Sneak Peek!

Here's a sneak peek of the blocks I started a few weeks ago with Handloom batiks. These blocks are for a new pattern--the quilt is almost ready to be quilted and is scheduled to be photographed mid-October so stay tuned!

I used about fifty different prints for this new sample quilt.  But, don't worry, at the quilt show in Madison, WI last weekend I replenished my stock :).

Inspiration Day

After the last school year, I stopped teaching history so that I could a) devote more time to my quilt patterns and b) spend more time with my youngest daughter, who is growing up so fast!  Last week they started teacher’s meetings, and I would have been busy the whole week.  To celebrate ‘not being busy’ - or I should probably say ‘being differently busy’, I permitted myself the luxury of running errands on one of those weekdays. And, in the process, I ended up having a rather inspiring day!  I find it so satisfying to buzz around on a day that I would normally be working.  It’s almost like playing hookie.

First, I went to the library to get a book on teaching elementary school art (I’m still teaching art--more on that later!).  There, I spent a happy, decadent hour in a comfortable chair by the window looking through art magazines.  I discovered several new artists this way and am always interested to see how different people use color and texture to transform every day objects.  If you are a visual person (and I am) looking at pictures/paintings is such a great source of inspiration.  I love the library and magazine racks at bookstores.  Even home dec magazines are a great place to find artful inspiration.  They often feature beautiful artworks of all types--representational and abstract on the walls of rooms that are drool-worthy. As an aside, the Des Plaines library is also kind enough to hang a lovely vintage quilt near the magazine stacks.  I couldn't find a plaque (if there is one) with any information about the origin of this quilt but I sure do like it's simplicity.

I then moved on to Home Goods, where I continued my inspirational errands with another favorite of mine--dishes.  On Friday, (and everyday, for that matter) my favorites were blue and white. I will never stop wanting to make blue and white quilts.  In fact, Blue Willow - one of my very first published patterns, is all about blue and white dishes.

The above photos were taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this summer.

To assuage my guilt for what could be seen as a frivolous day, I went to Home Depot to run a much needed errand--we needed stain for our privacy fence.  But something happens to me when I am in the paint department at a hardware store.  The paint chips call to me like a plate of chocolate chip cookies and I am suddenly inspired to repaint every room in my house (much to my husband’s chagrin).  I always come home with a fistful of color chips and hang them randomly on the wall.  Then, I try and convince my dear husband, who hates painting, that a year is really not an unreasonable time to start thinking about a color change in the kitchen and bathroom!  

I find the arrangement of all of the paint chips at hardware stores really spectacular, don’t you?  In fact, they are practically begging to be made into a quilt!  

That idea is going on my “bucket quilt list” - which at this point, I would need five lifetimes to complete!!

Pre-washing and errands

I recently started a cover quilt for a new pattern that uses beautiful hand crafted fabrics from Handloom Batiks.  I have been collecting these batiks every time I go to a quilt show where they are vending.  They are beautiful, and different, and it took everything in me not to just start cutting into them once I decided how I wanted to sew them up.  But, I knew that they should probably be pre-washed, especially since I was going to sew them together with cream solid!

As a general rule, I do not prewash fabrics, mostly because of time.  I usually just sew them into a quilt and then wash the finished project.  I have only had a few cases in which the fabric dyes ran, or at least only a few cases in which they ran and transferred onto other fabrics in the quilt.  Luckily, color catcher sheets (just what the heck are those things anyway?!) have always taken care of the problem.  This time, however, I was not going to risk it.

Here is the super-technical way I determine if fabrics need prewashing:  I group them together by like color (and by that I mean colors that won't show it if the dyes transfer a little).

Then, I throw them together in my white laundry sink and cover them in hot water.  If the colors run into the water (and at first it looked like they might not...), I just throw the wet fabrics in the washing machine - without detergent.

But this time, as the sink filled, I could tell I was going to need to not only pre-wash these fabrics, but possibly treat them a little with something to guard against any colors transferring onto the cream solids.

A quick search through my laundry cabinets provided only white vinegar.  And after a google search about setting fabric dye with vinegar, I decided that I was going to need to get some Retayne - a chemical dye fixative. Luckily, you can usually get this at your local quilt shop!  Needless to say, this decision dictated the next several hours of my day.  I drained the sink, leaving the wet fabrics in a pile at the bottom (later I would be sorry about this, but I was having a fabric emergency so at the time it didn't matter).  A quick phone call told me I could get some Retayne at Quilter's Destination in Arlington Heights.  So, I packed up my daughters (promising them lunch, since it was 11:30 and I had to pull them away from their figurines and Sophia the First castle!) and we all piled into the car.

A few hours later (lunch took longer than expected and we made a quick stop for school supplies) we pulled up in front of Quilter's Destination.  Thanks to some good advice, I picked up both Retayne and Synthrapol (a chemical detergent that can be used before and after dying) and headed for home.  Ok, I might have bought some fabric, too.

When I returned home, I put all of the still-wet fabrics in the washing machine and ran them on a normal, hot water cycle with Synthrapol in the detergent compartment.  I have a front loading washing machine and have been putting Retayne in it for years.  When the load finished spinning I took it out and set it aside and repeated the same process with a stack of warm colored batiks - mostly reds.

I actually had been more worried about the red fabrics running (red dye has a reputation!) but believe it or not, they actually ran way less than the greens and blues.

After I had washed both loads with Synthrapol, I threw them in the washer together and washed them on a hot cycle with Retayne.

In the meantime, I soaked my laundry sink with hot water and bleach because the bottom of it was green and blue - yes, leaving a stack of steaming wet fabric in need of pre-washing at the bottom of a white laundry sink is a bad idea.  I was really afraid that the dyes would not come out, and I told myself that it didn't matter if I slightly ruined my laundry sink for the sake of quilting, only I knew that it did.  My daughter was standing by watching me saying "Mom, I really don't think that's going to work.  What are you going to tell dad?"  Luckily, the bleach worked and my sink is back to white again!  Thank you, Clorox!

The hot water/Retayne cycle worked.  When it finished spinning, I took out a few pieces of the different color ways and threw them back in the laundry sink (well rinsed from the bleach soak) to see if they would still run in hot water.  They didn't.  To be absolutely certain, I rolled them in a white terry towel and twisted it--success!  No dyes transferred onto the towel.  So, I threw everything in the dryer for a few minutes.

Years ago, I learned a nifty trick from my business partner, Janine.  Instead of letting pre-washed fabrics dry all the way in the dryer, she takes them out while they are still damp-dry and hand presses them flat to dry the rest of the way.  She uses the carpet, but I have two kids and a dog, so I tend to use my cutting mat and sewing table.  The trick is to hand press them well, like you would a sweater that has "lay flat to dry" instructions on the tag.  If you do this step well, you won't have to iron them when they dry--you can skip right to cutting them up!  I usually stack them about four pieces high.  In this case, however, I ran out of room and had to stack many on top of each other.  I have a de-humidifier running in my basement studio, but it's been pretty humid here in Chicago.  So, I rotated the pile a couple of times to be sure that all of the fabrics dried thoroughly without getting moldy.

Pre-treating/washing fabrics is sometimes a long process (especially when you don't have what you need on hand and you have to stop on the way to get what you need for washable markers and glue sticks) but it is so worth it.  I have such heart ache when I spend hours working on a quilt only to take it out of the washing machine and find that the light colors all look - well - less light.

Going Back to the Beginning.

This year I have the honor of teaching art to the seventh grade girls at the school where I teach-The Willows Academy in Des Plaines, IL.  The entire curriculum for the seventh grade year is based on geometry and fiber.  We have covered knitting, hand sewing felt cuties, basic geometry and color theory and we are finally at the mountaintop--hand piecing!  We are making pieced "mini quilts" that the girls can finish into a pillow, table topper or doll quilt.

So, I made a very professional looking lesson plan and tried to anticipate how many class periods I would need, what supplies we needed to buy, and what fabrics the girls should use.  I also made a swanky power point and a work sheet to go along with it!

I decided that to take some of the pressure off of the process that we should all use solids to make hand-pieced 16-patch blocks.  On the day before the lesson, I had some of the art students grab the fabric bins from storage so they could take out all of the solid fabrics (the only ones I had planned on using).

We have three bins of fabric in my art room.  One is full of donations from unknown sources.  The second and third are full of fabrics that I brought in from my sewing studio.  The contents from the first bin is about what you would expect: fabrics that people didn't want to throw away but clearly didn't want to keep, either.  There were pieces of burlap, denim, satin, scraps of clothing and weird novelty fabrics.  Suffice it to say, the plan to use the solids was working on the girls after going through all of the odd (and ugly) fabrics in the first bin.

The very minute they opened the second and third bins, however, I knew I was going to have to change my mind.  Their reaction to rifling through all of the pieces reminded me of the way I react to fabrics!  They could not resist touching, turning over, scrunching, grabbing, squirreling away, squealing about and even smelling the various prints!  One girl was walking around for so long with a half yard piece that she loved that I finally told her to take it home! Within moments, most of the fabrics were out of the bins and being closely examined.  Everyone started making her own stacks of favorites.  And then I remembered.  I remembered that fabrics--their patterns and their colors--are one of the main reasons I wanted to start sewing in the first place.  I began to think about the first scraps I hoarded in my nightstand as a ten year old ( I had 'stolen' them from my mother and grandmother--although I think they knew).  I thought about the scraps of fabric my mother threw away when she was cutting out a quilt that I pulled out of her wicker waste basket in her studio (the one that she still uses and I still pick things out of).  I thought about the scraps of fabric from various quilts I have completed that to this day I have in a bin because I just can. not. throw. them. away.  And let's not even get into the fabrics I have that I know I will probably never use but just had to own because of the color combination, or pattern, or combination thereof.  One of the reasons I love to sew is because I can work with pieces of fabric over and over and over again.

In the end, each of my students made a stack or two of fabrics that they thought would look good together (only one or two students decided to use some solids in their project).  They raised some interesting questions for a group of people that have had limited experience with fabrics and color.  Would different patterns in the same color family go together?  Can you mix batiks with fabrics that "don't look like batiks?"  Can you use only two fabrics in your quilt block?  What happens if you use only one fabric? Can you still cut it up and sew it back together? How do you know if fabrics match? What happens if you can't decide? And, Can you use sixteen different fabrics?

Their questions forced me to go back to some of the basic lessons I learned when I first started to sew and to reflect on some of the principles I have formed because I have been sewing so long.  It was a really great review.  It was also very inspiring to see how excited some of them were about the possibility of beginning their project with the fabrics they have chosen.  Of course some of them asked the inevitable question:  "Can I take these home and sew them on my sewing machine?!"  "No, I replied....the unit is on hand-sewing!"

As I locked my classroom that morning, I looked around the room at all of the fabric stacks and workspaces.  Some of the girls had already started cutting their blocks out.  I had that feeling that I get when I am up sewing late into the night and I don't want to go to bed.  I was scheduled to teach a history class directly after art.  But, I did't want to leave--instead, I wanted to dig in and start cutting some squares of my own.  And then sit there and sew them all together!  I can't wait until Monday's class.  We are all going to sit in a circle and have a sewing bee. :)

This weekend.....

....has been such a treat!  A big THANK YOU to the Riverwalk Quilt Guild of Naperville, IL who invited us to be their featured artists at the first "Naperville Quilts" show at the NIU campus.  Not only did they hang more than twenty quilts of ours, but they also featured members' beautiful quilts that were made using our patterns!  We have never seen as many Blue Underground Studios quilts hanging in one place!!

And, the mayor of Naperville came to do a ribbon cutting.  The city has an official pair of "Ribbon Cutting scissors"--I must confess, I am a little jealous.  I've never seen scissors of this magnitude before...

We also have to thank all the wonderful quilters who stopped by our booth to say hello!

This week, Janine is off to market in Portland.....I'll be talking about more quilts from In Love right here next week.

Happy Mother's Day!

Quilting in Heels

On Monday, I came home from school (yes, school) and traded my black heels, a copy of the Creating America textbook, and 40 tests on the Interwar years for a stack of quilts and a three ring notebook.  For the past seven months, I have been teaching history again! Teaching was my first career, and still holds a dear place in my heart.  I am still keeping a foot in the quilting world, however. And Monday night, I had both feel firmly planted (on TOP of the cutting table, to be precise) at Patched Works, Inc. in Elm Grove, Wisconsin.  Janine and I took all of our quilts from our latest book, In Love with Squares and Rectangles, to show to a group of Patched Works' lovely customers.  We had a wonderful evening browsing Julie's beautiful selection of fabrics--and patterns!  She has a whole wall of our patterns!

I love showing and talking about our quilts.  Especially our book quilts--I hadn't even seen many of these quilts since we packed them in boxes and sent them off to California at the post office with a sprinkling of holy water for good measure (just to make sure they'd arrive).  So, in honor of the official market debut of our book in Portland in this month, I am going to talk about each of the quilts individually right here over the next few weeks.

I have to start with Berry Patch--I love this quilt!  The inspiration for Berry Patch started one day as I was organizing my batik bin.  I took out all of the pieces I had and arranged them by color.  I of course had a fair number of greens and blues, and they made substantial piles--each of their own color.  Reds--I had a fair number of those as well--but I was lacking in the hot-pink department.  So, I decided to throw the pinks in with the reds.  This is the moment I started wanting to make an entire quilt out of pink and red batiks.  As is usually the case, I am astounded by the color variation in tonal fabrics--especially batiks--when I make a quilt with an analogous color palette. Hot pink can have many different looks--and together, I think a variety of reds and hot-pinks look stunning.

After I had amassed what I felt was enough batiks for the larger blocks in this quilt  (which took a fair amount of digging through unorganized parts of my own stash, Janine's stash and also a couple of trips to the quilt store), I had only to decide what color I would make the smaller squares.  The decision to use plums and purples came naturally.  I couldn't stop thinking about berries when I looked over at the stack of pinks and reds on my cutting table. So, I decided rather than fight it, I would just go with a berry theme.  Sometimes going with your gut reaction is the best thing.  To continue the berry theme, I quilted this quilt on my long arm with a freehand stone design.  It's a little time consuming, but I always feel it is worth it in the end.

We came up with three variations for each of the book quilts--the variations for Berry Patch include alternate color ways, and alternate setting options.  Check out the book to see them!

If you missed Monday's book signing, Patched Works has a stack of signed copies.  And, we'll be at some of the other local shops this summer.  Join our facebook page for the latest news!  We are also the featured artists at the Riverwalk Quilt Guild show (Naperville Quilts!) May 10th and 11th at the NIU Campus in Naperville, IL.  We'll be talking about color, AND showing our quilts and patterns.  Hope to see you there!

Coming Back with a BANG

Although sewing has been part my life for well over 1/2 of it, I have to confess to periods of time (some of them lengthy) during which I am unable or unwilling to do any sewing. Of late, until recently, I have been going through just such a period. I have however, a pretty good excuse--and her name is Elizabeth Louise!  Since March, she and my little Maggie have received top billing in my life. And what a fun time we have been having!  I converted my longarm to a clothes drying rack (as it turns out, 12 foot metal bars with canvas overlays make a great place to hang little girls dresses as they are drying!), my sewing table to a laundry folding table--complete with a baby seat, and my design wall became the world's biggest felt board for Maggie to experiment on. I had a slight twinge of regret about putting all of that time and effort into refinishing the basement--after all, it was in the name of "working" down there.  But I knew that when I was ready, I would get back down there, clear out all of the miscellany and get back down to business.

It happened a couple of weeks ago. I woke up raring to go, and before I knew it I was in the basement with a gigantic cup of coffee and did not come up until that evening. The result: a clear sewing table, empty longarm frame, blank design wall (much to Maggie's chagrin) and about 300 new ideas I was dying to try.

I had to put some order to my thoughts! I am famous for having a ton of ideas and getting none of them done....So, I started with a couple of projects that could be completed quickly, one long term project, and one project that was completely new to satisfy that itch. Here they are on the design wall...as you can see, I am still happily sharing space with the alphabet train.

The quilt in the background on the left is a sample of a new pattern that I released at spring quilt market called Juxtaposition. I had been wanting to work with these particular fabrics by Malka Dubrawsky.  I love their bright colors (lime and teal are currently on my list of favorites). These blocks had been cut out before Eliz. was born so they were a cinch to sew up and get on the wall. The blocks in the background on the right are some pillow tops that I am hoping to quilt and put on my couch.  I love the way quilted pillows look but it seems that I suffer from some sort of creative laziness. Despite the fact that I love the way they look, and I not only know how to sew and quilt but even have many tools at my disposal to make the job easier, I still put off this task of making pillows.  Hmmmm....

The quilt that is on top of the others is an Around the Block sample.  Janine and I released this pattern together in our second year of pattern designing.  Since then, we have made many samples of this quilt. I have long been drawn to the log cabin pattern and I am so happy with the way it looks using a neutral solid and some of Marcia Derse's latest fabrics. It somehow makes this very traditional pattern look modern. We are getting together once a week to sew this quilt up, hoping to get it done in a reasonable amount of time. More on that progress as it happens.

The last project I decided to tackle has been a long time in coming. I have been an ardent admirer of Kaffe Fassett/Westminster fabrics for--well--it has actually been years at this point. I have been shuffling bins of these fabrics around my studio, not really realizing how much I had accumulated. As it turns out, the rough total is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 1/2 rubbermaid bins.

I decided to cut a strip of each of these fabrics to make an In and Out quilt that I could work on intermittently, throughout the summer. The upside of this project: I got to look at ALL of the prints that I own in this category and use a lot of them.  In some cases, I used the rest of what I had.  The downside of this project: 160 strips later, I have not even used all of the fabrics I have and I was somehow inspired to do a little shopping and ADD to this collection--to fill a few gaps, of course.

To date, I have all of the strips cut into pieces, and 180 blocks made. I'm feeling pretty good about this progress--especially since this particular quilt does not have a deadline. Oh how I love sewing for fun!