Knitting Iris

falling stars quilt

I knew that a quilt for my mom had to be blue and white, as blue is the color she predictably, consistently, almost exclusively, gravitates towards. 

It needed to be a pattern that I thought she would like, that I would enjoy making, and one that wouldn't take years to make.  She is 81 after all. 

She was born & raised in Norway and,  60 years after leaving there, is deeply connected with her roots, family, and friends still, both there and here in the U.S.

The variable star pattern seemed fitting with it's 8 points, somehow having a Scandinavian feel to it.

It reminds me of these folded paper stars.

It is a pattern I find pleasing, both visually and in the making. 

This is the tutorial I followed, using cutting measurements for the largest sized star.

The white is Kona 'Snow' and is the only fabric bought specifically for this project.  Most of the blue fabrics are either from 2nd hand clothing or thrifted fabrics.  The rest are leftover from other projects. 

One star is made with leftover fabric from an attempt my mom made at venturing into the world of quilting herself a few years back (fifth row down, 4th column from left).  It turned out not to be her thing.  She's a knitter through and through.

The backing is not necessarily a print I would have chosen if this quilt were intended for me but it's one that I thought my mom would like, and in the end it was just the right choice.

I opted for flannel for the backing as my mom has become an increasingly tinier person who, while hale and hearty, is easily chilled now, even during the summer months.

She's also been dealing with some new and difficult challenges, particularly over this past winter.

I guess this quilt is an attempt to wrap her in warmth and comfort and coziness from afar.

There are 12 extra star blocks, enough to assemble into a baby blanket, and I'll most certainly be visiting this pattern again, hopefully soon and in a more varied spectrum.

 

summer quilts

  

 

 

 

 

Almost the whole year here it is cool enough at night for down duvets but,since the boys' loft beds lie just under the peak of the highest point in our house, it can also get quite hot up there during the  warmest part of the summer.  

Three winters ago now I got the crazy idea in my head that I was going to finish two quilts for them, before the beginning of that summer (very much inspired by Amanda's quilt for her E here).

Ha!  Two plus years later, at the very tail end of this summer, as the temperatures are dropping into the 3o-40 degrees F range at night, and we're already waking to see fresh snow coating the nearby mountain tops,  the quilts are both done!

To be honest, I doubt either of these quilts would be even completed before next summer if it weren't for the entry deadline last week for this year's county fair as motivation. 

As I could only enter one item per category, the blue/green/brown quilt was the one I chose.  (That's E's quilt.)  I certainly didn't expect a ribbon and didn't receive one either.  There are some extraordinary quilters around here.  The point is to participate.  The judge did, however, leave written feedback which is always helpful (not all judges leave feedback).

And so, finally, the boys are tucked snugly under their own quilts tonight, just in time for the first **FROST WARNING** of the fall and, just as the first cold of the season hits our family.  Maybe with a fire in the wood stove downstairs, they'll be able to use their quilts a little while longer into the fall before putting them away until next summer. 

Just to make sure, I tucked an extra, warmer, blanket made by his grandma, underneath E's quilt, just under his sniffly little nose.  As I did, I told him he was wrapped up in our love....and he responded, "But I'm always wrapped up in your love."

Now guess who was trying not to sniffle.

Of course,  I've caught the bug now...the quilting bug, that is,  and so another quilt is already under way.

Tune back in here a year or two for the finished results...

Quilt Retrospective. Last One. Baby Quilts.

I almost forgot about these.  They've been packed away under the bed for a few years now.  They needed an airing out and cleaning anyways. 

The plaid triangles quilt is R's baby quilt.  I think the triangles are the shape they are to make the most of quarter-yards of fabric.  It was intended to be a bigger quilt but somewhere along the way I lost steam and it was set by the wayside.  As my first pregnancy progressed, I realized I wouldn't didn't have the time or energy to make a baby quilt so the unfinished one was just folded in half, quilted and edged.  Voila.  Nearly instant baby quilt, reversible, with the same but different triangle patterning on the other side as well.  It's hand pieced and quilted.

The star and moon one is E's baby quilt.  The strips were added around the outside to make it bigger.  It's backed with a yellow patterned flannel.  The star pattern is a small section of a quilt in some magazine and the moon was improvised.

The leaf quilt?  I don't know.  I think I started it before E was born but didn't finish it until later.  I'm not sure when, although I'd guess it was when we were still considering having or adopting another child.  It's based loosely on a pattern from the same magazine, I think, as the star pattern in E's quilt.  Maybe I intended this for a girl if we had one?  I don't really know.  I had forgotten about it but now that I think about it, E used this one a little bit, too.  It's hand appliqued and machine quilted.  This one could probably be

None of these have much wear and tear because both the boys slept with us and never had a crib, moving straight into a bed on the floor next to our bed.  In the winter they wore fleece snow suits so I think we really only used these to lay them on when they were too little to crawl.

That's it.  The end of the quilts.  So many more I'd like to make. 

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. 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.

Church rummage sale quilt

Ta da!  Wow, tying makes for an easy and quickly finished quilt, especially when you get the quilt top already pieced at a rummage sale.  The backing is several yards of fine wale corduroy that a friend recently passed on to me and it's tied with yellow Red Heart yarn we already had on hand.  There isn't any batting since the corduroy already lends some thickness to it.  It took less than a couple of hours to sew long lengths of the yarn through the two layers in continuous parallel lines and then one rainy day in late May I laid it out on the floor and recruited the boys to help:  E cut the yarn in between the stitches and helped with a few of the ties,  and R helped me do quite a bit of the tying.  E instantly made himself at home, pulling out other blankets, quilts, and pillows to make a cozy spot for himself to "read."

Finally, now the binding, in fabric thrifted last winter, is done.  I wasn't really thinking when I chose a mostly white fabric for the edging. This quilt is going to live in the VW Bus and thus will have to survive quite a lot of dirt and sawdust from camping and C hauling his tools to and from jobsites.  Oh well.  It seemed right for the quilt and I'm not changing it now.

Working on something like this or with thrifted fabrics and yarns always gets me thinking and wondering about the person who started this.  Who were they?  Where did they live?  How old were/are they?  Where did the fabrics come from?  Why didn't they finish it?  All unanswerable but enjoyable ponderings while working away.  It's nice that someone else did most of the work for me and I can only hope they'd be glad to know someone finished their work, even if it might not be how they would have chosen to do it themselves.