yarnstorm

still-life

When I'm making a quilt, I keep this little bowl next to sewing machine and I fill it with the cotton threads I need for piecing and the threads I think might work for quilting. With each quilt, the bowl beomes a miniature still-life that reflects what's happening on a larger-scale with my fabrics. It's a kind of crucible of colours - if the threads look good together, then there's a good chance they will work in the quilt.

I particularly like this mix of paint-palette colours and was sorry when the contents had to be tipped out to make way for the current collection. But at least I know there's still life in the still-life.   

another month, another quilt

I'm still quilting away to the sounds of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour and the reading of Dorothy Whipple's Someone at a Distance on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime. The challenge of making twelve to fifteen quilts in twelve months for my quilting book (whilst also writing another book for Hodder & Stoughton - more of which another time) is still one that inspires me and I haven't yet reached the point of hallucinating about scissors and patterns and endless stitching. It may just be a matter of time...

The current quilt (made from the pile above) has presented an interesting problem. When I sorted the fabrics for it, I discovered that I'd managed to collect not one but two colour stories that don't quite work together. So, although I'm all for the path of least resistance in quilting, I've decided to make a patchwork front and a patchwork back and am now considering how to quilt it, as I can imagine that what would work on one side might not work on the other and will only show up the fact that the squares are not perfectly aligned when sandwiched together (I know my limits).

Mmmm, best just listen to Bob and imagine what he'd say. Something wonderfully sardonic, I have no doubt. That's why I love him.

                                 ***

The recipe for the lemon cake shown in the previous post can be found in The Gentle Art of Domesticity.

The correct recipe for flapjacks is here.

heppy quilting

Although I managed a creditable amount of hand-quilting during our time away on holiday, it wasn't enough to meet my self-imposed deadline. So desperate measures were called for when we returned; they came in the form of a boxed set of David Lean's films which have worked much as super-glue does and have kept me happily in one place for four super-long quilting evenings.

Actually, that should be 'heppily'. If there is one word which keeps me glued to my settee, screen and quilting, it's 'happy' - particularly in David Lean's films where it's almost always pronounced 'heppy'. As in, 'Are you heppy, darling?' to which the answer must be, 'Yes, darling. Very heppy.' Which makes me very heppy, too.

My film-fest has consisted of such gems as Hobson's Choice, The Passionate Friends, Madeleine, This Happy Breed (known in this house as This Heppy Breed) and Blithe Spirit with their casts of marvellous British actors (Rex Harrison, Charles Laughton, Ann Todd, Claude Rains, John Mills, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson) with perfect diction whether they are (allegedly) in London, Salford or Glasgow.

The films are perfect for quilting for another reason: they don't move too quickly. Look down at your stitches for a nanosecond when watching a contemporary film and the chances are you'll miss a squillion frames and a large chunk of plot. The joy of David Lean's films is that they move at a graceful pace with the camera often lingering on a beautifully lit face or a delicately coloured interior. So you can look down as much as you like and be sure that Claude Rains' brooding, proud, tormented face will still be on-screen when you've done your stitch or stitches.

And these films have a lovely texture to them, especially the black & white ones with their intricate layering of light and dark and shadows. Perfect for quilting: texture for my hands and texture for my eyes - something that makes me verry, verry heppy. Darling.

florilegium

I like the idea of a floral florilegium. A florilegium - such a lovely word - is an anthology or garland or collection of choice literary extracts - but I feel it's the perfect term for the collection of choice flowers I saw in Suffolk.

The local hollyhocks come in a huge range of pinks and reds, deep burgundies and yellows, some as tall as the houses against which they grow, a kind of of feminine version of a beanstalk for a questing Jackie to climb.

Then there were some stunning no-holds-barred dahlias, like this 'Duet' which lifts my spirits every time I look at it. I've put it outside the kitchen door at home so it can make me laugh with its huge floppy head and utterly wonderful petal design.

It stands next to the 'Akita' dahlia which is more restrained colourwise, but is even madder in terms of spiky, complex construction.

Then there's this pretty specimen which looked amazing against the blue exterior of our rented house.

In fact, the one thing I noticed about so many of this summer's Suffolk flowers was how beautiful they looked against the different shades of blue paint. Although there are yellow and white and 'Suffolk pink' houses, I came to realise just how wonderfully well blue in particular works as a backdrop for a garden. 

Then, just as I was developing this theory, I came across these tall, deep red and pink and white acanthus spikes in front of a deep red and pink and white house. The whole ensemble could not have planned better. Maybe I need to make a little more effort to match my house to my flowers?

And I found myself inspired by all this floriferousness when I went to Quilters Haven and was drawn to these abundantly floral fabrics which will be going into a quilt I have planned. In fact, it may just be a florilegium quilt.

To paraphrase Aristotle, it's not so much swallows as flowers that for me a summer make. Which means it's a good summer.

booking ahead

In the course of the next twelve months I'm going to be making a pile of quilts. A big pile of quilts. Because I have been commissioned to write a book on quilts and quilting. Just the thought of working with wonderful fabrics like this makes me very excited, although I know there will be times when I wish for Rumpelstiltskin-style speed and skills when turning my piles of fabric into a pile of quilts.

I can't answer any questions about publication date or contents or any other aspect of the book, but this news does explain why there has been a lack of quilting posts recently (I'm saving all my quilting thoughts and projects for the book).

And now I'm taking two of the quilts to the seaside to hand-quilt. I booked ahead, and we're off on holiday with a carful of children, books, bats, balls, bikes, needles and thread.

misc.

I am one of the world's worst filers. In the days of office filing cabinets, my Misc. (for miscellaneous) file was always the biggest, fattest, most overcrowded section - and always by far the most interesting. It contained anything and everything I couldn't be bothered to categorise so was stuffed with the most significant and insignificant details of work. Which made for far more interesting browsing than, say, the files containing budgets, marketing plans, sales reports and, worst of all, anything to do with Nielsen.

Half-term holidays are full of Misc.. As is the house after I've finished writing a book. As is my office at any time. As is my head always. Generally, I like it that way. So this is a Misc. post which reflects the filing cabinet that is my head today.

I've been quilting this Provencal summer quilt and loving the way the fabrics look when I fling the quilt aside or leave it across the back of a chair while I make a cup of tea. I've also just designed and made the top to another quilt - very pretty fabrics in a pattern which works but I couldn't work out why I wasn't getting a real buzz from making it or feeling the kind of connection I usually enjoy when piecing. And I realised it was because there simply wasn't enough colour or vibrancy or joy in the whole thing. I was really quite surprised; I'd thought I would like something a little more subtle for a change. So that's something useful for my Misc. Education file this week.

On the other hand, it's been a good week for Misc. Reading; Forgotten Fruits by Christopher Stocks, Midwest Modern by Amy Butler,Piri Piri Starfish by Tessa Kiros. The highlight, though, has been The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy (which I happened to pick up a day or two before she died - so had a shock when I read the obits that week). I couldn't decide whether I really liked Sally Jay to begin with, but as the book gathered pace I was drawn into her character and ridiculous scrapes and was carried along to the end which is one of those that makes you realise you're going to have to reread the whole thing knowing how it ends.

And there's something to go in the Misc. Films file, too; I Know Where I'm Going! a wonderfully atmospheric Powell and Pressburger film laden with swirling mists and whirlpools and metaphors and some pretty dreadful drama school Scottish accents - none of which could detract from my enjoyment while quilting. It Happened One Night was another great stitching film - and the first time Clark Gable's made me laugh.

There's been Misc. Work as well. I am in the very early stages of writing book three. Yes, book three. And this meant that this morning I had to do some very real sorting and filing of books which have been stacked in my office until now but which can longer stay. So I emptied the fireplace of its current collection, and replaced it with all the children's books I used to write book two.

My goodness, it's sights like this that almost convince me that I might have been a good filer if I'd really put my mind to it.

Almost. But not quite.

opposites: an education

Opposites have been on my mind today. And with them, the memory of Alice when she was young saying 'ossopite' for opposite which is, I suppose, quite apposite.

I am in the early stages of a new columns quilt - a version of my Hot Summer Quilt which was inspired by the columns quilts in Kaffe Fassett's V&A Quilts. This should be incredibly simple; take nine 9" wide strips of fabric and sew them together to make a quilt top. How difficult can this be?

As it turns out, it's the opposite of simple. I love this design and the visual effect it achieves but, by golly, it takes some sorting out. It's actually a matter of taking a bundled, complex mixture of designs (above) and straightening them out (below) into a pattern and overall design which works. 

And, as you can see, I've only managed so far to put seven fabrics together. I'm ruthless, I know, but this is a quilt in which opposites don't work. So a mix of small and large-scale patterns are out, as are contrasting colours. In a bundle a mainly bright red fabric looks wonderful, but when you set a strip of rich scarlet flowers into the line-up it looks terrible.

My strips are laid out on our bedroom floor. For the last two days I have been doing a huge amount of step-exercise, running up and down stairs with various fabrics. I have gone to sleep thinking about the quilt and woken up with it staring at me from the end of the bed. But gradually, the idea of KISS (keeping it simple, stupid) is working and I am sheddding the more difficult fabrics. It's quite an education in visual ossopites, as Alice might have said.

a good run

What do you do during the four days of the coldest Easter for forty years? Well, if you're me you manage to convince yourself that the long weekend was custom-made for hand-quilting a quilt.

So when I say Easter turned out to be a good run, I don't mean the sporty kind. I mean that I was able to spend hours and hours doing running stitch up and down the edges of the green and red diamonds of what is to be my Amaryllis Quilt.

I took up residence on a comfy settee and stitched and stitched and stitched. I had my red thread, red thimble and red tea mug which was replenished at regular intervals, plus plenty of good company.

We watched rugby (I predicted 'man of the match' correctly twice - something of which I'm very proud considering I wasn't actually watching, only listening), Pride and Prejudice (the very pretty but insubstantial recent version with lovely linen dresses), our favourite scenes from The Pajama Game (I realised that my Hot Summer quilt was remarkably similar to the clothes worn in the picnic scene) and Ocean's Eleven (why does Brad Pitt's character never stop eating?). And I received offerings of chocolate and wine and daffodils picked from the garden.

By the end of the holiday I had quilted the entire thing. I think it took about eighteen hours in all, but it was one of the most restful marathon quilting runs I've ever had.

scattered thoughts

I like to keep everything important close to me while I work. Books. Notes. Recipe scribbles. Cup of tea. Green and Black's Caramel chocolate. I always say that all I need is an A4 space while the rest of the room can look like a bomb has hit it. Last year I read A Perfect Mess which has all kinds of wonderful theories about and explanations for disorder, and discovered that the apparently chaotic ordering of my workspace is actually extremely ordered and organised. (I love this book.) Not that anyone else can tell, and it does rely on absolutely no-one apart from me touching anything in my office. Least of all the chocolate.   

Just as I concentrate on one small space in my office and one small space in my brain while I work, so everything else in the room and mind is scattered in inverse proportion. It's all I can do to keep mugs, pens, scissors, papers, thoughts, ideas, plans, fabrics, books and yarns under control.

   

But sometimes there's a certain beauty to scattered piles and I often find myself rearranging the fabrics or suddenly espying a colour combination I hadn't seen before - usually when I'm in the middle of Something Very Important. Like describing jam tarts.

And, at this point, while my thoughts scatter once again, can I just tell you how gorgeous the new Rowan fabrics by Kaffe Fassett and Philip Jacobs are? Quite amazingly rich in colour and varied in pattern.

I may be scatty and scattered at the moment and pressed for time to reply to comments and emails and requests, but please don't think for one moment that I'm not reading every single comment here with pleasure and interest. I saw a discussion on another blog this week as to whether the writers of blogs that are widely read actually take any notice of comments. Well, I am fortunate enough to have quite a few visitors to this blog and I can tell you that I certainly never take comments for granted.

And now it's time to get back to that little space on my desk and in my brain before the children come home from school, and my thoughts and many more things are scattered all over the house.

swimming pool quilt

Although it often takes me a long time to plan a quilt in my mind, I usually manage to get the cutting, placing, piecing, sandwiching, quilting and finishing done in a reasonably short space of time. But the Swimming Pool Quilt was different. I wanted to make a blue snowball quilt and cut all the fabrics as long ago as last May so that we had something to photograph for the book (there's a photo of me and Tom, who has changed dramatically since it was taken, placing fabrics on the floor). I made some neat little numbered piles of squares so that I knew what went where, and then they sat around my office for months. Until I finally let go of the snowball idea and decided to dive into a simple swimming pool. (I'll make a snowball quilt one day. When I have time to deal with all those little corner triangles.)

But last month, I realised I'd done enough putting off and got to work on finally making the quilt. The freshness and the details brightened up quite a few days; it was such a straightforward quilt to put together that it was a real pleasure to simply swim in the colours and fabrics. The photo above shows the effect I wanted - that of uneven, rippling surfaces of swimming pools - perhaps natural, outdoor pools or lovely David Hockney pools.

I wanted the main part of the quilt to ripple and to make the eye drift over it without seeing lines and joins and patterns. But I wanted a bold and definite border, just as swimming pools often have edging or paving.

The backing fabric is a huge Kaffe Fassett Brocade design from Glorious Color which makes me think of the swirling water and reflected sunlight of a pool in summer.

And the edging fabric is a tropical flower and leaf print from the amazing eQuilter. It didn't work in the pool, but was just fine as the rim.

Phoebe dived right in.

                               ***

The quilt measures 80" x 90" / 205cm x 230cm and is a mix of fabrics mostly by Kaffe Fassett, Denyse Schmidt, Amy Butler, Martha Negley, and Philip Jacobson. It is machine-pieced and hand-quilted.