Full of Soup

Let’s take a breather from that last post and look at quilts that are somewhat rectangular.

The American Folk Art Museum is showing quilts all year long, but the first half of their Super Stars exhibit in Lincoln Square is ending on April 26^th when they will put up the second half of the show- so hurry up! It’s free dollars!

The entrance of the museum has an intricate quilt tributing 9/11 victims.

The exhibit is small- or maybe it just seemed that way after their Red & White Quilt show- but there are some really beautiful examples of the diversity and depth of the star pattern.

This one is one of my favorites because I think the colors speak to such a specific time and place. I am usually drawn to more symmetrical quilts, but I love how she layered the stars in the top right-hand corner and the slice of another star sneaking into the frame on the bottom right-hand corner. There is so much movement and beauty in this quilt and by working with mostly solids, the piecing really steals the show.

I liked this one for similar reasons. I love the stars on the lower left sliding off the quilt.

The high contrast of the colors in this quilt pulse too loudly, but I love the “legs” of this crib-sized star. It’s just like nothing else I’ve ever seen.

This quilt was so striking from across the room.

And still stunning up close. I love the polka-dots.

Again- more solids! I am really tempted to work with high contrast solids.

I wonder why she quilted the top as a square and rounded the bottom corners.

This one reminded me of the Dear Jane quilt pattern.

The show was really inspiring and they have a really cute gift shop. Also, I saw Alan Alda outside. Quilt shows are the hot place to spot celebs.

I started adding the boarders.

I haven’t appliqued the circles on the center panel yet, but I placed a couple to get an idea of how the quilt will look.

The lighting in my apartment is terrible, but not terrible enough to hide a mistake this big.

See the lower right hand corner of the screen. In the lower left hand corner, you can see Indy’s head shaking.

The center “rectangle” is not a rectangle at all but a trapazoid, so my corners aren’t meeting up. I haven’t sewn on the bottom paned (which is why you can see all the sticky tabs reminding me how I wanted the panel oriented), but I have a feeling that the 4 inches is not going to just disappear.

I don’t even know how to begin to fix this. I think putting it in a drawer might help solve things, right?

Two years ago I walked by Metamorphosis in Cambridge, MA and found this old Singer 15-19 complete with a cabinet to fold the machine away into.

Anthony and I were making plans to move to New York City and I spun a long tale about how I could keep all my sewing confined to this one desk by keeping my machine inside it, my books on top of it, and my fabric underneath it. The student housing I was considering was 450 sq feet (including the bathroom), so the idea of a small machine that could fold away was appealing.

Anthony was not completely convinced of its utility, but I called my mom and she told me it was the perfect gift for my birthday.

After moving to New York, it seemed Anthony was right. I continued to use my Kenmore and my Singer was been stashed away in its cabinet taking up space. I didn’t even know how to thread the machine.

Finally, last week, I asked him to sit and help me figure it all out. We looked up the serial number and found out the machine was built in New Jersey in 1954. Through the magic of YouTube and an instruction manual, we were able to get the old girl up and running.

The first creation- Towel Hat. For me this is like I just got a brand new machine and it is the perfect counterpart to my Kenmore. It doesn’t have as many stitches and bells and whistles as my Kenmore, but it can sew through many, many layers and it has twice as much space under the arm so I can quilt larger quilts by machine.

I tried to take all the advice from the Kaffe Fassett workshop very literally and so when Liza said not to count the blocks as we make them, but just to keep on sewing and sewing, I did just that. For months.

Before the retreat, I was feeling smug that I had made most of my snowballs and I would be well on my way to a completed top after the weekend, but after making all my piles and pinning and counting and writing numbers on sticky notes I realized I was only about halfway there and I would have to cut more fabric to finish the top.

I think most normal people would be able to just move on and cut more fabric, but for me this was tragic. I work very methodically and finish each step completely before I move onto the next. Having to take a step backwards threw me to a screeching halt.

Okay, so this next part is really airing my dirty laundry. I am admittedly air-headed, but when I went to the quilting retreat, I looked at the pattern again and realized that I was just shy of making double the amount of blocks that I needed. DOUBLE. As in, I should’ve been done with this quilt in half the time. Also, since I like to work so methodically, I completed each color one at a time, and there were entire colors I didn’t even get to add to my quilt. I had been saving my favorite colors for the end so I had something to look forward to and now I had way too many blocks and none of my favorite colors.

THE DRAMA. I just kept sewing. I figured I’d make two quilts. Or whatever. My life is ruined I might as well just sew snowballs forever.

When I got home, I realized not only was my original count correct and I needed all these snowballs, I had to CUT MORE FABRIC and make more.

Liza was right. I shouldn’t have counted. As of two weeks ago, I have made exactly the number of snowballs I need. Not a one extra.

On the bright side, the top is spinning together pretty quick.

And Indy has found a use for the ugly Dresden Plate I started a couple weeks ago.

Notice how jealous Aesop is of the collar look.

Well, the top is finished.

The lighting in my apartment is heinous, so I took it outside to try to get some better shots.

Queue the wind!

This is the quilt wrapped around my face and arms while I try to hold it up to get a decent shot.

I started constructing this quilt top by cutting out about 1600 2 inch squares. I made 52 piles of the squares- one for each row- and then sewed the squares together from left to right and then sewed each row together.

This is what the back of an obsessively ironed quilt top looks like.

If I ever make a quilt like this again, I think I would work in squares of ten or so and then sew the squares together. It would’ve been nice to see little patches completed along the way rather than waiting for it to unfurl row by row.

A nice woman in the park asked if she could help when she saw me in an Around the World straight jacket. We each held up one side while Anthony took the shot.

Luckily, the wind died down for a moment later in the day.

Most of the construction took place in the past year, so I look at this quilt and think about the summer of 2010, when I was searching for a job and Anthony was traveling back and forth to Boston and then in Ireland for 6 weeks. I spent a lot of time alone with this quilt, and I think the sense of purpose I felt in creating it kept me happy during a long, long summer.

Which might explain why I obsessively oriented all the stripes and diamond prints to face the same direction.

The whole process of creating the quilt started two years ago when I was on a trip to Lancaster with my mom and I started picking out the 30’s prints without knowing what I would make. After I decided on the Many Trips Around the World, in tribute to Nellie’s quilt, we made a trip out to Patchworks in Sayville, Long Island to collect the rest of the prints. I can look at this quilt and remember the tea and sandwiches we had on our way home from the store.

I chose to make a quilt of squares after making a quilt of stars because I thought it would be simple.

I was wrong. I probably could’ve sewn two tops with the amount of stitches I had to rip out and resew in this one. I am planning to hand quilt this once I finish quilting Yellow Brick Road, but for now I am putting it in a draw and taking a long break from squares.

We were lucky enough to have the wind pick up again for one last activity.