First row down... um, I mean up

If you've been following along, here is the latest installment in the scallops/clamshell quilt in process. It doesn't look like much because the overall color scheme needs to work itself out. But you can see how the thing is constructed. There will be 36 squares with 17 pieces on each. I'm being fairly methodical about the work, trying to minimize drudgery and doing some things in batches like the cutting of all 36 bases. Each square is sewn onto a base which keeps thread ends and raw edges to a minimum. When there will be as many seams as there are in one of these log cabin quilts, that kind of thing is nice to go with. The base is only unbleached muslin, very cheap and easy to work with. I actually use unbleached muslin all the time. Every quilt, more or less has it as the base. Brownie Heaven, the brown quilt a little further down that you can see was pieced entirely onto unbleached muslin. Yay IKEA for offering this so cheap! I think it's less than 3 francs a meter.

Tomorrow, though, I plan on heading in another direction. I have this craving to do something beaded and I  do have to make it so I can bead it. You'll see.....

Cut copy paste

It occurs to me that noting every step of the way I did this quilt will come in very very handy by the time next Spring rolls around and I can actually teach it. I once did a quilt like this and sold it straight away. But proposing a course in the technique means I have to make a model of it to display in the quilt store/class space. Here is the original one I made:

This time I feel like working in some lake colors. I'm still ruminating on these summery pastels even after several fairy pouches in varying palettes related to these colors. So here is the way I start one of these clamshell quilts.

Words aren't even necessary today, are they? Well, maybe just a quick note to point out the border fabric that will bring it all together. It's a Philip Jacobs print with soft turquoise and a gray/green and there is a very bright chartreuse. Hopefully the pictures show that I have the right matches for these colors in the palette. Yum.

Blogger's tricks

They will swear that it is to make life more exciting and fun, but apart from the excitement of being lost in space, all Blogger's innovations to the way one navigates and functions are just like wearing sandbags around my ankles. I have to plod along for a while every time they do this to us.

But that's not what I originally wanted to say today. I wanted to welcome anyone who is tuning in for the first time. The idea that someone will actually read this is a little abstract to me. Whenever I give out the blogspot address, it occurs to me for about one or two posts that someone will be reading it. It's a little disturbing, actually. But then soon enough the potential reader fades off into the sunset (both in my mind and in reality... I mean, who would want to follow this stuff?!!) and I can write freely again.

I've been very active these past few days working on that new quilt, the one that was originally going to be brown. Well, I suppose if you back up a half a mile and see it hanging from someone's eaves it will look brown. But any closer than that and you can see that there are many colors ranging from russet to purple... and including brown. There are lots of batiks and what is typical of a batik is the magical and surprising color combinations within every print. Sometimes the secondary colors are just very slight, but it makes for highlighting that brightens up any quilt. Yes, there are some real browns, though. And the way the pieces fall it looks like someone's wild idea of brownie heaven... so I just might call it that: Brownie Heaven.

Notice I'm not including any picture? I actually took about a hundred of it in the process of being made. The motif of the pieces is one that I figured out myself. I've never seen this in any book, so I'm pretentiously assuming it's totally original. But once going to a big Art Fair in Basel, we saw some burned and battered paintings that had been done in the 1940s and we just stood there with our mouths open looking at them. We had always assumed that Thierry's idea to do burned and battered stretchers and paintings was a world premier. Well, humble me Lord! It seems that everything, but EVERYthing has already been done. So my motif just might be out there already.

In any case, I have this idea to make an eBook tutorial about it, which might be an excellent idea or one fit for the trash. I am waiting for my Inner Voice to tell me what's what. It can probably go under the heading of "Terribly Interesting Things to Develop and Work Through, but Impossible to Sell. I'm really good at alighting upon this kind of project.

The other reason why I'm not yet flashing the pictures of it is that I want it to be a surprise for the person who commissioned it. I just love that moment when I've lugged a big, heavy quilt all folded up to the house that it's going to live in and I unfold it and go Ta-Daaah! So you will all have to wait...

That new quilt

What do you think? Can I still call it brown?

Romeo's Cat Pad

This saga actually starts with another quilt, one I was commissioned to do for Geneviève. Here it is:

Way back in the last millenium Geneviève asked me to make her and Dan a quilt. She has amazing taste and is known for her quirky and wonderful designs for Cicatrice in Lausanne. When we met to talk about the quilt, she gave me about 20 tiny little bits of color from some Pantone catalog and said that that was the palette she would like.

So I went home with this assortment and pondered.

First I tried a block I had been dying to try. I dug out lots of cloth. In fact I had tons that worked with the colors she had designated, many more than I would have said when I was with her and thinking abstractly about it. I loved the block, a New York Beauty. It had lots of intricate points and it was all done on paper, a technique I had never tried either. I was totally enthralled, but then after doing a few I started to doubt if I would be able to sustain my enthusiasm to do 42 squares, the number I would need. So I put them aside and started something else.

The second try was a fun half-rectangle that had its possibilities and I did a few of those blocks too. But in the true spirit of Goldilocks, it seemed a little too simple to be able to sustain it and stay interesting throughout an entire quilt. So...

Then about 3 months later I saw Geneviève and Dan at an opening of a show of his paintings. She asked me how I was coming along with the quilt. And I sheepishly said that I had given up. That it seemed impossible to work with those colors and I couldn't nail it down. In true Geneviève style, she just said, "Well, try something else!"

So I did. And I started to do the concentric square version of log cabin, only in varying sizes. This time I found the Right Thing. It went along crazily well and all the colors of the palette seemed to work together. The smallest of the squares is 6 cm and then there are all the multiples of 6 up to 36.

When it was all finished and I presented it to Geneviève and Dan, they liked it a lot and the deal was done. But as we were gazing at the dressed up bed, along came Romeo, their ginger cat, and we all said, "Oh no!" I said they'd need a cat pad for the bed because he was definitely going to make that quilt his own. And we all had a good laugh.

Months went by and at some point I dragged out those other squares from the earlier trials. I had so many of the half-rectangles that I actually made two smaller quilts... not really quilt size, but cat-pad size. The border/framing of them were done the same but in totally different color schemes. One has the  purple fabric as the main color and the other has the olive green as its base.

Good old Romeo never got his cat pad, but those two quilts did eventually find two homes. And they were called Romeo's Cat Pad I and Romeo's Cat Pad II. Here they are:

All this is to say that I had no idea about cat's claws when I made these quilts! So much for esoteric interpretations! After all, these are quilts!

So aren't you curious about the original blocks I did, the New York Beauty blocks? Me too! I drag them out every now and then. I think that there is a small cat-pad size quilt in the wings waiting to come out and take its bow. I actually have 12 blocks. So...

New Quilt!

Well, almost. That is, I started it today. I've been collecting the cloth for a while, though, ever since Kathleen mentioned that she'd like to have a new quilt. And that was back in November. Who would have thought these colors would be good together?

The exciting bold Kaffe Fassett print in the foreground is actually going to be the back of the quilt, but it's so pretty I'd like to go back and get much more. The rest of the quilt will be more brown with that aubergine added into it for pizzazz. The other lively Kaffe Fassett print will be in the border, I think, because there are all the tones from taupe/brown, russet and the aubergine... not to mention the gold in tiny highlights.

Anyway, here is a kind of journal of the work that began what will finish off to be a very big quilt.

I'd like to say "Stay tuned," as usual, but I have a hunch this will take a while, especially since I'd like to do some other smaller work on the side. I've become fairly addicted to the slow, centering work of beading. There's nothing quite like it. And it would be perfect to be doing that parallel to the major, physical stuff of the quilt.

Promenade at Ouchy

This past winter, through all kinds of weather, I walked as much as I could everyday at Ouchy. Oddly, after having been here for 31 years, I had never before felt the connection to the lake that I feel now. I think it was seeing that water every single day and noting the great differences in its mood from one day to another. Even in the coldest weather I needed to sit down on one of the many benches along the walk, so I really would get my fill of that gorgeous blue, gray, green and the light in all its forms on the surface of the water. There was such a wonderful opening for me and breathing was so much easier.

As a perfect place to enchant tourists in Lausanne, there are a number of small panels placed on the wall along the walk. All of these panels relate some historical fact of the area, including the period around the World War II when the park Denantou across from the promenade was converted into a huge field to grow potatoes and other edibles for the entire population. The choice of colors for these panels is exactly those in this bag. I think I dreamed about these colors as much as the colors of the moody water when I wasn't actually at the lake. That turquoise, that tender green... I enjoyed every minute of working on this bag.

Featured on the flap is another one of Janet Mealha's inspirational porcelain cabochons. This is the largest in the series I recently bought from her on Etsy in Blue Magpie Design. You can also take a peak at what she does on her very own website www.jjmealha.com.