Hugs from friends: signature quilts

Friends and colleagues signed quilt blocks instead of a guest book at my retirement party last month, and today I finished the binding.  Binding is always a wonderful, meditative activity for me but this one was even more special as, sitting under the quilt as I sewed, it felt as if I were being hugged by all of those friends.
(BTW, the display rack I now use for photgraphing quilts is fabulous--I can set it up and make all the adjustments by myself; I bought it from Craftgard.)

Autograph and signature quilts have long intrigued me and I have made occasional forays--or, at least starts, into signature quilts.  I am thinking about doing a series of classes on signature quilts and various blocks and have dug out some pieces from those forays/starts.


Fifteen years ago I made traditional Chimney Sweep blocks for visitors to my home to sign.  I don't remember why I stopped making them, whether time or sheer forgetfulness or who knows what, but I have enough of them to make a small quilt--provided I do alternate plain blocks.  I am still working on layout and fabrics (and pressing!) for the alternating blocks and side triangles but it will be finished.  Sooner or later--and now I'm sure it will be sooner!

Some years later I embarked on another signature quilt project, again from people visiting my home (which, by this time, was a house instead of an apartment).  I remember liking this one very much, and the blocks would certainly take less time to make but, again, it went by the wayside.  It re-surfaced, coincidentally, a couple of weeks ago and looking at it now I can see that I am a better piecer!  It will be something of a challenge to put these blocks together accurately but I would like to resurrect this one for visitors to my home.  I have some catching up to do!



My retirement was from public employment and I am enjoying my new "job" (how can you call something that is so much fun a "job"?) as a quilt teacher and designer.  I love teaching, and learn so much from students; I'd love to have autographs from students in the classes I teach and I have started yet another signature quilt.   I have a bit of catching up to do, from a few classes that I have already taught at Cut Up and Quilt but I'll start with the classes I have coming up in the next couple of weeks.

Many years ago I started yet another signature quilt. (Are you seeing a trend here?  It's time to break that trend, don't you think?)  This was an applique quilt, with autographs from librarians attending an annual continuing education retreat in a woodsy setting.  Each librarian signed a leaf made of fabric, to be appliqued to....well, that was the problem.  I never made a decision about what the background would be.   There's something abstracty in the back of my mind and one day soon it will come to the front and manifest itself.  :-)   (I DO know where the leaves are.  That's a point in my favor, I think.)


I also have a plan in mind for autographs from people who may be part of larger gatherings.  With luck, that will be ready for a short return into my pre-retirement library world this fall.  We'll see how that goes.

The signature quilts are wonderful reminders of places and events of my life but, more importantly, of the people.  Looking back at the names on the older blocks I remember friends who have passed out of my life, one way or another, as well as those who are still a vital part of it.  They all piece together into my life, past and present.  And in the future the quilts that friends are signing now will remind me of these days, and the part of my life that bring me to that point.   I will be hugged, even when I am alone.  

Is there anything better than a Nine Patch?

Designing quilts and trying new ideas and patterns is a great deal of fun for me.   I often have quite a short attention span, however, and like to have several projects going at once so I can switch around. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)  After finally arriving at the proper width of a sashing for a new design---after four re-tries--I decided to just do some plain, old-fashioned piecing:  pedal to metal, straight-on, feed-it-through piecing.   As I'm working on scrap quilts for a presentation and/or book project I settled on an old scrap project.

There is nothing like a Nine-Patch, is there?  No matter how many quilts I do, no matter how many blocks I piece, no matter how many artsy quilts I design, it is always a delight to come back to the simple but perfect nine-patch.  Its basic design and configuration figure into so many traditional blocks, and many modern designs, as well.

It has been "improved" (debatable, I think), skewed, made uneven, curved....and while those are all perfectly lovely designs, to my mind the original is still the best.  I like any quilt with nine-patches in it.

There are several nine-patch quilts in my UFOs (have I mentioned that I have a short attention span?) but today I went back to the oldest nine-patch waiting for me.   I have been cutting and collecting 1-1/2" squares for, oh, probably 30 years now--and that doesn't count the 1-1/2" strips I collect to be, eventually, in this nine-patch.  When I cut for a quilt, I cut leftover pieces to 5", 2-1/2" strips or squares and, when I can't cut anything that size, the pieces are cut to 1-1/2" strips or squares. (I draw the line at pieces smaller than 1-1/2."  Yes, if I were a better woman I would keep smaller pieces, but there you have it; I'm not that woman!)  If there are at least four squares of the same fabric they go into the nine-patch box; if there are fewer than four they go into a separate box for a postage stamp quilt.  Someday.



I've had some children, over the years, settle in with the box to help me sort through them, gathering stacks of fours and fives, and it can be a settling exercise for me, too.  And having developed a method for piecing them easily, it's also a soothing activity for me to piece them.  I don't have to concentrate or work through the math, I can just feed the squares through the machine and have my favorite block emerge.

It's going to be awhile, I imagine, before this quilt is finished and when it is I expect that I will start another.   It's not going to be elegant or masterful, it is just going to be a wonderful amalgam of fabrics from other quilts I have made, stitched together in a block that I love.  It will be colorful, for certain!


What's your favorite block?  What do you keep going back to making?

Something's gotta give...

I know I've said it before, and there's a very good chance you're said it once or twice before, but something's gotta give on my stash; it's way out of hand.  Knowing that, you'd think that I would stop bringing in more fabric until I had used up some of what I have.  (Does any of this sound familiar to you?)

All right, so with a new quilt shop in town (after being without one--nearby, anywhere--for nearly 9 months, I haven't quite declared a moratorium on buying new fabric.  (I'll have you know that a friend and I went to a closing sale at shop 30 miles away, and I didn't buy even a scrap of fabric!)  However, having learned some Kaizen principles (small steps--very small steps) I sat down with one of my strips bins today to sort into light, medium, and dark strips for a scrap project I have in mind.  Now, a Kaizen-sized step would be get down the bin and find bags for the sorted strips.  I out-did myself and sorted the entire bin. 

 

I expect to be making some changes in the sorting, especially moving from the medium pile to either the light or dark, but it will do until I pull out a ruby beholder.  

The next step is cutting some muslin for the foundations, then do some stripping.  I have a picture in my mind's eye, which may or may not be how it manifests in reality.  We'll see.   I'll keep you posted!