Studio Shuffling

I'm so glad some of the quilters in the area are faithful library users--this is how I keep up to date on the new books out there. Another interesting one crossed my desk yesterday.

This is Creating Your Perfect Quilting Space by Lois L. Hallock. I grabbed it for lunch break reading and wasn't disappointed. By page 10, I could see changes I could make to improve my sewing space. At the very least I could shake things up a bit, and that's never a bad thing.

The first thing to be done today was to clear out some clutter that's been just messing with my mind. Too many projects are in process! I'm embarrassed to admit there are a couple garment projects that have been lurking unfinished for two or more years. One of them needs only buttonholes and that is no excuse whatsoever.

I managed to do some condensing and repurposing,

some vacuuming and dusting, and then accomplished a furniture move. The book mentioned a "work triangle" of sewing machine, pressing area, and cutting table. This makes sense. I used to need to move around my ironing board to get to the cutting table. Maybe this sort of thing was contributing to the general confusion? I rotated the sewing machine/serger/pressing unit a quarter turn to the right so that I have an accessible triangle. I'm pretty pleased.

This is as orderly as it gets, friends. I'm afraid I never will be a minimalist.

My only problem, which you can see if you look closely, is that the TV is now behind me when I sew. Hmmm. This seems like a job for Mr. Kathie, involving cable connections and odd-looking wall receptacles, which aren't in my job description. He tells me he will get on it tomorrow. At any rate, I'm pleased and plan to get cracking tomorrow also.

Maybe I will make those confounded buttonholes and get that two year old jacket finished once and for all.

Education, Suffering, and Finished Objects

They say that if you have three of something, it's a collection. So I guess this is a collection. These little nuns have been finding their way to me--all were gifts from friends who understand what it's like being the product of sixteen years of Catholic schooling. Or at least they sympathize and have been listening to my nun stories for a long time.

Then there's this one who sits on my desk at work.

You can wind her up and sparks will come out of her mouth as she approaches, ready to bash you with her ruler. I always say that I actually had her for math in high school. It's true!

There is a family tradition of this sort of thing. My mother always relished telling of being called a " bold brazen hussy" by a nun during her school career.

It's the very welcome end of what seems like a very long week. Returning after vacation is hard. I was either dragging myself around exhausted or, like yesterday, I lay awake most of the night due to the effects of THREE 44 ounce Diet Cokes. Perhaps I should think before doing THAT again.

But check out a FINISHED OBJECT!

Yes! It's the Kimono Shawl, completed and blocked. I love this shawl--the yarn, which is Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift, the color--pale heathery gray, and the pattern which presented far fewer headaches and meltdowns than my first shawl.

Later edit: Forgot to include pattern info. This is the Kimono Shawl from the book Folk Shawls by Cheryl Oberle.

Now, I'm relatively new to knitting and this is only my second shawl. I am still in the mindset (see Catholic school reference above) that one must suffer a bit for these moments of knitterly completeness and happiness. So I don't begrudge the SIX MONTHS I spent working on this shawl. But what am I to make of this woman who dashed off a Kimono Shawl in TEN DAYS?

Only awe, I guess. And gratitude. She posts marvelous tutorials on lace knitting and other things.

Clearly I have a long way to go. But I'm getting there.

Up North

Little Kitten Lake. This is early in the week with just a touch of fall color. Much more by the end of the week.

This is the lane that winds from our cottage to the main road.

Back to normal life after a week spent in the wilds of Northern Wisconsin, just about completely out of touch with civilization. It's good to be back home to creature comforts like soft water, fancy shower gel, and Mr. Kathie, but I spent a lovely week away from it all.

The weather was kind of poopy--chilly, gray, and rainy. But we had a couple days of cool sunshine. And even when the sky was sullen, the fall leaf color was getting better and better.And good friends, some Shiraz, and lots of sewing and knitting were good medicine for all eight of us.

Before I left, I set out some goals. Let's see how I did.

1. The Opposing Forces Quilt.

Here's how brainless I am. I had this pile of blocks and took them, but it never occured to me to take any extra fabric. I came up with a layout I like but it needs some blocks without orange. I sewed together as much as I could, but came home with a quilt with some blank spots. I also neglected to take along the rules for the original MArQ Opposing Forces Challenge. Is this quilt the corrent size? I bet not. Sigh.

2. The Red Japanese Kimono Squares. These are sewn together. I don't have a photo but they're pretty much randomized (I'm liking that word. What a classy-sounding word for toss-it-all-up-in-the-air-and-see-what-lands-where!). Next step will be to layer this and quilt and embellish like crazy.

3. The Alpha Project for the week, my Crossed Kayaks, never got off the ground till Thursday. It seemed we were all spending an awful lot of time knitting and watching movies. I didn't want to come home with this still just existing as an idea. But I finally got cracking and voila:

I'm really pleased with this little quilt--the secondary patterns just are so much fun. I had hoped to use up a lot of ten-year-old stash in this quilt. But the reality is that I used only a 7.5 inch strip from each fabric and there is still one heck of a lot of fabric in that bin. I have about four yards of a Smithsonian repro toile that will be the outer border and then I plan to back it with pieced hunks of stash. Done in the most artful way possible, of course...

This quilt went together in about two days, slick as a whistle. If anyone is contemplating this pattern, it's easy to put together and gives a lot of bang for the buck. Well, in my case, not a lot of bucks. I'm a firm believer in that old quilting precept about "once you've had the fabric for six months, anything you make from it is free".

4. The Kimono Shawl is D.O.N.E. I hope to get it blocked this week and will have an artsy shawl photo series then. My daughter sort of has dibs on it but she had just better love this shawl to pieces because it's going to be very hard to give up. We're going to have to make that crystal clear before I hand it over. I really enjoyed the yarn and every aspect of the six months I spent working on it.

5. One pink Lorna's Laces sock is nearly done.

6. I also started the Rosedale United sweater and had an entire sleeve completed, but I'm planning to un-knit and start over due to some sizing issues (made more challenging by the fact that I'm substituting bands of garter stitch for the ribbing at the cuff and at the bottom of the sweater).

I had mentioned that our group was sending about a dozen quilts to Ironwood, Michigan with Liz to be part of the biennial Northern Lights Quilt Guild show that was going on the first weekend we were Up North (about 50 miles from where we were staying). The show was great--it's always fun to see what other quilters are up to. And get this--my Carmen Miranda won the small quilts Viewers' Choice! That was an unexpected big smile to add to the week.

Returning to work today was as good as it could be. Maria brought in THREE bags of M&Ms to celebrate my return and also to help me make it through my first day back. It helped! Yay Maria.

Into the Woods

Vacation!! I'm in full prep mode.

Friday morning I'll be making my way up north, for a week in Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, with seven sewing and knitting friends. This is an annual trip, a great marker of the turning season. We stay in a large house (decor locked firmly in the 70s, but that sort of adds to the ambiance) on the property of a secluded fishing lodge called Wildcat, deep in the balsam-scented woods. A pristine lake lies right outside the back door, with loons and eagles swooping overhead.

We all haul most of our sewing rooms and half of our kitchens. I always take two sewing machines--my Bernina and my emergency-backup Featherweight, several quilt projects in Rubbermaid tubs, and a big basket of knitting. Renee will be bringing pantry staples and all of us will fill in with snacks and chocolate. And wine. We trade off meal prep, so each of us usually totes some kitchen devices we can't live without. One year there were four different coffee makers and a latte machine. For eight people.

(I swear that coffee drinkers are nuts. None of that for me--as long as I have a continual infusion of Diet Pepsi I'll be happy. Does that make me crazy too? Or just an example of arrested development?)

A couple people had asked me how this group evolved and how everyone gets along on a trip like this. I've known half of the people in this group since my days a decade ago when I worked at an area quilt shop. Two of the group, sisters, had owned another quilt shop of their own for several years. We all sort of hung out at that shop--that's how I met the rest of the people.

The sisters, Liz and Sue, used to run a much larger annual retreat at Wildcat. They found being tour directors and social directors very stressful. When a couple dozen people were along, there definitely were some Issues, ranging from people not liking the decor to people miffed at being assigned to what they perceived as the "B" accomodations. Arrrrgh.

After Liz and Sue closed their shop, the Wildcat trip was whittled down to a smaller group. We know each other well, have well-matched sewing abilities (although some are far better knitters than I am), and are more or less on the same page as to viewpoints and attitudes. We all agree that the funky decor is part of the charm. And in the course of this week-long trip, there is plenty of time for getting out on your own on little field trips. There are yarn shops to visit, quilt shops to explore, and thrift shops in each little town in the area. In other words, we aren't in each other's back pockets all week. But we DO do a lot of hanging out together. It's all very relaxing and fun.

Projects going along with me: (we'll have a grand accounting to see how I did, once I get back.)

1. My Opposing Forces blocks. The Milwaukee Art Quilters' deadline for this quilt was a year ago, and I've managed to make a quilt from the mistake blocks. Maybe it's about time to make the actual quilt.

2. Red Japanese kimono squares. These are glorious silk fabrics purchased at a quilt show several years ago. I plan to assemble them into a simple little top. Where I go with it after that is undecided.

3. I had mentioned here my love of a starry quilt in a 1991 Laura Nownes book called Star Quilts. I drafted it all out in EQ and was set to go, but then a couple weeks ago, a Nancy J. Martin book called A Treasury of Scrap Quilts came across my desk (purely in a professional capacity, you understand...) and I couldn't help but sift through it. I saw a quilt called Crossed Kayaks, made from kind of a Peaky and Spike block. This looks simpler than dealing with all the eight-point stars in the Laura Nownes quilt. Plus the Crossed Kayak block makes for some delectable circular secondary patterns. This is stash reduction territory--I hope to work through a lot of my traditional blues and browns. This is the Alpha project for the trip.

4. I WILL finish the Kimono Shawl this coming week.

5. Once the shawl is finished I plan to begin this sweater that I have loved for a couple years.

6. I may whittle away at these:

Northern Wisconsin is a place apart. As you drive north, the terrain and vegetation change noticeably. The woods turn to white birch and evergreen with crystal clear little lakes everywhere. It will definitely be autumn up there, with fall leaf color to see. Towns are few and far between and my family knows to expect to hear little from me. Cell phone reception is dicey--I have literally stood on tree stumps trying to get a signal.

I'll be back Sunday, September 24. Till then, happy sewing and knitting to all.

Some Peoples' Kids

Here is the best thing I can offer today. And it's pretty cool, if I do say so myself. See the face that's circled? That's my friend and old college roommate Alice in about the SECOND ROW at the first Beatles concert in Chicago, September 5, 1964. This picture ran in the Chicago Sun Times back at the time. Alice always did have a knack for being in the right place at the right time.

Oh my, the adventures we've had together. Unfortunately, this concert was not one of them. The Beatles never came within 200 miles of my small town. And even if they had, it's doubtful that my dad would've sprung for tickets. But a few years later I was springing for my own tickets and Alice and I saw The Stones together, and Joe Cocker, and Chuck Berry. Those were the days...!

Back to reality. Loooooong day at the library today.

It was election day, which always means a lot of traffic going through, and not necessarily people who normally frequent the library. One woman brought two kids and more or less dumped them in the library while she went to vote. The younger one--about 3 years old--was crying and really causing a disturbance, kind of aided and abetted by his older brother, who had to be 11 or 12. The younger one discovered our automatic door opener and was punching the button over and over. Alli told the boys that they needed to get out of the doorway--we've had enough experience with pinched fingers with that handicap-accessible door. So they went outside.

Later the mother called us and reamed us out for embarassing her boys and for "making her sons leave the library". She felt we should have been watching them.

Know what I have to say to parents who expect us to babysit?? You don't want to know.

I got home tonight and actually put dinner on the table--fried chicken and curried broccoli on rice. I didn't really want to tell Mr. Kathie that this was more or less a dress rehearsal for a dinner I hope to do up north next week at the cottage. Let him think that it was just his loving wife coming through. Ha!

I planned to relax and knit after dinner but I hit the chair and dozed off immediately. Not a lot of fiber art happened tonight.

And so it goes.

But I cannot BELIEVE I forgot to add a link to Sonji Hunt's blog last night when I showed her gorgeous little Irish Blessing quilt. For a real jolt of creativity, you need to check it out.

But Where Are the Shamrocks?

I'm always glad when I make the effort to get to a Milwaukee Art Quilters meeting. I have to say the internal dialogue went back and forth on it all day yesterday. It was an ugly, chilly day, with rain coming down in sheets throughout. Very tempting to NOT endure the rainy rush hour traffic into Milwaukee. Very tempting to go home and wrap up in a quilt on the couch and not move till bedtime.

But Casey and Jenny had emailed, "Come on along with us", and I'm grateful to them for pulling me out of my drab little world. The meetings are always endlessly inspiring. I get to feeling a bit isolated artistically; getting to a meeting and seeing what everyone is up to always gives me a big shot in the arm.

Some of the group showed the results of a poetry project--participants had exchanged poems and had made small response quilts.

This landscape by Chris Sommerfelt illustrates a poem by Tennyson.

Sonji Hunt's exuberant take on An Irish Blessing

Getting to be with Sonji is such a treat. She approaches design problems and life in general in a fresh and very original way. This is good medicine for those of us who toil in the world of the concrete and practical eight hours a day. The above quilt is such a marvel, full of visual surprises and lots of WOW. Sonju described it as "very straightforward". We couldn't avoid teasing her a bit: "Sonji! It's an Irish Blessing--where are the SHAMROCKS??"

Sonji's little quilt went home with a very lucky Casey.

This quilt by the wonderful Suzanne Riggio just underscores what I always feel about her pieces--they're perfect, just like little pieces of jewelry.

Poem interpretation by Carol Griffith. Can't remember the poem!

Regular S&T was also a treat.

Jenny Biwer's details her large floral pieces with extravagant and exquisite stitching. I love to examine Jenny's quilts closely--sometimes she hides little images in the quilting. But even when it's just straight quilting, it's PERFECT.

Cecilia Rotter took a class with Hollis Chatelain. This dye painted and stitched Navajo portrait is the result.

Judy Zoelzer Levine has been working with upholstery scraps. In Judy's hands, wonderful things happen.

This is one of Dagmar Plenk's recent small fused and painted pieces. Dagmar Plenk Fabric Arts is one of my favorite places in my area to find gorgeous hand-dyed cottons, silks, and velvets. She sells from home and vends at shows but has no online sales yet, as far as I know.

And this is far from all. Blogger gives me fits in uploading and imposes its own limits. As many of us well know.

Off to work!

Art Show

Sunday was a good artsy day despite gray skies, cool weather, and drizzle. Friend Rose and her daughter Emily trekked up here from Chicago and the three of us set out for the Mount Mary College Starving Artists' Show. Rose and I are alums and friends since our college days. It's always fun to go back to the campus, which is beautiful and the absolute image of ivy-covered Collegiate Gothic.

The stars aligned and we were able to connect with Alice, another college friend, at the show. So it was a good group for sharing the day.

The Starving Artists' Show is an end-of-season thing for most of the artists involved and often deals can be had. Usually you have no intention of buying anything but then maybe you see Something You Cannot Live Without. Talk about the stars aligning! That can be a dangerous alignment...

And so it was. We stumbled on the work of a San Francisco artist named Jie Zhou--wonderfully evocative oil paintings, many of them watery scenes from China. I bought one.
I'm very pleased. (Disregard shadow on the right--unfortunately that's me taking the picture.)

Happy Mail!

Our weather has turned chilly and autumnal. And though I know we still have some nice days ahead of us, change is definitely coming. Our cranes are still with us daily but I imagine it will only be another week or two and they'll be heading south.

On a gray day, there's nothing like a nice squishy package in the mail. Last week I signed on to the mini fabric giveaway over at A Bird in the Hand. And today my package arrived. Just as I anticipated, there were fabrics that are totally new to me. I especially love the mid-century and the Japanese prints. It will be fun to see where they lead me.

And don't I know that it's ME who ought to be doing the de-stashing. My hat is off to these organized folk who can edit their stash and bear to part with anything.

Today was the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival down in Elkhorn, WI, and although I would like to have gone, I never quite made it there. Will was picking up his new car (!) today and I thought I might be needed to provide some transportation for him. But by the time I found out my services weren’t needed, it was just a bit too late to head out for Elkhorn. Once again I say, “next year”.

Instead, I’ve been sewing all day. I started working in earnest on the Cowboy Jacket. I decided to do the black satin lining as an underlining, e.g. sewn in one piece with the outer fabric. So it took a bit to serge the lining pieces to the cowboy fabric, all around the edges, but I think it’ll work out well. I don’t use the serger very often but these garment projects are when the serger really proves its worth. In the end I had just enough fabric to cut pockets—with a print this splashy, I like to match the pocket to the fabric it will sit on.

This was a weird print. There are several different cowboy images and—it took some arm-twisting with the fabric to get those pockets cut from the right images.

And finally the piping. I haven’t quite figured how I’m going to manage the beginning and ending of the piping. Going to sleep on that one.

Oh man, I hope this doesn't end up looking like I'm wearing the drapes, a la Scarlett O'Hara...

My favorite sewing accompaniment—a nice classic B&W movie. Tonight’s was Brief Encounter, with Trevor Howard courting Celia Johnson amid the train whistles and the teacups and that gorgeous Rachmaninoff Second Concerto. Sigh.

Tomorrow is the Starving Artists’ Show at Mount Mary College. Rose and Emily are coming up for lunch and the show.

Mid-Week Inspiration

Hello, my name is Kathie and I'm a magazine addict.

I can't leave them alone. I spend way, WAY too much money on them. If the theme is home decor, antiques, art, books, sewing, quilting, beading, food, and lately Buddhism, or if it's anything British or French combining any of the above, my wallet is on its way out of my bag. And I have the piles of magazines on every horizontal surface in my house to prove it.

(And I have years worth of most of them. I had nearly every issue of Threads until last year when I got mad at them and dropped my twenty-year subscription. But that's a topic for another post.)

Anyway, after work last night I drove up to Brookfield to pick up a few sewing-related things I needed. I stopped in Harry W. Schwartz, our area's very best independent book retailer and stumbled onto a new source of wonder and inspiration in the form of this very pricey magazine:

Rich and Poor, Variation 8 by Mamoun Sakkal

This magazine. Oh. My. Goodness. That cover art above would make a dynamite quilt, wouldn't it? It's a type of Arabic writing called Square Kufi, the script working its way inward in a spiral. Such graphic impact and it actually says something! (It's a text attributed to the Caliph Ali.) And that ripple efffect--that just brings the whole thing to life.

But here's what made me hyperventillate and then shell out the considerable shekels for this magazine:

Alphabetic Composition by Kjell Sjoegren

This is pen and ink on paper but oh, what a quilt this would make. This one image literally kept me awake last night. One could take the idea of this and render it a la Tonya, in free-form pieced lettering. Or one could do it in fused applique, which would make it possible to better imitate the fine points, such as the angles and curves and the wonderful negative spaces crossing multiple letters. This just absolutely makes my heart sing.

Thinking, thinking...

I have always loved typography, letterforms, and fonts. We played with just a smattering of pen lettering in a college design class--just enough to make me dangerous with a wedge-tip felt marker. I get to play with fonts in my work and to pick just the right one to express a mood when I'm doing publicity things for the library. I love the look of letters and numbers and words and have a healthy stash of letterform fabric such as this gorgeous Marimekko duo that I haven't been able to bring myself to cut into in the, oh about fifteen years I've owned it.

Positive/Negative Marimekko Cottons

After the bookstore last night, I stopped in at Bigsby's, which, if not exactly a LQS is certainly a LBS: Local Bernina Shop. It used to be a hole-in-the-wall sewing machine dealership with buttons but is now a wonderland of Bernina and thread and patterns and notions and--lately--fabric too. They're getting ready to vend at the Madison Quilt Expo and were kitting merchandise like crazy. Owner Rosemary took me for a quick tour of the newest fabric arrivals--wonderful Japanese and Australian things. And fun space-age-y barkcloth. It's all pretty exciting, but then, fabric has always made me weak in the knees.

I stayed strong. No fabric purchases, just about $40 worth of Mettler thread--enough to get me through the upcoming Boulder Junction trip, I hope.

Too Fast

In Liz's Kitchen

This weekend sure flew by. I had looked forward to savoring the three days off and poof! It's all gone, too fast. As usual I didn't get everything accomplished that I'd hoped to, but it was fun trying.

Saturday was total retail therapy escape. My cousin Jane and I hit the best mall in the area—the one with ALL the stores—and did some serious damage. Lots of girly stuff--we cut a wide swath through the place. Jane knows more about beauty products than anyone else I know and it’s always an education trolling Sephora with her. It’s fun to do a totally self-indulgent day every once in a while. Besides all this, we were honoring Jane’s birthday and did a nice celebratory lunch. Very fun.

Much of my Sunday was spent wandering the maze of East Side Milwaukee streets looking for Will. We had set a time and place for me to pick him up and he wasn’t where he’d said he’d be. The misunderstanding was complicated by the fact that he assumed I’d have my phone. If I’d had my phone there would have been no problemo. Like an idiot I’d left it at home on the charger. We eventually connected—I’ll spare you the details of all the general confusion, door pounding, buzzer buzzing, and street wandering, except to say that I had to parallel park twice. TWICE! That’s always a white-knuckled high adventure with me at the wheel.

Bottom line: I will NEVER leave home without my phone again.

We eventually made our way out here to the country and finished the day with a relaxed dinner of grilled tuna, mango salsa, corn on the cob, stir-fried summer squash, and peach crisp. So excellent to have at least one of the kids at home. The day turned out pretty well after all, even if no sewing got accomplished.

More from Liz's Kitchen

Two weeks from now I’ll be up north on my annual trip with several sewing buddies. We’ve decided to enter some quilts in a guild show in Ironwood, Michigan, which will take place while we’re up there. My friend Liz, one of the above-mentioned sewing buddies, is a sales rep for a notion company and plans to be in Ironwood on business this week. She’s offered to shuttle the quilts for the show up to The Fabric Patch in Ironwood. I dropped my quilts at Liz's house this afternoon. It's always a visual feast to visit her home--besides her other talents, Liz is heavily into vintage. I think she actually has more stuff than me, though I hate to admit it.

Tonight I got the cowboy jacket all cut out. I'm happy to say that I had enough fabric to match the pockets but only barely. The thinking part is over--just hope I thought it out all right. And I did find some leftover bias strips that will make the perfect piping for the seams. Hoping I can get cracking on this project this week--it's nearly time to be wearing jackets. If this one turns out, it should be pretty cute.

Nightingales and .....Cranes

I finished a great book last night: A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight. It's funny how you hear about something new, and then suddenly you're hearing about it everywhere. It was like that with this book. First I heard a podcast interview with the author, then reviews of the book started showing up in The New York Times and in some of my library journals. I love good, well-written historical fiction. The universe seemed to be aiming me at this book and I wasn't disappointed.

Late one night, author Susan Straight was listening to the whistle of passing trains and smelling the jasmine that smothers her white picket fence close to where the road dead-ends into the sagebrush chaparral near her Riverside home. Her imagination strayed from the contemporary novel she was writing; what if her three daughters, sleeping peacefully across the hall, had been born 200 years ago, when girls just like them were someone's property?
Straight wandered into their bedroom, where they were safe and softly breathing, and ran her hands over their stuffed animals, their Kobe Bryant poster, their books, touched their peaceful faces and long curly hair. What if her girls were the children of rape, or the sexual prey of the people who owned them?

Straight — a white writer who had three children with her ex-husband, who is black — set aside her other novel and began a painstakingly researched period novel, "A Million Nightingales," about the life her daughters might have led in America's not-so-distant past of racial feudalism.

(This an excerpt from a review published in the Los Angeles Times and reprinted in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in May, 2006.)

A Million Nightingales follows a young woman named Moinette, racially mixed and blessed with a strong and independent mind, making her way through life in antebellum Louisiana, beset by challenge and adversity. Such sadness; such an uspeakable legacy of inhumanity bequeathed to modern Americans. It is beautifully imagined and written. If you like historical fiction that makes you think, give this one a try.

Yes, we still have this foolishness going on in the back yard. Mr. Kathie ran several strips of bright blue tape across the windows that seemed most in jeopardy. That seems to have taken care of the unpleasantness between the Dad Crane and his imaginary rival. In other words, no more blood spatter on the windows. But Junior Crane comes up and peers in the windows at us, which is kind of odd. What goes on in his little bird brain?

They do a lot of grooming. There are feathers strewn all over--the yard looks looks like a bird exploded. You can see some of the feathers in this picture.

Last year they were with us till late September. It's been fun and we certainly have learned a lot about crane behavior.