Full of Soup

Last night my friend Katie came over and I pulled out all my quilting stuff and showed her what I had completed over the summer and some older projects that I’m not sure what to with next. I have a small trunk in my bedroom where I keep the older projects and just as I lifted out the first quilt, my cat jumped into the trunk. I ran over to pull him out, but it was too late. He peed all over my quilts.

I told Anthony what happened this morning and he asked, “Did you pick him up and put him in the litter box?”

No, Anthony. I snapped his neck. We now have two cats.

For our wedding, my mom made this beautiful quilt.

It is a sampler using traditional Amish-style blocks.

Thimbles or Bow Ties.

Butterflies.

Appliqued flowers.

Log Cabin stars.

The quilt show in Somers, New York was beautiful.

I loved the examples of applique and embroidery and was inspired to give hand quilting another try.

The Winter Trees quilt was one of my favorite quilts. Trunks of three trees were embroidered on a pale blue fabric and white and blue iridescent beads made up the snow-covered branches.

This weekend I’m headed up to Somers, NY with my mom to check out the Quilt Show!

I signed up for the Dear Jane workshop at City Quilter this summer. Dear Jane is a sampler quilt and the book has 225 patterns from 1863. The workshop meets just one Monday evening per month from May through August and we will learn a different sewing technique, such as paper piecing or applique, at each class. At home, we can choose patterns from the book that use that technique and practice making a few blocks. The blocks are small- just four and a half inches. From what I understand, the patterns are pretty tedious to work with, but I think this is a great way to get a lot of practice.

Here is a beautiful example from Bridgett’s photostream:

Lately I’ve seen a lot of quilts with patches that look like cute wonky houses gathered to create a neighborhood and I’ve been thinking about what a quilt would look like to represent my neighborhood. Here is some of the shapes that have inspired me lately.

My mother’s grandmother told her that every stitch you sew on Sunday, you have to take out with your nose in hell. That’s pretty much how the day felt. I worked on my Around the World quilt for a couple hours, but ended up spending more time pulling out stitches out than sewing.

However, the day was not a total failure. My new design wall:

I used black-out fabric that doesn’t let any light shine through. This fabric is typically used for curtains, but I had a lot of it lying around from my husband’s dark room. The texture is just right so my ironed pieces stick to it without any pinning. Batting or flannel would also work well. I think my designs will be framed nicely by the black color.

This weekend, the Quilters Guild of Brooklyn had a quilt show.

I went to the Kaffe Fassett workshop on Tuesday at the City Quilter. Many of the quilts from his latest book, Simple Shapes Spectacular Quilts were hanging throughout the shop.

I know I’ve never been able to take a picture of my own quilts that do them justice, but I always wondered if Kaffe’s quilts were enhanced by the professional photographs in exotic locations I’ve seen in his books. But I have to say, in person, even under florescent lights, his quilts are even more spectacular than they appear in a stylized photo shoot.

Bounce, in particular, is spectacular in person. I saw this quilt in his book and I wasn’t drawn to it at all. I admit I was disappointed to when I found out this was the quilt we were going to workshop.

However, once I got to the store and got to see this quilt, I was so excited about the workshop. In this workshop, we didn’t sew a stitch. We simply cut out our fabrics and put them up on design walls and edited our designs with the help of Kaffe.

I loved getting to watch everyone else progress and their stacks of fabric turn into neat little squares on their design walls.

The woman on the left gesturing is Liza Prior Lucy, and I believe she is the one who turns Kaffe’s designs into actual quilting patterns. She is the co-author of his latest book.

I like bright colors and I picked out a wide range of polka dots for border of the quilt, but I was hoping to get some input on which fabric would be a nice center to pull it all together. Kaffe took me shopping in the store and picked out this tennis ball fabric. I am not a huge fan of novelty fabrics and I really had a hard time getting over the tennis ball theme. I put it up on the wall to get an idea  of how it would look. Also, see Kaffe on the right in front of his version of this quilt.

I told Kaffe I didn’t think I could do the tennis balls, and he suggested these strawberries instead. I loved them, but I was hoping to NOT make a pink quilt for once. He asked me why one would ever NOT make a pink quilt. I admit, I agree.

After a break, some women in the class decided not to go with the design Kaffe suggested. He gave us a pep talk about how they could always go with their own designs, but for this workshop, to try his designs. “Listen to me and your quilt will be beautiful.” After that, I decided to brave it with the tennis balls. I also kept in mind that we were not sewing the pieces together, so I always had the option to change things.

I do love that bright, neon green color and I thought it would bring together my other prints better than the pink. In this shot I’ve divided up what I believe are my light fabrics (at the top) and my dark fabrics (at the bottom) so I could begin an alternating checkerboard border.

I have never worked with a design wall, so it was really interesting to be able to throw all the fabrics up there at once and really play around with them. I am so hooked on this process.

I added in some of the corners just to get an idea of what the snowballs might look like. I felt really happy with the design at this point.

The best part was getting to see how many different interpretations we all made of the same quilt and how they EACH were so beautiful and inspiring.

This woman chose Japanese prints. I really love the fabric she chose as her background. I think it ties together all the shapes in the quilt so well.

This woman shocked the class at first. How can you design a black and white quit at a Kaffe Fassett workshop? In the end, her quilt was SO much about color. It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz.

Each and every fabric in this quilt is beautiful. I love the color combinations.

The two designs on the left were made by sisters and used mostly Kaffe prints. I think their checkerboards were so successful. We started our designs with just the center pieces, and I was amazed how much the checkerboards changed the whole look of the thing.

This quilt started out as a tremendous pile of scraps and I really could not envision how they would all come together, but lo, they are beautiful.

At the end of the class, we all gathered around and looked at each person’s design and Kaffe offered feedback about what worked and what didn’t work. The quilt on the left will be a wall hanging and is smaller than the ones the rest of the class was designing.

This class was so incredibly inspiring. Picking up a Kaffe Fassett book was one of the reasons I really became excited about being a quilter in the first place. I knew my taste was loud, so I was not prepared to have that loud taste stretched even further by choosing a tennis ball print, but I am so happy that happened. I feel such a new sense of freedom in picking out fabrics now. I can’t wait to get this quilt to size.

My mom made me this quilt in the winter in 2006.

I took some photos of it on the East River during the snow storm a couple weeks ago.

After I started quilting she was worried that I would notice all the little mistakes in her quilts.

But the idiosyncrasies are my favorite part. There is a part of one heart where she ran out of the red fabric she was using and substituted a very similar patterned color. I loved finding this and knowing this about my quilt.

She sent it out to have it quilted. I really like the different types of quilting on different parts of the quilt.

Here is the quilt in its typical home.