Fan Improvisation on a rainbow. Quilt finish

This is the completed Improv Fan Quilt which has been a long time coming.

I began with a request from Jessie Aller for some improv blocks for a DC Modern Quilt Guild charity project she was putting together in 2014  for a member named Angela. It was simple rectangles of mixed fabrics building a block using a scrappy theme. After I made several I decided it might be fun to try and make a bunch of these blocks to use as fabric in my own quilt.

My new blocks would be in the colors of the rainbow because our apartment is flooded with these spectrum every sunny morning and lots of quilters are really into "rainbow" as their color theme, I wanted to try my own version but I wanted to do it with black as my background like the Amish quilts I like. It was in part a reaction to all the gray and white used by many modern quilters. They rarely choose black to work into a quilt design. The bold colors of Amish and Mennonite quilts really appeal to my eye and they are usually dark and have black or dark blue as a ground. 

gratuitous chicken shot taken at the Zenzendorf Hermitage Pitman PA. 

Back in 2006/2007 I went to a retreat and for an artist residency to a magical place in the mountains of Pennsylvania called the Hermitage founded and run and created entirely by the Zenzendorf Brothers who have a huge collection of early American log buildings filled with all sorts of tools, furniture and implements of farm life circa 1800's from the many farms around their Pennsylvania Dutch valley. In the oldest house there was a sort of loft room with beds piled high with antique quilts. At the Hermitage they used no electricity and candles or oil lanterns (flashlights) under the stars.  A shower house with water from the well and a propane gas tank to heat the water and run a refrigerator were the only modern comfort luxuries. It was such fun to be there and In the 1747 reconstructed Moravian house (see image below) I discovered this antique fan quilt. I got a snapshot of it on the bed in the loft where I slept under it one chilly autumn night. The bed was antique too with no box spring just ropes holding the lumpy mattress off the floor. 

When I began I wasn't sure how I would use my rainbow blocks this row of colors with black edge and solid strips was an early sketch and it helped to keep count of how many improv squares of each color I had completed and how they looked as a group.

This shows one idea I played with before I moved on to add a magenta to this spectrum and then came to the conclusion I wanted to do a 2015 year of curved piecing in my quilts. I looked around for design ideas and realized that I would like to try a fan quilt like this antique crazy pieced fan quilt from The Zenzendorf Hermitage which I slept under years ago. I took the fan idea and built my blocks to be my color fabric in a curved pieced design using the black as background.

Cut glass crystals hang in my windows where they cast spectrum all over our living room in the morning when the sun rises. I took careful note of the order of the colors to do my layout then forgot it in the end as I split the colors up to place the orange near the center.

Rainbow lighting on the White house to celebrate Marriage Equality decision by Supreme Court last summer was just one of the many reminders about rainbows last year.

I made this rope bowl for a charity auction early on in the year which pushed me to create more blocks in more colors of the rainbow after the orange and blue ones I did for the guild quilt. 

It was challenging to cut and piece so many small curves my fan block size is 8" finished with the colored fabric having so many seams to sew over in danger of being chewed by the feed dog... By the time eight fans of each color were pieced I ran out of steam and decided it was big enough to be a nice nap sized quilt and laid them on the wall and pieced them together in a diagonal design that shows off the rainbow effect. 66" square is the finished size.  

I used pins to make each fan, that helped keep the colored improv seams under control as I rounded the curves. Then I got a number made and began experimenting with how to assemble the fan blocks.

Lots of ways to put them together with the black background were considered but in the end I chose to do the diagonal layout and save the stars for another quilt top design. 

The view across the 2012-13 English Paper Pieced Rose-Star quilt to the wall that holds my quilts in progress. You see on my design wall an early layout of the shapes. I had two shapes from my curved cuts pieced with matching curved black grounds. 

Once I got the fan top together I wanted to use the traditional fan quilting pattern to do my quilting on this project and I chose rainbow pearl cotton size 8 thread in colors as close to the row as possible.

 I don't have a great source for pearl cotton threads anywhere locally and I don't like to buy by mail order due to the high cost of shipping. I did it once and at $13 for a single spool it is just too high a cost so I continue to hunt for shops that sell pearl cotton #8 in a wide range of colors. 

 There you can see the orange red rows of quilting and then below the oval label I embroidered using regular two thread embroidery floss with a peek at the back a print that has butterflies and dots in a lavender gray on black ground. The binding is solid colors laid out in the spectrum around two times in a row all around the edges.

finished quilt on the wall 66 x 66"

Another antique crazy quilted fan quilt I saw last summer done by a lady Esther in 1896 which reenforced my creative process to building my own.  She did a nice hand embroidered label that puts mine to shame but it's not a new idea to embroider a makers label. 

That is all. Carry on, quilting whenever possible. 

spring arrives bringing snow, flowers and an art exhibition

 It feels like ages since I wrote a blog post and well maybe it is but everything takes off in the spring time and there is that little pocket computer that draws me into a black hole of Instagram fun which circumvents the previous goal of being a blogger who is posting stories as they happen.

 My life feels so full of good stuff I feel guilty sometimes wondering when the dream is going to end. That doesn't mean there aren't stresses and worries but I like to focus on the joy and delights and marginalize the other end of the spectrum here on my blog. I also like to use this place to make a record of what has been good and beautiful in our lives here on 10th St. NE in Washington, DC. With the long winter we had and the snows and cold spells I had almost forgotten the joys of spring would be coming along. It was especially odd to have yet another snow storm on the first day of spring but we are fortunate to have warmth in the city this time of year that pushes the earliest flower right up through the cold snowy ground and reminds us that it is time for things to change. The sun comes up in a different spot than it has done in a while making the crystals in our windows cast bright dancing spectrum's around the room. It happens every time we have a sunny day but this time of year it is more directly shinning through the window and that makes it more intense. It was an inspiration for the bowl I made and donated to the Smith Healing Arts Center's annual funds raiser show of 125 artists work. I was invited by my former boss George Hemphill to submit an Alchemical Vessel for this years exhibition. I had a bit of a hard time digging up a idea for a vessel that could be made like my quilts with fabric and thread but in the end there was a great little trick with ropes, thin strips of fabric and long hours twisting, sewing and building a fabric bowl. Much like a clay coil pot only the glue wasn't clay but thread, its a technique used to make rugs too I believe. I started out with a small bowl to try one way then built a second beginning that seemed more pleasing to my eye with less exterior threads showing. Orange was the start up color and then the rainbow fell into place ring after ring...

slowly building rings in a spiral up and out to match as best I could the shape of the ceramic blank canvas most of the artists were using as their canvas I really didn't expect it to take so long. Each day it was growing slowly and the anticipation of the next rings of color helped me move forward day by day. 

In the end I added a foot and a label to the bottom and finished with a little fabric hook to hang it on the wall then whisked it off to the gallery with my statement to be photographed and installed and added to the catalog. Each bowl will bring a $150 for a ticket to the guests which they get to select according to the first come first serve ticket purchases. But you can also go see all the bowls Tuesday-Saturdays at the gallery on U.Street NW near the corner of 17th. from March 27th through May 22nd. The benefit is May 1st. for more information on getting one of these great art bowls check out the Joan Hisaok Healing Arts gallery's website. 

I went by yesterday and really enjoyed the show and began wishing I had a ticket. The glossy photo catalog will be available next week!  

New Quilt: Cantilever Log Cabins

Cantilever Cabins quilt 34 x 60 inches

Another small quilting project completed last week which I am calling Cantilever Cabins because of the layout of my units makes me think of modern architecture's modern buildings made from units that are stacked and sometimes cantilevered designs that defy gravity. It's a riot of colors and finished around the time the gay rainbow flag is flying in lots of big cities commemorating the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York City. I missed them by five years when I moved there in 1974 to study art in Brooklyn. Eventually I found my way to the parade in the summer of 1975 marching up 7th Avenue to Central Park where we

playing with the rainbow strips on my design wall 

had a blast dancing to a disco radio truck at the Bethesda Fountain and watching men strip naked and climb the fountain angle's shoulders to wiggle and dance displaying their pride while clearly under the influence of some mind altering chemicals we didn't have...
I digress, this quilt is all cotton and made from lots of scraps of colors and neutrals. I used inspiration from an antique wool suiting quilt pictured here for the blocks shape using a triple bar log cabin block.

antique triple bar log cabin wool quilt

I chose a different way to stack my blocks which is where the cantilever came from in the title. I organized my colored blocks as darks and the lighter ones as background. The binding is a scrappy mix of strips from the same fabrics in the brightly colored blocks. 

My backing consisted of left over strips which I assembled in different lengths alternating warm and cool sets stacked up like a pile of books surrounded with off white print scraps for a background.

The quilting is using multi colored pearl cotton #8 around the squares on the top/front and showing up nicely on the whites of the back side and the stack of multi colored bars.  

In the final stages I had to make two labels. The first label on a strip of patchwork didn't work on the quilt because it was different scale. 

 This first label looked great when I started but once the wash away was gone the coral pearl cotton threads didn't read very well, so I began again. 

failed label embroidery

I am happy with this coral on white in a square format like the quilting from the front.
Sometimes simple really is the best choice.

Thanks to the Modern Quilt Guild for the idea to mix lots of neutrals with bright colors in a new way using old fashioned block design. 

Sky

Yesterday, while napping with my flu bug, I was awakened by a sudden burst of light coming in the bedroom window. I jumped up and went to see what the clouds looked like with that bright sun shinning on them just above the horizon. What I found was a huge rainbow. It is the first time in a long time I have seen a late afternoon rainbow break over DC.

Skies and clouds are one of my favorite subjects to photograph.