Amsterdam!

We are back from vacation, and what a time it was! I'm overflowing with things to talk about but since the most dreaded words in the English language are "Let me show you my vacation photos," I'll limit myself to quilt/art-related (in the broadest sense!) photos and a few general observations that I hope you'll find interesting. Today, the 4 days we spent in Amsterdam. This time of year, there are flowers and bicycles everywhere.
I loved Amsterdam. I had been there for a long weekend in 1980 and I worried that the city would not live up to my rosy memories, but it did. Amsterdam exudes charm and warmth; it was foreign, yet I felt at home. The art museums are among the best in the world (the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh), and when you take in the light and atmosphere of that part of the world, it's like walking onto the canvas of a great Dutch or Flemish painting.

There were far more bicycles than cars in the city. The two bikes parked in front of this home show how they can be used for everything -- the first has three children's seats (one in front of the handlebars and two behind the grown-up seat) and the second has a 'trunk' attached in front to carry things in. This is far more fuel efficient, and far more cardiovascularly healthy, than driving everywhere in an SUV!
There are even stoplights for the bicycles. Tourists can rent bikes, but the city is small enough that we walked everywhere. I was also pretty intimidated by the traffic.

I had read about some quiltshops on Laura Jasper's Lola Quilts blog, so of course I had to visit!
Unfortunately, the one specializing in traditional Dutch fabrics was closed for the month of July, but the other -- Bird Blocks -- was open. They had a lovely assortment of fabrics (mostly American, but most were new to me) and I bought two tiny paper piecing kits of Dutch scenes as a memento. I will have to go back in October one year (yeah, right!) to see the Netherlands guild annual quilt show. There is only one guild in the country, and it has 1400 members!

I did enjoy the clamshell quilting look of the sidewalks.
One of the highlights of the trip for me was visiting Amsterdam's 17th century Portuguese Synagogue , which is still lit only by thousands of candles. Next door was a Jewish children's museum that was a blast to visit. The coat rack at the entrance was a delight:
And I loved the cascade of Hebrew letters next to one of the windows. One day I will quilt something like this -- don't know what, but it's percolating!
And in the museum's art room, the table had this saying, which we quilters understand:

And finally, I have to share the stairway carpeting of the hotel we stayed in -- very cool indeed, and it made me smile every time I saw it.

I Spy received, a nice story -- and off on vacation!

My niece Laurel just phoned to say the I Spy quilt arrived and was a big hit! I'm so pleased. Here's a photo of her daughter Julia enjoying the quilt. Apparently Julia was so excited when the quilt arrived that she would hardly let it go so her mother could look at it! I have hexagons cut for 3 more I Spy quilts for my other nieces' and nephew's children. I must be crazy, but when I heard how excited Julia was to receive the quilt, it makes the time and effort more than worthwhile.With this I Spy quilt, part of my quilting journey has come full circle. I made my first quilt when I was a college freshman for the child my brother and his wife were expecting the following autumn. I didn't know how to make a quilt -- I just cut squares and stitched, some by hand, some by machine, using fabric we had on hand (I don't know why we had it). When I finished piecing it, I knew it needed backing -- I didn't know about batting in those days. So I purchased some flannel and borrowed a machine to stitch it envelope-style to the back. I didn't quilt it -- didn't know it needed it! I proudly gave it to my new niece Laurel. Alas, it fell apart the first time it was washed. Everything shrunk unevenly and the stitches pulled out. I was devastated, and gave up quilting.

Fast forward more than 30 years, to 2005. My husband and I spent 6 months in California on his sabbatical, just a few minutes from where Laurel lives now. I had decided the time was right to try quilting again. Coincidentally, Laurel had taken up quilting, but as a working mother of a newborn, she had no spare time to sew, so she lent me her machine. I took a class at a local quilt shop and haven't stopped quilting since! It feels right that I should make a quilt for Laurel's children -- hopefully, this one will hold together!

And finally, I am beyond excited about leaving tomorrow for vacation -- it promises to be an amazing trip (Amsterdam followed by bits of the Italian coast and Greek islands)! I will be back looking at blogs around July 17, and I hope you come back to visit me then, too. I'll have lots to post! Hope everyone is enjoying the summer (or winter, for you Australians). See you in a couple weeks!

Why can't yellow be spelled like Jello? (or why I sometimes get takeout for dinner)

I guess I could have also called this post "ow"!The o went together so fast that I thought I was on a roll, but the w ... let's just say I have a larger scrap pile than I used to! It took a loooong time, and now I wish I had made the little inner strokes wider. I had hoped to move on to another color word and if I hadn't made the mistake of checking the time, I would have. I almost did anyhow (love that Chinese takout), but I have been hankering for slow-roasted tomatoes and I had promised myself to get them into the oven for tonight. Brian came home with some amazing bread from Mirabelle's, and that with the tomatoes will be a to-die-for combo. They're in the oven now.
I have been working hard to finish up my I Spy this week, and Saturday we had a Project Linus workday, but my Stroop quilt has been in my mind the whole time. I am now thinking that I will try to make some small color words, too. Should be fun to do and will make for an interesting quilt. The Stroop effect must be pretty strong -- as I was thinking about how to make the w, I kept seeing it in yellow. I remembered that I had made the word red, but I couldn't remember what color I had chosen to make it! Odd, isn't it?

I thought I'd also share these two useful tools with you. Someone suggested using a toilet brush (a clean toilet brush) to pick threads up off the carpet. My sewing space is mostly uncarpeted, but I have one small rug and it gets really thready -- the brush works pretty well. I got the Cotton Picker at the Chicago Quilt Show and it's fantastic -- just swipe it over cloth and all the little quilt droppings (as my husband calls them) stick to it like a charm.

I Spy finished!

Just needs a label, which I'll do this afternoon. I don't usually label my quilts, but this is a gift for children and I want their names on it.
Here's the back. A friend suggested using the map, and I think it's a great idea.
We had a Linus workday yesterday and the guild member in charge of our raffle quilt brought the blocks that have been completed so far. (Some still need eyes.) We got permission from Ami Simms to make her adorable Dog-Yeared Calendar Quilt as a fundraiser for Project Linus. Each block has been made by a different guild member. When it's all put together, we'll raffle the quilt.

I Spy binding

Finally! I had hoped to have this in the mail this week, but with overnight guests, working, getting ready for vacation, and a bit of laziness on my part, I didn't get the binding on my I Spy. Didn't even work on any other quilting projects. This morning I read the Calico Cat's blog and she was discussing whether or not to trim the batting and backing before stitching on the binding. I was taught not to trim, did that once (my first quilt) and then never again. But I got thinking about it after I read her post and decided to try one more time to attach the binding before trimming. It was great! No worries about whether I was catching the backing, whether there would be enough fabric at the corners, etc. I think I'll do it this way from now on!

I also do mitered corners it what I have discovered is an uncommon way -- I stitch them in as I go.I learned this method from Sharon Pederson shortly after I started quilting. It's easy and since you begin and end at a corner, you don't have to do that tricky bit to get the binding ends to meet in the middle. It looks good when it's done, too. Directions are in both of her reversible quilts books, although she says it's not her discovery, just a method she was taught years ago.

Time for a real stretch

I don't have a background in art and I've sewn very little over the years, so I'm a little surprised at how intensely I've taken to quilting. I've spent the last couple years learning basic quilting skills and figuring out what works for me, and now I'm ready to break some rules! Actually, I don't think of it as breaking rules, I think of it as trying my wings -- finding out who I am as as a quilter. If the end result is not aesthetically pleasing, it doesn't matter what rules are followed or broken.

I love this book -- I've spent hours looking at the quilts and trying to figure out what makes them work. Most of them I like, several I love, and a few I could do without. It's not a pattern book, it's a book that gives you ideas you can play with. It shows you a few things you need to know, then sets you free. And now I'm going to give it a try! We recently repainted our main living area and changed the furniture. This was a big step for me -- my first walls that weren't white! We love it, but we have a big blank wall over the cranberry red couch. My wonderful husband suggested that it would be the perfect place for a quilt. And it would! So I'm going to try some of the suggestions in this book to come up with a quilt for that space. YES!

For other projects -- Laurel's I Spy quilt is almost completely quilted (I love watching the diamonds form on the back!) and in looking through the Outside the Block book, an idea for a border for my Stroop quilt just popped into my head -- I hadn't even thought about a border before! Can't wait. Unfortunately, I have to go to work in 10 minutes.

Art in the park

It's been so hot (93 degrees today) here lately that we've been heading over to Meadowbrook Park early in the morning to get in some walking before we melt. This morning I brought my camera with me. The park is a prairie preserve and also a sculpture garden, with maybe two dozen sculptures scattered along a two-mile loop. For reasons I don't quite understand, this one seems very quilty to me -- perhaps because of the squares? These guys, directly across the path from the previous sculpture, have always been among my favorites. They're not particularly happy fellows, but I like them anyhow. The whimsical nature of both sculptures really appeals to me.

And of course, Mother Nature provided some beauty of her own. This graceful deer was breakfasting some thirty feet from us. Yesterday we suddenly came upon a deer only eight feet distant. We stared at him and he stared at us, then bent his head and continued to eat. It makes getting up early worth the effort!

Yell(ow)

My younger daughter Val is home visiting for a few days (hoorah!) so most of my free time is spent with her, but I managed to find a few minutes today to get back to my Stroop quilt. The letters are not sewn together, but I laid them out on the background fabric for this photo. The scale is uneven, but I'm just leaving it for now and after awhile I'll figure out what I like and what I don't. The pink color is more true in this photo than in the one above:
I've been using Tonya's tutorial, but as her basic message is play, play, play, I haven't followed it to the letter (pardon the pun). I put an angled line in the y just to see what it would look like. I made one straight l and one angled l, but it turned out less angled than I had anticipated. I have found that to be a common problem for me. The angle always feels much bigger when I'm cutting and stitching than it appears when it's done.

I'll add the ow soon (the o looks easy but the w is a tad intimidating). Leaving it as yell for now has some merit. I had a rather unpleasant week at work and a bit of yelling might have been cathartic, if not productive in the long run. I did take today off to be with Val, however, and that was very nice. Actually, a couple days ago I wanted to work on my letters and found I was too keyed up to concentrate. I just wanted straight line sewing. Today when I started working, I was sorry I hadn't attempted the letters because they are so much fun that it would have been good for me.

And I found myself remembering that my dad once took some medication that made him see things in the wrong colors. His first clue to the problem was when he noticed a pink schoolbus on the road!

Borders, in more ways than one

I got the borders on the I Spy quilt a couple days ago. I had been worried that the green background was too dark, so I put in a yellow inner border to lighten it up a bit. I considered using FMQ to write the names of some of the items in the quilt along the inner yellow border, but was afraid it would get sloppy. I also would need to do that before I made the sandwich since it would read backwards on the back and would interfere with the map I'm using for backing. I think there's probably enough going on this top that I don't need to add more. Here's a very crooked photo.

I was looking at this quilt closely again and noticing all the little things I had fun including. I have a hexagon with a Dutch girl in it, since this is for the children of my niece who lived in the Netherlands growing up. I put in a block of Abe Lincoln, since I live in Illinois. There's a hand print block that makes me think of the sweatshirt with my kids' hand prints that I made when they were very young. And then I thought of my niece's children looking at this quilt and I wondered what memories they will form of it, and how long they will carry those memories? I must be in a reflective mood, because it reminded me of the old Simon & Garfunkel song that alludes to the 'borders of our lives'. Normally I'm not so sentimental, don't know what brought this on.

As long as I'm on the topic of borders, I'll mention that I'm crossing a few this summer. We'll be spending a couple weeks in Greece and Italy, preceded by a few days in Amsterdam. I can't wait!! I've been to both Amsterdam and Italy before (though only one of the places in Italy we're going this time) but I've never seen Greece. Here are a couple things I'm looking forward to:

The amazing mosaics. This was my one and only quick shot of the tiles in the entry way of San Marco in Venice. No photos allowed inside. I didn't know that meant no photos in the entry, but they let me know very quickly. As you can tell by the light reflecting in the upper left corner, these tiles were underwater -- Venice does flood. Truly amazing floors, amazing. I bought a book with photos of many of them, and came home and got Bella Bella Quilts.

This was a stairway landing in the Doge's palace next door, where photos are allowed.
And, of course, I'm looking forward to good eats! Here's a cheese stand at a farmer's market in Tuscany.
And here's where you can go to learn to cook -- but with such flavorful, fresh ingredients, you don't have to be a chef to make delicious food.

Busy week with Linus

It has been a very busy week getting ready for a Project Linus worknight. I'm chair of the Linus committee at my guild and it is far more work than I had anticipated, though I feel good about it. People have been extremely generous with fabric donations, although not all of it is really child-friendly (but we've been working on creative ways to incorporate that fabric into the quilts). This week we made Happy Houses.It was so much fun, although the sewing took no time compared to the hours I spent sorting through our fabric and cutting out the pieces. Do click on the photo to enlarge it so you can see all the people and animals in the doorways. If you're interested in making any Happy Houses yourself, I have links to the original directions and some simplified cutting info posted on the blog I keep for the guild's Linus projects. Click here for the instructions. I'm trying to decide on sashing -- all suggestions welcome!

The roof and sky are made by the quick corners method, which is easy but wasteful. One of the ladies stitched all the leftover triangle pairs into squares. We have a big block box where we put leftovers like this and eventually they get used in a quilt.

And finally, here I am in my very messy sewing space. Brian had put a new memory card in the camera and snapped this photo to be sure it was working. I'm putting the borders on the I Spy quilt I'm making for Laurel's kids. I trimmed the hexagons without incident, thank goodness, and hope to finish up the quilt this week. I'll post a photo soon.

A red thumb

I wish I liked to garden. I do love gardens, I just don't enjoy the process of gardening, and I confess to some guilt about that -- like I'm deficient in spirit for not liking to dig in the earth. I have tried gardening with very mediocre results and I think of myself as having a brown thumb. But a couple years ago last November, some friends brought over three bare twigs with the unlikely claim that they were from their raspberry bush and stuck them into the ground behind our house. Incredible! Even I can't stop their frenzied growth (and why would I want to?). Such luscious berries, so full of flavor after the tasteless fruit from the grocery store. Although I'm sure I don't get credit for this -- people tell me I couldn't get rid of the bushes if I tried -- I now think of myself as having a red thumb. Well, maybe only rosy red, as I have never done well with tomatoes.

Every morning for the past week we trot out the back door and pick berries for breakfast. So delicious! We have so many this year that I may even try a berry pie, though as DH Brian says, why would I want to ruin them by cooking?

Dear California relatives, eat your hearts out! And if any of you grow raspberries out there, please don't tell me.

The red blue

On Saturday I made the word blue for my Stroop effect quilt. (And what did I do on Sunday? Nothing as fun as this was!) Making these letters is the most fun I've had quilting in a long time, and I always enjoy quilting! I've been playing around with different angles in the letters. It's a real mind bender to know how to cut and stitch angles so that you end up with the fabric opening in the right direction enough to cover the area that needs to be covered. I'm learning! None of the letters are sewn together, and I've left plenty of extra fabric so I can lop things off as need be. The letters are different in scale -- compare the b and u -- and partly I love that and partly it drives me crazy (as my husband says, it's not a long trip!). I'm going to make lots of color words before making any decisions about things like scale. I'm practicing this type of freedom in my quilting (just like I try to practice being 'random') and I'm hoping the final quilt will be the better for it.

I also realized that I was not picturing straight rows of words, but rather helter-skelter words at odd angles all over the quilt. I don't know if that's how I'll actually do it, but it will be a piecing challenge if I decide to go that route. Still, I think it can be done. Whatever I decide, I may have to re-do some words or letters, but at this point that thought doesn't bother me. This quilt is a real learning experience.

Quick -- What color is this?

Did you say red or green? It confuses your brain because it's getting both messages -- the word red but the color green. Psychologists call this the Stroop effect. You can learn more about it at a neuroscience site sponsored by the University of Washington, and it even has a couple tests you can take to see how much more quickly you can say the colors when they match the word than when they don't. This is the beginning of my next quilt, the one with rainbow colors hinted at in the previous post.

I am totally smitten with Tonya's wonky letters. So engaging! So many possibilities! I've been toying with various ideas about how to use them and finally settled on this. Seems to fit the style of the letters, too. If you've never seen Tonya's quilts, you're in for a treat. Her blog is Lazy Gal Quilting, and on the sidebar she has a link to tutorials for her wonky letters. It's not my usual style to just cut and stitch without measuring several times first, but it was a blast!


Here's a photo of an old (a very old) t-shirt of mine that has the mismatched color words. Guess I've been fascinated by this for a long time. We saw an exhibit on the Stroop effect at a science museum in Canada many years ago and my husband, who is a cognitive psychologist, explained it to our kids and me. My older daughter went on to major in social psychology in college and the younger one is finishing her major in cognitive neuroscience, so this quilt will fit our family well!

This is not a rainbow

Well, it kind of looks like one here, but the finished quilt will not. I can't wait to start -- I kept daydreaming about it at work this morning! I hope to begin it tonight and will post the initial result soon. I'll tell you what it will be when I post the first photos, but in the meantime I'll give a little clue that may mean something to some of you: Stroop.

The young and the old

I love three-day weekends! I can't believe I finished piecing this top. Now comes the scary part -- trimming the sides so I can add the border. I always worry that I'll cut it in the wrong spot. Click on the photo to see all the cute prints. A friend brought over a huge bag of novelty prints or I never would have had enough!
And Happy Birthday, Valerie! My younger daughter turns 20 today -- how can that be? Here she is on her 18th birthday -- since she's still at school in California, I don't have one for this year.
It seems ironic to me that I was finishing up a child's quilt on the day that my youngest officially moves beyond the teenage years. I wish I had been a quilter when my own kids were little!

Bunny Love

'Bunny ears' are those tiny triangles that stick out when you piece with triangles. I love them.

I had read or heard somewhere that they could be useful when joining rows, but I tried to use them when I made my first I Spy quilt and the result was disaster. The points didn't even come close to matching! I resorted to pushing a pin through the seam of both pieces, pinning on each side, and moving to the next one down the row. It took forever, and the end result, while better, was only okay. Pretty discouraging.
I think the problem was that I had made the hexagons by tracing around a template and cutting with scissors. The blocks were not the same size. Before I started this quilt, I put every piece back under the template and cut around it with one of those tiny rotary cutters. Still, I was joining rows with the time-consuming 3-pin method. But yesterday it occurred to me to give the bunny ear method another try -- and it worked! Hooray!
I love bunny ears. Is there an emoticon for those? =:-) How's that?

Quilts can be dangerous!

You think you have a safe hobby? Check this out:
Man paralyzed when hit by falling quilt.

From random to chaos!

This is the hazard of using a portable design wall. I was taking something off my temporary batting and painter's tape design wall right next to this and accidentally bumped it. Oops.

Actually, I kind of like this look ... :)

So I have one more chance to practice randomness when I put the blocks back up, but I may wait until tonight.

I don't do random...

...but I tried to tonight. It should be easy to grab a block and stick it up without any thought as to where it should go -- grab, plop; grab, plop; grab, plop -- but it isn't. I steeled myself and left the blocks where I first put them. But I needed a little control, so if two blocks were obviously wrong together, I avoided putting them next to each other in the first place. That got harder as the wall filled up. I'm going to let this sit a few days and fiddle with the layout after I've given this a chance. I'll need to make a few more blocks, too. Sorry the photo is so dark -- the sun had already gone down before I got the camera out, but the flash really distorted the colors.These flannels are so visually rich and so plush to the touch that I love working with them. I'm keeping this quilt -- can't get enough of it!

Things I've learned:
1 - My perfect quarter-inch seam is only perfect with the weight of cotton fabric I tested it on. This flannel is extremely thick, and my seams were off. Took me awhile to figure out the problem. Fortunately the block is simple and I can just trim them all up.
2- Just because you hate your project one minute doesn't mean you will not love it the next. Recognizing that such changeability is just part of the process is as hard as doing an almost-random layout.

Graph paper on the brain

Ever notice how things seem to come in groups? I've been thinking about graph paper ever since posting about my little gridded notebook a couple days ago, and then last night while I was surfing Quiltville I came across Bonnie's Millennium Pyramids quilt and was smitten. She said the hardest part was drafting it, but at least she used triangle graph paper found "at most quilt shops." Triangle graph paper -- what a concept! Still, I was unconvinced that piecing rows of triangles would not be hard. I had a very difficult time with that when I was making Brian's office quilt (which I have not posted because I am still mad at those triangles!). But her way of cutting and piecing the triangles was something I had never seen and it looks so much easier than what I did. I will definitely try it.As I looked closely at Bonnie's quilt, a hexagon suddenly jumped out at me. Duh! Of course a hexagon would be there. So I mentally played around with it and wondered how you might piece a six-pointed star, a shape with which I am enamored, using her method. It would require drafting and considerable planning, but it could be done! I wanted to do it NOW. (Sometimes I am like a two-year-old.) I had no triangle graph paper. Internet to the rescue! I found a great site that offers Free Online Graph Paper. So I printed up a sheet of triangle graph paper and drew out a double six-pointed star. I'm going to color it and then go through my stash and piece it her way. Can't wait!

J'adore le bloc Rhodia

When I lived in Paris as a student more than 25 years ago, I fell in love with French paper. Notebook pages were thick and felt silky, and every sheet was covered to the edges with a faint blue grid. It was expensive, so I hoarded it. I brought a couple packs home with me, and only a few months ago I discovered a few still unused sheets in an old binder.

When I became a quilter, I started using a graph paper notebook leftover from chem lab to draft blocks and layouts. In my heart I pined for my old French gridded paper. It was such a pleasure to write on, and embarrassing as it is to admit, I felt that the quality of those elegant sheets would somehow transform my designs into something more worthy than they were.

The powers that be must have been moved by my deep and wishful sighing, because just before Christmas I discovered this little French notebook in the UI bookstore. I love it. It's small (3.3 x 4.7 inches, or 8,5 x 12,0 cm), fits easily in my purse, and I can take it wherever I go. Best of all, the paper is silky and has a blue grid from edge to edge.



No matter where I am, I can doodle. Here you can see my draft of two ways to piece my flannel blocks. I saw the heart design on TV and grabbed my notebook to draw it before I forgot the details; I think it will be a lovely border on a Linus quilt. When I'm out and about and see a great design on a brick walk, or a tiled wall, I will be prepared.

I won the lanterns!

What amazing good fortune! Thursday night was the block lotto drawing for the Japanese lantern blocks -- and I won ! Aren't they beautiful?I hope enough people sign up for the swap that it will be a go. I've never been in a swap, although I've tried. The two I signed up for had too few people. Same thing happens if I like a new TV show -- it won't last the season!

My friend Glennys thinks that miniature versions of these lanterns would be great on a purse. There's a bag challenge at the guild and she's thinking of doing that.

The kids know I love Asian fabrics -- look at these gorgeous half-yards they got me for Mother's Day!



Val drove down (yes, she has a CAR!) to Eddie's Quilting Bee, which I really miss, and picked these out. Since my very first quilt had used red and blue Asian fabrics, she chose 3 of each color. You can see they come in pairs. Thanks, girls! I love them.

Happy Mother's Day!

In honor of the day, I thought I'd post photos of me with my terrific daughters...















...and me with my wonderful mother...














...and the girls with their loving paternal grandmother.

Happy Houses

I've been trying to come up with a variety of block projects for Linus workdays. It's easier to make a block than a whole top -- duh! -- and people get really creative when they make just one block. Here's my latest idea , "Happy Houses."Before Simply Quilts was taken off HGTV (sigh), one of the episodes I taped was Quilting with Kids. The guest showed how to make a butterfly block and a house block. Both are simple enough to make with children, but I figured that since the designs are so child-friendly, they'd make great Linus quilts, too. I used her pattern (available online if you click the link above) but put a child in the doorway instead of using the roof fabric for the door. I cut twelve blocks, each with different fun fabrics, so we can stitch them at the next work night. I love the balloons in the sky! Do you suppose this little boy is so happy because it's his birthday? ;)