Experiments in Demon Slaying

I vowed to myself to use my UFO stack to practice on new free motion stitches.  It seemed like multi-tasking at its best--I would whittle down the unfinished pile and i would also have a chance to improve my skills.  So I chose a wall hanging that was mostly done.  i had put it aside because....well, it turned out to be a boring piece.

So I pulled it out and decided I would do each square in a pattern I hadn't worked on before, then use the border space to practice retracing my stitiching line--bifocals are not really great for that kind of thing.  So I sat down and....nothing.  I couldn't commit to a pattern.  I spent way too much time looking at different possibilities.  The first day I had a break and could have sewn, all I did was dither--'what if it looks bad?' 'what if I don't like it?' 'what if I mess it up" 'I don't think I can do this' Mehehh!!

 I had to smile--I sounded just like my high school students!  And my response to them is usually 'what's your point?' (I know--it sounds a bit rude, but we're talking about high school students, so it's not) When they stop panicking and really focus on the heart of the issue, most of the time they admit that they are afraid of failing. My responce: 'and what's the worse that's going to happen if you do crash and burn? Is the world going to end?'  And since the answer is generally 'no', they usually pull themselves together and go for what they want.

Dancing With The Fan

     This has not been a very productive week--it seems like everytime I have sat down to do anything, some crisis has occurred.  It's been everything from toilet paper hanging from the trees (I teach high school and it's homecoming) to a missing doggie food bowl (that was a serious trauma for the pampered schnauzer). But I finally managed to get in a very small amount of work on an old UFO.  Knowing that for the next month or so, time would be at a premium, I decided to re-think how I chose my UFO to work on.  I decided to go with the not-so-great ones first--I know, that sounds silly.  But I figured I could use them to practice new stitches and kind of mutli-task.  I'd get better at free motion and I'd whittle down the pile.  And, if the stitch I was practicing didn't turn out so great.....well, it wouldn't be at total loss. A grandmother's Fan got the nod this week.
     I started this small Grandmother's Fan patchwork quilt quite a while ago--it's got fabric that used to be maternity tops in it, so it's at least fifteen years old--I think I waited a year  after the baby was born to start cutting up the maternity stuff.  Hey--they had stretched through three kids, they deserved a decent upcycle.

Once again, I was left trying to piece together the past--it's really like a quilt, isn't it?  I look at these UFOs and get glimpses of the person I was then and the life I was in the middle of.  Some of it I can remember vivdly and some of it is nothing more than the merest shadow of a memory.  I don't immediately remember where all the fabric comes from, which bugs me because almost all of these early quilts come from someone's clothing. I had pieced it and begun the quilting on it twice.  Some of it is handwork--which means it was really early in my quilting time.  I think I got frustrated with it; probably it seemed like I wasn't making any progress on it.  Gee, I can't imagine why--it's not like I didn't have three young children at the time!  This quilt also had some really bad machine echo quilting around the outside of the fan sections.

I was ripping out the bad quilting to rework the piece when my youngest, the 16 year-old princess, plopped down in the sewing room--aka my oldest boy's empty bedroom.  She watched for awhile and then started the memory trail.  There were pieces off of some of her old dresses, pieces from my blouses, sashing that was left over from a christmas tree skirt, and some things neither one of us could remember.  That's always been one of my favorite quilting times--that invitation to remember the journey of how all the parts come together.

So even though this little quilt isn't destined to be a show-stopper, I think I'll have to keep this memory.  Once I got the atrocious stitching out, I stitched a flowerbomb over the fans.  It's hard to see with the different pieces, so I flipped over to the back. I used a kind of branched paisley on the background.

Weaving and Watching

It's a nice, crisp autumn evening. Am I curled up in front of the fireplace, dozing with the dog? No!! I'm sitting in a semidark room trying to weave a table runner. I know, it sounds sketchy and it is. It's dark enough to require me to really focus on counting the pattern instead of visually checking for mistakes. And I'm sure the question rolling through your head is 'Why doesn't the ninny just turn on the lights????

 Well, it's homecoming week here in Natchez. I teach high school and our student's favorite activity during this week is rolling houses. They say they only roll the houses of teachers they like, but I have my doubts about that. It wouldn't be too bad if they just threw the toilet paper and left, but no, they finally have to show some creativity. One year, the rage was to 'fork' the yard by individually shoving hundreds of clear plastic forks into the ground. It's amazing how quiet a bunch of teenagers can be when they want to. Another year, everyone's cars got saran wrapped shut. Another time, they decided to tear off each square of paper and drop it on the ground. This year, it's 'snowblowing'--the dumping of thousdands of Q-tips all over a yard.

 The year we got wrapped six nights in a row, we decided to fight back. Clean up is brutal and if it rains before they're done for the week, we'll be picking toilet paper out of our trees until March. So we got a couple of spotlights and mounted them on stands. Now my front yard is brighter than an airport runway--you could easily pick up a dime at midnight here. And if I sit in my semidark loom room--a.k.a my living room--I can recognize them, sneak out the side door, and scare the living daylights out of them. Yes, I know it's a little juvenile, but I have to get my entertainment somehow.

 So what am I weaving in the dark? I'm weaving on a four shaft jack loom. The warp is a blonde rayon chenille. The weft is a really neat loosely spun silk. It's the recycled pieces left over from Indian saris.

The yarn itself is amazingly beautiful. This is a multi, but I've seen it in an array of colors. It's a little stiffer than I had figured it would be. Originally, I had thought to use it as part of a warp for a shawl, but it's too loosely spun. It kept stretching as I tried to set the tension and eventually just shredded apart. Very disappointing, but really, I should have seen that one coming. However, it works well for a weft. The texture of the yarn will add to a simple weave and make for a more interesting runner.

It's a really easy pattern -- a simple 2/2 twill. The sari yarn has a good body to it. When combined with the sheen of the chenille, it should make a really nice runner. Once it's done, I think I might twist the fringe to help keep the chenille frm losing it's fuzz. The finished size should be 10 x 32 inches, not including the fringe. So here are the specifics:

 warp: 12 epi

 120 warpends

 threading: 1,2,3,4

 tie-up:1 & 2
        2 & 3        
        3 & 4
        1 & 4

 treadling: 1,2,1
            3,4,3

Digging UFOs

I confess---I have more than my share of UFOs.  It's probably my own fault--isn't that true of all relationship issues?  I'm sure you've been there--it seems like the perfect relationship at the begginning.  You love everything about it when you're in that first bloom of love.  Thenall the doubts begin to creep in--is this really right for me?  i'm I going to respect myself when it's over?  Can I really live with those annoying little imperfections?  Next thing you know, you're wanting to wipe it right out of your memory and pretend like you had never lost your mind in the first place.We're talking about quilts remember?  Not major life choices!!  But if you're like me, I get really wrapped up in what I create and I begin to look at them as much more than a collection of fabrics.  I tend to see them as an extrapolation of all my other choices in life and allow the failures and successes of my projects to define me personally.  Not much pressure, huh?

So when I started following Leah Day's UFO Sunday, at first I didn't want to go there.  It was sad to look at that forlorned collection of dashed hopes, patiently waiting to see the light of day again.  After a couple of weeks, I reconsidered.  When I dug through them (and there are a good number of them)  I came across some that not only weren't too bad, but I couldn't even remember why I had discarded them.  So I took out the most promising--what looked to be a nearly complete Christmas table runner.  It was all appliqued and bordered--nothing too threatening to get started on.  It was even attractive--why had I let that one slip away???  Oh yes, now I remember..it was supposed to be a part of a larger Christmas quilt I was making for one of my babies (the youngest is 16 and a junior in high school).  It was going to go across the top of a double bed quilt when we moved the older boys into bunk beds and it just wasn't going to work.

I wasn't very ambitious--I used a fairly close stipple to fill in the background.  Then I used a silver metallic thread for the reins.  I set my sewing machine--a brother cs6000i--to a one of the button hole options.  When I decreased the stitch width and increased it's length, it made a neat kind of chain stitch.  I went around one of the borders with a vining heart-ivy and bound it off with another of the decorative stitches from the brother; this one makes a kind of chained snowflake.  And there it was--completed on a Sunday afternoon!

It was empowering!  Instead of feeling like a slacker, knowing that there were projects that deserved better than to be cast into the cabinet of oblivion, I once again in love--and this time there was a happy ending!!