Knitting Iris

Quilt Retrospective. 4th Quilt.

Hey.  Something other than plain squares.  The Dresden Plate pattern has always been a favorite of mine.  In fact, it's probably the first quilt pattern I ever saw.  During early grade school, my mom, who really isn't a quilter (yet.  She recently took a beginner class at the age of 75.), was making one of these with a group of women at church for a raffle fundraiser.  They brought the quilt to our school one day, setting it up on a quilting frame in the school library where each class went in to see them work on it and hear about how quilts are made.  It was raffled off at the annual mother/daughter dinner at our church and I can remember how much I'd hoped we'd win it, fingers crossed tightly behind my back.  I think that quilt might have been on a yellow background.

This quilt was cut and pieced in the winters during the three plus years we lived in the trailer before moving into our house.  There wasn't enough space to lay out the whole quilt for basting the layers together so it had to be done on the sawdusty floor of C's shop, a rented space in town back then.  (There were a few times where I recall laying out fabric and cutting out sewing patterns on the floor of the laundromat a few times, as well.  We didn't have electricity back then, either, so I sewed amongst the sawdust at the shop at one of the workbenches, as well.)  I don't really know exactly when I started or finished this one.  Actually, it never really was finished.  The quilting isn't complete but, honestly, I don't think I ever will.  The name that came to me during the hours of piecing it:  "Winter dreaming the summer garden".  I don't think I've ever told that to anyone else before.

That's our dog Griz, or Grizman for long, when she was a good bit younger sporting one of the  Dresden "plates"  as a collar.  As a tiny puppy, she had been given as a gift to a young woman in Denver right after the birth of her first child.  She was also given a kitten and a rabbit around the same time!  Her husband was a truck driver and was gone much of the time.  People had thought she needed company and that the child needed animals to grow up with.  What were they thinking?  She tried to take care of them all but finally decided to sell the puppy.  C brought her home on Easter Sunday.  She's a chow and irish setter mix and is the sweetest thing in the world, possibly because, before we got her, she'd been fed a bowl of ice cream every night.  She was terribly sad after we had children, dissappointed in us for not giving her as much attention as she'd had before and she's only finally forgiven me in the past couple of years. 

Quilt Retrospective. 3rd Quilt.

This quilt was started sometime during the two year stint in Boulder.  I guess I just wanted a quick quilt made from big squares of different colors of kind of odd fabrics.  We would have liked to have stayed in Colorado but what we were looking for, acreage, was unaffordable for us.  Those few days we'd spent in Montana two years prior were still calling us back.  We bought a 1950's Zenith travel trailer one spring (not too unlike this one) and spent a summer fixing it up to be liveable.  September 1, 1996, we left for Montana, putting the trailer in storage while we once again lived out of the truck. 

This quilt was pieced already and I brought it along in the truck to do the handquilting.  Each square has a circle the size of a wide mouth mason jar on it because it was something we had on hand to trace around.  In early October, while camping on National Forest land not too far from where we live now, I was sitting outside the truck one evening working on this quilt when a guy, who soon became a good friend, stopped while driving by in this truck, his first words, "I've seen you camping here a couple of times now.  You must be looking for land."  He invited us up to his house deep in the woods for dinner with his family and soon they offered for us to park our trailer for the winter on a piece of land they owned until we could move on to our own place.  I guess I must have finished this quilt during that very snowy, first winter here of 1996-97. 

Quilt Retrospective. 2nd Quilt.

Let's see.  It must have been 1994. We had spent August through early March in Seattle, saving our wages to move on to somewhere else.   C swears it rained every single day we were there.  As we drove east up towards Snoqualmie pass, the clouds parted and out came a huge rainbow.  Certainly a sign.  We stopped and spent a couple of days with a friend in Missoula, MT, checking out the Bitterroot valley to the south and the Mission and Swan valleys to the north.  We like it, but we were only one day's drive from Seattle and still had two months of travelling money in our pockets so we weren't at all ready to settle again yet.  Our travels took us from there back to Colorado, to see family in St. Louis and Dallas/Fort Worth, then onto New Mexico and Arizona, down to Mexico for a couple of weeks of camping on the beach about half way down the Baja Peninsula , and then back to Durango, Colorado where the money finally ran out. 

We ended up on a newly established organic farm just north of the New Mexico border between Durango and Pagosa Springs and spent the spring and summer living in a canvas tent in an extraordinarily beautiful place. Yes, it was tent living, but not without the luxuries of a futon, feather bed, and down comforter.  Long story short:  The guy "running" the place really just wanted to be a spiritual guru, so half the people there were there to work hard and learn about organic farming and the other half were there working the minimum 4 hours a day and spending the rest of the time meditating. 

There was plenty of food to eat but we didn't make a penny that spring or summer until C went to work for someone building a traditional adobe house nearby and I spent a couple of weeks picking chokecherries in the mountains to sell to a local buyer.  Towards the end of the summer the farm fell to pieces  and C and I ended up camping out of his truck and my car, eating a lot of turnip-rutabaga-carrot soup dug from the fields.  (C won't touch a turnip or rutabaga ever again.)  When the temperatures dropped in the fall I went to Boulder and crashed on C's sister's floor, working two jobs (Starbucks AND the Bookend Cafe, a strange mix of both corporate and independent coffee shop jobs) until we could afford an apartment of our own.  C came behind me a month or two later when his construction job was done.  We spent about 2 years in Boulder living in a dive of an apartment at the primo location of 4th and Pearl, saving our money to buy land.  Prices were out of our price range in Colorado so we moved to Montana.  I miss so many things about Colorado.  Someday we'll take the boys on a road trip back there to all our old haunts.

Oh.  The quilt?  Most of the fabrics are from second hand cotton shirts bought at a thrift store's $1 bag sale that summer, mixed with other scraps I already had, some of them leftovers from the first quilt.  The quilting is by hand and I'm not sure about the piecing, maybe some by hand some by machine?  It was probably finished in late 1994 or early 1995.  I made a couple of tank tops as well that summer from an old cotton sheet, tracing a tank I already had, embroidering flowers around the neckline.  R has been using this quilt lately this spring and summer, ever since it's been too hot for a down comforter.  It's showing some wear and could use new binding.

Quilt Retrospective. 1st Quilt.

My first quilt, dated 1989, all little calico prints, now much faded.  There is a pattern in there:  each four squares pieced together of two in one color, two in another, then sort-of randomly sewn together.  I was about 19 years old when I made it.  I think it's entirely pieced and stitched by hand, such the purist that I thought I was back then even though I didn't have much of a clue what I was doing, checking out piles of books from the library on quilting.  Not that I'd consider myself anything but a novice quilter now either.  This poor quilt was showing so much wear and tear that it became a beach blanket for a couple of years and now it's in tatters.  I guess I didn't put a binding on it, rather just folding under both front and back pieces and topstitching the edges together by hand.

I found these pictures from where I lived my senior year in college, this perfect little cottage with green shutters and glass paned front door, wood paneling throughout, furnished with old wood bed, dresser, table, desk, and craftsman style rocking chair, clawfoot bathtub (please ignore the gross shower curtain)....complete with garden gnome by the front steps, green shutters and screen doors, a chestnut and flowering cherry tree out front and white picket fence if I recall correctly, half a block from the university library on campus....all for only $150 a month, hot and cold water and laundry included!  The keys were even the old fashioned kind. 

The landlord was 94 years old and this was one of two cottages she rented in her back yard.  Her two tenants and another neighbor who could see her kitchen window from their house had a system going:  she pulled the shade down behind her kitchen sink when she went to bed at  night and put it up again when she got up.  She slept odd hours so if we didn't see it raised by noon we were to go and check on her to make sure she was OK. Fortunately, that never happened. The thought of paying more than double to rent someplace else not nearly so nice kept me there another 6 months or so after graduating, even though I wanted to leave the area.

Anyways, the point of this is to show the quilt in it's original state:

I made all the curtains, winged a slipcover for the old orange and brown flowered couch, sewed a plaid duver cover, built a bookshelf, and replaced the bedroom door with a curtain because the door swung out, taking up half of the living room.  Ha!  It's just like our bedroom door curtain now.  :)   

Hey look, I had a red LeSportSac back then and that's my mom's old green sewing box under the bed.  And that antique floor lamp: oh my, I loved that.  So much so that I've since bought a similar one.  (I have yet to find a glass shade to fit it.  It's only been, oh, 10-12 years or more now. Mabye it's time to do something about that.) 

These were just the beginning of my fabric store and thrifting days and there were a few false starts at knitting a couple of years before and around this time, including reading a lot of library books about it, swatching and playing around with different stitch patterns, but not really making anything in particular.   This couldn't have been more than a year or so after receiving my first sewing machine.  I had wanted a black velvet skirt to wear for the holidays but didn't like the prices I was finding so my mom took me to the fabric store, we picked out some fabric and a pattern and I sewed it on her machine, and then they gave me my first sewing machine for Christmas and paid for me to take a beginning sewing class at a local fabric store the following summer.  When my mom sewed, by the way, it was the closest I ever heard her come to swearing, so she wasn't about to teach me much of it herself, I don't think.  Wait.  What am I saying, "first" sewing machine?  It's the same one I still have, nearly 20 years later.

I've no clue who's cats those are in the pictures.  I guess I was watching them for someone.

A hodgepodge of red & black quilt squares and bandanas, for Project Spectrum 2.0

Quilt squares, red and black ones here for Project Spectrum 2.0, Flickr pages here, if you'd like to see more.  I've been gathering mostly green and red fabrics for this quilt for years as I see ones that catch my eye, particulary when JoAnn's has quilting cottons on sale.  Some are leftover fabrics from other quilts. 

About half of these were cut out individuaoly with scissors after tracing each one with a plastic template.  I've never really gotten the hang of the rotary cutter until last month when I stopped in the local quilt store one day, while my car was getting worked on across the street, and a woman there was cutting fat quarters.  She gave me a few pointers but, more than anything, she somehow passed enough confidence my way to convince me to just go home an go for it, to not worry about messing things up.  I've been shown a couple of other times by other people but for some reason, this time, it just clicked.  It looks like I might have gotten a little carried away, though, as now it appears that there are possibly enough squares for two good sized quilts.  Only about 8 of 24 strips of squares (24 squares per strip) are pieced so far so it's going to be awhile before I'm going to need the binding fabric that I picked out recently:

Anybody else out there loving the bandana themed articles in the July issues of Martha Stewart and Country Living?  O.K. so maybe the strawberry tart made to resemble a bandana in MS and the bandana clothes hanger covers in CL are a little over the top, but still, as a lover of bandanas, both new and vintage ones (Yes, I know somebody probably blew their nose on them, but things do come clean!  I'd prefer not to think of it, actually.) I've thoroughly enjoyed those articles.  On that note, I think that, after the seeing the Crazy for Dots and Blueberry Fresh articles, too, in that same issue, CL just might have won me back as a subscriber.  Not that MORE mags are what this household needs.

On the subject of quilts, I've been photographing my old quilts and putting together a little retrospective of them, along with pics and stuff about where I was living and what was happening in my life at that point in time.  It's been a nice little trip down memory lane for me and made me look back through some old pictures.  I might have gotten a little long-winded so consider yourself forewarned.    The posts are already drafted and so will take me through the week without any new posting. 

For some reason, even though I've checked the proper box on the proper page, Typepad isn't forwarding my comments to my email address.  Anybody else having the same trouble? 

Not that I often get the chance to get back with people.  Sometimes I wish there were a couple of extra hours in the day just for correspoding with other bloggers and commenters.  Please know that I do appreciate the time that you take to comment and that I read them all, often with the best of intentions to respond and then something comes up (lunch, a scraped knee, any of a million questions from the boys each day, a phone call, etc.) to prevent me from doing so.  I'm sorry.  I just can't get to it all.  Your comments and kind words stay with me, though, as I go about my days.   

Summer Days, and Eve's.

A friend invited us and a pile of other kids (and few adults) to come up to her farm waaaaaay up in the mountains for a day of crafting and to get out of the heat down in the valley.  It was 10 degrees cooler than the 101 degrees in town that day.  Still hot, but better. 

There was the usual good stuff like the tour of the garden and the animals, fresh whole milk and homemade mozzarella for all,  a walk in the "International Peace Park" she created in the adjoining shady woods, and a dunking in the creek of the "unwilling" hostess herself. ;)   

ALWAYS a good time there.  She sent us home with two dozen fresh eggs, her favorite movie to borrow, and some other craft supplies (more on that whenever we get around to using them.)

The drive back down the road brought us past this amazing field of daisies (pic does it no justice at all):

Down out of the mountains, we headed straight for a cool down swim in the lake and then to an off-the-beaten-track local restaurant with piles of friends and good pizza and beer all to the sounds of  the best local musician/good neighbor/friend :)  out on the deck while the bunch of kids there played tag on the grass, climbed apple trees, fed horses over the fence, and just generally caroused until they nearly collapsed well towards midnight.  There just aren't too many nights around here where you can be outside late into the night without a coat or even hats and gloves.  It doesn't get much better than this.  Must be summertime.

More of much of the same today. C's taken the boys to the lake again and then we're off to more local music and a swing band from Missoula in the park in town tonight. 

Let Your Freak Flag Fly

After two consecutive years of doing absolutely NOTHING for the 4th, this year was filled with the classics: fun with family, friends, flags, fireworks, a kiddie parade, pinwheels, water balloons, bubbles, sun, sand, water, Coca-cola, beer, burgers, watermelon, corn on the cob, potato salad, cole slaw, pies, ice cream, and more.

There was R's version of the Stars and Stripes made with a thrifted sheet and a piece from my fabric scraps  (made this entirely by himself, stitching the star patch on with my sewing machine) and lots of red and blue paintings of stars, stripes, and fireworks, welcoming friends and family to the 4th of July gathering.

There were also red, white, and blue daisies, dyed with food coloring.

There was R's Playmobil reinactment of October 15, 1967:

These past few days haven't all been about peace and love.  I was tearful while teaching the boys the Star Spangled Banner, not only out of ingrained patriotic emotion but out of sadness that our national anthem is based 100% on the glory of war.  I was in first grade in 1976 during the bicentennial celebrations, with all the patriotism that came along with it.  I think we spent the entire year studying colonial America and the revolutionary war, spending a lot of time coloring in dittoed pages of scenes such as Betsy Ross stitching, the flag laid out in her lap.  As homeschoolers, we certainly don't start each day with the Pledge of Allegiance like I did all through school.  In light of my own feelings about where our country has been heading in recent years, I've been finding it challenging reconciling my own beliefs with the teaching of things such things as the symbolism of our flag and the meaning of the words of our national anthem, without incorporating a fair amount of cynism.  I don't want our children to be jaded at the ages of 4 and 7, but I also don't want them to learn without questioning, if you could call that really learning.

At the Jewish/Christian wedding ceremony we attended on Sunday evening, I listened while the father of the bride spoke and preached, about how peace starts at home, then spreads to the community, the country, and then to the entire world.  Then, I spent the next few days agonizing over why the boys have been at eachother like Cain and Abel and why I'm so irritable myself.  Things haven't exactly been running smoothly and peaceably around here.   How can we have world peace when we're not being peaceable at home?  Or is it just that they're finally getting around to doing what normal siblings do and it's driving me mad?

Maybe because the summer heat is finally and suddenly here?  Maybe because four out of the last five nights we, the boys included, haven't gotten to bed before 11 pm?   R and I weren't out of bed before 10 this morning and E slept until 11:30!  Mostly, it's been a whole lot of fun but, hopefully, we're getting back on track.  No.  Wait.  There are solid all-day-and-into-the-evening plans straight through the weekend.  Thank goodness for a little respite today, not exactly peace and quiet, but at least there are lots of leftovers and caffeinated sodas in the cooler.

Happy belated 4th, however you celebrated.

Pics of the bridesmaid dresses are over at Flickr here and here, by the way. 

Thrifted Vintage Fabrics

Here they are.  Most, or maybe all of the my vintage fabrics.  At least, all the ones that are worth scanning.  The rest are mostly just solid, linen fabrics in the form of second hand dresses and button down shirts, in nearly every color in the spectrum.  These are here in a Flickr set with any pertinent info about them.

Ha!  Apparently I gravitate towards polka dots, the color orange, and flowers, particularly zinnias.  Not exactly news.  It's just interesting to see the patterns that develop when all of these are together in one place.

Thrifted Ironing Board

An ironing board I picked up while I was in Seattle at the Salvation Army.  The covers were loosey-goosey with old stretched out elastic around the edges.  All I had to do was cut the elastic out, make a coordinated bias tape out of an orangey-red, thrifted shirt, sew it on, and thread some (also thrifted) cotton cording through it to cinch it tight.  Perfectly functional an perfectly pretty, even if not perfectly sewn.  I'm madly in love with this midweight cotton print and wish I had yards upon yards of it.  The colors!  The daisies!  Oh my. 

I have a medium sized table top ironing board already (also in need of recovering) and now this nice little one, so all I need now is a regular, full sized one to complete the set, or maybe then the medium sized one could be passed on.

The problem with thrifting:  so many great finds that are too hard to pass up, but often they're in need of alteration or work, so ultimately, I'm just bringing YET ANOTHER project into my life that's already filled with WAY too many projects, both in progress and yet to be started.  At least it's cheaper than buying new, right?

Finally I've gotten around to scanning most of my thrifted, vintage fabrics and will have a post about them later today or early tomorrow.  They're in a Flickr set already.

Camping At Home

Sleeping all together out on the trampoline with all the pillows, down comforters, and sleeping bags from the house.  Cooking and eating pudgy pies at our own firepit.  All the benefits of camping, minust the packing and unpacking, and no money spent on gas.  Easy peasy.

We've been talking about sleeping on the trampoline for a couple of years and I've had those pie irons ever since I bought them just after going to a pudgy pie party years ago. We've only used them one other time and that was before the boys were born.   I've almost given the pie irons away numerous times.  Last night we made cheese and turkey melts with avocado and sundried tomato, followed by marshmallow, chocolate chip, blackberry jam pies.   Mmm. Mmm.

The wedding with all the dresses is tonight, at the end of this picture perfect summer day.  You can be sure I'll have my camera but I may have to share headless posts.  I'm reluctant to post people's pictures on the blog without knowing them well first.

Congratulations to Shannon and Emily who opened their yarn store, Twisted,  in Portland, Oregon this weekend!  They've been working like crazy for months and months.  Wish I could have been there for opening day.  Go check out the new store, meet these two wonderful women (I have yet to meet Emily myself), have a cup of tea, and check out all the yarn.  And a happy birthday to Emily and happy anniversary today to Shannon and S, as well.