quilters room

embroidery of crazy quilt panel

this shows the work on the panel I brought home from Manassas last Sunday. Slow but steady progress. You also see the gray damask in the center which came from Richard's fancy Italian shorts mom dissected for me to include a memento. 

Manhattan special orange soda

I saw these bottles in an old Italian grocery  found hidden in the DC Wholesale Market district after Dan Vera's poetry reading earlier this week while on my way home with some long time residents who gave me a ride home to Brookland from the reading. I can't drink this sort of stuff because it is to acidic but it does have a great orange color to enjoy. 

crazy quilt set up

crazy quilt panels laid out on top of double bed 

closer view of crazy blocks on the bed

Last weekend I made a trip to Manassas Virginia for a couple nights. 

Mother offered to let me bring my crazy quilt parts back out to her house and use one room to spread it out and get back to work putting the whole thing together. What a boon this room is to my quilt project. I do not have room in Washington DC in our apartment to work on anything bigger than a single panel. Last weekend at Mom's suggestion before we left to go see the big quilt show we set up the equipment in the room for my project so it would be ready when we got home. I opened up the box that has been stored in a closet floor for several years which is full of materials. It had a number of pieces I had forgotten about making. These are extra blocks of crazy patched  background fabric, almost ready to embroidery and add to the quilt top. I include some photos of my work room and panels on the bed once it was all laid out and set up. I am using the old Singer treadle  sewing machine my Grandmother Nunley left me as a table for my mother's more modern electric 1960 portable Singer. I have an ironing board to press seams and connect parts from Great Aunt Mary Ellen with my mother's vintage steam iron. After attending the big quilt show, where we saw nothing quite like my project, we went to lunch and rested our dogs after two hours of standing on hard concrete floors. Then first thing after breakfast Sunday I got to work using the great light that fills this room with a north east exposure. I spent about 5 hours working on two panels. Mom offered plenty of team spirit and encouragement and she ripped seams of some fancy Italian damask shorts I wanted to use in the new panels. That was a pair of shorts that belonged to one of my friends from Pratt Institute who died of AIDS in 1992 Richard Hoffman. Before dark  I packed up one panel with muslin backing brought it and my embroidery kit  home to DC where I am slowly filling in the embroidery of the center. This new panel will in turn will be connected to the side or top of the panels you see laid out on the bed in my photos. Then all those edges of panels will have areas of connections that still need to be embroidered to finish off the top. I expect that will take most of this year to complete if my arthritis in my spine doesn't kick up requiring me to take another break. I began this crazy quilt in 1999 and took a few years off due to spinal arthritis three times over these past ten years. I hope this year to put it all to bed now that I have a place to spread out and work when I visit Manassas and Mom.