Hostas, a natural for a quilt

As I wrote yesterday, I saw a large bed of hostas, of various varieties. at Heritage Plantation. I'm sure quilters who also garden -- and from the blogs I read, there are many of them -- have surely seen the possibilities of making large -- actually, simply life size, hosta leaves on quilts and then quilt them along their natural vein lines. Since hostas have many varieties I'm sure a lot of possiblities will come to mind.

I have just discovered a new blog that I recommend,lby Diane Yates who is a crafter, quilter, and now elder blogger of my vintage. I suggest checking it out. One day soon when I am feeling more technological than I am this afternoon, I will add it to my side bar along with two or three others that I have recently begun looking following. If I were really technologically ambitious I would try to find out how Helen Conway of Down the Well does her side bar with always updated photos from the blogs she follows. I love that but I think my brain will probably not wrap around the steps to do it. At the moment I'm stymied by some online banking steps and that is supposed to be really, super easy. My philosophy is that there are some things we just don't have to master -- for me it is dying my own fabric for quilting and the subtler points of the blog set up.

Heritage Planation, Sandwich, MA

A break from quilting to enjoy the glory of late spring, just before summer arrives. Rachel and I spent part of the afternoon at Heritage Plantation, a botanical garden in Sandwich, about 20 minutes away. The great concentration of this garden is a small forest ofrhododendruns and azelas although there are many other flowers that make other seasons magnificent also. Above a display o color that only hints at what boquets were at every turn of the meandering paths.


One of the first sights is the dramatic windmill with huge beds of hostas of many varietes planted in front. The bright blue sky had just the right amount of fat clouds;the temperature was just perfect although it was a little humid. Paths wind in and out, many of the bushes have plaques with varietal names, some trees do too. We were especially delighted with a Japanese umbrella pine with soft needles that spilled gracefully like umbrellas.



This was probably the peak of the glory for the rhonies, some had dropped petals so that the ground beneath was carpeted in color as in this picture. The planners put nice benches in scenic spots, there was also a lake with forested walks beside it and there are other points of interest like a herb garden, a museum, a carousel for children, of course a snack tent and a gift shop. Many plants were for sell also. We had a very beautiful slow, meandering walk and delicious ice cream cones to finish.

Using my Design Wall -- and Floor

I am SO enjoying having a sewing room where I can spread out what I'm working on. I have three quilts in process and I can see all of them using the design wall, the work table under it and the floor. Three's about right -- the little cathedral windows project is in it's own plastic bag and doesn't need to be seen at this point.
On the floor is a batik patchwork that has kind of grown like Topsy or maybe like the Gees Bend quilts only more structured. I've wanted a rich colored batik for my bed for a while. The photo was taken before I got it together with all the borders it now has. It's ready for it's back and batting but it's backing isn't ready for it. I'm using two other batiks but they feel stiff. They have too much finish on them. So I meant to wash them today but haven't gotten around to it. Tomorrow -- ah-ah, yes, manana.
The block quilt, a '59s vintage design that I'm paper piecing and using scraps; I'm giving it rows of mixed reds along with other rows of various scraps. I love to watch such quilts grow. This won't fit on the design wall entirely -- only about half will but that will be okay. I can make sure the pieces blend which I love doing with scraps. It will grow slowly.
Finally the kalidoscope a la Maxine Rosenthal's book. This will be a slower project, I'm just doing hexagoons at this point, only a few at a time and there will be many, many before I"m ready to put them on the design wall and work out a pattern.

How luxurious this feels after so many years of cramped working conditions! I keep getting drawn here instead of doing other things I've promised myself I'll do now that I have time -- like go use the exercise room. Darn -- didn't do that today and it's too gray to entice me to walk. Manana, manana ... manana is good enough for me. Am I the only person who remembers that song?

An Aside

Cathedral windows -- most quilters recognize this design which is not a "real" quilt in that it has no middle layer of batting, although there are three layers of fabric. I have never made even one "window" although as I write I am very close to having made one, that will become more. What size the finished product will be I have no idea. This is not a technique I wanted to learn, the repetition seems boring to me and the amount of hand sewing time wasting and fussy.

BUT I think I may be excused for breaking my resolution not to buy new fabric when I bought four yards of white muslin for some cathedral windows. Why? Because a nice person deserves to be treated nicely. In my new apartment complex I found a notice about a Thursday night needlework group. I stopped in, hoping to find quilters or at least to find potential friends. I found one quilter who may be a potential friend, Mary, a woman of 89, who has spent hundreds of hours making cathedral windows and who was working on one using very bright oolored insets, many with metallic bits of the design. It was pretty. I said, "Oh, that's a technique i've never done." I couldn't make myself say "And I really don't ever want to." No, can't do that. I read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People back in my very impressionable adolescence and cannot immediately alienate people I've just met. That was the period of my life I was learning the pre-feminist rules about being a "nice girl" and damned if the lesson didn't stick, even to this day.

Mary wanted to teach me the technique. How could I say no? What could it hurt to learn something new? So I promised to purchase some muslin and prepare the basic squares. This I did. Last Thursday I went to the Needleworker's evening. Several non-needle workers stopped by, so I met a few more people -- I remember one name but I don't think I could connect it to the right face.

The technique is so time consuming and meticulous, in two hours I did not complete one "window" as you see here with the pins in it and the turned back sections not sewn down yet. I told myself i'd spend at least an hour this holiday weekend working on it so as to see if I've got the various steps in mind -- I suspect not. However two days has passed and I haven't sewn a stitch on this, though many stitches on two other quilts. Tomorrow -- ah, yes, manana. Really, I mean it.


The traditional "window" has a variation that Mary showed me and the other ladies when she passed out gift coasters as below. She calls them "mug rugs" but this is really too delicate and pretty to be called a "rug", I think. First, I said to Mary, I will try to make something sizable [not very sizable probably] in the traditional way and then I'll learn the variation.

Mary is a patient and practical teacher, she seems a very nice person. She surely has stories to tell as anyone who is 89 does. So I shall go to the needleworker's gatherings with some frequency, I think, which will probably be the only time I actually work on the cathedral windows, so the total will grow slowly.

Vintage and Contemporary Quilting

I discovered I was a Gemini at about age 12. Great! Of course I was a Gemini, I could never stick to one thing [don't say fickle, say multi-tasker]. I was always interested in opposites, and trying to do two things at once [or three or five]. So, right now I have two quilts in the making -- and two UFOs out of sight in a hamper, and I've just bought [yes, Stash Busters, I fell off the wagon] fabric for a third.

I wrote last time about the vintage quilt I've started. That will be a side project, ongoing for as long as it takes. It is the epitome "quilt" in basic layer of my vocabulary. A quilt is made of scraps, it grows a bit like Topsy, helter-skelter depending on what's available and when the top is done it will be layered and backed and quilted, by machine these days. I don't know how long it will take but I get a feeling of righteousness and thriftiness as I use up pieces from my sizable scrap bag.

The second quilt in the making is entirely batiks collected over a few years. Putting them together is a visual adventure. I'm watching soft and brilliant colors blend. The top is a simple strip pieced one-block pattern. It's growing in an organic way as I study my collection and decide what to use next. So far I have only most of the center pieced [photo in a day or two[ I'm enjoying the feeling of working almost abstractly but within traditional block format.

At the far end of the spectrum is the book pictured, Maxine Rosenthal's One-Block Wonder: One Fabric, One Shape, One-of-a-kind Quilts. I said when I listed what I want to make tis summer that I wanted to do a Bethany Reynold's type Stack=n-Whack. Maxine takes Bethany's technique another step from traditional to art quilt. I said I was not going to add to my stash and in an effort to stick to that resolution I spent yesterday afternoon contemplating all the larger pieces of fabric I have. None fit the crtiteria of fabric needed for one of Maxine's fascinating quilts made of kalidoscope hexagrams which become abstract compositionis that bear almost no resemblance to the original fabric. I saw one such quilt at a show in New Jersey and stood in front of it studying and absorbing for quite some time.

This is the antithese of vintage scrap quilt. Here one buys a carefully selected fabric, cuts it into lterally hundrds of triangles, sews them together carefully and arranges them carefully by predominant color and produces a complex composition as unlike a vintage block quilt as Jackson Pollock is unlike Van Gogh. In searching for the "right" fabric -- not easy to find -- the criteria Maxine suggests are that it must be colors you love, the repeat of the design is best if it's 12 inches or more, there should not be too many colors in the design, and the design should be flowing, not geometrically static. As I discovered, these criteria are not aasy to meet but I finally chose a fabric with a black background, flowing green leaves and fuschia flowers with only small hints of yellow and white and a repeat of about 18 inches.

As I said I love the excitement of sewing kalidoscope blocks and now that I am about to have a design wall, arranging them with Maxine's helpful intructions is going to challenge whatever color sense I've managed to acquired. It will be the major quilting challenge of the next several weeks. I'm really very excited about getting started. More soon. Pictures too.

The Angry Drunkard Stumbles Home

onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzjiOyJ97Ka8f9pZMYiJhpS-L0D37bKmiCWpdSWTo3tzbiLKcic1YiZeCk3kay8k1b5gnAutuiYJCM00ZqBHsJpRNJX5qj9OhWhqP70tKaGhgUWTOKJqQ3WYcOGD6LS7OshbbpLQ/s1600-h/PICT0468.JPG">

"The Angry Drunkard Staggers Home" is the title of this now complete throw-size quilt -- obviously it is a traditional drunkard's path setting, the poor sot's too drunk to do anything but mumble a little as he staggers home, all his anger being contained in the reds on the back. I'm glad the quilt is finished.

onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0PKtn9Vt8edB_r7a3MfJ7uaYEqKdMCOCHg7wmvfSxlEEA9GAL_Xg231H6rNhcZ2XxZp77EuN3GmpXouS2XKLvAISsZYxNUsZOgUJeflo_wNHel6qbJ0j-0HBI48YN75vh4ZDW3Q/s1600-h/PICT0467.JPG">

And here is one I started this morning -- it's called "Endless Chain" and is a vintage [1930s] pattern from a Quilters Newsletter Magazine many issues ago. It will be entirely a scrap quilt. I love using up pieces from my scrap bag and it looks like I'm still on a bit of a red binge. Half the non-white pieces will be red scraps and the other half will be scraps that are lighter but at somewhat harmonious. I will particularly try to use calicos and rather dope prints like the one in this block. If you click the picture to enlarge it, you can see some of the pattern I'm using. My first impulse was that it should be paper pieced but then it looked so easy I made templates from cardboad, put half a square together and saw that my first impulse was the only workable one for me. This square was paper pieces as will be all the rest. It's a ten inch square so for a twin bed quilt I'll make 35 squares. And then give it a not very wide border.

I really enjoy having some paper piecing project going that I do one or two square a day [or work session] as I work on something else. I spent quite a bit of time deciding what stripping to use with the batik stash pieces I pictured a few days ago. Settled on purples. Didn't start sewing but will tomorrow I think. Once upon a time purples would have been anathema to me but I've become much more inclusive as I've quilted a lot more. I think I will like it and I have a rather wild batik fabric for a backing. This should be a fairly quick quilt ... famous last words, of course. I know, I know, I know ... projects always take longer ... etc.

Your Wish Is My Command

Helen asked for the kuchen recipe, so here it is: First make the yeast dough.

Scald a half cup milk into which has been stirred a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of sugar and generous pat of butter which will melt as the milk scalds. Then let milk cool until it's lukewarm [when a drop on the wrist feels only warm is the test]. Stir in and dissolve a half tablespoon of dry yeast. Then mix in one egg. And finally stir in two cups of flour which will make a soft dough. When it's well mixed let the dough rise until double. When it's double dump it onto a floured board and kneed just a little bit and then pat it into a lightly buttered pan which is 8" or 9" either square or round and 2 or 3 inches deep. Let it sit about half an hour in a warm place to rise a bit again. [Note: some fruit may produce juice that will run over the sides of a too shallow pan.]

Meanwhile prepare whatever fruit you're going to use. I used 1-1/2 cup chopped raw rhubarb and with 1/2 cup of sugar and a pinch of salt. Most other fruits need no extra sugar but some, like apples or peaches, need to be sliced or diced, berries of course just need have stems removed. Prepared fruit goes on top of the dough.

Streussel topping: combine 1/2 cup each sugar and flour, grated rind of a lemon, 1/2 cup chopped nuts [your choice, or skip them] and 1/3 cup of melted butter. Drop struessel in bits all over the top. It'll spread as it cooks.

Then bake at 350 degrees F. for about 35 minutes. It is yummy.

And, Helen, I'm sorry these are all American and not British measurements. I'm trusting you to be able to figure the conversions as I, like most Americans, am an ignoramus about converting metrics/inches/pounds/cups and so on