Back on the Road

This past weekend I went on my first quilting trip since the Pandemic. I’ve had a few in person events and the odd class, but this was my first get packed, get on a plane, and a hang out with quilters all weekend kind of trip. It’s been forever!

It felt so good.

As stressed as I get before leaving (always with a moment of regret for the commitment) I feel amazing once I arrive. This teaching gig gets me to some beautiful places with wonderful people. I am so lucky.

This particular trip was to Parksville, British Columbia. Parksville is a town North of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. In the summer it is packed with tourists because it has great beaches, beautiful parks, and a wonderful people. By this time of year the tourists are gone and the rain is settling in. Still absolutely worth the trip.

The Parksville Quilt House Guild is the largest guild on Vancouver Island and one of the oldest in British Columbia. Everyone I met was kind, full of laughs, and tremendously supportive. My hosts were incredible. I taught two workshops (Traditional Variations and Improv Lettering) and delivered a trunk show to over 150 people. At the workshops quilters brought treats for the group, fruit from their own trees, and made sure I had tea and medicine when an unexpected migraine hit. And, they followed my supply list and brought chocolate!

I’ve written before about how inspiring it is for me to be on these trips. I get to see parts of the country (or the world) but I also get to witness the creative acts of quilters. Both things inspire me so much. I get my own cool ideas as we all play together. More importantly, I get to witness the changes, ideas, and freedom many quilters feel in my events. Yes, I am tooting my own horn, but I see a lot of quilters leave my events brimming with ideas and with newfound freedom. No one has given them permission to play before and you can tell.

At the end of my trunk show I had one lovely women come to me and tell me that she is more of a “looker” than a quilter. She made her first quilts decades ago and while she was so proud of what she did she was judged by the quilt police and barely sewed after that, feeling like she couldn’t be good enough. After seeing my improv quilts, my bits of wonkiness, even my mismatched points when I am trying for precision, she felt so good. It’s not that my bad work made her feel better about herself. No, it was that she could see there was another way to create, and that the judgement of the past didn’t need to apply to her anymore.

That right there is why the stress before leaving is worth it. It’s always worth it. Rainbows over the ocean, bald eagles, and stellar sea lions are only a plus.

Quilters' Playcation Adventure Sewalong Update

The Quilters’ Playcation Adventure Sewalong is back after the summer break. Our map is growing. This is the point where I can really see the blocks coming together as a map. I went out recently and added more beige fabrics to the stash so I could complete the island part of the map. Now I can see that I will have it as an island surrounded by water.

Like most of my quilts, this one started without really knowing where it was going to end up. I just committed to making the components. Really, this is about committing to the process more than anything. Being willing to play, experiment, and relax about knowing the end result. To me, this is the ultimate freedom. I know, however, that to others this is absolutely scary, terrifying even. Many folks want to know exactly what is coming and how the whole thing will come together. That is their comfort zone. Meanwhile, that sounds boring to me. We are each different quilters and that’s okay!

The second version of the quilt is also progressing. This is the more abstract one. Each row definitely references the inspiration, but it is far from a literal interpretation. (Is it really literal when it is an improv quilt block?) I can see that the next few rows need to do some things composition-wise, and I will have to think carefully about the colours I use. These two things will help the overall quilt feel balanced.

If you are new to the Adventure Sewalong, you can find all of this year’s videos on You Tube.

Morning Make 2023 - Collage Portraits

Up first in my portrait making, aside from learning how to draw, was something I was just a bit familiar with. Back in 2017 I took a class with Melissa Averinos on making faces in fabric. I made one face, loved the process, developed some grand ideas, then promptly did nothing about them. Needless to say, that’s why I chose to start with this technique. Also, I was using her book to learn the drawing basics so it was a natural extension.

In the book Melissa walks us through the basics of anatomy and shape. She outlines many ways your can interpret this with fabric, then encourages you to go for it. It’s all so very approachable. She also has tonnes of examples. You can see the myriad ways people, her students, took to the portraits. You also get to see a big selection of her own work. It is all inspiring.

The first photo I took to interpret in fabric was my headshot, the main photo on the homepage here. I found it an interesting challenge because it is hard for me to convey depth in the collage. It’s obvious in the photo but in the collage the shoulders look a little off. But can we take a moment to celebrate my hair?! She is quilted with a million thread colours and stops and starts, providing texture and depth.

The second collage portrait I did was in black and white. I took a colour photo from when I was visiting Lucy Maud Montgomery’s house in PEI. I was just to happy on that entire trip and it shows in the original photo. I think the collage does not quite show that. In fact, it feels a bit skeletal to me. That being said, I still really like it. I played with being a bit more abstract in shapes and with value. To soften the whole thing I used a pale pink thread for quilting.

To finish both quilts I did give them a quick soak and blocked them. They are small (less that 20” on any side) but had got a bit misshapen in handling. This roughed up the fabric and I discovered places I hadn’t quilted as well. A few repairs with both glue and the sewing machine were needed. Then the mini quilts are bound with a single fold binding in a black on black print. I decided to be consistent among all my self portraits with binding and treated it like a picture frame.

These quilts were an excellent first start to this Morning Make adventure. Fundamentally, I am a quilter so fabric portraits are the way to go for me. Will I make more fabric collages? I’m not sure. the technique is freeing and effective, yes, but I don’t love the roughness of the raw edges. You do get ultimate freedom in cutting your collage though. I think this is a great technique for play and it may instead stay in the repertoire for that reason, even if I don’t make another full portrait quilt with it.

December Morning Make 2022

A bit too on the nose?

In December I dug into my daughters’ craft supplies, augmented by yarn scraps from a dear friend who knits, and experimented with punch needle. Each day I used one little ball of yarn to randomly fill a space. It’s easy to do and doesn’t take long at all. Indeed, some morning’s I was at it for only 5-10 minutes. In the crazy days of the winter holiday season it was just about perfect.

We had a ball of that ultra soft acrylic yarn in white. A fake chenille? It was the right choice for the directions.

I’ve been thinking about touch a lot this winter. Realizing, mostly, how important it is to me. Not that I am a huge smuggler or hugger, but I do love a good hand hold. I was reading about how you can get your own body to release dopamine and serotonin and reduce cortisol (the stress hormone) through non-sexual touch. I found myself gently petting or rubbing my own hands in a calming gesture. My husband thought I was weird, if I’m being honest, but I found it very helpful.

Thinking about touch and seeing the benefit of these simple hand movements for myself also made me realize that this is part of why I like hand work. Using your hands isn’t just useful for the task at hand. It activates something else, something associated with the sense of touch outside of the brain’s task. When I am getting stressed or ansty I tend to feel an energy in my hands that is distracting and uncomfortable. I am often looking for an outlet to ‘get it out’. The more hand work I do, the more active my hands are in a positive way, the less I feel that bad energy.

Punch needle itself is practically fool proof with the right tools. Obviously some yarns and tools are easier to work with. It really does help, as well, to use the right base cloth. If I were to do this again I would upgrade our punch, the cheap plastic one we had was nice for being adjustable, but not very comfortable in the hand.

One of the things I quite liked is that the back is/can be as neat as the front. Depending on whether you used the punch from the front or the back it changes what you see, but both work. Varying the thickness and type of yarn as well as the depth of the punch meant I have a lot of textural and visual variation in the piece. Being open to the scrappy nature of this comes naturally for me as a quilter. If I hadn’t used words I could have chosen which side to display.

In the end, I mounted the piece on an old dollar store canvas with a staple gun. We don’t need another pillow in this house and I liked the visual of a mounted piece.