Unmolested Friday

Good Morning.

I took a  vacation day today! My aim is to putter around the house. I'm so excited. Kate is off to Special Olympic Summer Games for the whole weekend. Joe is going to work. My son sleeps half the day, so I am more or less alone. I think, since Kate isn't here, I might clean her room a little. With wrecking ball and a bull dozer.

I'm also going to start gesso-ing the pages I've prepared in my altered-book-sketch-book. I've glued together every three pages, then I started to fold some of the pages funny, into triangles and such. The entire book is not prepared that way yet, but, it's a work in progress. It is raining again, every day this week, so I don't expect anything to dry today.

Ellene stopped by the other day and commented on the Magic Tree post. She was able to see the Gustav Klimt style fabric in the quilt. I have included some close-ups this time. Remember, this is when I jumped back into quilting. I went on line to look at fabric and I almost fainted when I saw the patterns that were available. I was seriously addicted for a while. I'd drop $100 bucks every time I looked at the site. Once I had a decent stash, I had to cut back. You know.

So, time to get another cup-o-coffee and make this day count.

Quilt Show Anxiety

Or, Wow, I really suck at this!  That is kind of how I feel after a day of looking at some of the best quilts ever produced. I can understand reaching perfection when you hand quilt, but how do you make no mistakes, not a single one, when quilting with this crazy fast monster at your fingers? (That would be my sewing machine.) But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Alas, I have no pictures of the show. I searched for my camera just minutes before trying to leave (I had been meaning to locate it for a couple of days) I could not find it anywhere. Finally I peeked behind the computer. It had fallen down, and was still attached by it's umbilical cord to the computer. Unfortunately, the battery was sucked dry. Kate said hers was dead, too.  I don't want to dwell on it, this is just how it is with me sometimes. I said, "Screw it," and we left.

If you've ever been to a big quilt show before, you know there are all kinds of things on display. We also saw dolls, wearable art, different challenges and themes. There was some kind of Hoffman challenge with peacock fabric. Some were really good, but nothing I wish I had done. There was a large section of black and white quilts, some of which were absolutely great. Dog quilts, orchid quilts. But, there is always a section running up the middle of the show area with some of the most stunning quilts you have ever seen. One was a pale yellow quilt, the quilting was so tight it was just ridiculous, and the border... how to explain? Individual tubes if fabric made connections to the outer area of edge of the quilt, kind of like a fence?  Here is an on-line picture of the damn thing. You can't go in close, so I don't know if it will help in understanding it. I just had the idea to search around to find pictures of these quilts on the web. I'm a bit surprised at how few of these quilts I can find. So none of these people have blogs?!?

On to the vendors, that was fun. I spent a bunch of hard earned Etsy cash. Lots of fabric. I was disappointed, because I could not find any paint or oil sticks or fibers, or printable sheets of fabric... things I have been wanting to try. Although there were a lot of art quilts in the show this time, I think everything is aimed at traditional quilters.  Kate bought some fabric. She has her own stash going now. She promises she will make a quilt with me soon.

Remember I was all into reading about old fabrics a few posts back?  I scooped up a couple of charm packs of 30's feed sack style squares. Looks like I have 2 or 4 of each pattern. I have blues purples and greens, and a set of pinks, reds and oranges. I will use these in the "depression quilts" I dream of. I know I said that I suck at quilting, and I do, compared to what I saw at that show, but I also can't wait to make more!

Yikes, I've been here so long my husband woke up and came down stairs. Let me go say hi to him.

Look at This Fabric

This is a scan from one of my library books, "Dating Fabrics, a Color Guide, 1800 - 1960," by Eileen Jahnke Trestain. As you can see, this was a page about fabrics from before 1830. That little brown print, top middle, really does not look very old fashioned. Looks like something out of the 50's. I want this fabric.

The next 2 fabrics are from a book called "America's Printed Fabrics, 1770 - 1890, " by Barbara Brackman. It was hard to pick out these few fabrics to show, because I am drooling over so many of them.  This book talks about the different manufacturing innovations and then shows examples of the fabrics that resulted. The author then put reproduction fabrics on the facing pages and talked about what was different. Often the pattern was scaled down, but some of them are exact copies.

My final example today is from a book called "Textiles of the Arts and Crafts Movement" by Linda Parry. This book focuses a lot on the designers of that time, sort of the Art Nouveau Amy Butlers and Kaffe Fassetts of their day.