It's Not a Quilt if it's Not Quilted

I don't know much about the writer Gene Fowler, except that he gained a reputation for impertinence in an interview with the Army scout and Indian fighter Wild Bill Cody, during which he spent more time inquiring about his many love affairs than anything else.

But Fowler did come up with one of my favorite quotes about writing. It goes something like this: It's easy to be a writer. You just sit and stare at a white sheet of paper until blood forms on your forehead.

(As a writer almost since I could, well, print, and the 6-year-old author and illustrator of a story called "Kippy the Kangaroo" that became a minor sensation in Mrs. Bastian's first grade classroom, I also like this, by P.G. Wodehouse: I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.)

Whether I was trying to rend something Plath-like on a notepad as a teenager seated at the kitchen table ... pound out something lucid in journalism school on an electric typewriter ... or tappitty-tap a client's annual report on my keyboard, I have experienced the very tangy sensation of blood dripping from my pores known as writer's block.

But I've never had quilter's block.

The problem with quilts isn't starting them. It's the finishing.

Not the piecing. The quilting.

I hate the quilting.

I know there are many who find the rhythmic rocking motion of needle through cloth layers that produces those tiny stitches soothing, therapuetic, Zen-like.

I stab and stitch. It doesn't sound pretty, and it doesn't look good, either.

Haunted by the specter of Unfinished Objects -- yes, UFOs -- and the idea that a quilt is defined by its quiltedness, I've hired professional quilters to finish my quilts. One time, my good friend even let me try her longarm machine, an experience that was as nervewracking and exhilarating as I imagine it is to be in a runaway car.

But now, I've taken quilting into my own hands, thanks to my embroidery machine.

I'd wanted an embroidery machine for at least a decade, although I had only some vague sense that it would improve my quilting. I really didn't imagine embroidering little flowers onto squares and then inserting them into my quilts. And I found most of the built-in patterns to look like Nixon-era throwbacks.

But I couldn't shake my desire. (For the machine. I've gotten over Nixon.)

With the advent of etsy, the world of embroidery designs opened wide.

So I went to my favorite sewing machine shop and took a couple of models for a spin.

Yeah, they're fun. But will I ever use them for quilting, I asked. I don't need a completely new hobby, like embroidering duckies on baby bibs.

"You know you can quilt with this, right?" the clever salesman said. He showed me a child's quilt with appliqued letters, all done on the embroidery machine. Then, he shoots! he scores! told me about actual quilt patterns I could buy that would emulate longarm machine quilting. The Elna 8200 was mine.

My contest quilt -- shown in my first post -- would still be just a top, a batt and a back if not for my embroidery machine.

And here's my latest. I made a long, summery table runner from a charm pack of 5-inch squares and quilted it with a sun motif  from Advanced Embroidery. I like the subtle texture that the embroidery/quilting adds, even though it's not an overall design.

I think about plaid

The trip between Houston and New Orleans takes anywhere from 5.5 hours (if you leave at, say, 5 am on a Saturday) to 7 hours (if there's construction at Baton Rouge, where there invariably is. When my son and I were caught one time in a particularly snarled traffic jam en route to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, I suggested that the intersection of I-10 and US 290 in west Houston must be the worst spot for driving in the world. At age 12, my son had no experience in the driver's seat, but he remembered well the bladder-kicking he took in the back seat as we spent nearly an hour negotiating a two-mile section of Baton Rouge freeway. So on this rodeo night, he said, "No, the worst traffic is in Beirut." "Beirut?" I asked. "When have you been to Beirut?" "Oh, I mean Baton Rouge." I read once that the typical round trip commute in Beirut takes three hours, so maybe my son is more attuned to worldwide comparative traffic messes than I could imagine.)

On our Lousiana driving trips, my husband I would take turns at the wheel. He is an avid reader of history who seems to recall every word on the page. We were returning from New Orleans and I was doing the 60-minute stretch to Baton Rouge when he started to tell me, nearly verbatim, about the book "1491," which imagines what the Americas were like before Columbus. For the first five minutes or so, I was able to split my attention between the road and the story, but eventually I did the only thing I could to keep my focus on safety and restrain myself from pitching us off the road just to get him to stop.

I started thinking about plaid.

I like plaid. I've liked plaid since Ann Schumacher, the little girl next door when I was 5, started going to parochial school and wore a navy plaid skirt. I like that plaid can be sedate or playful, and I especially like it when the crossbarred pattern changes hue where two colors intersect. I like mixing plaids with dots and florals. It makes me happy.

In his book, "Passionate Patchwork," Kaffe Fassett uses plaids and stripes to great effect. Inspired by his quilts, I started collecting plaid and striped fabric. I used some of the stripes in this quilt:

This was an extremely fun quilt to make, and I'm really pleased with the secondary patterns that developed from combining light and dark fabrics. (This is for sale at www.etsy.com/shop/quiltingmissdaisy, if you're interested.)

Now, I'm experimenting with plaids. In order to stretch my creative muscles (i.e., make it harder on myself), I decided to sew brightly colored plaids into a log cabin pattern. I'm working with about 30 different plaids; Each log cabin block has five different plaids in it. The center from one block becomes the outermost band on the next block, and so on.

Here are a few of the blocks I've completed, which I think will make a colorful, fun quilt for a baby or child.

Mardi Gras Ties

My dad was a 32-year-old bachelor when he was drafted into the US Army in 1941 and began a four-year tour of duty, much of it overseas.

Before he left for Italy, he told my cousins -- who were in their late teens when I was born but were just little 4- and 5-year-old girls at the time -- that he would bring an Italian baby home for them. Apparently they were terribly disappointed when, instead of proffering the promised bambino, he gave  each a good luck keepsake, the fabled Little Bell of San Michele. I prefer to think of this story as an example of my dad's enthusiasm for playful teasing rather than any sort of commentary on his personal prowess, or lack thereof, while overseas. (Actually, I prefer not to think at all about the latter.)

Dad loved to tell tales of his Army days. (Actually, Dad loved to tell tales of most any kind, a trait that is apparently heritable.) He mentioned several times that on his first leave to Naples, he felt as if he had been there before. He described an unerring sense of where things were and how to most easily travel to them. Perhaps he was reincarnated, he mused, and had been a Neopolitan at one time. (He did always like their ice cream, he added.)

The dutiful daughter I was, I listened then discounted a lot of what he said.

But then, I took my first trip to New Orleans. And the same thing happened to me. I felt instantly that I knew the place.

My husband marveled as I negotiated the streets of the French Quarter, which converge at odd angles and change names without notice. I hadn't been there before, but, somehow, I sensed that I had.

Because we live just six hours away, we visited New Orleans fairly often while our children were growing up. Then, as if to cement our love affair with the city, our daughter decided to attend Tulane University there.

Now our trips became more frequent, our immersion into the culture more complete. With daughter as guide, we explored every mainstream and offbeat art venue, learned all the shopping areas -- from popular to obscure, ate at places only locals knew, and could tell at 50 paces the difference between a pedestrian snowcone and the city's revered Snow Balls.

One thing we never did in her five years there (four in school, one working as a researcher post-graduation) was attend Mardi Gras.

She thought we'd hate it. That the noise, the crowds, the dirt, the drunkenness, the strangeness of it all would be upsetting or at least offputting to us. She even discouraged us from attending the Krewe of Barkus parade, thinking the procession of pet dogs might somehow be offensive.

She, of course, never missed an event. I had apparently raised a very hearty (and perhaps somewhat sneaky) child.

Her freshman year she asked that I make a Mardi Gras tie for her male RA, with whom she and her roommate had become quite friendly. I found fabric printed with a mask montage -- appropriate in scale, daring in color treatment, and still quite masculine overall. I understand that, six years later, he still wears the tie each year.

And, six years later, I still had some of it left. So, as one of my first steps in my sewing closet clear-out, I made a table runner. In addition to the featured fabric, I used the traditional purple, green and gold of the season and added a little pink and turquoise for pop.

This way, I'll always have a tie to Mardi Gras.

The 21 Pillowcase Weekend

One of the many great things about the fabric haul my friend gave me was that it included yardage. Over the years, I've been the recipient of everything from upholstery samples with the display hangers still attached (those pieces made great, sturdy totebags, by the way) to thumb-sized bits of cotton. But rarely am I given a full yard of anything, among fabric "collectors" that being generally considered too valuable to part with. (I have to admit, the 10 yards of bright fuchsia cotton/poly blend I received were a little unwieldy when it came to washing and ironing, and I have never mustered the courage to ask what she intended to do with all of it, although I suppose if anyone were planning a flamingo-themed wedding, this would have made lovely tablecovers.)

Which begs the question, How big is a scrap?

For seamstresses (I was happy to see someone coin the term sewist to replace sewer, but I still prefer the original designation), anything smaller than a half-yard appears to be considered scrap. But a quilter -- especially if she appliques -- can make something with a piece no larger than a quarter. I read a clever article in Quilter's Newsletter Magazine in which the authors compared scrap sizes to cooking measurements. A tablespoon of fabric could be a yo-yo, they asserted, while a cup could perhaps craft an entire patch.

But back to yardage.

On the first Memorial Day weekend after my fabric windfall arrived, I decided to comb through the material mine to search for treasures. There were stripes and solids and polka dots. Prints adorned with cats and cows, frogs and fairies.

Spread out on the bed in the sewing room (which is sometimes actually a guest room where I get to sew), the combinations and permutations astonished me. The polka dots and frog prints simply sang next to each other. A turquoise plaid toned down a bright paisley. I might still be playing with the fabric, except I remembered a sign in my favorite quilt shop (Quiltworks in Cypress, Texas) asking for donations for the Million Pillowcase Challenge.

(Click here for more information http://www.allpeoplequilt.com/millionpillowcases/)

I was particularly moved by the fact that, in our area, pillowcases would be given to pediatric hospital patients. My son had been diagnosed with a rare disorder called Langerhans cell Histiocytosis as a toddler and although it took eight years of chemotherapy and radiation to control his disease, he was only hospitalized a few times. The idea that I could, in some small way, bring comfort to kids like him with a silly, funny, colorful, delightful pillowcase was motivation enough for me to start cutting and sewing.

And when I finally got up from the machine the next day, I had a stack of 21 finished pillowcases. The idea that someone is sleeping a little better because of my efforts, cheers me to this day.

Let's Use Up All of this Fabric!

About two years ago, a friend who was preparing to move to another state gave me part of her fabric collection. The fact that my share amounted to 300 pounds tells you a little about the extent of her fiber addiction. Now, it's not easy to store 300 pounds of fabric and it's even tougher to use it all, particularly when your stash already runneth over. But I was now the proud owner of colors and patterns that I might never had selected myself. And if I had to attach a pricetag to this bounty, it was pretty much like winning a lottery.

I wrote about this mixed blessing in an article published by Threads Magazine called "Weighty Windfall."

At the time, I vowed to make a charity quilt each month, which I have. I promised to donate a lot of the fabric to organizations like Linus Project and Quilts with Valor. Done. And I even started an etsy shop called Quilting Miss Daisy (www.etsy.com/shop/quiltingmissdaisy) to give me a venue for saleable items.

However, my sewing room closet still harbors untold yardage, as well as scraps too precious to set free. (What do they say? If they were meant to be mine, they'd come back to me anyway.)

It didn't help that late last year I decided to enter my first quilt contest. Sponsored by a fabric retailer, it required me to purchase all new fabric (because submitting the receipts was part of the entry). Now, buying fabric is a great joy, but for the piece I made, I challenged myself to work only with fat quarters. 65 of them. That were then cut into small pieces. So I have a lot left over.

Anyway, I've decided that (unless I enter a similar contest this year) I will sew through what I've been hoarding (uh, storing) and not buy any fabric this year.

Join me on my journey. You'll get to see the sum of what I've sewn and listen to my musings along the way. I can't promise to always keep you in stitches, but at least it will "seam" like I'm trying.