Blog Archives

Micro-Mini Quilt

11/27/2023

Last year, at the Northwest Quilters' Guild's Festival of Quilts, I saw a selection of "mini quilts". Most were doll-bed sized. I remember looking at them and thinking two things simultaneously:

1. What's the point of a tiny quilt?
and
2. I can make it tinier!

So one day, I took a post-it note for foundation paper, and marked one-inch squares on it. Within those squares, I marked the lines of a pineapple block. This picture shows several stages of the process in one frame: the back of the quilt-top, half made, half bordered, half-un-papered!

But let's look at more pictures.

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Fabric Collage

11/10/2023

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Last night, I pulled out a bunch of scraps and some double-sided applique web, and tried my first fabric collage. As I worked, I was thinking of water and aquatic plants, but subsequent alterations make it resemble mountains more.

I was in a creative zone, and took few pictures, so I'll describe verbally what I did, with reference to the pictures I do have.

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The Discourse Around Gee's Bend Quilts

11/10/2023

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I have mentioned before that I dislike Gee's Bend quilts. This is a rare opinion... people tend to love Gee's Bend quilts, or at least praise them. Good for them! I am all for people loving art that speaks to them. What interests me today is the squirming cringe I feel when I say I don't agree. Why do I feel constrained to pad my opinion, when I give it, in a lot of stuffing about how great the quilts are, really, even if they're not my thing? That psychology interests me more than the quilts themselves!

The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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Couture Brute?

11/4/2023

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An outside hall at Mt. Hood Community College (hereafter MHCC)

What I dislike occupies more brainspace than you might expect. I worry at it, like tonguing a cut in my mouth, trying to quantify what I dislike and why. Sometimes, in creative assimilation, I make what I don't like, and so become a connoisseur. Then, like a cut in my mouth, the thing heals and I forget it ever bothered me. Most things have some beauty if you look close enough.

Today I contemplate Brutalist architecture, the Brutalist design philosophy, and how it might be expressed in thread. The photos in this post are all my own, of Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Oregon, USA.

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New York Groovy blocks

11/4/2023

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Remember how I said the 1970's scrap fabric would have to wait ("A Groovy New York Beauty")?

It didn't wait long! One day when I was wiped out from school and didn't want to work on my Meadow quilt, I pulled out the 70's scraps, and began making blocks.

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Micro-Mini Quilt

Fabric Collage

The Discourse Around Gee's Bend Quilts

Couture Brute?

New York Groovy blocks

Karen Roy

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