Tibbits Blue TieDye Quilt

Here's a joyous riot of colors in this quilt made for my husband's father and step-mother.  It features a lot of  fabrics from Keepin U N Stitches at Jay, Oklahoma and the centerpiece is one of my hand-dyed Kona panels.  I machine-stitched the strip pieces and applied custom machine quilting, including a few mysterious words in the stitching.... such as the fact that it was quilted on Solstice 2010.  If you are in this geographical area, rent the longarm machine at the quilt and fabric shop above, for about $10 an hour to do your very own machine quilting--- you can buy back and bat there, and run your backing seam.  Then Keepin U N Stitches will provide you with thread from their choice or you can bring your own tread and bobbins if you have something particularly unusual in mind. 

Pop Art Vintage Footballs Quilt

Pop Art Vintage Footballs Quilt

Does anyone have a clue what this pattern is called?  This is a magic quilt.  It appeared in my collection and I have totally forgotten how it got there.  It contains those great 1960s or 1970s  cottons, although some of the fabrics may date back to an earlier time.  Here you find those difficult curved lines and points that have all but disappeared from contemporary quilts, because they are not so easy to execute on a sewing machine as by hand... and what woman today has the zillions of hours it takes to hand-sew a quilt top?

This one is hand-pieced, and hand quilted in shells with a thin soft cotton batt.  The binding is a half-inch self binding, but one end has a flat crisp 1 1/2 " binding with no batting inside of it.  I'm guessing that its function was to help the bed maker to find the top of the quilt because it is different there.

I'm so grateful for the women of our past who were quilters and left us these big soft wrinkley warm huggy pieces of art, all vibrant and complex.  This one is especially 'woofy' and it doesn't lay flat.  It gets a new surface of puffiness every time it is smoothed one way or the other.  Some quilts are too fragile for use because they might never survive the washing.  But they can be stabilized if they are batted and backed with new fabric and machine quilted with plenty of stitches to nail down the remaining surface fibers so they cannot shred.

Chenille Crazy Quilt Sampler

Chenille Crazy Quilt Sampler

Quilts made with leftover pieces of fabric are called charm quilts, and this one is just that.  It is made from a lot of my early hand-dyed fabrics.  The fuscia, turquoise and smoky-colored paralellagram was created using a shibori wrap dye technique.  In the lower righthand corner is a postage stamp rectangle of squares, about an inch or two inches big.  I see some red stripes that evoke an abstract flag idea.

You may be familiar with foundation pieceing... it is where you start with a muslin square and build the surface layer by sewing pieces in strips across it.  This is sort of one big huge foundation piece on a scruffy old acrylic fleece $10 used nubby blanket that had worn out beyond being comfortable.  I started piecing pieces onto it because it was scratchy.  As the pieces were added, and sometimes later, I added commercial chenille yarn between and across the fabrics to give it a windowpane or stained glass effect.  This was kinda cool-looking, but it also served a purpose of bonding the surface to the underblanket where there were wide expanses that would have otherwise hung loose.

This is the back of the Blue Quilt featured here some time last month.  It is quite different from the calm, soothing and elegant opposite side.  I usually use it with the blue side up.  I am not particularly fond of this side of the quilt as a favorite... it just happened to have been made at a time when I was less selective about which quilts I keep and which quilts I give away or sell.  It breaks my almost-rule of never working with the color red.  Early on, I did a few quilts with red in them but found it to be unsettling or unattractive as a quilt color and have stopped using red as a personal design color.

Mad Hatter Bandana, Inspired by Alice in Wonderland

 

Here's a quarter-section of detail from another Alice In Wonderland-inspired fun piece of wearable art.  It is a soy wax batik resist cotton bandana in a dreamy kaleidoscope of colors.  Everyone should have a bandana.  tie it on your backpack or day sack and you'll always have something to carry pretty rocks in.  Stop by a mountain stream and wet it down for a neckerchief cooler that is good as an air conditioner in the backwoods.  Gather radishes and baby greens in it.  Clean a geocache with it.  Summon a helicopter when lost.  Wave it at a Saints game.  Wear it to Alice in Wonderland.  Pull your hair back.  Or, if you don't have hair, then the curls on this bandana are a colorful suitable alternative.

One only.  $15 includes shipping.  Artisan original.  Look for more items of this nature at Fluffy's Compleat Boutique in the Oklahoma Food Co-op.  Or visit some of the 3 etsy shops by clicking one of my items for sale in the righthand margin of this blog.