What we are waiting for...

In case you are wondering how Fionn is going to fit in sewing the Panda's quilt with all her other projects, I should explain that we have decided to not start officially on the 100 Good Wishes Quilt until we are approved to adopt. For that to happen we have to go through 3 months of social worker interviews & assessment which should start in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I have been thinking about what fabric I can contribute. (I'm allowed to contribute, aren't I Fionn?) I have a brocade vest that was part of my going away outfit for our wedding. It matched the vests that Scott & his groomsmen wore. I am going to chop that up for the quilt. I also want to find something special for Gemma & Ben to contribute. Maybe it will be a piece of fabric from a favourite piece of clothing (that they have grown out of, of course.)

I also have a large piece of pink fabric that I inherited from my Grandma. It has since become the official "Girls' Night In" tablecloth. "Girls' Night In" is a fundraiser for the Breast Cancer Foundation. The idea is that you get your girlfriends together and stay home and put the money you would have spent towards finding cures & treatments for breast cancer. My friends & I do it a little differently. We get a big apartment or a couple of hotel rooms and all bring along some pink champagne and something to share for dinner, then throw the cost of dinner into the pot to donate. We are developing other silly, funny traditions to go with it (such as the magic fortune telling fish) and my grandmother's pink fabric has become one of them. Grandma suffered from breast cancer in both breasts but recovered both times. So, a piece of Grandma's tablecloth will be going into the Panda's quilt to remember Great-Grandma Claire.

Updated stars

Here is our updated quilt diagram:



And a photo of some stars lying on fabric that will be incorporated into the non-star squares:

Star quilt, Makindu, consulting

Progress continues on the star quilt. I have 6 of the large stars completed, and have procured additional white-on-white fabric to make more. (We want to have some stars spinning clockwise and others spinning counterclockwise, so I thought I would make four of each: this guarantees we'll have enough for each direction, no matter whether Becca makes "lefties" or "righties".)

I should give credit where credit is due. Part of what inspired us to make a raffle quilt for an organization that is personally meaningful to us is the fact that my mother and several of her friends are nearing the homestretch on a raffle quilt for Makindu Children's Program. (This is an organization that provides healthcare, education, and support to children orphaned in Africa.) I have seen photos of their quilt in progress, and it's pretty impressive. I hope to be able to show you pictures when they have the top finished, and will also share a link to the raffle if Makindu puts it up online.

In other quilt-related news, I am helping another online friend plan out her first quilt. (I imagine she may in part be referring back to the instructions I wrote up for Becca last year, which I will be modifying for inclusion in this blog once we get started working on the Good Wishes quilt.) She will probably post about her quilt project on our bulletin board when she gets started (this summer). It sounds like it will be very like one of the Good Wishes quilts in certain respects - but since this is her project and not mine, I'll leave it to her to talk about the specifics.

Friendship stars

What, me, only work on one project at a time? Never!

Last year I taught my friend Rebecca how to quilt over the computer (using lots of words and lots of pictures). We didn’t know how well it would work, but she did a great job - she was very focused and stuck with the task all the way through, and her quilt looked really great when she was finished.

Well, last night we were talking on the computer and we decided that it would be fun to try to make another quilt together - but this time, we'd be working on the same quilt instead of on parallel ones.

I usually make my charity quilts for Project Linus, but this time we thought we would contact a charity near and dear to Becca's heart, the National Stillbirth Society, to see if they would be interested in doing a raffle. Becca says that some of the parents like to imagine their babies as being stars (like in Greek mythology) so she thought we could make a quilt with stars on it. She picked white-on-white stars on a scrappy blue background.

These are two sample stars I made:


And here is the layout we are working on. (She's put together a neat idea for the last two rows, using 6" stars instead of 9" stars, but I haven't diagrammed that part yet):



We haven't talked about what happens after we put the stars together... but I guess we'll see when we get there :)

Names and meanings

One of the hobbies Sandie and I share is collecting names. So, while I know that she already has some ideas for her baby's name, I thought I would post this list of Chinese names for girls in case it might be of interest.

Whenever I look at a group of names from a particular culture, I can't help but think about what the names' meanings say about that culture. A lot of the meanings in this list refer to the beauty of the natural world, and the images they bring to mind are truly lovely.

Look at many of the meanings of elements in the old Germanic names (coined by my bloodthirsty naming ancestors) and you get a rather different picture. My name book, making a similar point (I swear I didn't lift the idea), cites the following meanings as examples: war, strife, battle, protection, rule, counsel, raven, wolf, and bear; adding that Germanic female names "are no less warlike in meaning than their male counterparts" (A Dictionary of First Names, p. xvi).

Were we as a culture so single-mindedly focused on fighting back then that we really couldn't come up with anything else worth commemorating? Oh dear.

Really gives me a new appreciation for the 19th century love for flower and gem names...

Qianjiaxiu: 1,000 families embroidery

Last month I wrote about the East Asian tradition of making robes for children out of 100 pieces of fabric, as referenced in a museum exhibit of antique children's clothing. Like the Good Wishes quilt custom, the Hundred Families Coat tradition incorporates the idea of sewing 100 pieces of fabric together into a lucky item for a child.

I wanted to introduce you to another tradition that overlaps with the ones we have been examining. (What's so exciting to me here is that this time, there is not only a quilt involved in the custom, but also a [general] locale where this custom was practiced, should we feel inclined to search for more information.)

Back in the spring of 2002, an article appeared in "New Internationalist" magazine about a project intended to bring attention to the importance of China’s dying folk art. A teacher and five students traveled along the Yellow River collecting pieces of cloth from farming families in the area. They assembled these pieces, 1,000 altogether, into a 350 meter long patchwork quilt which they termed "Qianjiaxiu," or 1,000 families embroidery. (NB: 350 meters of quilt would be around 230 lap quilts in a row!)

Why did these artists use patchwork to underscore the importance of folk art in the region?

The idea... came from an ancient ritual in the Yellow River Valley, in which local families praying for good harvest and fortune made a quilt out of 100 embroidered pieces to please the deities. The tradition has been dying out as more and more people have left their villages for towns and cities. (Findarticles.com, "Folk fabric: Chinese villages where unsung artists dwell"; originally printed in "New Internationalist," April 2002)

If this Yellow River custom of creating lucky quilts from 100 pieces of fabric is truly "ancient," I wonder if it could possibly be the basis for the Hundred Families Coats (ca. mid-19th-mid-20th centuries), and ultimately, the basis for our 21st century 100 Good Wishes quilts today?(!)

Flowerboxes

Here is a sneak peek at the pink quilt mentioned below. (The blocks are currently just lying next to each other, so the little ones have to overlap a bit to line up with the big ones. They'll look more regular when they're actually sewn together.) I haven't settled on a border fabric just yet, although I am leaning toward red-violet. (The blog's deep pink background does seem to work fairly well too.)



You could imagine doing a pattern like this for a Good Wishes Quilt (using the wish fabrics in the centers of the blocks) although I think you would probably have to provide the participants with color guidelines for it to work well.

P.S. Yes, those are the aggravating red and green blocks to the right in the photo.

Quilt sighting

I always try to photograph my quilts before I pack them up to go. Sometimes sending them away makes me a little mopey, so I like to make a few visual souvenirs before it is too late. (Of course I would prefer photos of the quilts with their recipients, but that rarely occurs to people, and I shrink from asking. Somehow it feels terribly awkward, like asking for a thank you or something. It is just simpler to snap the pictures myself.)

One of the quilts that I didn’t end up photographing was one that I finished for my friend B. She began the project herself, but since she had a young baby at the time, she had difficulty finding time to come sew. Finally she lost steam altogether. So I dug through my stash to find border fabric, and finished the quilt for her. I was really pleased with the way it came out.

At the time I rationalized that it wasn’t my project to begin with so it didn't make sense to take a snapshot. But later I wished I had one anyway...

Yesterday, we went to a birthday party for B's now 5 year old son. When I came into the living room, something brightly colored caught my eye – and I saw that it was the quilt! It was a real treat, kind of like running into an old friend after years apart. I was thrilled!

Who knew that on a little boy's birthday, I'd end up getting a present too? :)

The art of writing headlines

I ran across an article on the way that news organizations are learning to rewrite headlines for their online articles to make them more search engine friendly.

I wonder if this is something we ought to take into consideration on this blog too?

Not that this means anything of course...

but we dropped our completed paperwork into Adoption Services on Friday, and on Saturday, my nephew picked a ladybeetle out of my hair...

Troubleshooting a quilt layout

Currently the floor of my studio is strewn with fabrics and blocks for not one but two quilts.

Why am I making two in parallel? Inspired by a piece by Kaffe Fassett (the world's most fearless user of color), I started working on a quilt that uses a complementary color scheme. (Technically I suppose it might be more correct to term it something like a double split complementary scheme since I am using not only complementary colors but also the colors on either side of them in the color wheel.)

This is hard to do well, especially under poor lighting conditions. (Yes, I have daylight bulbs. No, they are not accurate.) I got stuck and couldn't get a handle on what I needed to go forward, so I pushed these blocks aside aside, grabbed some of the leftover reds and their friends, and began working on another quilt.

The second quilt includes red-violet, red, red-orange, and orange, with pink (a tint of red) as the starring color. It’s been remarkably painless to make. It’s simple and happy and playful, and really a very likeable look. (Sandie, it reminds me very much of the gerberas at Aimee's wedding!)

Imagine taking these cheerful colors (sans pink) and throwing them into a pit of greens (blue-greens, greens, and a few yellow-greens). That's the first (nemesis) quilt. The contrast is so striking and so frustrating!

I’ve been trying to think of what I can do to make it better. This is the current eye-popping layout (simplified to show only a single red and green; you'll have to imagine variations there).



Last night I went to my favorite book on color and found some keys that may unlock what's happening here and give me some ideas on what I can try to fix it.

Magenta and green are nearly equal in value on the color wheel. Thus, their partnership emphasizes the optical intensity they can promote with each other. [no kidding] For visual ease, one color must be made the dominant partner…. Once you choose the dominant color, use the subordinate one to help give the design visual balance. (Joen Wolfrom, The Magical Effects of Color, p 34)

As you can see in the above sketch, the colors do appear in equal amounts. Based on what Wolfrom counsels here, I should try alternating these four-patch blocks with a patch that includes red or green, so that this one color predominates.

[U]sing complementary colors at full strength… can make a harsh visual statement that completely overwhelms the eye. Therefore it is important to control the strong pure colors with large areas of toned colors – those that have been grayed to a variety of intensities in the complementary family. (pp 33-34))

Here is one option that takes her advice into consideration. I have used the four-patch units as part of a larger block, and then have alternated this block with a plain green square.



Easier to look at, isn’t it? I don’t know that this is "it" but it does seem to be going in the right direction...