Collaborative Quilting Part III: Deconstruction

One of the very best things about the Gwen Marston Freddy Moran books is that they have, particularly in the second volume, taken some time to point out critical &/or significant design elements. That practice not only gives the reader and student a nice peek into the Freddy and Gwennie design process, it helps inform your own process. Marston and Moran place a high value on the inclusion of unexpected elements, which by confounding expectation, cause our eye to stop and say "hey, what gives??" This forces you to look carefully at the composition, and have a little conversation with the quilt in hand.

A perfect example of this approach is represented in the quilt below:

 Photo from the Sue Spargo blog, taken at Sisters, Oregon. Quilt by Marston and Moran, "What a Star!" p. 186 of "Collaborate Again"

First, the colours. Not many times in our quilting lives do we finger a schoolbus orange fabric sprinkled with red dots and say "hmmmm, what a fabulous background fabric this would be"! And yet, it works so very well here. In the notes on this quilt, the makers point out the salient design elements: mixing of liberated and traditional (precision) pieced elements, filler strips both pieced and plain, split blocks, unexpected colour shifts in the sawtooth borders. In addition, you can see blocks constructed of both high and low contrast elements ie. stars that stand out from their background fabric, and stars that blend with it; a small twist on the traditional that makes you stop and look around the quilt for similar unexpected elements.

It becomes clear as you examine the quilt that these unexpected, non-conforming elements give the quilt its charm and depth of character.

I have become especially fond of those filler strips. They are, all on their own, tiny design challenges.

You could lay in a simple strip of fabric, but what if you decide to take that space and fill it with a custom-designed filler composition instead? Will you use tiny stars or tiny Freddy's Gardens? All elements the same size or different sizes? Floating on the background fabric or a new fabric? Sashed? Split?

I was particularly charmed by the row just inside the outer black & white sawtooth border, which features regular blocks of either stars, churn dash, or broken dishes. That's interesting enough, but the spaces between the blocks, normally reserved for plain background fabric, have instead become mini design fields containing smaller and interestingly placed stars, churn dashes etc.

And do I need to point out the border of wiggly coloured lines on black? I'd like to meet the fabric designer who had the guts to submit that design for printing! That fabric is wild, strikes me as rather grotesque, and I can't imagine saying "I'll take 3 yards!"...but it totally works in this quilt.

We talked in class about what drives the composition of a quilt like this, and how you digest it visually. For me, a successful quilt evokes pure emotion, and from the Marston/Moran quilts I get a jolt of unfettered  joy. These are not particularly restful quilts, but they are vibrant, resonant, and engaging.

Like most good friends.

p. 102/103 Collaborative Quilting

Part I
Part II

Collaborative Quilting Part II: Fabrics

It is worth taking a moment to discuss the fine points of fabric acquisition.

To gear up my stash for the Freddy Moran and Gwen Marston experience, I first turned to collecting black and white fabrics, something completely new to me. I was astonished at the variety available (having never noticed them before, **blush**), and at the effort fabric houses are putting into creating new and useful black and white prints. I quickly learned that these prints fall into three categories: prints that read primarily as black, prints that read primarily as white, and prints that read as grey. This last group, the busy and generally small scale black and whites that read as grey, are of limited use in the Marston/Moran style of quilting. In general, any fabric that is middle of the road in terms of contrast value, neither high nor low contrast value, adds to the "mush factor" in these quilts.

Many of us have experienced the mush factor via charm pack projects: if you construct a project out of charm packs in any one collection, the fabrics all fight for your eye time, and individual, lovely prints (no matter how prettily they match in terms of palette) get lost, utterly lost, in the visual confusion. The way to remedy this is to add high contrast sashing or rows, and this baby quilt pattern from the Moda Bakeshop site is a perfect example (below). The busy-ness of a charm pack has been pleasantly tamed by the visual rest-stop offered here by white fabric:

Marston and Moran use black and white to accomplish the same end, often sprinkling in "reads as black" or black fabric through the blocks themselves, and/or using black and white sawtooth or checkerboard strips to visually separate the more colour-full elements. Note that even in sawtooth or checkerboard construction, high contrast is a must for clean, sharp and sophisticated design. I quickly found that in making my first strips of sawtooth that the best look came from pairing one "reads as white" fabric with one "reads as black" fabric.

Also useful are fabrics which are some variation on black and white stripes: a big favourite of mine has been this wonderful irregular stripe:  Micheal Miller "Ebony Reeds" CX-3529:

In terms of choosing coloured fabrics, Freddy advocates (wisely) the choice of highly saturated, pure colours, that is to say, colours that are not tinted with black or white. Designers like Brandon Mably and Jane Sassaman spring to mind here, but most bright collections (ie. Moda's "Happy") will contain some winning pure saturates.

The timing of my first visit to Back Porch coincided with the release of the Kaffe Fasset "Spots and Dots" line, and the fabric below revealed itself as one of my "super fabrics", a flexible mixer in clear colours that pleased my eye greatly:

And it turns out, bright polka dot fabrics in all scales will be a good addition to your Collaborative Quilting stash. Brightly coloured stripes, again in various scales, are also reliable stash bets. Both spots and stripes make fabulous binding fabrics.

When it comes to putting these brights together, keeping the contrasts dialed up is again the key to success. You want to include in your base fabrics high value and low value along with high hue balanced against black or black and white. In my mug rug photo, repeated below from an earlier blog post, you can see the contrast principle at work:

The centre black and white is small scale (and also dotted), and balances against the third row of larger scale, rectangular black and white stripes. The sapphire spot fabric is paired with a glowing cerise and orange stripe (so again, round with squares/rectangles, and hot colours paired against cool colours). Turquoise appears in many of the prints but is not dominant in any. The binding works not only in picking up that turquoise, but offering a dramatic hit of black. I stitched in the ditch (so as not to muddy the clear colours) with a variegated yellow and orange thread, which shows really nicely against the sapphire blue backing (the blue from Patrick Lose's "Mixmasters Dot to Dot" collection).

To begin with, I simply chose fabrics from my stash and laid them against each other on my cutting table. It quickly became clear which paired in a pleasing yet dramatic way.

Working in small projects like these mug rugs is a great way to experiment with colour and design without committing to a huge and expensive project. Liberated log cabin mug rug projects are especially well suited as a learning curve project in colour and design.

Past choosing small projects, I found that in tackling my class project, really my first "Freddy and Gwennie" project, using a strip quilt format worked well. I sewed parts into strips (ie. a strip of pinwheels, a strip of flying geese, a strip of 16 patches on point). Why? Because on the design wall, you can easily lay your strips side by side and start shoving them around into pleasing arrangements. It quickly became clear what background colour for my setting squares worked well, whether to add borders on all sides or just 1 or 2, what sawtooth and checkboard elements worked well between strips, etc.

Where did I get all these fabrics? I shopped brick and mortar when and where I could, faring well at Back Porch. But most of my local fabric stores are heavily traditional, and most in any case only stock a limited number of the new collections, and a limited selection from any one collection at that. Online vendors were a big help, and I could scan their offerings fairly quickly and comfortably, particularly when they allowed sorting the fabric images by colour. I find screen representations surprisingly accurate.

A good site to begin with is www.quiltshops.com, and from there I shop hard for free or no shipping. I like Desperate Quilters and  Quilt Expressions  in  particular, not just for their selection and pricing, but the fact they tuck fun and useful little gifts (like note pads, pencils and pens) into my orders. Thanks, ladies!!

Other online shops I have used include FabricWorm, EQuilter, Fabric Shack, From Here to Quilternity, Hancock's of Paducah, Pink Chalk Fabrics, Sew Mama Sew. There are tons out there, you just have to track down the fabrics you are after, and using Google Images is a good way to turn up hard to find fabric sources. Incidentally, a good online fabric house will advise you if they are not able to fill your order precisely, and will give you the option of adding another fabric before placing your order. Since I often gauge my order to be maximum yardage for a shipping cost category, it can be a real extra cost to me when the fabric house ships me a short order. I track my shipping cost per fabric yard quite carefully.

Enough for today!

(to be continued...)

(Part I)

Collaborative Quilting Part I:Empty Spools Seminar, Asilomar by the Sea

It all began with a decision to take a long overdue romantic weekend away together, for which we chose the Monterey Peninsula, booking a stay at the transcendent Old Monterey Inn. During the course of that delightful weekend, I followed the advice of fellow Stitcher's Guild posters and popped into Pacific Grove's Back Porch Fabrics. Not only was Back Porch the single best quilting store I have ever been in, the selection of quilts hung on the high walls was gallery-worthy. I was struck by one in particular, similar to this one, below:

Based on "Sticks" by Marston and Moran

Now, I am not a huge fan of modern and abstract quilts (perhaps blinkered by my Virgo nature!) but this one really spoke to me. Under the quilt was the tag "from page 180 of Freddy and Gwen's book". I found a book by these ladies and quickly turned to page 180 only to find a page on making liberated star blocks...and realized that there were TWO books! The first was Collaborative Quilting, the second was Freddy and Gwen Collaborate Again. I bought them both.

These books were a revelation. Never before had I seen such masterful colour handling, and such an unfettered, joyous approach to quilt design. Best described as "sophisticated-primitive", the designs are based on elements in traditional quilts, but respun in a modern esprit, in modern fabrics.

I took the books home and read them, scanning the photos over and over. I definitely wanted to make something like these, so I went hunting for a workshop by the authors. First in line was a 5 day seminar hosted by Empty Spools, on the ground of Asilomar Conference Centre in good old Pacific Grove. The stars were obviously lined up, so I signed up.

The format of the class is to prepare a number of parts with which to stock what Marston and Moran call "The Parts Department". Living on opposite coasts as they do, they make stacks of quilt elements independently; blocks of various sizes in stars, churn dash, pinwheels, flying geese, free form houses and trees, even chickens and Freddy's signature "Freddy's Garden" blocks. Whether precision pieced or made in a casual "liberated" style, these are made in a rainbow of colours, and to prevent visual overload, are judiciously balanced with strips of black and white elements; sawtooth, straight strips or alternating black and white blocks. These disparate, pre-made elements are brought together when the authors meet, and they design directly with the parts, up on the design wall. The quilts tend to come together very quickly out of a well stocked Parts Department.

In preparation for class, then, I had to put together some parts of my own, and a quick survey of my stash revealed a complete lack of suitable fabrics. I am young in quilting years, having taken my Quilting 101 class only three years ago. And having spent the intervening years largely focused on building my nascent precision piecing skills via kit projects, not only was my stash small, it was very traditional. And I didn't have a single solitary black and white fabric. For the Freddy and Gwennie style, that would simply not do. Mercifully, Christmas was just around the corner, so I used my tidy sum of Chrismas present money to lay in a suitable range of fabrics, largely by shopping online. I hunted up online fabric houses that offered low or no shipping for large orders, and scanned the sale offerings, which often feature bright, outlandish fabrics perfect for the Collaborative Quilting style, but anathema to the more traditional approach. And I got a swatch card for Kona Solids, and stocked up on saturated solids.

As the eye-popping packages began to arrive, I quickly found that certain patterns and fabrics really stood out as particularly well adapted to this new approach. When one of these super-fabrics appeared, I would re-order, stocking 5 yards against future quilts and parts. To my surprise, my favourite pieces leaned heavily toward a sapphire blue/orange combo, and the turquoise and red combination from one of the Marston/Moran quilts. I found myself using colours and combinations I had never dreamt of before.

Given that this saturated palette, balanced by blacks and whites, was new to me, I decided to make a series of "mug-rugs" (aka coasters) in which I would practice my noob colour handling skills:

That proved to be a very good beginning exercise, and I really love using these mug rugs under my endless cups of tea! They also save my cutting mat from warping under the hot cups...

Over the 4 months or so before the course, I made up lots of pinwheels (focusing on combining a black based print with coloured fabric), liberated stars, Freddy's Gardens, black and white sawtooth, nine patches (made of 1" strips), and 16 patches (made of 1 1/2" strips). 

I learned quickly that when new fabrics arrived, it paid to cut three 1" strips, and three 1 1/2" strips right away, and then sort them into drawers by light/dark/black & white. 

 After my shopping spree was over, I had small Rubbermaid drawer units:

filled with sorted strips. I could then, at leisure, pull out sets of strips, sew them together, and then when cut into the actual base units needed for assembling the 9 or 16 patch units, stow those base units in their own drawer, ready for assembly. In this way, I could slip up to my studio and sew up a few units without any need to do design or cutting work, meaning even small chunks of time were  highly productive.

This suited my situation perfectly...not only was I able to fit sewing in and around my usual roster of chores, but we are very involved currently providing support to a dying family member. The intensity of that situation leaves us mentally and emotionally "on empty" when we get home, and I found the simple sewing of units together from pre-cut elements the perfect way to zen out and regenerate. And working with the cheery colours and finished units was a real joy and solace in a dark and sad time.

Having all the base bits ready to go also helps you make the colour quotient in the 9 and 16 patches truly random as possible, which is the aim. For most traditional quilters, the most difficult element of the Collaborative Quilting style is letting go of the urge to match things! These quilts do not tolerate the quilter being "matchy". Balance and  proportion are brought about by clever manipulation of the groups of elements, not so much by planned colour work.

(Part II)

Chocolate Brownies

Some years ago, when my first two were small, and the mommy gig was new to me, I realized that my maternal toolbox was missing an essential skill: the making of truly fantabulous brownies. At the time, the internet was in a fledgeling state, all ASCII, no images, but I ran an internet wide contest for The Best Brownies Ever. I got tons of submissions, and for 6 weeks we baked several pans of brownies daily....cakey brownies, chewy brownies, fudgey brownies, every sort and size you can imagine.

My husband, at first ecstatic to return home to our warm and chocolate scented kitchen, soon learned to dread the nightly plate of brownies. "Try them!" we would urge, and judge which was the new best recipe.
Many, many squares of chocolate later, we had our winner. The winning submission was made by Dave Woodall; the recipe was his grandmother's, and we are all fortunate she was the kindly sort of cook who not only shares her recipes, but shares them complete and un-edited, sans strategic omissions and booby-traps...


Today, you can buy those wonderful little One Bite Brownies in the grocery store, and I think they must be based on Dave's grandma's recipe. But nothing beats a pan of these brownies fresh out of the oven, warm and oh so delicious! We love them with good vanilla ice cream.

Grandma Woodall's Brownies

2 squares unsweetened chocolate
1 c. oil, canola or corn
2 c. sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 c. flour
1 t. baking powder
1 t. salt
1 c. broken nuts (optional)

Mix the flour, baking powder and salt with a whisk.

Just barely melt the chocolate in the oil (in microwave is easiest).

Add all other ingredients in the order shown, taking care that the eggs do not cook in the warmed oil/chocolate mixture, adding flour mixture last.

Pour the completed batter into a greased and floured 9" x 13" pan.
Yes, it has to be that pan size to cook properly!

Bake 350F
30 minutes
Let cool at least 15 minutes before serving.

Optional garnishes:
Press half walnuts into each square before brownies cool.
Drizzle with chocolate glaze...white chocolate looks nice.

Enjoy!

A Milestone

Wizard quality free motion machine quilting - by Diane Gaudynski

It is funny how random events change the course of your life. Two years ago I was preparing to go out and shop for a nice longarm machine and frame. Unfortunately, the recession hit, and our income stream vanished overnight. So much for a big hobby purchase like a longarm! That would have to wait for better times.

I was at the point in my quilting journey where piecing was coming together and I was beginning to make things I actually wanted to quilt up and keep...but that was the problem! How was I to do the quilting?

I had hand quilted when I was younger, before babies arrived and the sewing was put away. But even then, bouts of quilting gave me instant tendonitis in my right forearm. And hand quilting was slo-oooo---ow going. I am not content to wait months to finish any given piece.

The easiest option was to send my quilts out to be quilted by a pro. But the artist in me objected: I wanted to control the quilt creation process from beginning to end. For better or worse!

I could also use my walking foot and quilt in straight lines. While there are times I do like straight line quilting, I would feel too limited if it were the only kind of quilting I could do.

I could learn to free motion. I had already taken one workshop and I wasn't half bad for a raw beginner. But I could see that learning to free motion well was going to take a long time and a lot of practice. At one trunk show, the speaker mentioned that it took her about 300 hours of practice before she felt she was in control of her free motion quilting. Wow. Even if an hour a day practice allowed me to learn to free motion quilt as well as she could, that was going to take me a year!

by Cassandra Williams - she must have practiced more than a year!

At first I thought I would just put the quilting on hold for a while. I went back to work on my piecing and design skills, which can always stand a little refining. But with the tops beginning to pile up, I realized I had to change my attitude about free motion quilting. I was deeply reluctant to accept that for a long time, my free motion quilting was going to be herky-jerky and wobbly. I have always hated to hand in less than stellar work, and those high standards applied to my quilting along with all my other endeavours. But those high standards were now getting in my way.

I had to accept my own journey along the learning curve in order to progress in my craft.

I looked at the lap quilt top I had just finished. I loved it! And I really wanted it quilted up so I could use it as fall descended. It was time to learn to free motion. I went out to the discount fabric store and bought 10 metres of high quality, discount priced quilting cotton. It was ugly, but it would do. I made up a stack of 24" square practice quilt sandwiches. I set up my D1 on a home made quilting table setup.  And went to work.

I was surprised at how quickly I progressed on simple meandering. After a week of daily practice sessions, I felt that I was ready enough. My meanders are a bit wonky, to be sure, and there are plenty of bobbles where I have not yet mastered the art of stopping, repositioning quilt and hands, and continuing on. And my stitch length varies too much. I get excited or panicky and put the pedal to the metal...not so good for nice, regular stitch length! And I often keep trying to quilt when my hands are totally out of position...that makes for really long stitches as I strain for quickly vanishing control.

Here is my lap quilt all quilted up...what a great feeling it was to take it off the quilting table! Is it perfect? No! Did I improve as I went along? Yes! And was it fun? Totally! Will it be lovely to snuggle under my new lap quilt on winter evenings? Oh, yeah!

Next project up is this adorable doll quilt. The sashing and border strips are only 1" wide finished, and I realized I have to have much more control to free motion quilt those creditably than is necessary for large scale meandering. Onward!

Contemporary vs. Traditional Quilts

Bunny Hill Designs - Uptown Baby

I had to post this quilt by Bunny Hill Designs! I thought it did a lovely job of harmonizing the two ends of the quilting spectrum, traditional (the block designs are largely pinwheel, and the plain areas highlight tone on tone quilting) and modern (colour scheme). Isn't it posh? And delightful! And in this case, makes a great quilt for either a baby boy or baby girl.

I am not a huge fan of very psychedelic quilts, particularly those with multiple sharp pointed elements (which remind me uncomfortably of the horrible visual disturbances that accompany migraine headaches), so for the most part, quilts that are typically defined as modern do not draw my eye. But I do like this next quilt, the pattern for which is available at Blueberry Buckle:

City Park Quilt

It reminds me pleasantly of the patchwork of fields you see whilst flying over the prairies, and of maps and yes, city blocks and parks. And the serene palette (notice the interesting punctuation provided by the two small white squares) is visually rich without feeling like a pop art poster.

Work Quilt #2 by Victoria of Silly BooDilly.

I stumbled onto this quilt on the Silly BooDilly site...wow! The front, pictured here, is made of shot cottons; I had no idea what those were, but I surely want some now! From Kaffe Fassett, they are cottons woven with two different colours, given them a really rich and sophisticated dimension. To the basic pattern of mixed rectangles in three shades, Victoria hand applied and hand quilted 31 smaller patches in a brilliantly chosen array of fabrics and shapes. Her quilting, showcased at her Flickr site, is a mix of machine quilting and hand quilting in brilliantly chosen coloured threads.

This quilt, possibly the most beautiful I have ever seen, is a perfect example of how simplicity can set the stage for masterful colour and design elements.

Inspirational.

Color Mastery Exercise #1

The first exercise set you in Color Mastery is to constuct a colour wheel out of fabrics you find in your own stash (or failing that, from magazine photos). I dutifully photocopied the blank colour wheel onto some canvas textured card stock, and went hunting through my stash, with the book opened to the colour wheel page.

I needed that page!

Turns out I am terrible at seeing colour in my head and matching it to fabrics in the real world, but this simple colour wheel exercise was illuminating. I had no trouble with blue, red and yellow, the primary colours. My sense of what they were and which fabrics represented them best was quite accurate. But things began to fall apart when it came to green, purple and orange. Turns out I did not have a clear idea of what those base colours really are. I saw a range of colours as being equivalent, which of course they were not. But with the book's colour wheel at hand, I could match basic green to the basic green fabrics in my stash, putting to one side the yellow greens, and the blue-greens, which suddenly I could see were quite different after all.

Things got even harder with purple. I had one in my stash that approximated the purple on the colour wheel. All the others were actually from the much pinker looking red-violet range (the same range from which most of my favourite pinks are drawn, although some pinks fall squarely into the red family rather than red-violet. I don't tend to like red based pinks very much.).

Orange was nearly my downfall. Again, I had only one true orange fabric in my stash. The other "oranges" I had were all yellow-oranges. I had not thought of them as different until I actually compared them to the colour wheel.

The most difficult colour of all turned out to be red-orange. I had absolutely no awareness of this as a hue all on its own. Couldn't even conjure up a mental image of "red-orange". But again, I compared the red-orange on the colour wheel to my stash...and found ONE fabric that fit the bill. And I was surprised to find I really, really liked that colour. How odd I didn't have more of it!

Here is my finished colour wheel from Exercise 1. Yours would look different, depending on what fabrics you have in your stash. And Maria advises making up additional fabric colour wheels in variations: all prints, or all solids, or all polka dots. More practice will refine your eye and build your familiarity with your stash:

At the end of the exercise, Maria asks "What hues did you have trouble identifying in the colour wheel?"

For me, the hardest were blue-violet (again, I only had one and had always thought of it as a blue), and red-orange, which I had never thought about at all. This led me to ask myself "What hues should I be looking for to round out my stash and build my sense of colour?" I resolved to add:

1. Red-oranges and blue-violets...although I will have to take along the colour wheel at first to keep me "on colour"!

2. Colours I had few examples of. My stash turned out to be mostly blues, greens, and violet-red pinks. Period.When I go stash shopping, I will actively collect blue-greens, purples, oranges, orange-reds, yellows.

Red-violet.

The elusive red-orange!

Exercise #2 will focus on value...can't wait!

Techni-colour

One of the most frustrating aspects of quilting is the not-so-simple task of choosing fabrics for any given project. For my first quilting class, we were pretty much dragooned into buying our class fabrics from the store sponsoring our course. I had no objection to this, but after choosing a focus fabric, wandered the store for half an hour trying, in vain, to find anything that worked with that fabric. I tried another, and once again had absolutely no luck in finding great coordinates. In the end, an ancient fat quarter from my stash saved the day. But since then, I have often walked into a quilt shop and found that while they may have one or two fabrics that work in a given project, they rarely have ALL the fabrics I need. Even when they display collections, most shops cannot afford to stock all the fabrics in any one collection. They pick and choose.

One of our local stores brought in a particularly beautiful line of Asian inspired fabrics. Ten or twelve different bolts were on the wall, along with a kit for making their display quilt. That display quilt featured a luscious fabric in a dark, plummy purple. But was it available for sale off the bolt? No. They had used the entire bolt for kits.

And so began my first foray into online fabric shopping. Since then, I have often bought lovely fabrics online that I could not easily find local coordinates for. And it is very hard to colour match online, as digital images are not completely true to the colour in the actual fabric. What to do?

I found an important colour matching tool in the Moda Marbles swatch cards (there is a card for cottons and another, smaller card for the Moda Marbles Flannels. The swatch cards don't just show me what ranges of colours might work best with the focus fabric I have in hand, they give me a colour lingua franca. If I ask one of my online sellers to find me some nice fabrics in blue....well, blue can mean a lot of things. Primary blue? Blue-greens and teals? Periwinkles and violet blues? Turquoise? As you can see, below, "blue" encompasses a large range of possible colours:

But if I say "I want a few fabrics that coordinate with Moda Marble swatch 9873 Wine", then we have a concrete reference point to work from.

I have also found the swatch cards of great use in working my way through my latest workbook, "Color Mastery: 10 Principles for Creating Stunning Quilts" by Maria Peagler. When Maria instructs me to find 5 fabrics to complete a split complement colour scheme, I can use the card swatches to give me a concrete example of the basic colours I am after, enabling me to refine my vision before I go fabric shopping. Turns out I am not terribly good at visualizing colours in my head and then matching that vision to what I find in the real world. Using the swatches helps with that translation process. And I can take the swatches to keep me "on colour" when I am shopping!

I have long wanted to make a baby quilt in a range of neutral flannels along with soft, faded colours also in flannel. But it has been really hard to find a range of neutral flannels and coordinates. For that project, I was able to refine my thinking and then search online for the perfect fabrics, using the Moda Marbles Flannel swatch card as my starting point:

Hope you found this fun and helpful! I will end with a few close up shots of the cotton cards:

Tidiness Tip #1

**update June 04, 2010 at end of this posting**

I am a terrible housekeeper. Well, to be more accurate, I can clean house beautifully but I choose not to. There are just so many other more interesting things to do in a day. In spite of my lack of effort in the housekeeping department, I really hate a mess. And one of the things I have always loathed about sewing and quilting is all the danged little thread tails you are left with once you clip the beginnings and ends of your seams. They get all over the place, and all over me. My husband was forever tut-tutting and picking pieces of thread off my clothes (he can't help himself, my mother in law was a Home Ec major...), a process neither of us enjoyed. So I was overjoyed to find I could actually prevent thread tail formation.

It is called "a scrap piece of fabric". In a nutshell, you sew off the end of whatever it is you are sewing and onto a scrap piece of fabric, leave the needle down in the scrap and cutting your project off behind it. Simple.

But I am a Virgo. Sons of Home Ec majors are well advised to marry Virgos. We are the only sign that can be relied upon to be as picky as their dear Mamma. This Virgo also loathes random fabric scraps all over the place. So I turned to my trusty unbleached cotton yardage, which I buy locally, trés cheap from a discount fabric warehouse. It is thick, slubby, with a drapey hand, and feels like lightweight raw silk. I love the stuff:

I then take a piece of the cloth and cut it into 4 squares, roughly 2" x 2", like so:

Once that is done, I fold the little squares in half, and iron them flat:

To use the scraps, place one under your needle and presserfoot. This all works best if you work with your needle in the needle down setting:

Sew to the edge of the scrap, and with the needle down, lift your presserfoot, position your actual sewing where you want it (in my case I am usually quilting that all important 1/4" seam with my trusty 1/4" with guide presserfoot) and leave a teensy gap between your cloth and your scrap piece. Note the scrap piece is now to the rear of your needle:

Once you have reached the end of your seam, feed another scrap piece under the presserfoot and into the needle, leaving that teensy gap between the scrap and your sewn item, like so:

Now the reason for the gap becomes clear! It is where you clip your sewn item off the scrap piece:

You leave that ending scrap, the one you have sewn off onto, in your machine with the needle down, waiting for your next sewing adventure to begin:

Of course, the scrap you began sewing with is still attached to your sewn item. Clip that off as well:

In this way, you will never, never, never have thread tails to cut off and put in your waste bag or basket, and you will not find you have arrived at a board meeting with thread tails all over your clothes. The floor of your workroom will be beautifully clean...well, it won't have any thread tails...and your little scraps serve two other very important purposes.

First, even that one inch of sewing across the scrap is a short test of your stitch quality. Better to find out on your starting scrap that the machine is sewing wonky than on your sewn item. Second, I find the older scraps, with their many lines of stitching, quite lovely. When I look at them, they remind me of all the happy work I have done, and if I have used coloured thread, that reminds me of whatever project it was used for. Those scraps hold my quilting history!

 

Update June 04, 2010

An even better idea has been brought to my attention: leaders and enders! Instead of using a little scrap, take all your scrap fabrics and separate them into light and dark. Cut them all into squares, 2 1/2" is standard but choose what works for you and your scrap pile. Note that a cutting tool is really useful for this, I have used my Accuquilt Go! for this purpose and that really reduces the drudgery.

Load the light squares into one basket or bag, the dark into another. Keep the two baskets close by your machine, and whenever you begin or end a seam, take one light square and one dark one, pair them right sides together and sew together using a 1/4" seam. When you cut them off your sewn work, toss them into a third basket. 

Over time, you are going to end up with a lovely big pile of sewn pairs. Press them open and then start sewing them together into blocks and quilts. Brilliant!

I saw this idea at Quiltville.com, which also applies a similar technique to deal with small strips and leftovers, the crumbs technique. Check it out, it's well worth a look!

And send me a photo of your results!