yarnstorm

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.

cheerfulness breaks in

Well, that was a break and a half, and it feels good to be back. I've been waiting for cheerfulness to break in (as in the wonderfully named novel Cheerfulness Breaks In by Angela Thirkell) and it took longer than expected.

In the meantime the amaryllis 'Benfica' have been utterly stunning with their deep, velvety, light-absorbing red blooms, and the white and pink hyacinths have come, filled the kitchen with their scent, and gone. Hundreds of tulips have been planted in the claggy soil and I can already see the tips of daffodils in pots.

I'm delighted with the sense of movement and growth and new cycles after a month of deep dislocation. These amaryllis have been more important than simple ornamentation and, thankfully, there are still a few more left to flower.

I'm thinking of calling my new quilt the Amaryllis Quilt, with its combination of deep reds and chartreuse greens. I don't quite know where I found the impetus to begin, but one miserable day I decided to make a diamond quilt, and the next day the floor was covered with jewel-like garnets and rubies and emeralds. It took me a little while to master the art of cutting diamonds but, once I had, it was incredibly therapeutic to build up the criss-crosses and angles into a stained-glass window design - and to be ruthless and reject the diamonds which simply didn't work. And there were quite a few - which have since been refashioned into thirty different dresses for a certain young designer's latest collection

I knew for certain this morning that cheerfulness is beginning to break in at last. Alice and I went to the Tate Modern, and there is nothing better for the spirit than going to see a collection of modern art with a teenager with an open mind and few preconceptions. At least she could see that the huge crack in the Turbine Hall was real (unlike some other visitors).

   

That's what I need: clear vision. And I feel I'm beginning to focus once more.

not red and green

It's not my plan make a red and green quilt. It has never been a red and green quilt in my mind since I first thought of it about twelve months ago when I knelt on the floor and looked and looked at a piece of Kaffe Fassett's Wisteria fabric from the Lille Collection (third from bottom in photo below) and saw the possibility of a quilt based on chartreuse and limey greens and cranberry and blood red. For me, there is a world of difference between this scheme and 'red and green'. It may be just a matter of words to some, but I find the matter of shades more important.

A little while ago I washed all the possible candidates to remove any size, as I prefer to cut and piece and stitch softer fabrics. But I put off ironing them until there was a good number of radio programmes to keep me at the ironing board, annd this week is a belting week for radio. There are the plummy, brisk and very English tones of Katharine Whitehorn who is reading from her autobiography. There was a fascinating piece about girls' education and my old school on Woman's Hour today.

And then there is the 20 part adaptation of Dombey and Son which would, in turn, require a huge amount of ironing. I think this is my favourite of all Dickens' novels and nowhere near as sombre and dour as some people think. I also love the cover of this edition, and when I looked at it again after listening to the very edited radio version (and why do they always have to do Dickens so 'dramatically' - why not just read it the way Dickens wrote it - he put in all the drama and comedy and tragedy you need), I noticed the red and green theme of the room. 

Only saying it's a 'red and green' interior is like saying Dombey and Son is a fine novel. There's so much more to red and green. And Dickens.

pools of colour

For months I've had little piles of fabric squares on my desk ready to be sewn together to make my Swimming Pool quilt. Now, at last, the fragments of water and reflected and refracted light (as I see them) have come together to make a swirling mass of blues and aquas and greens.

An all-time favourite book is Waterlog by Roger Deakin, a passionate outoor swimmer whose descriptions of swimming in the moat of his ancient Suffolk house are wonderfully vivid. I love the way he writes about swimming with wildlife and through underwater plants, parting and clearing the debris on the surface of the water. So when I was choosing fabrics for this quilt, I was happy to include leaves and foliage which suggest the variety of plants that appear or fall on the surface of ponds and natural swimming pools.

One of the best moments of quilt-making for me is choosing the backing fabric. I rarely buy it in advance, because I am never quite sure how the top will turn out. I like to wait and see, and then pick something to complement or surprise or contrast, or just something to make a statement. I'm prepared to keep an open mind until I see what's on offer, and then I usually know when I see the fabric.

So yesterday, when I pulled out the bolt of the gorgeously, exuberantly, rococo Brocade Flowers by Kaffe Fassett and saw the wonderful waves and curves of colour and light which match the aqua tones and suggestions of scattered sunlight, I could see it would work perfectly for what I had in mind. Putting the whole thing together will be like diving into a soft, warm, dappled pool.

I'm adding a dark, dramatic border to mark the edge of the pool so that people don't fall in, but can stand at the edge and look into the depths.

hot summer or wishful thinking quilt

How ironic that I should finish my Hot Summer quilt on a lovely, hot, sunny, summer's day. For this could also be called the Wishful Thinking quilt. We have had such a miserable, grey, wet and cool summer that I decided to quilt myself a better one. Then, finally, on the very day my ironically tilted quilt is completed, nature grants my wish.

It's a version of Kaffe Fassett's Floral Columns quilt in his and Liza Prior Lucy's V&A Quilts. It all began with the wonderfully kitsch, hot ladies fabric which I realised could ruin a tasteful quilt, or get lost in a busy quilt. So this design with nine 9" wide strips allowed the fabric to show off but not dominate. It took me ages to find eight fabrics to enhance and complement my buxom beauties, but eventually I worked out that the combination of tangerine orange and deep teal was what I wanted to play with.

All are large-scale prints and it's a real treat to let such lovely flowers and leaves and bosoms show off in good-size pieces for a change, rather than cutting them up small. Actually, this was the real attraction of the design in the first place - the opportunity to use fabrics I really love and want to be able to admire fully in a quilt. 

I decided a border wasn't necesary and chose a Kaffe Fassett blue and orange polka dot fabric for the binding; you don't see a lot of it but its aptness and jollity makes me smile.

I didn't have enough of any one fabric to back the quilt and couldn't wait for a delivery of one of them from the US, so I went to The Quilt Room and found this brilliant orange fabric with a tiny pattern which was perfect for suggesting a scorching hot day.

The quilt measures 74" x 80" / 188cm x 204cm and is machine-pieced and hand-quilted with a teal cotton thread using relatively large stitches. The fabrics are from eQuilter, Glorious Color and Purl Patchwork.

This quilt is for Phoebe. She claimed it early on when she first saw me playing with the strips on the floor. She helped me with the placement order, chose the binding fabric with me and came to Dorking to advise on the backing fabric. It looks stunning in her bright orange bedroom, and she happily put it on and twirled round and round in the garden for me.

It was difficult to get her to stand still for a moment (top photo), because she was soon off doing a Mexican wave or Hawaiian dance as the ladies might do if ever they came to life.

Fortunately, she was reading when I did the morning photos (all the other photos) - the quilt is far less wriggly on a tree.

                                ***

Thank, you, thank you, thank you for all the encouraging and supportive comments on my last post. You are such wonderfully philosophical souls.

sweetness and light

When the children were tiny I knew I wanted to find somewhere we could go to on holiday year after year. I liked the idea of returning to a place that was special to us all, somewhere we could slip instantly into relaxation mode and feel at home, somewhere we could build an archive of shared memories and anecdotes and details.

I really had no idea where it would be as neither Simon nor I had any connections with the seaside (it had to be beside the sea) and neither of us had somewhere we'd known since our own childhood. We tried Cornwall, Devon and Dorset but couldn't find what we were looking for. 

And then one grey and windy summer's day ten years ago we took Tom, Alice and Phoebe to Aldeburgh for fish and chips. We sat on the wall of the shelving pebbly beach and faced the ever-changing sea and sky and shared our chips with the cheeky seagulls. And we fell in love with the charm of the town, the bleakness and simplicity of the landscape and the edge-of-the-worldliness atmosphere.

We've been back again and again, and still Aldeburgh offers the sweetness and light we were looking for. We've stayed in many different places in the town, but this was the first time I've wanted to move into a rented house permanently. In fact, it was so conducive to domesticity that one of the first things I did was buy three bunches of wonderful dahlias when we visited the utterly fabulous gardens of Helmingham Hall (an unbelievable £1 a bunch) and arrange them in the living room.

Inspired by these flowers and the general homeliness, we visited Woottens, our favourite plant nursery, to buy some plants to take home, including some 'David Howard' dahlias which I've been searching for for a while (lovely burnished orange flowers with dark, bronze foliage). As the house didn't have a garden we kept the plants in the wash-room - a wash-room to beat all other wash-rooms I've ever known, it must be said - and I spent inordinate amounts of time simply enjoying the effect in here.

This would make a perfect flower-room, I thought.

But the most stunning view was from our first-floor living room and it was best enjoyed with a glass of cold and fruity rose to match my dahlias and my husband (above). I was enthralled by the way that three wide strips - the beach, the sea and the sky - could offer so much drama and variation. One day we would have a calm and glittering silver sea and the next we'd be watching rough, brown, crashing waves.

The sky changed by the hour, and the clouds and the colours offered us brilliant wide-screen entertainment all week.

And I felt so at home that I was able to hand-quilt all my quilt while I listened to Leonard Cohen and the children roller-skated up and down the beach path, queued for fish and chips and designed ridiculous board games.   

Sweetness and light, indeed. 

hot summer quilt

I'm quilting myself a hot summer. It's probably the only way I'll get one.

I've been thinking of making a 'Floral Column Quilt' as shown in Kaffe Fassett's V&A Quilts for a long time, certainly longer than I care to remember. After all, how difficult can it be to sew nine strips of fabric together to make an over-the-top textile wallpaper? Well, a lot more difficult than you would guess.

It sounds easy-peasy; just go to your stash and bring out nine half-yards/half-metres of big, bold florals and get on with it. But it's not like that in reality. Because I wanted to make something that looked impressive, something that exploited the scale of the strips (approx 90" x 8" inches) and showed off some large-scale patterns to their fullest extent. I spent ages studying why Kaffe's two versions work and it's to do with eye-movement and clashes but also flow and harmonies. What I needed was a great starter fabric and then I knew everything else would fall into place next to it.

Then I found this wickedly hot-summer, kitsch Alexander Henry fabric on eQuilter. I make no apologies for my taste; I love this fabric, and I thought it would be be a laugh to work with and to see whether I could get it into a quilt which was relatively tasteful but with a nice touch of irony.

It has taken months to find eight fabrics which work with it. I've had to abandon many which I thought would be OK (too small, too orange -yes, it's possible - too dull, not the right blue) and it was only yesterday that I finally put the right combination in the right order (above is one of the attempts). It was Phoebe who found the missing piece - the very pretty Denyse Schmidt floral from the Katie Jump Rope collection in a lovely, deep sky-blue that I bought in Purl Patchwork.

I have now cut out and lined up the fabrics in their final order and I am ready to put these buxom ladies into a 'Hot Summer Quilt'. I can feel the temperature rising already.