How to use this Page

Technically, this isn’t a quilting project at all because I didn’t do any quilting and didn’t use batting. It’s just a pieced quilt top backed with fleece.

We adore it.

I had some Moda Objects of Desire charm packs and used everything except the prints with shoes on them. Found some green fleece that matches the green prints exactly: joy!

The charm pack pieces are 5″ square. I pieced them into nine-patches (the girls loved helping with that part) and assembled the blocks into a 4 block x 5 block rectangle. No binding, just sewed the quilt top and the fleece together right sides facing, turned it right-side-out, and sewed up the little opening. The whole project took me, let’s see, about four baby naps plus maybe another three hours in small chunks of time.

We wanted a light but snuggly blanket for the living-room couch. I didn’t want it to be as heavy as a real quilt, so that’s why I skipped the batting, and skipping the batting meant I didn’t have to fuss with quilting stitches. I was going to back it with flannel—I’ve done that for a few baby blankets here and there, and it’s a nice weight, but I wasn’t sure how it would work on a larger scale. But then at the fabric store, Rose and I stumbled upon this fleece in a sale rack, and it matched so perfectly we couldn’t resist. And the cotton quilt top plus the fleece backing turns out to be the PERFECT weight and loft to cuddle up under on our cool mornings and nights. The air trapped between the two layers makes it cushiony and cozy and completely irresistible.

Just ask Rilla. If you can find her.

Hi All,

It's been a super busy summer. I have been slowly but steadily catching up on several years worth of projects from my to-do list that the enforced down time of this year have given me the luxury of doing. While they are not specifically watercolor, I thought I'd share the pretty pictures anyway.

I am also blogging about children's book illustrators with interviews, if you know of anyone interested give me a holler. I have recently added a follow my blog badge to my blog and would love it if you all would follow me. Daily Art Food. I have been doing facial expressions for my daily doodle challenge. Some of the images are quite amusing.

I finished a quilt I started back at the beginning of the decade. Eep!



I finished the CD cover but have to ask permission before I can show you guys. The album was supposed to go to press in mid September, but there have been some delays, so who knows when it will happen.

Has it really been a week since I posted? Just busy being busy, I guess. Lots of creative juices flowing here lately. Rose is hard at work on a novel inspired by Erin Hunter’s Warriors series. I haven’t been granted a peek at it yet, but her first effort, a twenty page tale filled with swash, buckle, and feline romance, was delightful. I’m eager to read this next installment.

Now that the baby is sitting and playing, and scooting around until he wears himself out and collapses for a two-hour nap, I’ve been able to grab some time for sewing again. I pulled a piecing marathon this weekend and completed three(!) blocks for my virtual quilting bee. Gosh I love piecing. Made two log cabin blocks on Saturday, my first sally at log cabin, and I am completely, utterly, head-over-heels in love with it. Log cabin is like the best parts of Legos, crayons, and yarn all in one.

Here is an excellent log cabin tutorial at Crazy Mom Quilts.

One of the best things about the quilting bee is finding a use for the little bundle of Japanese fabrics I got on sale last year. Like this one:

Couldn’t you just die from the cute?

But as you can see, I’m still having trouble making my seams go where I want them to go. I am just not a straight-line kind of girl. Happily for me, wonky is in. (Making this the best time in history to take up quilting. Fabu deals on Japanese fabrics at a zillion Etsy shops, and crooked seams in vogue? I’m in!)

Although I nicked the handle, this teacup makes me swoon.

Another thing we’ve been having great fun with is watercolor journaling, for which I must send Alice Cantrell a giant cyberkiss. A while back I blogged about our backyard art bag, which brainstorm transformed painting into a suddenly easy pursuit. A chief factor in its success was Jenn’s brilliant idea of cutting watercolor paper into postcard-sized pieces. GENIUS. Small paintings are less intimidating, are quickly finished, are easier to frame, mail, or store. Well, Alice Cantrell liked the art bag idea and carried it even farther, creating mini watercolor kits for her children. And then she shared a link to a Watercolor Journaling DVD, which I promptly ordered because I am completely in awe of Alice’s painting abilities and I not-so-secretly yearn to be able to create lovely pictures myself.

Well, we—my five oldest children and I, from the 3-year-old up—loved the DVD. It got us painting right away. Rilla insists upon my ‘making her a painty picture’ every day. Mind you, I still don’t know what I’m doing. Jane has taken a watercolor class and she is teaching me some techniques. Despite her instruction I have yet to manage a non-blotchy wash. But I’m learning. And the colors are so bright, so fresh, so cheerful, that I really don’t care how many mistakes I make.

Say! If your blotchy wash is in blue, it looks like sky!

My kids have been watching old episodes of Magic School Bus on VHS. (That’s how old the episodes are.) And when I’m painting or sewing, I hear Ms. Frizzle shouting in her merry way: “Take chances! Make mistakes!” This is quite a comforting mantra to keep in mind when attempting to learn a new art or craft, I find.

We haven't been to the pool much this summer. It probably won't get really hot here until school starts. What a pain!

I went to my mom's quilt group on Thursday. It was a lot of fun. I got to watch quilt design by committee—what a hoot! I'm glad I wasn't involved in that. I also got a lot of help on my first quilt. I really like simple, clean design, so I'll be making a nine patch with a white background.

Here's the fabric I won. Just loving these colors! Thanks so much Bari!

I was so lucky last week. I this stack of fabric from BariJ's new line, Full Bloom. I'm so excited! I've decided to make my first quilt with it. If I can find someone to take my kids on Thursday, I'll join my mom's quilt group and get it started with their help. I want to keep it very simple. Wish me luck. I'll keep you posted. (photo courtesy of BariJ)

Although I grew up in a small city outside of Los Angeles, my entire childhood was filled with everything country and mostly Southern in nature. You see, both of my parents were born in the Ozarks and raised during the Great Depression. They, like so many other young couples of that era, came to California looking for the gold at the end of the rainbow, or at least, a fair paying job. They settled in a post war cookie cutter neighborhood and lived a simple life.

All throughout my young years, I loathed everything about their simpleness. I despised that I had accidentally "inherited" their southern accents and slang words. I was ridiculed relentlessly for the twang in my spoken words. I tried with all my might to dis-own my heritage.

Of course, as time passed and I became an adult with children of my own, I began to see their simpleness as a blessing that was graciously passed on to me. A simple blessing that I am, hopefully, passing on to my own children.

Because of my mom's basic upbringing, she was taught to keep herself busy. Along with her daily doings she made time to can homemade jams and jellies, tend a lovely garden, sew many of my clothes (and my Barbie's clothes) and quilt.

Quilting, I suppose, was her way of relaxing. But...at the same time, she was creating something with a practical use. Of course, when she was a girl, quilting was necessary, as there was no extra money to purchase store bought bedding. By the time I was born, my mom could easily have gone to the local J.C. Penney's and purchased bedding, but she chose instead to invest her time and heart and talent into her craft.

My mom hand-quilted using her mom's old wooden hoops. They looked very much like gigantic embroidery hoops. I remember so clearly the sound of the stitches, and the click of the needle on her metal thimble. Ohhh...and every once in a while, she would let out a quiet naughty word. We all knew what that meant...it meant that mom pricked herself with the needle! I loved seeing the little blood stains on a freshly made quilt. It somehow stood for the heart that she put into it.

I have most of the quilts here in my home. Some are so very tattered that I keep them stored away and some are still in use. These fabrics that are sewn together make a beautiful yet practical hodge podge of memories. I can still pick out blocks of fabric that came from my "Holly Hobbie" short outfit that I wore in first grade, a floral print from one of my mom's dresses and the plaid fabric my mom used to make my Barbie's coat.

My mom is 81 now. She lived with my family and me up until last October. As she is declining with an end stage disease, I was forced to arrange for her to stay at a Board and Care. She is weak and ever so trembly now. Truth be said, she'll never quilt again. She started one several years ago, but was not able to finish it.

Her stitches were not the perfectly timed rows that they were in her younger days, but the heart behind the stitches remained...



I have that unfinished quilt now. It is exactly as she left it the last time she put it down...



The needle is in the same position...



It is still in Grandma's hoops...



I am committed to finishing this quilt. I don't know when, but someday...

Until Next Time:
Kim
Garden Painter Art

Block A-1. Only my second attempt at foundation piecing, and joining the strips was tricky. I botched some of my points, of course. Up close I'm only seeing the mistakes, but I pinned it to my bulletin board and it looks MUCH better from across the room.

2009 Coretta Scott King Awards - Another Year of Mock Silence?
cover illustration by Cozbi A. Cabrera

It is astonishing how much attention my hubby pays to my enthusiastic chatterings. Especially when the topic is something he has absolutely no interest in personally, like, say, quilting.

One of my birthday presents was a book I’ve been hankering after: Dear Jane: The Two Hundred Twenty-Five Patterns from the 1863 Jane A. Stickle Quilt by Brenda Papadakis. I learned of this book, and of the incredible Jane Stickle quilt itself, from a link on Twiddletails, one of my favorite crafty blogs. Anina, the Twiddletails blogger, has a second blog called (for now, at least—yesterday a bit of a trademark dispute arose over the name) Dear Baby Jane, an amazing site on which Anina posts step-by-step photo tutorials for making every single block in the Jane Stickle quilt.

This is no mean feat. Jane’s quilt is a masterpiece. Every single block of this large quilt is pieced in a different geometrical pattern. Many of the patterns are traditional quilt blocks; many seem to be unique to Jane.

An autographed corner square tells us that Jane pieced the quilt “in wartime, 1863,” and that she used over five thousand separate bits of fabric. A farmer’s wife, she lived in the little village of Shaftsbury, Vermont. She was born in 1817, which makes her roughly a contemporary of Charlotte Tucker Quiner Holbrook, the maternal grandmother of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whom I wrote about in my Charlotte books. This is one of the many reasons the Jane Stickle quilt intrigued me when I first read about it at Dear Baby Jane. Charlotte was born in 1809 (along with Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Louis Braille, British statesman William Gladstone, Charles Darwin, and Felix Mendelssohn—some year, eh?) in Roxbury, Massachusetts. As a young woman, Charlotte worked as a seamstress, advertising her services in the local papers. By 1863, the year Jane finished her quilt—four years before Charlotte’s granddaughter Laura was born—Charlotte had been living in the “big woods” of Wisconsin for decades. Jane Stickle, meanwhile, lived her whole life in the Shaftsbury, VT, area, and instead of a storytelling granddaughter, the legacy she left us was her incredible wartime quilt.

Here’s a link to a good-sized image of the Jane Stickle quilt—dubbed the “Dear Jane” by Brenda Papadakis. (Contemporary versions of the quilt are nicknamed “Baby Janes.”) I don’t know if it’s kosher to post the image itself, so I’ll just stick with the link. The color scheme is what’s known as and “around the world” pattern: the blocks move through a range of shades in concentric circles (more or less) beginning in the middle of the quilt.

A whole Dear Jane subculture exists in the quilting world, both online and off. There are many gorgeous quilts modeled after or inspired by Jane Stickle’s masterpiece. On the Dear Baby Jane blog, Anina leads an online community of quilters who are piecing the quilt a block at a time, two blocks a week. (Marvel at the photos here.) Just reading Anina’s instructions has been a tremendous education for me. (I was sorry to read, yesterday, of the trademark stickiness and the possibility that Anina will take down the entire blog. I am hoping hard that this does not come to pass.)

My indulgent but wise husband will read this and fear that I am poised for a dive into the world of Dear Jane creators, but he need not worry. Having never completed so much as a simple block quilt (Rilla’s little quilt is still only half quilted, if you can call the mess I’m making “quilting”), my attempting a Baby Jane would be something like a starling chick trying to soar with the flock while it is still in the egg.

But oh how I love to look at the gorgeous variations others have created, and to read about the gradual progress of people attempting the ambitious project right now. And I can’t wait to dive into my new birthday book to learn more about Jane Stickle and her quilt.

I took a leaf from Jenn’s book today and raided our scrap bin to make a spur-of-the-moment flannel quilt top for Rilla. We are in the process of transitioning her to her own bed in the girls’ room. (My three big girls share a room, and we’re adding a trundle for little sis.) This is something that’s always on the to-do list during a pregnancy, moving the toddler out of our room to make way for the newborn, but I admit I’ve been a bit lax with it this time around. Rilla still nurses a little at night; that’s part of it. And also, she’s very cuddly. Toddlerhood passes so quickly, and I like to savor every breathy little snore of it.

A month or two ago, we set up a (bedraggled old) child-sized futon next to our bed, and Rilla has been starting out her nights there. At some point in the night, she climbs into bed beside me. She’s like a cat, the way she sort of pours herself under the covers and curls up next to me with a contented sigh. She’s also like in a cat in the way she’ll turn on a dime and hiss and snarl at the blankets because they have offended her somehow, and she’s all flailing paws until the malevolent covers are no longer touching any part of her body. A mercurial little creature, is my Rilla.

Yesterday we moved the futon into the girls’ room. She thought this whole “sleeping with the big girls” thing was a pretty swell idea right up until bedtime, when suddenly it was The Most Offensive Idea Anyone Has Ever Had in All of Human History. But I snuggled up beside her in the dark, and her sisters whispered to her, and the devious plan I’d carried out earlier in the day—feeding her marshmallows at naptime instead of putting her down for a nap—paid off pretty quickly. She sighed, and sank, and slumbered, and when her limbs began lashing at the covers I knew it was safe for me to slip away. (Sob.)

Jane and I thought a special new blanket for her special new bedroom might help ease the transition. Rilla doesn’t have a blankie she’s attached to, though she does like the little patchwork baby quilt I made her before she was born. It’s way too small now, of course. So this morning Jane and I pieced together the remnants of the same cozy flannel plaids and prints I’d used for that baby blanket nearly three years ago and came up with a sort of wonky, large-patch quilt top. We’ve got a big piece of pink plaid-and-polka-dots to use for the backing. I’ve never actually quilted anything before, mind you—the baby quilts I’ve made are just patchwork tops with flannel backing, no batting in between. I need to go buy some batting tomorrow and we’ll see if we can pull this thing off.

In the meantime, the quilt top seems to have passed Miss Rilla’s muster.

The little embroidered kitty with flower umbrella at the bottom is a pattern from the Wee Wonderfuls “Tulip Fairy” Stitchette set, which I bought a while back and forgot about until today. That blank pink patch was just begging for a bit of embellishment. And I have to say, I am completely enchanted. The Stitchette pattern is a reusable iron-on which took all of ten seconds to transfer to our fabric. Suddenly everywhere I look are blank bits of fabric crying out for a little Wee Wonderfuls snail, or the mice pouring tea from that cunning acorn teapot, or that kite-flying ladybug, oh the cuteness of it all.

• twelve by twelve - Another one! Oh!
• Flickr: The one quilt Pool - And here's another virtual quilting bee. Delicious. I may not do anything for the rest of the day except look at these quilt squares.
• Flickr: The The Virtual Quilting Bee Pool - Well. I am completely enchanted. I don't remember how I came across this virtual quilting bee, but I can't stop ogling these photos. 12 women agreed to make 12 quilt squares through the course of a year—one square a month, each month devoted to one woman's quilt. The quilt recipient of the month sends out two fabrics to the other women in the group as a starting point for their squares. The results are stunning.
• Quilts & ATCs: Disappearing 9 Patch Tutorial - Smitten, I am.
• february block on Flickr - Photo Sharing! - I am so completely in love with this quilt square. And also this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/78168838@N00/2297623659/in/pool-quiltingbee/

Hey! Pinkee featured my red Wonky Squares quilt in a treasury on Etsy - along with lots of other cool wonky things. Take a look here. The list expires on Wednesday night - so visit soon.

Of course, this made me go visit her shop and now I really want to buy some of the bamboo tiles. You can find them here. I just love the feel of bamboo (Alan gave me a satiny-smooth bamboo crochet hook for my birthday one year) and I think these would make great pendants, bracelets, etc.

Thanks for the treasury love Pinkee!

Josh and I headed over to my parents this weekend, while Dad and Kiyon went camping with the Boy Scouts. We had our first rain in 7 months. I so miss rain during the dry season. It was the perfect setting for a sewing marathon. Gramma showed Josh her quilt designing wall and he was hooked. Here you see his rocket.

Ta da!! Here's the finished product.

And here are my Grim Reapers or Darth Sidiuses. They can't decide.

The update on my quilt is that I've finally finished hand quilting the entire thing, but now I'm planning to add double the number of rows. There are diagonal lines of stitching through each full square, but I'm going to add extra rows so that each full square has an "X" in it.

In the meantime I decided to bind the edges so that while I'm working on it there's no risk of the quilt top pulling apart at the seams. Also it's satisfying to see it looking more finished.
So I have a tip for a binding without bias tape or anything else. I'm not sure how to reference this, but basically I just saw some quilters on tv doing this on their historical quilts. The only difference is that their quilts were much loftier, and their borders were bigger.

This is the view of the underside - there's no seam!

I've been super busy lately, but I just made the time to finish a purse that's been sitting, unfinished, on my work table for a long time.I wanted to submit this to Lark Books for their 500 Handbags (juried by Jay McCarroll of Project Runway fame!) but they have really strict requirements for digital submissions and my camera and photography setup weren't up the the task. I really need to build a white box for photography so I can avoid the bad shadows you see above. Maybe in the new house. . .