Morning Make December 2020

December saw a decided slow down, a necessary slow down. I was in the mood for hand stitching plus I wanted something that would carry me through the quiet holiday at home. Having done embroidery in February and already working on English Paper Piecing I decided to try something entirely new to me.

Pojagi is a Korean art form of patchwork. It can be done by machine, but I chose to go the original route of hand stitching. The end result is a finished seam from both sides. This means any Pojagi piece is entirely reversible.

It was never a one piece of fabric to represent one day in the month kind of project. Some days I did a single short seam, some days I did five. I will say that, initially, I thought I would make it into a curtain or shade for one of my sewing room windows. The low winter sun and Zoom events mean I have to diffuse the light coming in the room for part of the day. This would have been a very traditional use for the Pojagi. But it’s a big window! So partway through the month I switched plans and made it longer rather that wider, sealing its fate as a table runner (if I finished it.)

The first exposure I had to Pojagi was years ago from Victoria Gertenbach. Despite the time passing, it has always stuck in my head. She did machine work, but it was the history and the effect that stayed with me. For a hand stitched technique I used this tutorial. I won’t lie, I had to look at the tutorial each day for a week while I worked on it to have it make sense.

For materials and colour I stayed close to home. Many examples of Korean work will use different materials from silks to polyesters. I stuck with quilting cottons and linens, a mixture pulled from my stash. Included in this was a sparkly linen left behind when a friend from Australia visited, leftover blues from Shiver, and a scrap of fabric used to sop up dye when we tie dyed sheets with the kids last summer. My fabric pull was, in the end, an homage to a winter sunrise here.

I did actually finish this piece. It felt silly to leave it behind to be both forgotten and potentially wrecked. During downtime and while supervising virtual school this week I hemmed the edges. The tree is still up, candles light our evenings, and a lovely reminder to slow down graces the table.

As for Morning Make I am going to continue on the monthly change for 2021. I really liked the strong focus for a relatively short period of time. It is fostering play and exploration but still allows me to dig in to something new a little.

Names for Snow

Names For Snow

47” x 58”

Okay, so I finished this quilt more than a year ago. Then it was on display and stayed living for a friend for a year. He was paranoid about it getting wrecked and so gave it back. I’ve just been waiting for a proper snowfall to get a picture of it.

Of course, I forgot that proper snowfalls actually make it difficult to take quilt pictures. There is the feets of snow, for one. And two, despite all that white, it is quite difficult to get accurate colour representation in snow. Good thing this quilt is inspired by snow! In a strange twist in quilt photography, shooting this quilt in the sun was the way to do it. Got my tween and her best friend to help out as I forced them away from the snow fort they are building.

The entire quilt started as a love letter to my favourite scissors. Kevin from Knife Wear goes on buying trips to Japan. I made a comment about scissors offhand and he came up with some pairs to try. Yes, I know we quilters are spoiled with a lot of scissor options. These ones are, by far, my favourite. So I set out to freehand cut half square triangles and sew them together. Everything was cut by hand - the initial squares, trimming, and squaring up. The only time I brought out a rotary cutter and ruler was to square up the finished quilt. What a liberating way to work!

Note to self: do this again.

Playing with all these neutrals resulted in another love letter through this quilt. To my favourite season: winter! It isn’t often that I have the name of a quilt early in the making but this one was set pretty quickly. Whites, creams, beiges, more whites, a little blue. No yellow.

I spent way too much time obsessing over the quilting. I was researching different languages and their names for snow, I was trying to figure out how to stitch in Inuktitut. I brainstorming loads of options. In the end, however, a deadline and my desire to never mark quilts won. I went with dense, wavy lines (snowdrift) with little asterisk/sparkles here and there. Texture, more than anything.

The white binding seemed like a no brainer.

When making improv quilts, whether free hand cut like this or now, one key thing to remember is that perfection does not live here. Points will be trimmed off, lines might be a bit wonky, you might cut more than expected to make things fit, and almost nothing lines up. This is precisely why I like this. It looks and feels handmade. I see my own movements in every line of stitching, every shape. It can be a hard switch from the pursuit of perfection in quilt making but it is a liberating switch for many.

Now that we are settled in for a Christmas at home I am glad for another quilt on the sofa to celebrate my truly favourite season. Winter is indeed for snow forts and skiing (hopefully) and skating. Winter is for curling up with quilts and cookies at the bookends of those activities.

Here’s to the season!

This is the third in my landscape series. See Mountain Meadows and Ripples.

HOME - From Virtual Workshop to Fundraising Opportunity

Wrapped up my last virtual workshop of the year this past weekend. What a whirlwind fall it’s been! Two of the most popular classes have been HOME and Make Words Not War. HOME is a more focused version of the other but both are about making Improv letters and using intention in our improv piecing.

As I developed samples for the HOME class a collection of blocks grows. Different text styles, different piecing techniques, and different homes.

A while back I asked followers on Twitter what home means to them. Interestingly, no one mentioned a physical space. It was more about a feeling - of warmth, safety, comfort, love, a deep breath. I’d always envisioned these blocks as representative of a physical space, so it presented a design challenge. It got me thinking about the different physical spaces that can be home - an apartment, a bed, a hearth. And about the non-tangible feelings. Not sure how to represent the latter, but I am working on alternatives to a single family dwelling.

This particular block started in a workshop with Keystone Modern Creative. It was about showing a few different ways to use curves in making the letters. Then that O happened. Doesn’t it look like a flame? That got us talking about the hearth of a home, the idea of warmth and comfort. With input from students I picked the fabric to make the tile surround and mantle.

Home really is the heart of life at the moment. For good and bad. I realize that for so many it is not safe place, not a place of respite. It can be scary or boring or dangerous or not even there. I’ve decided to take the HOME blocks I make for these workshops and turn them into a quilt come summer. After that it will be used as a fundraiser. I will also donate a portion of my earnings from each HOME workshop. So the more workshops I do, the more potential for fundraising.

Not exactly sure how this will all unfold, but I want the money to go towards a shelter that helps those finding home. I am open to suggestions, but will likely pick a local option.

Thank you so much to everyone inspiring these. Thank you to everyone staying home, staying safe.

Morning Make November 2020

Well this one was way out of my comfort zone! Just the way it should be.

Partly meditative, full of exploration, a lot of learning, and some very cool results at times. November Morning Make was some playtime with block printing. Thanks to my neighbourhood friend Julie who inspires me with her detailed reduction prints. Baby steps for me, as my one and only experience with block printing was a 2 hour class years ago where I recall being bored and distracted like a child in history class..

So I set myself some boundaries but gave myself free reign to try many things. I started with 3” blocks of the pink lino cutting material available in any art store. My daughter happened to have a lino cutting tool (I think it was a birthday present). I bought Speedball fabric printing ink, which the tube says was also fine for paper. Each morning I would carve a block then stamp it on paper in a 4 patch and then on fabric in a different 4 patch. Different patterns for the different materials simply to have two ways to see how the pattern of the block interacted.

Sometimes I did patterns that linked within the 4 patch. These were more or less obvious depending on the block. Sometimes I did a graphic motif that stood on its own, like a single stamp, so that a repeat was interesting, but not the most exciting. Sometimes the ideas worked, sometimes they did not.

The blocks above are probably my favourites of the whole bunch.

There were quite a few times where I wanted to print a number more repeats, to see a larger interaction. Or maybe mix a few stamps together to see the intricacies of the patterns created. Thankfully, I have the blocks still so I can always do that!

For the fabric I chose a slubby linen I had in my stash. I really don’t know if it was a smart or a stupid choice. I think my application of the ink on the stamp was a bigger concern than the fabric I used. I struggled to get it coated without being too thick or thin. Without doing much research - I didn’t want to use my phone while I was in the middle of Morning make but would forget as soon as I left the studio - I’m thinking that it is something that comes with feel and probably varies with the products used.

A friend pointed out to me that many of the things I’ve been exploring this year have potential to be repeat fabric designs. While I can’t argue with that, let me be clear that it was not my intention. I have been a quilter for 22 years and playing with prints that whole time so it isn’t exactly shocking that it would come out that way. Who knows? Maybe I will explore that a bit more in the new year? For now, though, I am just really having fun playing.