November Morning Make 2022

Well this was a different month!

I have a Creative Bug membership. In fact, it is like a gym membership for me. I pay for it each month and almost never use it. Oops! But the daily practice I did in November made it all worthwhile. Every day I worked on a book structure, as led in a class by Faith Hale: 30 Structures in 30 Days - A Daily Practice in Bookmaking.

There was an investment in supplies to start - book board, an awl, an Xacto knife fancy paper, glue, waxed thread. I shopped at two local art stores and the big A to get it all. In all honestly, the paper cost the most and I have a lot left. I was nervous about the knife, having sliced off part of my thumb as a kid with a similar blade. This time I followed instructions and I am 47, not 7.

Faith did a great job of moving through a number of techniques for folding, cutting, and assembling the book structures. Some were super simple and only took a few minutes. Others were a multi day process. We stitched sometimes, others we just folded. Some books have hard covers some are just paper. I even got to add fabric from my stash to a few because there was no official book cloth to be found.

The simplest ones are my favourites. Or the ones with interesting folds. Or the ones with hard covers. I picked out some of my favourites and filmed them for more detail.

I can definitely see making some of these again as gifts or for special notes for special people. All of these are currently blank. Now that I know how to make them I would like to try again with the pages already filled or at least planned out prior to assembly.

All in all, this was a fantastic month! I absolutely enjoyed this creative challenge. It still had me playing with colour but was a new to me experience. Totally perfect for Morning Make.

October Morning Make 2022

Okay, so October was not the most photogenic month for Morning Make.

I wrote. In the mornings. At the pool, at home, at my brother’s, on vacation. I woke up and wrote. In the summer I started a novel. It’s not the first novel I started. The first one is abandoned, the story died out and I didn’t feel is deserved a second life. But this manuscript still has me going.

It felt great to commit to each every day. I won’t lie, I’d hoped it would spur me on to keep that habit after October. It did not. But it is not abandoned, it is not dead. When I have the wherewithal I pull it out and add a few pages of text. The first draft doesn’t have to be pretty, good, or even legible, but it is has to be there.

Linda - September Morning Make 2022

Linda

79” x 72”

Linda is a force to be reckoned with. A retired educator she may be seen as not much to society now but she still brings joy to people and holds the world together for her family. The matters. She matters. She knows pain and joy, she struggled and fought but is coming out better for it. And now, as a grandmother she gets to see her children blossom more and those babies bring light to all.

This quilt came together in the month of September. Each day started with a scrap of batting and a handful of scrap strips. Trying to avoid a log cabin I sewed the strips to the batting one at a time. When the batting was covered I added a backing piece and quilted lines over it all. Sometimes straight, sometimes curved, sometimes on the diagonal. Then I trimmed it square. Repeat the next day. Essentially, I was making mini quilts, without the binding.

The technique is known as quilt as you go. There are actually a few different ways to approach the technique and, more importantly, how to approach attaching each piece to the others. Before I started I did some research and landed on the way that Marianne Haak teaches. I liked hers because I could quilt to the edge, rather than have to stop, and the joining method would use more strips. For my particular intentions this was perfect. I joined pieces every few days so it would keep me on track for a totally finished quilt at the end of the month.

You can see the back of the quilt here. Initially, I used the large scale print fabric. It is one from my 2017 collection with Connecting Threads called Tag. Unfortunately, I ran out of what I had left partway through the quilt so I had to back half the blocks with something else. With a busy fabric you wouldn't likely see the joining strips. In the end, I rather like the effect of the two fabrics on the back.

One of the great things about this technique is no basting! You quilt each block as you finish piecing and none were big enough to even need a more than a few pins. Then, at the end of it you have a finished quilt and it didn’t take much longer than the regular piecing. Brilliant! So all I had to do was pick the right binding and stitch it on. In the end, I chose this great pale yellow print from Heather Givens from Crimson Tate.

I used all scrap strips to make this quilt. I deliberately chose not to use blacks, dark greys, dark blues, or any muddy colours. As a result, the quilt is bright and sunny. It certainly made a dent in the strip bin, but I could easily make more quilts this same way. Indeed, I have a few more ideas for playing with this quilt as you go technique. It’s a win win situation too because I have a whole pile of scrap batting!

All the photos taken in the space that will become both our family business’ new workshop and my new quilting studio.

August Morning Make 2022

Whenever people tell me that can’t sketch out quilts because they can’t draw I like to pull out my own sketchbook. Chicken scratch, random lines, and quite often things that only make sense in my head. You don’t NEED to draw to quilt. As long as you can think about where your seam lines go you are good. That being said, I always want to draw better.

I’ve done drawing for Morning Make before. Quick little still life sketches of things around me. It was a good exercise but building a skill isn’t a one and done thing. So in August I decided to set myself a drawing challenge again. This time, however, I explored a technique called contour drawing.

In contour drawing - at least the way I did it - your pen isn’t supposed to leave the paper. You are doing one continuous long line. Some people do it blind, as in they look at their subject and never the paper. I was not ready for that. But in slowing down to look at my starting image and translating it through a single line I was able to focus on shape and composition. You can’t draw everything in the picture. Well, you probably could, but I didn’t. Depending on the source image (pictures from my phone) I narrowed the focus to only certain elements. Sometimes background were completely eliminated, sometimes just enough to give context. It was an exercise in looking just as much as drawing.

I’ll be honest, I think some, if not all, are quite bad. That is, if you compare to people for whom drawing is a livelihood or serious endeavour. There was improvement, for sure. Some are even better than I would have expected. All were, at least, recognizable. Regardless of the results it was an enjoyable exercise.