Month: October 2024

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The First Steps to College Fjord

The College Fjord quilt is going to be the most difficult quilt I have attempted so far. I made a SPREADSHEET. It’s ugly.

Let’s discuss, for the moment, the fact that I still cannot find the solid blues I want and that the indecision surrounding said blues has (temporarily, I hope) paralyzed forward momentum on this project for my ADHD brain. (Also, let’s ignore the fact that I have had a metric crap-ton of other things on my plate for the last few weeks, and I have not really been able do sit down and do anything in the sewing room beyond finishing a couple of bindings and watching old episodes of “All Things Great and Small.” (So excited about the new season in January! But I digress…)

I actually shouldn’t say that I haven’t found the blues I need for this project. I have found the blues for the mountains. Six of them. Muted blues, ranging from so-dark-it’s-almost-black to so-light-it’s-almost-white. Found them in one store actually – it was pretty perfect. 

My issue has been finding solid sky blues. Bright blues. None of this muted nonsense. The morning sky (and the sky in this photo) is a brilliant, sapphire blue ranging from deep royal blue to, again, a blue that’s almost white, but a different almost-white than the muted blue almost-white. I can hear you now – “A blue that’s almost white is a blue that’s almost white. You can’t have different shades of it.” I (and the people who make paint chips you can get at the hardware store) beg to differ. Trust me, there is a difference.

A few weeks ago, I found a jelly roll of Kona solid blues and thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It looked perfect in the roll, inside its plastic, in the store. I got it home and unrolled it and…it was no longer perfect. Some of the colors stuck out like sore thumbs. There were 12 different shades of blue. I put them up on the design wall and picked out a couple of them as being wrong. I’ve been staring at them for weeks, and I can’t decide whether I need another roll or two (one roll doesn’t have enough for my project), or if I should just start over from scratch. And I also can’t decide whether I should use the 2.5” strips as is or cut them down to 1.5” strips for a true bargello (and a better blend from light to dark). At it’s longest, the sky needs to be 13.5” – with 2” (finished) strips, I only need 7 blues, but with 1” (finished) strips, I need double that, which means finding even more blues.

See why there’s a ton of indecision paralysis? I feel like I need to decide how many blues I actually need before I can go out and find them, and at the same time, I feel like I need to see how many blues I can find before I make a decision about how many of them I need. I don’t want to decide I absolutely MUST have 14 blues, only to find that I can only actually locate ten of them.

Ugh.

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Horseshoe Canyon Is Done!

I finished the last of the binding on the Horseshoe Canyon quilt while I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago (finally catching up on the blog), and I’m really happy with it.

The binding wasn’t quite done when this picture was taken, but it was close enough. 

It’s rare for me to think that a border fully completes the quilt, but in this case, I totally believe it. I wasn’t entirely sure I liked the quilt before I put the border on it, to be honest. Once I put the border on, it felt…right for the first time. 

While I was at it, I hung the Crater Lake quilt over the fireplace for the first time as well. Here’s that update:

I think I started that quilt almost two years ago, and it’s finally up over the mantle. I’m glad it’s done, and I think it looks exactly like I was intending for it to look. That’s pretty rare in my house.

I’ve also been working on the College Fjord bargello, but it is slow going and I am still trying to find solid blue fabrics, so an update on that will have to wait.

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I Was Not Kidding…

…when I said I was going to have a busy fall.

Having said that, the abstract iceberg is done! I found an evening to quilt it, which took a lot less time than I thought it would. As a result, I was able to get the binding machine-stitched on that night as well. And a few nights later, the hand stitching was completed. I was even able to spend a couple of hours sewing the sleeve for the dowel onto the back so I could get it on the wall yesterday. Here it is in its displayed glory, hanging in my living room above my workstation.

I’m so pleased with the result!

I did post a photo of the quilt on Instagram and tagged Oscar, but he either has not seen it yet or has not reacted. (I suspect the former – I don’t think he spends a ton of time on Instagram.) I’ll let you know what he says if he ever sees it.

I wasn’t sure whether or not I would like the quilt without its borders, but the more I looked at it, the more it just fit, and the less I could imagine it with any sort of border around it. And now, where it is on that navy blue wall – I think it’s framed enough.

Now to get the sleeves for the Tracy Arm iceberg quilt and the Crater Lake quilt sewn on so I can hang those, too!

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A Busy Fall Commences

We’ve come to fall. Autumn in New England, actually. What everyone puts off during the summer – and there’s a lot of it – gets done in September and October. You’ll be reading this in early October because of the timing of my posts, but I’m writing it in mid-September, and I am about to enter the busiest fall I have had since my teaching days (fall of 2019 was my last fall in the classroom). If ever there were evidence of my ADHD, here it is – my commitments for this fall!

  • Prepping five photographs for submission to the Small Stones Festival of the Arts  
  • Beginning my term as president of Cornerstone Quilters Guild in Charlton, MA
  • Continuing my term as Vice President of Information and Technology for the Worcester Chorus, plus four concerts (Oct. 8, Oct. 27, Nov. 9-10, and Dec. 7) with the chorus or with the Bachtoberfest Chorus. Each concert has a different repertoire.
  • Beginning my term as Newsletter Editor for a local group of a social organization I belong to
  • Attending as many of my nephew’s football games (it’s his senior year) as I can
  • Trying to get my kitchen cabinets painted before the weather gets cold

Oh, wait…you want me to make quilts, too? Don’t worry! I will. It’ll just be a little slower than I’d like it to be.

So here’s what I have on my plate in the world of quilts:

  • Horseshoe Canyon quilt: still sitting, ready for stitch-in-the-ditch whenever I have a long enough time frame to devote to it.
  • Abstract iceberg quilt: also ready to be quilted! I layered it with the batting and backing and basted it all together sometime last week.
  • Oregon waterfall quilt: have fabric, ready to create paper templates and move on it, but needs a good long stretch of time to get in the mindset.
  • College Fjord quilt: still looking for fabrics. The blue ombre I ordered online isn’t going to cut it for the sky. Search begins anew. (Repeat after me: “I will NOT start dyeing my own fabrics. I will NOT start dyeing my own fabrics.”)
  • The other bargello quilt (which I will call “Hus Ved Havet” quilt – I’ll explain later): ironically, the ombre fabric I ordered online may be the perfect sky fabric for THIS quilt, but I am not willing to start sourcing the other fabrics for this until I have proof of concept with the College Fjord quilt. Stay tuned.

So the three quilts that are well underway are at a kind of standstill until I have a good chunk of time to devote to one or the other. The exception is the quilting for the abstract iceberg quilt, which again is stitch-in-the-ditch and could probably be done in an evening one of these days, if I can find one. The fourth quilt is at a standstill until I find fabric(s) for the sky. The fifth I won’t even consider until the fourth is well underway. So…here we sit.

In the meantime, I did a little binding work on a quilt that’s been waiting for the final hand stitching on the binding for probably close to a year. This quilt has absolutely nothing to do with this project, but it’ll be nice to free up some space in my box of UFOs. Maybe I’ll even get the quilting done on a Halloween door hanging I started years ago. Boo.

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Fabrics Before Grids

As mentioned earlier, I also went to the first two of the quilt shops in the All New England Quilt Shop Hop this past weekend. The shop hop runs through the end of October, and there’s no way I’ll get to all 91 shops, but it was a nice day on Sunday so I thought I’d go out for a drive. I particularly wanted to look for fabrics for the bargello quilts. I actually decided to start with the fabrics for only one of them, even though I drew out the plans for both on paper. I figure if the first one is a disaster, at least I won’t have purchased all of the fabrics for the second one!

I decided to start with the College Fjord image (above). I measured out the image at 30” x 50” on paper, and I had a general idea of what I thought it might look like. In my head, this quilt only involves solid fabrics (especially the sky), and it only involves shades of blue. (We’ll talk about the clouds in the picture later – I have a plan for those.) One of the stores I visited this weekend had not one single solid in the whole place, but the other shop had a whole section of solids, which I brazenly raided for the blue shades for the mountains. I started to also pick shades of blue for the sky, but I really quickly realized that I am actually going to need a blue ombre to achieve what I want to achieve there. Online fabric stores for the win! Ombre ordered – waiting for it to arrive in the mail.

I can hear you asking about those clouds in that image. The clouds – along with their reflection in the water – make that image what it is. I can bargello the heck out of a million shades of blue, but if the clouds aren’t there, the image just wouldn’t be the same, would it. My secret weapon – mother-of-pearl buttons. A little backstory…

When I travel, I try to buy fabric or yarn from small local shops, rather than trinkets, to take home with me. (I’m still trying to figure out what to do with a particularly lovely skein of purple, green, and yellow Mardi Gras yarn from New Orleans.) On the Alaska cruise I recently went on, we stopped in Alert Bay, a small First Nation community between Vancouver Island and mainland Canada. I found the mother-of-pearl buttons in a small shop on my walk back from the U’mista Cultural Center with Caroline, one of my cruise-mates. My thoughts, even then, went to using those buttons to recreate the clouds of that image when I finally made a quilt out of it. I am SO looking forward to actually doing so!

Looking for local fabric and yarn has become a really fun thing to do when I travel. In each town we went to on that cruise, I looked for a local yarn or fabric store. In Haines, AK, I found some yarn and a new-to-me-but-not-local maker of lovely knitting needles. In Sitka, I found a shop with both yarn and fabric and came away with a panel of Alaska national park images and some yarn made by a local-living-elsewhere. In Wrangell, I never found the fabric/yarn store (or maybe it was closed? we were there on a Sunday), but I did enjoy the Stikine Stitchers’ annual Fourth of July quilt show in the windows of all of the shops. How lovely that even in such a small town (pop. just over 2000 people) there’s a quilt guild that’s organized enough to put on a show each year! I found the buttons in Alert Bay, and in Vancouver (where the cruise ended and I met up with a friend for a couple of days), I found some fabric AND some gorgeous beads whose color mimics the iceberg in the Tracy Arm quilt. How much fun I am going to have with all of this stuff!