Brentwood Quilt Show

The city of Brentwood is about 25 miles north of where I live. Last weekend, on Saturday, August 17th, I went there with my friend Renée to enjoy a quilt show sponsored by the Delta Quilters Guild. It was held in the Brentwood Community Center. The city's decor out front beckoned me to climb up and wave hello. Guess I am channeling Lily Tomlin's character Edith Ann.

The theme of the show was The Journey of a Quilter.

The featured artist of the show was local quilter Julie Bretz. In the following photo (by Tony Kukulich) she is holding a bicycle quilt. Nine of these quilts with interpretations by different quilters were hung throughout the show and visitors were challenged to find all of them, extract a letter from each, and unscramble those letters to form a word and win a prize. The game added an extra level of fun to the show and ensured that the visitors explored every nook and cranny.

THE QUILTS
As I walked in the entrance of the high ceilinged community center I looked up and surveyed the striking quilts hung from the railings. I scanned from left to right, taking in the beautiful artwork and craftsmanship with an array of varying patterns and color schemes.

Walking along the rows of quilts I took photos of those that spoke to me for one reason or another. I liked the saying around the border of this appliquéd Monster Quilt exhibited by Norine Dolyniuk. I admire appliqué but do not do it myself. Norine states that although it started out as a quilt for her great niece, it now instead hangs in her own sewing room with a saying customized for those who collect fabric.

There are big scary monsters under the bed
And every night they must be fed.
They love to eat fabric. It's their favorite food.
It puts them in the very best mood.
So the lesson is clear, consider your plight.
Keep buying more fabric, or be dinner tonight!

This quilt, There are Witches in the Air, immediately drew me in because I too have purchased this richly colored panel and have yet to determine how to use it. This windowpane effect by Sue Schnittker, especially with her color choices for the mullions, transforms this panel into a striking wall hanging. I really do need to use more solids in my quilts. They can be truly effective.

The decor throughout the show was also whimsical and inviting. This chubby mummy wants the visitors to know that "Some mummy Loves me". And I do too!

This year is the 50th anniversary of the picture book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, a favorite of my own children, all grown up now to ages 39, 36, and 33. This quilt exhibited by Virginia Rose and named after the book reminded me that I have two – not one, but two – kits in my closet of hungry caterpillar themed fabric for making two twin size quilts. I bought these kits from Fons and Porter before I had any grandchildren at all. I now have five grandchildren, ages 7 and 4 via my daughter, and ages 5, 3, and 1 via my son. I am determined to make up these kits in 2019 and gift one per household.

The reason I chose to focus on this quilt titled Arrow Quilt in Gray and Yellow is that I have many layer cake stacks and fat quarter bundles and I thought this would be a quick and easy way to use them. Often I find it so hard so hard to break up those themed and related fabrics. Rose Merryman exhibited this quilt and credited the pattern from BeechTreeLane.com

What I liked about Christmas Courtship by Cathy Decker was the combination of colors that still spoke of Christmas but was refreshingly different from the standard red, green, and white. It is also a great use for many of the layer cake stacks that I have, even if they are not of an exclusively Christmas theme.

This next quilt is gorgeous in its own right but I was fascinated that it really represents three quilts of three friends each exercising their strongest sewing skill. One did needle turn and embroidery, one did appliqué and embroidery, and one did patchwork and paper piecing. They shared fabric and each made about one third the blocks in each of three quilts. Smaller images of the other two quilts are displayed – one in grays, and one in reds and grays.

This next quilt Summer Daze by Karol Wright shows the expression of art in two different mediums, watercolor and fabric. Karol's sister made the watercolor painting for her and Karol interpreted the same image in fabrics. I was impressed with the side-by-side pairing.

PURCHASES
No matter how well intentioned I may be to rein in the deluge of fabrics I bring into my home, no quilt show is complete without some purchases from vendors. This time I branched out in my purchases – no novelty prints, no fat quarter bundles, no layer cake stacks – yeah, me! This show I bought a tool, some trims, and a book. Not bad. 

I make the doll panels designed by Stacy Hsu and always struggle to nudge the stuffing down to the ends of their arms and legs. The various dolls I've made have been Cowboy & Cowgirl (6/24/15), Hansel & Gretel (8/24/18), Goldilocks & Bears (8/2/18), Mermaid (5/23/17), Lil Red (5/20/17).

This tool has serrations in the tip and a clamp at the looped grip end. The clamp is opened up, a clumped strand of stuffing is gripped in the tips, the clamp is closed, and the long slender tool allows the fluff to be inserted down into those hard to reach spaces. The clamp is released again and the tool withdrawn to leave the stuffing behind. The theory sounds great and the vendor of stuffed bears demonstrated it to me. I am excited to try it out for myself. I still have panels of other dolls to do – some bunnies and some elves.

One of the vendors used to have a brick and mortar shop but is now selling only at shows at very reduced prices to pare down her inventory. I bought these Christmas trims of tassels and satiny, lightly padded Christmas ornaments. Ok, I admit I do not know quite what I am going to do with them sewing wise, but at least I know they will make pretty gift package decorations.

This book contains a whimsical block designs and was priced at an almost giveaway cost of $2. The cheapest used one on Amazon was over $9 plus shipping. True it is about 8 years old with a copyright of 2011 but it contains a freeform alphabet which I can use whenever and the blocks are cute.

I told myself I could only buy fabric if I had a near term use for it. And yes I caved and I did buy fabric. I bought two 108" wide backing fabrics, each pre-packaged at three yards lengths at a killer closeout price. Since my stash is so full, I try to avoid sales as a motivation to buy fabric but this made sense functionally as well as economically. I dislike piecing quilt backs because I strive to match the seam and often with printed fabric there is a drift precluding a perfect match. Wide fabric will eliminate that frustrations for me. The blue paisley will be a backing for a blue Dresden plate kit I already own. 

The  dark green with blue swirls is earmarked for the back of a future Christmas quilt. The rich color makes me think of a blue spruce trees and the curlicues make me think of the blizzard scenes in the 2013 Disney movie Frozen.

Renée and I had a delicious lunch at Cap's, a restaurant just across the street from the community center. It was a great day, overall...  good quilts, good food, good fabric, good friend!

Stalling or Thinking?

In my previous post I described my struggles with FMQing a quilt. While considering my options I made several pillowcases. I was either stalling starting the FMQ or allowing my brain to subliminally come to a decision as to how to proceed. Either way I have pillowcases to show for it. They  require little thought in their construction for me now that I have made so many, and the selection of fabric combinations and accent strips always gives me pleasure and rejuvenates me.

These first two bunny pillowcases are additional duplicates of the standard sized pair I made for my son Alex and describe near the end of  my 5/27/19 post. The post also included tutorials on how to make these pillowcases. The sea of bunnies marching side by side intermingled with the sea of carrots makes me smile.

Then I had more fun combining fabrics to make two more pair of standard size pillowcases that will go to grandchildren eventually. I could not pass up this curlicue nautical octopus print which I bought just recently at my local quilt shop. The source is Studio-e Anchors Away Tossed Octopus by Sharla Fults 4077-77. I drew from my stash for the soft, blurred, blue/white stripes .

I bought the multi-colored foxes several years ago from a vendor at a  Lowell, Massachusetts quilt show described in my 8/19/2013 post. Since the vendor had only brought fat quarters of this particular print to the show and I loved it,  Waterwheels House Quilt Shop shipped me a yard of each from their store in Vermont to my home in California free of charge. Here I am cheerfully using it six years later.

In my 5/11/2019 post I described some king sized pillows I made for our master bedroom. My husband enjoys them a lot and, remarks about them often, and is incredibly pleased that I made something for us instead of the grandkids as usual – more appreciative than I would have guessed he'd be. I made another two out of this incredibly whimsical cat print.

The mini-plaid end band is from American Jane fabrics and is the perfect shade of soft, muted blues  to blend with and echo the ocean meets sky on the horizon. I had the multi-colored stripe I used for the accent strip as a fat quarter in my stash. It is serendipitous how the coral pink, pale blue, and soft olive tones matched those in the feature fabric of the pillowcase body.

Here are some other closeups of those sunbathing felines.

The kitty fabric was a fairly recent local purchase and the selvage reveals that the design is by PB textiles.

Coming back to the title question of this post... am I stalling or thinking? Truthfully, I believe it is a little of both. But if I enjoy what I am doing while I am doing it and like the results as well, motive is not very important after all.

Quilting Malaise

Some quilts stretch you to your limits. I started piecing Whirligiggles in a class I took from Sandy Klop and my first post about it was 1/23/2016. I thoroughly enjoyed the piecing and was quite pleased that I got skilled at Y-seams and also successfully managed to have the pieces meet at points. I completed the piecing on Whirligiggles and did the sandwiching with batting in my post for 11/23/2017 - yes, almost 2 years ago. Then it sat because I was chicken to start the FMQ.

I wanted to draw attention to the secondary pattern of the big primary colored stars, outlined in yellow in the following photo. I decided to use rulers to do parallel straight lines along the points of the stars. The results were disastrous. Although the blocks I had assembled met nicely at the point intersections, when I joined the columns of blocks, the pressing directions at those intersections (along the red arrows) were not as easily controlled. Though I forced them to behave and meet nicely, those intersection left huge lumps.

My ruler rocked on those bumps and slipped, even with sandpaper type grippers. When I tried free hand straight lines, they were crooked, unevenly spaced, and had irregular stitch size. The white thread drew attention to this summation of awfulness also. Stupidly, I kept on, deluding myself that my stitching lines would get better and I'd eventually be capable of accepting the imperfect results. I could not. The proverbial "It will not be noticed by a person passing by on a galloping horse" did not hold water. That horse would have needed to be moving at the speed of light. Discouraged, I set it aside for many months. Then, over the last couple weeks I paced myself and invested an hour or so each day taking out those stitches. Some were so closely spaced they were a nightmare to remove. I took my time with a seam ripper, scissors, tweezers, and a magnifying glass so as not to rip a hole in the quilt top. It has been over a month since my last post because it is uninspiring to write about negative progress.

However, it was time to move forward once again. I humbly took the shambles to my sit-down Handiquilter club meeting that convenes every other month and asked for quilting ideas. My criteria were 1) bring out the secondary star, 2) avoid the lumpy intersections, 3) strive for continuous stitching, and 4) minimize backtracking. One of the ladies suggested this three lobed design which I liked. The curves soften the angularity of the star points yet still draw the eye outward to them. Plus, the "petals" fall short of those pesky lumps.

What to do with the inner star? The group played around with some ideas. Getting from one star point to another without going though the lumpiest intersections would be a challenge and we did not really address that aspect. We were encouraging creativity, not technicality.

I explored other ideas at home. First row left to right: one spiral per inner star point, squiggles within two arcs in each star point, spiral in each in star half-point. Second row left to right: Lazy loops in star half-points, large petals with rounded tips in each inner star point, curled tendrils centered within each star point. Thread color or colors is still to be determined. Aargh! I detest that phrase "quilt as desired".

I broke out my trusty Angela Walters book for shapes and will continue to mull this over with her ideas for triangles, diamonds, and hexagons.

I will figure out the grey and white hexagons once I nail down the primary colored star pattern. I am hopeful they will be easier. Thread color in those will be grey or white. Whatever I decide on, I am convinced it will all be free motion with no ruler, thus allowing me the freedom to avoid those ominous, mountainous, mounds at some intersections.

I did take a break and go with my husband to our local nursery's show rich with artisans and vendors. Art mediums included oil and watercolor paintings, pottery and ceramics, photography, wood, glass, jewelry and much more. For photos see Alden Lane's Art Under the Oaks 2019 . At the entrance, my husband suggested I go sit in this bear's lap. 

I tried to channel the song Baloo the Bear sings in Disney's animated feature The Jungle Book

Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife

Then I went home and made pillowcases, my quick comfort project in the absence of burp cloths. Sewing them allows me time to subliminally ponder my FMQ options while still feeling productive. The pillowcases will be the topic of another post.