means I have to pay attention to order of squares as I am piecing. I think it will take me the rest of the month to get this top pieced and then I will be away from my sewing machine for 5 weeks, so I think the goal of two tops per month is blown. But that's OK, I am making progress getting through the bins of small scraps. And perhaps I will catch up later in the year when I move from working with tiny strips and 2" squares to working with bigger pieces. I can hope, anyway!

Play Date

Janet and I went to Quiltworks Northwest in Bellevue last fall to go to the Okan Arts yukata trunk show and stayed to do some shopping, then decided to make a day of it with a stop for lunch and a visit to Del Teet, a more-high-end-than-I-am-used to furniture store. The dubious pleasure of looking at furniture we could not possibly afford aside, we had such a good time that we decided to put a (more-or-less) quarterly date on the calendar to do it again. The next date would have been in late January, but the weather was cold, wet, sucky and generally uninspiring so we shifted the trip date to today. Which turned out to be very windy at times and very wet at times, but not too cold and not sucky, so all in all better than January. (Except for the fact that Jaye and I have birthdays in January, almost anytime in Seattle is better than January. February is not usually so great, either, but it's shorter and March awaits on the other side, and March in Seattle is the Beginning of Spring.)

At any rate, we set out yesterday morning after a brief episode of Show and Tell, and had a nice time at Quiltworks Northwest. I wasn't as blown away with the selection as I was the last time I went, feeling that I had seen the collections they had on the up-front displays already; that was a good thing, as it enabled me to wander around the store without feeling overwhelmed with fabric lust. I have been working on Year of Scraps #4, which is using 2" squares of particular shades of pink, orange and yellow, and I have been confronted with the dearth of orange in my fabric collection, so I focused on orange/peach in my shopping.

I'm perfectly happy to do random shopping (see below re: West Seattle Fabric Company) but focused shopping does usually minimize the likelihood of buyer's remorse once I get the fabric home. I am a little bit puzzled as to why that indigo and white fabric appeals to me so strongly but it does, so I have no buyer's remorse about that, despite a near total absence of ideas about what to do with indigo and white fabric.

We had lunch at a Thai restaurant around the corner from Quiltworks Northwest, where I learned once again that it is best to be cautious when asked how hot to have one's food made in a Thai restaurant. The pain of learning that lesson was balanced by the fact that after eating my "medium spicy" green papaya salad I could actually breathe freely, which had not been happening up to that point in the day.

We were done with Bellevue earlier than planned, so decided to add a second stop to the fabric shopping trip, this time over in West Seattle, home of the very new West Seattle Fabric Company. West Seattle is relatively easy to get to from my neighborhood, since the bus I take to downtown Seattle frequently transitions to being a bus that heads on to West Seattle after it gets through downtown, but it's not a short trip, so I've made it over there only infrequently, and never to the area where WSFC is located. That is likely to change. It's a charming little shop -- 3 or 4 bright and cheerful rooms filled with contemporary fabric and really pleasant people. The prices are reasonable, and wonder of wonders, the fat quarters are priced according to the price of the yardage. (A pet peeve of mine is quilt shop pricing of fat quarters -- most stores in this area price them at the equivalent of $12/yard, as though they expect me to believe that they need to somehow recoup the cost of cutting them, when in fact they just have staff cut them/bundle them when there are no customers in the store. LQS, I'm happy to support you, but not when you try to gouge me that way.)

I chatted with the WSFC owner, Monica Skov, for awhile; I must say it is a pleasure to talk to someone who is happy in her work! Although the shop is mostly stocked with quiltweight cottons, Monica is not a quilter -- she just loves fabric - a woman after my own heart! She does carry some home decor weight fabrics, and lots of notions and supplies for both quiltmaking and garment making. She's going to be holding classes, too, including basic sewing classes. It's probably a good thing that it's a trek for car-less me to get there, because I am sure I would bust my fabric budget regularly if it was within easy reach.

I have a thing going for gray fabrics at the moment, and added the group below to the growing collection. (The paprika red Alexander Henry floral -- Farmdale Collection -- is an example of pure random shopping. Nothing to do with any project in progress or under contemplation.)
More random shopping: dots, and the spring green scrolls. After a couple of years when large scale prints have dominated the fabric lines, it's nice to see smaller prints/blenders re-appearing. The blue and blue-green fabrics at the bottom are going to be backgrounds for a scrappy checkerboard top.

After the fabric shopping, Janet and I headed south on California SW and spent a little time browsing the shops in one of the main West Seattle commercial areas, until the wet-and-windy aspect of the day prevailed and drove us back into the car and home. I really like the way West Seattle feels as though everything you need for life is right there: not just groceries and a Bartell, but home furnishings stores, used bookstores, little restaurants, fabulous baked goods. We actually couldn't get into Bakery Nouveau because it was too crowded, so settled for Cupcake Royale, which was nice, too. The only problem with West Seattle is that living there would mean more time on Metro that I am willing to spend, so it will just have to remain a nice place to visit, and a scheduled stop on the quarterly Jeanne-and-Janet play dates. To which I am already looking forward with anticipation!

A vote for quilting happiness before quilting perfection

I was listening to "Quilting... for the Rest of Us" today, episode 36, and was struck by Sandy's comments about not being so hard on ourselves with respect to our quilting projects.

Last month when I got a chance to go to the American Folk Art Museum and see some of the quilts from their collection, I was struck by the lack of "perfection" in some of the quilts. Many of these are clearly masterwork quilts, and yet -- if you look at them, and you don't even have to look at them that closely, you'll see some points cut off, or places where a fabric was cut crookedly so that a vertical stripe actually goes off at an angle, and many many instances of blocks not all being exactly the same size. It doesn't distract from the beauty/brilliance of these quilts because perfection in construction isn't what makes these quilts fabulous. What makes them fabulous is the particular design vision that each of the quilt-maker had for her quilt...

It seems to me that a lot of the post-bicentennial quilting revival in American quilting was grounded in a kind of county-fair/quilt show competition approach that put a premium on technique, and that's certainly a focus that permeates the world of instruction-focused magazines and classes. It's much easier to instruct on technique than on style or design vision - but it doesn't necessarily lead to beautiful quilts -- or quilters who are happy with their work. I'd rather be happy with my work without worrying about whether all my blocks are identical or my points match up exactly. So, if someone is starting a let's-not-be-so-hard-on-ourselves-about-our-projects club, I'm in!

BFF/BQF

To use a phrase I've heard on Sandy's Quilting for the Rest of Us podcast...

Your BFF/BQF is the person who hates gift wrap and wraps most of her presents this way:


but knows you like wrapping paper and so wraps some of your gifts this way:


and makes sure the presents, whether wrapped in paper or fabric are fabulous:

(I mean, come on - a stitch in dye fabric, summersville fabric, and polka dot ecopencils? How fabulous is that?)

and who not only sends you a birthday card for every day of the month leading up to your birthday:
but also gives you a head start on your next quilt with a 4 patch inside each card:

Don't you wish she were YOUR BFF/BQF?

Thank you, Jaye!

Happy New Year

Not that Seattle is all that cold in the winter, but I grew up in warmer, sunnier places than this, and by nature I am a sunshine and blue skies kind of girl. When I visit back East in the winter, I come back to Seattle and am reminded of how fortunate we are to have so much green to look at in the winter, but the skies are often still gray and grim and the clouds hang really low, and the days are just way too short. The light does come back quickly, but there's not all that much difference between December 21st and January 1st -- nothing to make me feel as though we've turned a corner and are headed into more congenial territory. So it's hard for me to think of January 1 as the beginning of anything.

But now it is mid-January, and already there really is appreciably more light than there was on the solstice - at 5 pm it is merely dim outside, not pitch dark. I went for a long walk yesterday, all through my neighborhood and down to a botanical garden near the water, and I saw winter-blooming cherries shedding their petals in soft drifts,


rhododendron buds getting fatter and fatter, and the tips of what I think are irises pushing up out of the ground.All signs that day by day we move farther away from those days when it hardly seems worth it to get out of bed because all too shortly it will be time to go back to bed again.

It's mid-January, and today is my birthday, and today finally feels like I have turned that corner and left the old year behind. And oh, it feels good to face forward with energy and interest and the desire to get out of bed every day and do stuff. Happy New Year, Happy New Year, Happy New Year!

Screen-free weekend - literally

So, my computer monitor is on the fritz - as of yesterday, it comes on for about 1/4 of a second and then the screen goes blank. I suppose the problem could be the video card for the computer, but... I tried hooking the monitor up to my work laptop yesterday and had the same problem, so I think it's really the monitor. Which is better, in a way, as I am more confident of my ability to replace the monitor than I am of my ability to replace the video card. But, still annoying, as I have photos to upload -- the Year of Scraps top no. 1 is pieced! -- and fabric to look at ;-), and this is NOT how I want to spend my January play money.

There are some flat screen monitors sitting forlornly in the IT work room at the office -- abandoned after people upgraded to larger monitors recently. I'm going to see if I can buy one for cheap -- because no matter how inexpensive a new one is, it's still a lot of yards to fabric to buy one. Cross your fingers and hope for me...

In other news -- I changed my normal gift certificate behavior and used a Christmas gift as soon as I got it -- ordered several pieces of the new Daisies and Dots collection as soon as Fabricworm got it in (I got the first cut off the bolts!) It arrived today, and it's all as bright and cheerful as it appeared on line. The scale of the prints is rather larger than I anticipated, though. It seems that more and more of the fabric lines coming out are medium to large scale -- the better to be used for garments and tote bags, etc., I suppose, but a little difficult for me to work with, since I tend to find a 4" square of fabric to be really really big. This stuff is really cheerful, though, which is what I want right now, so I will make it work!

Resurfacing

I probably should not have tried starting a blog in the fall, which is typically the busiest time of the year for me at my day job and especially as the Northwest days get shorter, the time when I have the least amount of energy and stick-to-it capacity. Since my last post it feels as though all I've done is work, and more work, and yet more work.

But I did get a chance to do some traveling that involved quilts and fiber. In October, I made my annual trip to California to visit Jaye and go to PIQF. I think it was a pretty good show this year, although I have to admit that there is no quilt in particular that has really stuck in my mind as some have in previous years. The fiber viewing highlight of that trip was the visit I made to the deYoung museum to see the exhibit titled To Dye For: A World Saturated in Color. The exhibit is about paste-resist dye techniques around the world -- everything from Japanese shibori to Indonesian batik to Ghanaian adinkra to Peruvian and Mongolian textiles. I was enthralled with the sense of richness achieved with the various techniques, all so very different from what I am seeing in the quilt world at the moment. The only thing I didn't like about the exhibit was the lack of a catalog! Unlike other museums I've visited recently, the deYoung does not allow photography in the textiles gallery, so I have pages and pages in my journal full of sketches from the exhibit, but black pen on white paper doesn't really evoke the depth of color I was seeing. The exhibit is only on through next weekend; if you have a chance, you should most definitely go and see it.

Last month I traveled to the East Coast to conduct a training, and then spent a few days in New York City. I had a chance to see friends that I hadn't seen in awhile, but also had time to myself, during which I made visits to Purl Soho and ABC Carpet and Home -- more for inspiration than to purchase anything -- and also visited the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum, and both branches of the American Folk Art Museum. The AFAM is celebrating the Year of the Quilt, during which they will be displaying numerous quilts from their collection. Some of the masterpiece quilts are currently on display at the 53rd Street branch, and there is an exhibit of star quilts at the Lincoln Center branch. I assumed they would not allow photography, so I didn't even try to take pictures, but Rita over at Red Pepper Quilts was there shortly after I was and was able to build a nice set of photos which you can see on her Flickr site. I came back from the museums itching to get back into the studio. All around my office people have tacked up that "Keep calm and carry on" poster, but I'm more in the mood for the Matt Jones' "Get excited and make things" version.

So, I'm actually looking forward to the next couple of months when it is still too cold and wet to be in the garden - time to get back to playing with fabric. Wheeeee!!!!!

Year of scraps

As mentioned back in October, I've been feeling the desire to work my way through some of my accumulated scraps. While the blog has been silent the past months, I have still been sewing... a little. The blue solids in this first quilt top are from a fat quarter pack of Kona cotton solids, but all the other fabrics are from my scrap bins.

Quilt top for Margaret's Hope Chest - 45 x 60.

The blocks below are made entirely from scraps...

Center square log cabin blocks - warm color scraps. These will finish to 3.75".

Center square log cabin blocks - cool colors. Same size as warm colors. This piece is what I've been working on this weekend. There is one more row of very dark blocks to add to the top and two down the right side. It should finish to just over 55" square, unless I decide to add more rows to the top and bottom and turn it into a rectangle. I'm pretty sick of working with 1.125" cut strips, so making it into a rectangle seems pretty unlikely!