The past couple days have seen an uptick in visitors of the quiet variety. I have gotten a few likes or comments over on the facebook links to these posts but it’s quiet here. These things just intrigue me at a geeky level.
Had really good intentions to do a bunch of quilting yesterday. Instead I made a very small dent of throwing out some paper stuff from a room and ventured up into the attic and found a box of calligraphy books. Fascinating stuff. Even more fascinating, the Society of Scribes, of which I was once a card-carrying member, is still around and active.
The book, or more accurately folio, that I had been looking for was pretty much as I remembered it, although I’d forgotten the cards of historical hands for study and copying. The link I found to them online indicate that the designer and calligrapher, Ismar David, died in 1997.
This and a few of the other books made my heart glad in strange and amazing ways.
When I finally gave up trying to quilt last night I opened up my book to page 47 and started in on the writings of Robert Kirk re the presence and activities of fairies, fauns and elves in the low country of Scotland. I still had my dictionaries at the ready but Andrew Lang, editor, had thoughtfully inserted some of the definitions for me via square brackets.
Well it’s a bright and warm morning so I’m taking the rest of my coffee outside for a few minutes and encourage you to do the same. Then perhaps I will get that stint of quilting done (couldn’t decide about how to do the top area – two colors? start in the middle and work out?)
Up in the attic, in a box marked “Studio” was a box of books including the folio of prints I’d been thinking about lately. I don’t really know why I’d been thinking about it, but there you go.
I’m about half-done with the quilting. Half to go.
There are a few different things that quilting can do to a quilt:
I mentioned somewhere that I’d been looking at this recently finished quilt’s quilting when thinking about what to do with this one. That quilt is too large to hang up in the room I’m sewing in at the moment, so it is hanging draped over a pole, not in front of me all the time.
What I notice when I look at it, with all its color gradations and checkerboarding designs is that the quilting in each square seems distinct. The quilting “design” is to quilt the heck out of it as Naomi likes to say , which for me is a long long series of spirals, spiral-ly things, tendrilly things, flowery petals, dandelion-leaf-like things, pretty much whatever comes next and fits in the space. There are times when I may say oh for pete’s sake stop with the spirals and do a sunburst sort of thing here, or how about a feather-thing here, or do something small here because you’re getting boxed in.
Up close it looks like a lot of spirals and all those other things. A bobbin’s (#6 at the moment) worth of line at a time, generally speaking.
From over here though, what I see is that each square has its own bit of design, random as it might be. The quilting isn’t blurring the lines or colors. I still see the color and design of the bigger quilt. The quilting in “Ten Years On” looks like part of the fabric somehow, in no small part because of the checkerboarding caused by the crossing color directions.
On this new quilt, I wondered if it would work the same way. I had some thought to wanting some purposeful diagonal stuff going on in a particular direction but I wasn’t married to that idea. I’d try to get some in when I could.
So I’m here to report that this effect of seeing pattern in each small square still holds true. The effect is not as strong as with the previous quilt, because the color/value difference between neighboring squares is not as large.
I’m good with quilting the heck out of things, and grateful to have an official name to give my process. I’m very pleased that both quilts stand on their own color and design wise and the quilting adds something else. I do want the colors and fabrics to do their thing, after all.
Do what you want with that info.
I’m a quilter. I make quilts. I don’t want anyone to call them something that says otherwise.
Sometimes you un-sew.
That’s just the way of it. If you pay attention, it just sounds different and you stop and look. Hopefully sooner rather than later!
That thou seest, man, become too thou must; God, if thou seest God, dust, if thou seest dust.
