You're Crazy! Project Quilting 12.5

 I was so excited when I saw the 5th Project Quilting Challenge on Sunday. The prompt for the week is "You're Crazy" and we are to create our own personal interpretation and be inspired by the "Crazy Quilt".

I LOVE Crazy Quilts. There is something so simple, yet oh so elegant about them. Women made them as show pieces, using their left over "Fancy" scraps of fabric and then probably sat around all winter long by lamp light and embellished them with bright colored thread, beads and baubles.  The fact that they are just random pieces of fabric put together without rules is what really attracts me to them. This is my kind of quilting. 

Taking an excerpt from the article "Crazy Quilts and Mad Women", [...] the crazy quilt trend of the nineteenth century, incorporated motifs from Japanese art and decor, English embroidery, and fairyland. [...] In an era obsessed with female hysteria, it is no surprise that crazy quilts were the order of the day.

Somewhere in my stash of quilting books I have a book about the history of crazy quilts and how to create your own. Of course this week it felt like too much work to dig it out and get some tips, so like the crazy lady I am I just decided to wing it. 

A number of years ago our quilt guild purchased a stash of fabric and then divided it amongst those of us who wanted to "buy into the stash", the lady who had owned the stash made costumes for the theatre and was a quilter. This was (is) the most amazing stash of fabric, in my share of the stash there was a box full of what I like to call "fancy" fabric. It was mostly dress lining fabric, satin and taffeta. It must have been from a specific show, or maybe a wedding, but all the colors are in varies shades of ivory, rose, coral, grey and pinks. I have absolutely no use for that box of fabric, but no one throws fabric away, so I knew I still had it somewhere and I needed it to use for my crazy quilt! The following photo is what the box looked like after I dumped it out on my sewing room floor....just like a crazy! LOL 

I love crazy quilts and HATE the color Rose pink. Which is what I had to work with, that and a little grey. I have absolutely no velvet fabric anywhere, but I did have some wool and also thought it would be a great idea to add some minky fabric to replicate velvet. (it wasn't but I made it work). While digging through my boxes I came across a little piece of embroidery and thought it would be fun to add this to my project to make it feel more authentic. 

My sewing machine has all sorts of different fancy stitches so after I cobbled together my "CRAZY" quilt I used a rose colored thread and a maroon thread to create some fun stitches. I started out doing this before adding batting and a backing and realized it would work better if I used the decorative stitches as my quilting. 

The ring tone on my phone is the Waylon Jennings song "I've Always Been Crazy", so whenever my phone rings it blares out my life's theme..."I've always been crazy, but it's kept me from going insane". So I used the letters feature on my machine and attempted to add that to one of the larger sections of fabric. Of course I have never used this feature before and I really didn't know what I was doing, and probably should have practiced first! I tried to fix my lettering with a sharpie, and you can imagine how that worked out on silk fabric. I went too fast when I was stitching the word CRAZY and it looks more like CRABBY, which my husband would tell you fits better anyway! LOL 

I also dug through my mess and found some lace and rick rack to add to the completed top, and then added buttons to hide the corners that didn't quite match up. This would not win a prize for well executed sewing. After I had it quilted, I decided if I was going to create a train wreck I should probably just keep going, I had a scrap of the mint green minky and found a pillow inners and made the finished quilt into a decorative pillow case. 

So that is my finished project for the week, its not the most amazing project I have ever made, or the most beautiful! My phone keeps picking up oranges and browns instead of the rose and grey. But it could be because it is on a brown couch.  The finished pillow is approx. 10 X 15. 

 I hope someday to have "fancy fabric" in rich colors I actually like and brush up on my embroidery skills, and create a real crazy quilt. Someday! 

More Fun than a Barrel of Monkeys- Project Quilting 12.4

 I know I sound like a broken record, constantly repeating what a weird year 2020 was & how 2021 is turning out to be equally weird. But I think in all honesty everyone feels the same way.

It has just been a weird year. Even the excitement that I normally feel about Project Quilting is somewhat muted & missing something. Everything feels like we are in some sort of Limbo Land. Waiting and anticipating...but exactly what is it we are waiting for?  

While we are all clearly in the same pandemic, each of us has our own waiting and wanting. Which granted that is how life is even when we aren't in a pandemic, but for some reason add the whole insanity of last year & the whole crazy of this year so far, and it just feels extra weird. 

One of my daughters sent this meme to me and told me it was the spitting image of ME over the past year...LOL...she is right! 

So when the challenge for this week came out, I had a difficult time trying to decide if I wanted to be excited about it or not. The challenge was to create something using the quilt block pattern, "Snails Trail" or in some books called the "Monkey Wrench".

Well the monkey wrench pattern I thought of was this one, and I have never liked this quilt block.

So then when I saw the Snail Trail and that is was also called a monkey wrench, I just thought "weird". 

After reading some of the posts from other quilters who had already started the challenge about how challenging the block was, I thought great. I don't like following rules, measuring and cutting. I am a lazy, chop up the fabric and sew, quilter. But I decided maybe this would be good for me to follow a pattern for a change. There are as many ways to make the block as there are variations of quilts using the block. Some very basic and others which are just incredible. 

I think the pattern when done in two colors looks like those funny monkeys in the "Barrel of Monkeys" game. All just stringing along hooked together with their arms and tails.

 

Somewhere in the back of my mind I was envisioning a barrel of monkeys quilt, in fact I even imagined that somewhere in my stash I had monkey fabric. I did not, but trust me, I will be ordering some.  I decided I was going to make my block into a red monkey swinging through the trees. Just one and keep it simple. 

The block turned out to be easier to make than it looks, and since there are so many different ways to make it, I think I would like to explore some of the methods when I make my monkey quilt in the future. 

I found a pattern that was supposed to be foundation piecing, but decided that was too much work and just cut the triangles and squares and made blocks, without the foundation part of it.  

As you can see, this is not a red monkey, and there are no trees. 

If you have a fabric stash, you know what it's like to dig through all that fabric and get distracted from your original plan. First I found a fun bright colored tropical print that I decided would make really cool snails, so I tossed the monkey out the window and decided to go with a snail instead.

I dug around some more and found a pretty salmon color to use for the back ground, but while digging for that, I came across this amazing piece of hand dyed fabric. I have no idea where it came from, but I wish I had about 10 yards of it instead of the one little fat quarter. It blended so beautifully with the salmon and I knew I had to use it. Of course when sewn together they almost blended too much, and I could no longer see a monkey or a snail. More like an amoeba. 

If I wanted to impress you by pretending to be artsy and know what I was talking about, I would tell you that when I created my challenge piece I was trying to convey the feeling of a cosmic journey, an explosion of swirling star dust, the birth of a cell and the sense that all life is connected though our shared conscience, adding an organic texture to my block using hand dyed fabric and thread painting that tied each piece of the larger block together....  

But truth be told... I picked out two fabrics I really liked, sewed them together, decided they were just weird looking, and found some variegated thread that looked good on the fabric and then quilted them in the hopes that maybe it would look a little less weird and look a little more like "I planned it this way". 

I bound my creation using a piece of brown leafy batik binding that was already cut and in my left over binding pile. My finished piece is 13 x 14. Not quite square...so weird. 

I honestly wasn't sure about this challenge when I started. I was apprehensive about the imagined difficulty in the block itself. But after getting started and figuring out that to get it to sew together correctly I just needed to imagine it as a puzzle piece and follow the pattern layout. The possibilities with the block are endless. 

So in keeping with the weird of the whole past 12 months, instead of a Snail Trail, or a Monkey Wrench, I created a uniquely strange - More Fun than a Barrel of Monkeys Amoeba Quilt. 

Make sure you take a look at the other challenge quilts this week, it is really fun to check out the different ways people have interpreted the block pattern, from snails to witches hats, every idea under the sun! 

They can be found on the Persimon Dreams Blog at kimlapacek.com  under the Project Quilting tab. 

Project Quilting- 12.3 Virtual Vacation Challenge

After being so lazy in the 12.2 Fussy Cut Challenge I thought I better step up my game this week.

This weeks challenge is "Virtual Vacation" and we were to create a project that symbolized the vacation we aren't on! 

On Sunday when the challenge came out, I thought about a road to somewhere, and I decided I would think about somewhere I wanted to go and then create from there. 

Monday morning I opened my email and the first email that popped up was an ad with an article titled "There Is No Dream Destination", that stuck in my head for the rest of the day, and I kept thinking, well where can I go then? LOL 

It's interesting after almost a year of hanging out at home, for the most part, I realize there is really no place I want to go. There are days when I would like to get in my car and just start driving, no destination, just drive, so I still wanted to do a road theme. But a road to where? 

I had just ordered a stack of fabric from Quilter's Corner in Faulkton, SD and there is a piece from Moda called Cider Golden Delicious Tart. I am in love with this piece of fabric. It has a nostalgic feel of the 70's to it. Remember the record album covers, old rock band posters, the vintage fashion, it's all there in that one piece of fabric.

 So I decided I was going to create something that had the feel of a vintage poster. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I had good intentions to get this project finished early, but the week got away from me, suddenly it was Saturday and I had nothing but a sketched idea on a piece of notebook paper. 

It was cold today, I have customer quilts I need to get done, but I had been up late all week hand binding quilts and I decided I was going to just hang out in my sewing mess and get my challenge quilt done.

Of course I still didn't know where I was going to go on my vacation.  As much fun as we had "Back in the Day",  I really wasn't sure I wanted to travel back to the 70's! 

Thinking about my road in the middle of my design I was reminded of Walt Whitman's poem,

Song of the Open Road, and the line in section 8, 

The efflux of the soul is happiness, 

There have been many days this past year I have felt like happiness was pretty elusive. But this line reminds me that happiness is already inside of me, and I don't need to go looking for it any further than myself. 

So there is where my plan was hatched. A 70's vibe piece of fabric, old rock band posters, happiness, the open road, makes sense doesn't it! LOL 

So I created my little quilt and call it, "My Virtual Vacation on the Road to Happiness". 

I really wanted to find a little mirror to put in the place where my sunbeams are, I wanted the mirror to represent the idea that happiness was inside of us. I couldn't find a round mirror, or a silver button, but I liked the way the  bright shiny gold button looked with my fabric choices. It's all made using fabric scraps, except that one section of good stuff, and I added some road signs with good advice for recharging your Happiness along the way. 

My finished quilt is 8 x 10 

A Bright Spot on the Horizon ~ Project Quilting Season 12- Challenge 1

Life isn't just about darkness or light, 

rather it's about finding light within 

the darkness.

~ Landon Parham

When the Project Quilting 12.1 challenge was announced on Sunday the rules were that we were to base our project on Pantone's Color of the Year 2021-which is actually two colors:  Pantone 17-5104 Ultimate Gray + Pantone 13-0647 Illuminating. Our project this week must be predominantly Gray & Yellow. 

I was excited because I love these two colors together and I already had a spark of an idea. That is until I started digging through my stash. Now if it were a green & brown challenge I would have enough fabric to create 100 projects, but find some grey or yellow in my mess, not a chance.

I did manage to pull out some batiks that were mostly gray, I found one lone strip of bright yellow/gold & was thrilled to find some gray wool pieces. On Sunday I had a plan & I had fabric!

To say 2020 was a rough year is an understatement. I can't really claim the entire year was rough since we made it through January & February with our hopes still intact. But when the middle of March rolled around the year pretty much went south. 

Not all of the stress of my year can be blamed on the virus, life can be tough even without germs lurking around, but throw a pandemic into the mix & suddenly the crazy became even crazier.  There were days when life just felt overwhelming.

Yet we all know, we have had other equally tough years. Throughout history people have gone through hard times, plagues, sorrows & heartbreaks. What keeps us going, how do we muster the strength to get up every day & face the unknowns? 

I believe for many of us it is our faith & a strong sense of hope that keeps us always moving forward. Even when we are in times of deepest despair there is something hardwired in us that tells us that there is something better waiting for us. We may not see it in the here and now, but deep inside us we know it's there. There is always a "bright spot on the horizon."

Seeking out the bright spots in our lives can make the present situation more bearable. This year it seemed there were a lot of dark days for many people, some days really felt hopeless on all fronts. Keeping ones eye on the horizon wasn't always easy, sometimes just when we felt things were working out the way we hoped they would, something else would come along & knock us back down.  

I like to think I am a pretty optimistic person, but this past year my negativity came out in full force. I was crabby, annoyed, tense, irritated, down right ANGRY & most of the time honestly irrational.  It was probably a really good thing we were stuck at home for most of the year!  I know in order for me to keep moving forward, I need to hold on to hope, keep the faith & look for that bright spot on the horizon. 

One of the bright spots for me this year has been a running conversation that two of my dearest friends and I have been having together through texts & messages every week. For a number of reasons based around health issues, work issues & travel issues we have not been able to get together in person, yet we have kept in touch almost daily. 

This bright spot of shared love for each other has kept me going on some pretty bleak days. We don't really talk about anything overly philosophical, mostly we talk about art & quilting projects we are working on, our grandkids, THEY were able to talk about their gardens this summer (mine was a bust! LOL), we rant about life, jobs, things that annoy us, frustrate us or even things that we are frightened or worried about. Our conversations connect us with the shared hope that soon we will be able to get together in person & spend an entire day together doing absolutely nothing but enjoying each others company! 

When I found out the challenge was one using only gray and yellow, I knew I wanted to make something that represented the bright spot that has kept me going through some crazy, rough days. 

I love string quilts,  I think cutting all those strips of fabric & then sewing them back together without any rules, makes my heart happy. So I decided I would make a little string quilt that represented the horizon on a dreary day & insert a little tiny piece of bright yellow HOPE to catch your eye.

I got a little carried away cutting my strings & some of them got pretty tiny & hard to sew together. I quilted it with straight lines, adding some zig zags along the edges with a darker thread. 

I liked the way the edges looked when I was done quilting it, jagged & unfinished, just like 2020 felt.  I took a strip of the frayed pieces of wool & used it as binding, leaving one edge ragged to give it that "rough around the edges" feel. 

It reminds me of a little woven rug & the finished size is 7 x 12. 

Before Project Quilting started this season I was feeling a little bit meh about even joining this year. But once I starting slashing that gray fabric & sewing it back together, my hope was restored & I was anticipating the next challenge before I even finished binding this one.

Keep the Faith.

The most amazing things in life 

tend to happen right at the moment 

you're about to give up hope.