WIP - National Quilter's Circle Block Challenge Part 2

As I mentioned earlier, I started the year with the National Quilter's Circle Block Challenge. In the earlier post, I shared that blocks three and five were done, but not photographed. Here they are:

Block six was still in-progress as of the last post, primarily because I changed it a bit to allow for the continuous stripes of the fabric in the bounding square set on-point. I am positive it would have been easier to just follow the directions. Here it is:

Block six and some other commitments in my life led me to set this project aside for a bit. Hopefully it will be a late 2018 or 2019 finish.

What does Modern Quilting mean to you?

One of the modern quilting e-zines I read is Jessica Skultety's Wonky Press. She has a great mix of current activities, trends and movements in the online modern quilting community and her own personal project accountability. Each issue has at least a couple of links to works I'm really glad to have found. If you haven't yet checked it out, visit her site, The Quilty Habit.

In a recent issue, she asked readers to share what modern quilting means to them. It prompted me to reply. My contribution follows.

Modern quilting encompasses a methodology, an aesthetic and a community. The best modern quilters are technically sound quilters who are skilled at knowing when to adhere to age-old rules and when to toss them out the window. As someone who isn't particularly adept at following rules, this is part of what draws me.

Modern quilting formalizes improvisational piecing, wonky lines, "made" fabric and other techniques that quilters have been doing for generations. The aesthetic of modern quilting is what I feel is most defined - the use of bold colors and prints, high contrast and graphic areas of solid color, improvisational piecing, minimalism, expansive negative space, and alternate grid work. "Modern traditionalism" or the updating of classic quilt designs is also often seen in modern quilting. I would add asymmetry to this list. While quilters have been gathering for centuries, The advent of modern quilting in a time when social media has exploded has allowed quilters to identify a global community no longer limited by face-to-face interaction or geographic proximity. That said, modern quilting has also brought together new groups of quilters in communities around the world.

I am a member of two long-standing general or traditional guilds. One is small and based in my local community. The other is larger and meets in a nearby city. I am also a member of two modern quilt guilds, both in nearby cities. I am one of the youngest members in my two general guilds and solidly in the middle in my two modern guilds. The modern quilting community has been more inviting to new and younger quilters than the traditional quilting community has seemed to be.

In the most recent issue, #59, Jessica printed my response! It's always exciting to see something you've written in print. Thank you, Jessica!

So, what does modern quilting mean to you?

Modern Quilt Guild Swap

One of the few perks of membership in the greater Modern Quilt Guild in which I participate is the annual MQG Swap now in its second year. I was paired with Linda McLaren aka the Quilting Biker from Ontario, Canada. She is a tremendously talented longarmer and quilter.

At the time I was making my mini to swap, I was also experimenting with a simple loom I had gotten Anne for Christmas a couple of years prior. I decided to bind and finish one of the woven quilts I had made as a part of this experiment.

I used fabric from a MQG Michael Miller Challenge for the back and as the guide for my quilting. Knowing that this mini was for a talented machine quilter - which I am decidedly not - was a little intimidating, for sure. (Photo credit: Linda McLaren)

Here is the finished mini I sent: (Photo credit: Linda McLaren)

Here is the beautiful mini I received. One of the things I love about quilts is that I receive quilts outside my typical colors, fabrics and patterns. I love when my partners experiment as I have often used swaps as motivation to try something new. Linda knocked it out of the park!

WIP - National Quilter's Circle Block Challenge

I've had a productive few weeks, though I haven't shared much of it, yet. One of these projects is the National Quilter's Circle Block Challenge. This free quilt along is a series of nine blocks constructed primarily with half square triangles and flying geese. They are deceptively complicated. I think one block has 81 pieces! I've made a few modifications, but, other than being a couple of blocks behind at this point, am excited by the challenge. Gina Perkes of the Copper Needle has designed nine excellent 16" blocks.

One of my quilt goals this year is to make a couple of quilts to live on our couch. This will be one of those quilts. Because I knew it was staying home, I cut into a layer cake I've had for awhile now of the first Cotton + Steel line by Melody Miller. It was a little scary, I'm not going to lie. I've opted for Kona Steel for my background.

I've managed to take pictures of blocks 1, 2 and 4. I also have blocks 3 and 5 complete, and block 6 is in-progress. This is one that I am modifying slightly. It has a great square set on point that separates the inner and outer parts of the block. The original pattern makes this box with a lot of smallish half square triangles. I'm not intimidated by the HST's, but I do have a striped fabric I'd like to fussy cut and use to frame the inner part. I'm pretty sure this has been more work than just following the directions would have been. Blocks 7 and 8 have been officially released and block 9 was leaked. Hopefully, I can have them all complete by the end of next weekend.

I've also played some with designing a setting for the blocks. The nine blocks on their own are a little smaller than I'd like the finished product to be. I'm up to six variations in Illustrator and about a dozen pictures from similar quilts done by others and shared on Facebook or Instagram.

This post will be linked to Elm Street Quilts' One Monthly Goal. I'd like to finish the top by March 31.

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!