Art and Life

A while ago I wrote about finding a longarm quilter that fits your style. I know when I first started quilting I lived in Ohio and just found a local lady and basically said "just a meander in white is fine" for every project. Hey, forgive me, I was new and just really excited to see anything finished! I know better now. The quilting can change everything about your quilt!

My longarm quilter Teresa from Quilts2aT got together and made a wall hanging from the scraps leftover when I made 2 matching queen quilts for my bedroom.

Guestroom 

I had a few of the 9 patches leftover and put them together thinking it might make a good crib quilt, since there is also a crib in there. After bringing it over and hanging it on her design wall, we started talking about it. A lot. There was so much negative space. Too much negative space actually. This wasn't a killer piece on my part. It was sparse. It was missing something. We talked about the best usage for the negative space. Working on a quilt with someone can be like working on a painting with another artist. You paint a portion, hand it over, they work on it, maybe you get it back to add more, and so on. You know what the other artists aesthetic is, but you can't predict what the finished work will look like when it is all done. What she did was stunning. 

From far away you can see it is a lot of white space.

Closer you can see the ghost 9 patches. We called it The Canterville Quilt. Oscar Wilde fans, here is your giggle for the day. 

Movement and rests, quilting can be musical

I love the bubbles

Freehand, so every swirl is an individual

See? Amazing. We entered it in MQX this past week. We didn't win any of the prizes Wednesday, but yesterday Teresa walked by and Toby Lischko was pinning her faculty ribbon on our quilt!

yeah! We got a ribbon!

Toby Lischko and Teresa at MQX in Springfield.

How cool! Happy sewing!

Family Sew Time

School is out. I am OK with this. I think. We are at the point where durihng the day we can all spend a bit of time in the sewing room. There are 3 machines, so no fighting over machine time. Vasi has a toybox in the room full of cars and legos. He also has the scrap bag to make "outfits for his monster trucks" while we sew.

This past weekend, Evie finished her third quilt.

She is 9. Sometimes she is so grown up I forget that. She is already 5'2". She's very mature for her age, thinks through things and loves reading and math. She even says her favorite part of quilting is doing the math. This quilt was no different. We were talking about modern quilts, looking at samples and techniques. Then we also looked at Modern Art, to talk about what modern can mean. We also have been working on color theory for the past few weeks. Altimately, she found her inspiration in the paintings of Mark Rothko. She remembers seeing his work at the Carnegie in Pittsburgh, and liked it because of the colors. I thought she would want to do large blocks of colors, but no, when we went to Sew Memphis for solids, she chose 4 shaded of pink. We bought a half yard of each, then sat down to start planning. We had 4 colors and she wanted large blocks, so this is what came out. She chose the grey border from my stash, to be a frame of sorts. This took her 2 days with my help. I still don't let her rotary cut. 

My 7 year old (8 next week!) worked on this

She had scrap fabric from my stash and we printed out a map of Mississippi for her to use as a pattern piece. The burlap is a burlap canvas we found at Walmart in clearance a while ago. She is my hand stitcher, she loves handwork and would rather make stuffies. She has started doing a split stitch around the border and wants to make a heart where our town is! 

I love my lazy days in the sewing room with the kids! Happy Sewing!