Creating with creativity

I'm committing to this idea of not making something that doesn't have my voice in it in some form. Im tired of making things that anyone else could have made. I'm not saying that every single project has to have improvisational piecing... Or curves, or hand quilting or lots of grays and reds... Maybe the only thing that says I made it is the way I put the colors together, but I think I'm tired of making the same stuff as anyone else. I am an artist with a voice that I already know how to express, so why have I not been doing that? These are the thoughts floating around in my head this week...

This little pillow has spring out of that internal conversation. It's an old block I made with scraps... It was sitting in my studio over a year... Just sitting. And with about 3 hours of work, I have finished it and made it something I am proud of.

I feel like I want to ask myself ... What makes this project "Libby" - this one? It's the analogous color scheme... The way I always put colors in families. There's a little bit of improv in the way I put the log cabin together and the hand quilting was very spontaneous in its construction.

I don't really know if anyone is reading these posts, but if you are, I'm curious to know what you would define as YOUR voice in a project.

New quilts and saying goodby to old habits

Lots of sewing. In the past two days, I've dealt with stuff by sewing. It's the old joke that my sewing machine is the one thing in my life that I feel I can truly control.
So in 48 hours, I've made 3 baby quilt tops.... I've also basted two of those and a twin sized quilt (an old unfinished one that I started in my first months of quilting -it's really boring compared to what I want to be making) ... And now I've quilted two of the baby quilts and this orphan block which is destined to become a pillow....I've even attached bindings too. Tons of really brainless sewing... My new machine has arrived and I have a load of new ideas I want to try out, but I didn't have space to put it in the studio without clearing up some space first... I think I needed the mental space too. I haven't made a quilt in many months and need to get a bit reacquainted with the process.

I've been thinking a lot about my process too. Going to Quiltcon was really good for me this last month because I became more clear on the path I want to take as I move forward in my quilting. For years, I have put off my most creative ideas as I have cranked through fabric that people have given me... For some reason, gifted random fabric has always screamed at me loudest - "use me up! Find a use for me!" Even louder than fabrics that I treasure and bought myself. Perhaps I just wanted to use things before they go to waste. A part of me looks at the challenge and says... "Can you make something good or even beautiful from something you don't like?"
But I'm tired of that process now.
I want to work with things that inspire me now... And I'm getting tired of never using what I love the most... These quilts have been a good exercise for me to realize that just scrapping along isn't doing it for me anymore. My most favorite quilts started with a true idea and even when they were done, I wanted to make them again. So these 4-5 little projects here are a bit of a swan song to my old process. And I like that.

I just need to hold myself to it.

Vintage Quilt Redux

This past year, I was commissioned to fix a filthy, torn, tattered quilt top and asked to "repair" it. I'm not sure if the owner even knew it was only an unfinished quilt top, and not a finished quilt until I told her. It was in bad shape.
I consulted my friends, quilty experts and contacts, including art restorers, wardrobe experts, people who market professional textile cleaning products. And then I dug in to the mess. I had to hand wash it 4 times in Soak textile wash just to get it clean enough to work on. 

Then I bought vintage feedsack scraps on eBay and made little patches for the really bad holes. 

There was lots of hand sewing to be done and much going back as I'd see more holes, ripped seams and tears, but slowly it began to come together.
I fell in love with the fabrics the more I worked with them, and found little gems and favorite spots throughout the quilt.

The more I worked with it, the more I wished I could speak to the woman who made it... The whole process felt like a conversation I was having with her. There was a distinct primitive beauty about it... I can't help but wonder if this was the only quilt this sewist ever made. So many quilter rules were broken (which reminded me a lot of the natural beauty in the quilts of Gees Bend) and I just loved the innocence of it all. As I finished the quilt, I didn't square it up, I left the edges all wobbly and dealt with the wrinkles that were there as part of the design. I told the customer that these were beautiful and should be preserved as the voice of the original artist.
What a joy it was to finish it. I quilted it really tightly and backed it with Denyse Schmidt's Greenfield Hill line, a vintage inspired line that matched really well.... When it was finally finished, it was strong and safe enough to wash thoroughly with some of my favorite handmade laundry detergent... And what came out of my dryer at the end was gorgeous. It was an absolute delight to work on.

free quilt patterns by Robert Kaufman

Last year, I was privileged to design a few quilt patterns for Robert Kaufman. They gave me some fabric from their lines and asked me to design a pattern that would work with the product.  These are the two I made for them. The process of designing and writing the patterns was really fun for me. Both patterns can be found for free at the Robert Kaufman website and they are not hard to make at all.
HEXIE HELIX PATTERN - click for the link
SPECTRUM CANDY PATTERN - click for the link

HEXIE HELIX

 

SPECTRUM CANDY

The quilt that made me late to the hospital to give birth

I'm going to be transferring a few of the posts I had made on my Facebook page over here so that they can all be in one place again - to catch up...

Here's a post of the quilt I made up to the last minute as I left for the hospital to have baby Dax.

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Here is the last quilt I finished before going into the hospital to give birth... It started off a few years ago as 4 leftover blocks from the quilt I made for our foster baby as he left our home... Then I made it into a small (too small) top.  For years I would pull it out and try different borders onto it to try and make it bigger, but none of them worked.  I finally pulled it out recently and found some fabrics I liked for it. I decided to hand quilt it, since it had been a while since I had hand quilted a project, and then when it was getting close to done, I couldn't imagine parting with it... So it had to be finished before baby came home.
I "may have" actually (read: I DID) delayed our departure to the hospital by 15-20 minutes as I begged Jay to understand that I needed to finish this binding before we left.
In the end, I could have brought it with me and worked on it for the next 24 hours before I finally had my c-section to get this little guy out...

Little surfer quilt

Many times when I am working on a project, some scraps will fall to the side and will end up becoming random quilt blocks. As I spent my last few months before having the baby, last year, I became driven to use up whatever unfinished blocks and quilts and projects I could find. I came up with the hashtag #crazypregnantladysewing and posted my ridiculously prolific work on there. Insomnia helped with that too... One of those projects was this sweet surf turned quilt ... These four very simple blocks had been sitting neglected after another baby boy quilt was made a year earlier, and so I turned them into a surfy baby quilt for a baby boy born to an old friend of mine. It was backed with the softest brushed cotton and gifted just in time for both of us to have our little guys.

Twin sized quilts for twins

Two of my very best friends had twins this past year, their birthdays bookend Dax right in the middle. Both of these friends are quilters and Alissa had two little girls just a few weeks after Dax was born. Alissa also has a toddler for whom she has been painstakingly hand piecing a twin sized quilt made of tiny hexagons for over a year. When she got pregnant, we teased her that she was going to have to make another (no, TWO!) twin sized quilts for her new girls.
So instead of giving her a bunch of baby quilts (she still got a lot of them from the other quilty friends), Latifah and Hollie and i collaborated to make two twin sized quilts for the twins. They're bright and scrappy log cabin and log cabin house blocks with I-spy centers to make them fun for the girls.

The log cabin house one was a pattern that I had made two blocks for my friend, Janice, in BeeHappy a few years ago and had always wanted to revisit. It's such a fun block to make that I may have more in my quilting future still. :)

I've also included a pic of Dax and the twin girls on another one of their amazing quilts, made by the uber talented Liz Harvatine.

Men Quilters exhibit

An artist friend of mine, Luke Haynes recently opened a show at the Craft and Folk Art Museum near my house. It's a show of quilts made by men, and it was a wonderful, very creative and liberating show to see. The emphasis was on the creativity and message and some of the quilts there simply blew my mind. Luke once introduced me to the artist Joe Cunningham, and I was excited to see he also had quilts in the show.

Joe's quilt, the black/white/chartreuse one that I have details of here was so stunningly quilted that I nearly cried with inspiration. There was also another quilter who I had not yet heard of, named Jimmy McBride, who made this Mars moon quilt which took my breath away.

I would have loved to stay so much longer than I did, but alas, I had a date with me names Dax, who was getting a little bit squirrelly by the end... His buddies Dash and Vaughn were also there (since their mom, my girlfriend, Hollie) was there as my real date. We figured that as quilter moms of boys, this was a great way to expose our babies to quilts as art.

Charity quilts

I love sewing. Like really love it. And there just aren't enough bodies or beds in our family to justify how many quilts I make. So a favorite way of mine to help the quilts find homes is to sell them and donate the money to good causes. Here are some I sold in the beginning of this year.

Half Square Triangle baby quilts

When I first started quilting, I was terrified of anything having to do with triangles. They can be fussy and really show mistakes. These days, I've still made some major blunders with them, but I have really come to love what are called Half Square Triangles (HSTs by quilt nerds). They are super easy to make and really versatile in their possible outcomes.
I actually have a bunch of HST quilts to share, but these three baby quilts are some recent favorites that I've made. You can see how the layout changes everything and the fabrics really get to show off.
It seems like my world is really full of boys these days, only about 2 out of the last 10 or so baby quilts I've made have been in girl colors... That's okay, these color schemes are currently in the top 10 for me.

Pillow-palooa

Everyone knows pregnant ladies nest in different ways. Since I had no nursery to paint (Dax sleeps on our room) and no house to remodel, it made sense that I would sew. And especially towards the end of my pregnancy, the only thing that took my mind off of my discomfort was sewing...

I quilted commission quilts until I was too tired to make deadlines, I basted every top I could
Finish until I was too big to baste, then I pulled out all the bag patterns I've bought over the years to try out those (fun)... And I made pillows (I think about 14 in all) that I have as teacher gifts at the end of the school year. They were small, short term projects that required minimal effort of moving my big body around.

The pleated design became so much of a favorite that I made a bunch of them. I plan to write a pattern for how to make them.

Finishing quilts - baby quilt WIP done

Last year, my buddy Ramona gave me a few awesome pieces of Robert Kaufman's modern cheater prints. I was really inspired, started 2 quilts with it and then left them unfinished for a year. Z's bed sized quilt is finished now, but this second baby quilt was still languishing.
I'm super motivated to get through these WIPs, and also motivated to work on my free-motion quilting. It's a skill you can only learn by lots of practice, so lately everything has been a quilt to practice on. This one I tried a new (to me) pattern of interlinking boxes.
I could definitely point out lots of flaws, but overall, it was a great first try.
I backed it in pinstriped flannel and now have it in the happy pile of quilts to give.

Scrappytripalong finished!

January 1 this year there was a funny trend that began on Instagram for those of us who are into modern quilting. A couple popular quilters decided they were going to start to sew along together using a tutorial called the scrappytripalong.
I was up in Mammoth and far away from my sewing machine for the weekend but I joked that it was January 1 and I had already missed out on the biggest trend of the year.  When I came home I immediately started on my own scrappytripalong.  I decided to cut into some of my very favorite fabrics (from many different lines) designed by AnnaMaria Horner that I had never been able to decide how to use.
Soon after I started this project Mimi got a new bed and it was queen-size. We didn't have a quilt for her so this quickly became the quilt that I was making for her.
I am absolutely in love with the way this quilt came out and so is she.  J was jealous of how heavy all the seams make the quilt and now I have a second scrappy (all red and white!) scrappytripalong in the works.
This pattern is super easy and lots of fun I can't recommend it highly enough. You can find a link to it here: http://quiltville.com/scrappytrips.shtml

Sent from my iPhone

Zane's cozy quilt

I told you I am trying to burn through these WIPs... Here's another one that's been half finished for a year or more. (Ugh!) it was a while ago when my friend, Ramona, gave me some of Robert Kaufman's modern cheater prints to play with. I loved them and sat there trying to figure out what to do with them... Here's how I know this was so long ago... I'd just started to drive down to Yolanda's house every week to sew with her as she had learned her cancer was serious. I noticed she had a couple of her own WIPs that were this easy pattern... A 5" square with a 5" border around it. Simple. But really pretty! So I decided to try that with this cheater print for a fast (haha!) baby quilt I could give away. But when I made the first four squares and laid them out, Z started saying, "I WANT THAT QUILT!" (What? Really?) "yeah! I love it!" ("Um, okay... I've never made you a bed sized quilt"... Remember this is last spring, before the Christmas quilts, which were also languishing in the WIP pile)
So I planned to make it bigger. But then it sat there for months while we moved houses, remodeled, and I dealt with all of Yolanda's unfinished projects and dreams. So Z's quilt was in a pile at the bottom of the box.
November last year was our retreat and I pulled this puppy out - all four squares of it and asked my friends, "how do I make this baby quilt into a bed sized quilt?" I had all sorts of border options - all of which were lame until we all pooled our resources and realized that I had enough of each of these fabrics to make an additional 8 squares for a proper repeat. I love generous friends!!! (I think Hollie and Ramona especially contributed to this one)... XOXOXO!
Thanks to the retreat and my pals, the top was completed before Thanksgiving.

This is Z we are making this for. The kid is so into how things feel. I realized he would love it regardless, (he's also very sensitive and sentimental) - but it would mean SO much more to him if it was super soft. Ahhhh. I bought some super nice gray dotted flannel for the backing and then I decided to hand quilt it so it would have all that yummy give.

I kept losing interest in quilting this quilt. The hand quilting was boring this time; repetitive and I did most of in white thread on white fabric (snore) ... At quiltcon, however, I picked up some awesome variegated yarn that had the exact match of colors - primaries plus aqua (what are the chances?) and that finally got me excited about finishing this quilt. I used that in the middle sections (which I forgot to mention, are 8" not 5") ... Finally got all the quilting done during this horrid flu I've had....
And the binding is something that Zane saw floating around my office the other day...it's an adorable postage-type stripe called "Handle with care" - also by Robert Kaufman.

The end result is something I am really happy with and I hope he loves it long enough to take it to college with him.