Quilting Influencer: Grandma Patent

I've been fortunate to have access to many talented quilters in my life. Some briefly for a class or workshop and others for more long-term, deeper relationships. One of the first quilters in my life was my paternal grandmother, Lorene Patent, or as my children called her, Grandma 'Tent.

For most of my memory, she was an avid hand-quilter. She spent hours and hours quilting nearly every day at home on family or customer quilts, at the local senior citizen's center for fundraiser quilts and at church on charity quilts. Her standards were exceptionally high. She was known to take out what she considered sub-par quilting done by others and restitching it to not let customers down. She was a retired elementary school teacher and meticulous in her record-keeping. She could estimate how many stitches were in a quilt based on the number of turns around the spool of thread the she used on the quilt.

Grandma was a Type I Brittle Diabetic. Her blood sugar was quite volatile. Her mortality was always at the forefront of her mind. When I was in later elementary school, she thought it was important for my sister and I to know how to do all of her various crafts so we could finish whatever she was working on when she died, particularly since many of her projects were commissions or work other people were paying for. I learned to hand quilt at this time, but have not done a lot of it since. We also learned how to cross stitch and embroider.

I made her this mini for her 96th birthday on February 2. It is made with half-square triangles and is based on a similar quilt made by a guild friend. It was a great project for the Prairie Point Quilters' Retreat. The solids are all Kona Cottons by Robert Kauffman.

I talked about Grandma in the past-tense in this post because she passed away shortly after celebrating her 96th birthday. Because I am the most avid quilter among her descendants, I received her collection of quilt design templates including many from her mother, a precut quilt kit from the 1930's or 1940's, her hand quilting hoop, and the last quilt she had started hand quilting. Fortunately, it was not a client quilt, and I will be able to keep it once it is complete.

Pizza, all rolled up

Thursday nights have become homemade pizza night at our house.  Awhile back I checked out Jim Lahey's My Pizza from the library and ever since, we have experimented with better than decent and sometimes darn good homemade pizza.  I especially like that I can mix up the dough on Wednesday night, just mix, no kneading, and after leaving it on the counter, have great pizza dough on Thursday night.

Sometimes I plan specific toppings, while sometimes, I clean out the fridge. Leftovers make great pizza toppings.  The version shared below is an example of both with a slight twist. Lahey recommends preheating one's oven to 500+ degrees for at least 45 minutes before baking your pizzas. This is great except when our un-air-conditioned kitchen is already over 80 degrees in the summer or a weeknight when dinner should be served before the kids' bedtime. I started making stromboli because it cuts my oven-on time to a half an hour to forty minutes.

Weeknight Stromboli
Dough:

• 500 g unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 g active dry yeast
• 16 g sea salt
• 350 g water

Yes, I prefer to weigh ingredients in a yeast dough.  With the variable humidity in our house, it is more accurate than volume measures.  It also gives me an excuse to pull out the cool digital kitchen scale my mother-on-law got me for Christmas a couple of years ago.

Combine all ingredients thoroughly.  Cover and let rise on the counter for 18-24 hours.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.  Pat out or toss to make a rectangle (for stromboli).  Note, the dough is pretty wet so I use a lot of flour to prevent sticking to me and the work surface or pan.  Make a row of toppings down the middle of the rectangle.  Cover with both flaps of dough.  Tuck ends under.  Make a couple of steam vents.  Bake for 20-30 minutes or until the crust is golden brown and everything is bubbly.

The stromboli shown here is stuffed with homemade pesto, leftover Caprese salad with local fresh mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes and some browned pancetta bits.  The pancetta had been procured specifically for pizza night.  Everything else was leftovers.

Look Both Ways, Don

My office lost its curmudgeon today. After twenty-five years of driving more than two hours from home to work and traveling across Nebraska, Don retired. He has dedicated decades to keeping Nebraska drivers safe, improving roadways and helping local public agencies solve big problems with budgets that are never enough. From my first day at my office, Don has taken me under his wing accepting my idiosyncrasies, teaching me, and supporting my growth in our field. We are fortunate he will still be doing some contract work in the foreseeable future.

I've known for awhile that Don was thinking about retiring. At the August Lincoln Quilters Guild meeting, I saw what I knew would be the perfect quilt. Tonya Alexander of Stashlab Quilts shared a quilt to be published in the Fall 2017 Quilts and More Magazine. The alternating arrows with the orange highlights was absolutely perfect. Arrow boards and signage are important parts of traffic control devices - Don's specialty, and orange is an important color in road construction.

I'm not a scrap quilter. I have been collecting grays and low volume fabrics for awhile now, but I had almost no orange in my stash. Fortunately, about the time I was ready to get started, #grantyourquiltywishes started on Instagram. More than a dozen quilters, including one from Australia, sent me their orange scraps! I will need to make some great Halloween quilts this fall to use the remaining scraps!

I find scrap quilting frustrating. The amount of time it takes to maintain scraps in a way that is usable makes me a little impatient. It always takes me three times as long to select, pair and combine scraps than when I start with fresh fabric, too. This project would work with bigger, solid pieces or less variety, but it wouldn't be as impactful so I went with it.

To make this quilt more personal for its recipient, I also included fabric from a Type II safety vest. These are important daily wear for our clients, and, often, for us. Even better, the silver-gray stripes are made with retroreflective fabric that will reflect a flashlight or tv light just like a street sign.

A couple of my co-workers pitched in. One shared some fabrics from her stash and another made many, many gray strip sets.

As I was laying out the blocks on my design space, er ... bed, I found the larger, lap-sized quilt with all of the pieced squares to be a little overwhelming so I added some negative space. This has left me with a few blocks leftover to repurpose for a different project, but it also made for a quilt I am much happier with. I believe fully in the value of negative space whether it is in a quilt or on a page.

I was able to give Don his quilt last Friday during a potluck lunch. I was pleased that he seems to like it. It is a small token of appreciation for all that he has done for me and our clients. Enjoy your retirement, Don!