Satsuki

Published on Tuesday March 9th, 2010

I’ve spent the past five days under the thumb of an ugly cold, not much good for anything but lolling on the couch with my box of Kleenex and countless mugs of tea. I’ve read about 140 pages of Wuthering Heights, watched the Pride and Prejudice miniseries for the umpteenth time, and I’ve finished sewing the binding for the baby quilt I started last summer. See?

Satsuki_done2

This is the slapdash log cabin I named Satsuki (for the girl in “My Neighbor Totoro”). I finished the top months ago, then realized that the eight-point stars I wanted to machine quilt over each block were going to cause a problem.

Satsuki_done3

If you don’t quilt from the center of the whole quilt, you tend to get bunchiness somewhere. For me, that was going to be in the sashing between blocks. I was too wedded to my eight-point stars to change my mind, and not feeling fastidious enough to make the quilting process much more complex by sewing the parts of the six stars on the interior of the quilt first. I wanted to just sew one whole star at a time, block by block, so that’s what I did. Like the rest of the quilt, the stars are intentionally free form. I made no attempt to align the points from block to block, and I let them be lopsided because the bright center squares aren’t really in the center of each block.

Satsuki_done4

Sure enough, the bunchy sashing happened exactly as predicted. So I created a fix and pretended it was a design element.

Satsuki_sashing

Yep, I used red embroidery thread to whipstitch up the center of the sashing, gathering and securing the excess fabric in a pleat.

If you want to make a quilt like this yourself, you’ll need a yard of fabric for the back (I had enough excess in my yard to also make the small squares that link the sashing strips from the backing fabric), a yard of flannel for the batting, five fat quarters in neutral fabrics (mine looked very quiet in their bundle but livened up considerably once I was sewing them) for the log cabin blocks and the outer border (this was exactly enough; I had hardly any fabric left over), about a third of a yard of neutral sashing fabric, and small amounts of leftover brights for the block centers and binding. Start with a 2″ square of your bright fabric, then start snipping scraps of the neutrals at random to fit around it. I cut every piece with scissors as I was ready to attach it, and I let the strips be variable widths so the whole thing would be rustic and cattywampus. Don’t measure anything, but keep working around and around until it looks like you’ve got a square about a foot wide. When you’ve made six blocks, square them all up to 12″. Cut seventeen 2″ x 12″ strips for the sashing and twelve 2″ squares for the small squares linking the sashing strips. Assemble them around the six blocks and sew all together. Then cut the remaining neutral fabrics into 4″ strips of variable lengths and piece them together in lengths sufficient to log cabin them around the quilt to form the outer border. Make the quilt sandwich with the backing and the flannel, then draw eight-point stars (as you’d see in a compass rose) radiating from the center of each block to its edge and corners (don’t quilt into the sashing). Machine quilt around the center square and along the lines for the star you’ve drawn. You’ll need two hanks of embroidery thread to whipstitch the pleats; just pinch up the center of the loose fabric in the sashing and whipstitch from the center of one of the small sashing-linking squares (these must have a name, right?) to the next. Let the center of that little square stay loose and poofy. Repeat in all seventeen of the sashing strips. Cut 2″ strips of variable lengths from your scraps of brights for the binding and attach it in the usual way. (I like the directions in Bend-the-Rules Sewing for the Lap Quilt for bindings.) Et voila! A cute baby or lap quilt that makes you feel terribly creative and folk artsy and doesn’t task your patience for fussiness or accuracy. It’s liberating, I promise you.

Satsuki_done1

Some quilting, and a challenge

Published on Wednesday July 15th, 2009

An apology: the Comments have run aground. I don’t know what happened, but at some point in the last few days they all vanished like Kate Moss turning sideways. The Blog Mechanic is going to take a look at it as soon as he can. Meanwhile, I’m not sure whether you can leave a new comment or not, but I hope you’ll send me an email if you find you can’t communicate in the usual fashion!

The Sisters quiltapalooza was a heck of a good time. I enjoyed my two classes, I showed reasonable proficiency in learning new techniques and was satisfied with the results, I met lovely new people and relished the company of my mother-in-law and her sister, I sat in the presence of some of the quilting women of Gee’s Bend and found them as salt-of-the-earth powerful and full of spirit as their art would suggest, as well as overflowing with gratitude and love for the world that has embraced their quilts and the individuals who have advocated for them. (Also they sing spirituals while they work and are quick to praise God for their gifts and inspirations; they are deeply humble and wise about the primacy of human relations in times of difficulty; and they are fiercely proud of the beauty they have wrested from a hardscrabble life. I already counted them among my primary inspirations; hearing them speak and sing only increased my admiration and regard.)

Here’s what I made:

Thursday: Hand Quilting, taught by sisters Jan Bressler and Lou Shafer of Philomath, Oregon

Clicking for bigness will show you that the first picture is of the back of the work; the second shows the blue marking lines of the pattern I have yet to complete. Jan and Lou teach the use of a simple metal tool called Aunt Becky’s Finger Protector, which you use underneath the work to avoid stabbing your fingers and to help manipulate the needle tip for small, even stitches. Mine are still twice as long and twice as far apart as my teachers’, but they don’t look too bad for my first try. I learned the value of a good quilting hoop or frame right away. Jan and Lou had a number of different frames on hand for us to try, and I found that the models with little stands or legs to hold them above your work surface were far less cumbersome. Turns out I’m hopeless at balancing a traditional basic hoop. I need my work to hold still by itself in order to use both hands correctly.

Friday: “Sisters 4’s and 9’s,” again with Jan and Lou.

Jan and Lou adapted this quilt design from an antique quilt that came across the country on the Oregon Trail in the family of Margaret Peters. Pardon the lack of ironing; I was scrambling for the last of the light here. The quilt is assembled on the bias from these two large blocks of 4-patches and 9-patches. It’s obviously easy enough for a raw beginner, since I made a go of it. I loved seeing the color combinations my classmates chose; as we began to finish our first blocks Lou and Jan pinned them up at the side of the classroom (which was the high school library, an ideal setting—I parked myself next to the biographies of the Founding Fathers) so we could see the many permutations. See the block in the upper part of the picture? I opted to divide it visually as a 9-patch by making five light 4-patches and four medium 4-patches, but others divided it as a big 4-patch of two light and two medium 9-patches. Also, I realize now that I tipped the “fancy” A block a different way in that photo. I meant to do it like this:

… or like this, if I decide I prefer vertical green “stripes” in the B block:

So many possibilities! We’ll just have to see what I like when I’ve made enough blocks to assemble the whole top.

Now, that challenge I spoke of. Ye olde blog has been much neglected of late, and I don’t just mean the Comments problem. Between work and managing an international knit-along and cycling, I haven’t made much time for the creation and posting of content here. I’m not alone; I’ve seen a lot of bloggers abandoning the spaces they’ve inhabited for years in favor of shiny new Twitter feeds or what have you. Twitter holds no appeal for me (I don’t even have a cell phone, people), and I’ve never been a good Flickr user, so Blue Garter stays, even if it needs a good dusting. But my father recently told me he checks it almost every day for news of my life, and that was so touching I need to find a way to respond. More discipline in posting here is what’s needed.

So the challenge is this: Keep the camera with you, Sarah. Use it. You’re no photographer but you sure could get better with practice. Upload pictures and post them here, even if you don’t have a lot of words to go with them. Or post words without pictures—surely you had at least one interesting thought in the past day or two. Provide peepholes for the people who love you and care about the beauty and proportion of your daily life, and for unknown internet voyagers who might find a point of resonance here. Starting tomorrow. Over and out.

Owl!

Published on Wednesday October 8th, 2008

Owls have been some of my favorite creatures since childhood: hearing their soft, haunting voices in the night woods from my bedroom; a rare ghosty glimpse in the trees or a flash of luminous eyes in the beam from the headlights on our country roads; my beloved worn paperback copy of Farley Mowat’s boyhood adventures with his unusual pets in Saskatoon. Later I was intrigued by their status in myth all over the world: birds of wisdom and prosperity, companions of goddesses, omens of death, divine messengers or demon spirits. And let’s own to it: a lot of them are cute. So it’s no surprise I fell for the tiny owls on Alexandra Rasmussen’s blog, Moonstitches, on my first visit. (I also fell for her beautiful quilts and photographs; she’s one of the craft bloggers whose posts I most look forward to nowadays.) I knew there were adorable sewn owls in my future.

I made this little guy last night when I realized I wasn’t going to finish the birthday present I’d started for Jen. He’s a placeholder until the real present is done. I stuffed him with wool and stiffened his bottom with a circle of cardboard from a priority mail envelope, which I figure is sort of a good joke for Harry Potter fans. And look how perfectly he nested overnight in my new 100% Philistine Made pin cushion:

I gave him to Jen at school to be her desk owl. Here he is on my desk:

… and outside at the bird bath:

(He didn’t go in, being so new and squeaky clean.)

Now I know why Alexandra says they come in swarms. I don’t know if I can resist making him a bunch of cousins. The literary collective noun for owls is a parliament.

Recovery

Published on Tuesday June 24th, 2008

Thank you, each and every one of you, for your comforting words about Selkie. It’s so hard to believe she’s gone when I’m still vacuuming her fur out from under the table. My parents brought her down for a visit just a week ago when they came to collect another truckload of my grandmother’s furniture from my garage. I’m glad I got to see her so recently, to give her love and pats and praise.

During the effort to move the furniture, my father spent hours breaking down the excess packaging, and the wind blew some heavy cardboard over to squash the tender young lupines I planted in the patch of soil by the garage. I put them out in homage to a favorite book from my childhood, Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius. (I loved saying Rumphius. What a name. Someday I’m going to design a comfy cardigan and call it after that character. I just had the thought that if the book were coming to print today, surely the marketing department would insist on a different title – The Lupine Lady, perhaps. Miss Rumphius isn’t a very enticing and obvious sell to grown-ups.) Anyway, the foliage on one side was all busted, but the main stalk seemed to be bent rather than broken, so we propped it up with a sturdy stick and hoped for the best. Here’s the same plant, ten days later:

Isn’t it marvelous how things grow back?

In an effort to jolly myself out of the glummery of the past week, I finished cutting my Leafy Snowball fabric and laid it all out.

Never mind the little seafoam-green squares; they’re not staying. I’ll find either a more olive-ish green or a grey-blue of similar value. But here’s the thing: I have LOTS of squares left over. I could make this quilt twice as big, and I just might. I’ll need more of the border fabric, which I think I can get; the calico for the back I think is all gone at the store, but I might be able to hunt it down somewhere else. Or I could just have the back be half something else. Here’s a medium-large cat for scale:

I is teh most helpfulest kitteh.

You’ll be glad to know I didn’t think about the layout for this quilt for more than the three minutes it took me to crawl around setting down squares willy-nilly. I wish it had more large-print fabrics, but I’m not going to worry about it too much. It seems I’m helpless before an array of beautiful calicoes, so that’s what’s here.

Oh, and lest you should think I’ve stopped knitting entirely: