Quilt finish for charity

New finish Blue & White Wedges quilt 

 Recently I finished this new blue and white quilt of wedges sewn in long strips which were left over from a Dresden Plate quilt called Blue Diamonds I made almost three years ago.

Blue Diamonds quilt 2012-2013 a Dresden Plate set on point and hand quilted.

 I made too many wedges for my Dresden plates because I wanted lots to choose from when I was building them. I cut and cut six inch wedges and then put them together as I needed them to mix and match my dark and light plates. When I was done making two large bed sized tops I set the remaining wedges aside. At some point these wedges got sewn together into long alternating blue/white strips that laid in a pile of left over blocks for quite a long time. Opportunity this year to make a quilt for the homeless arose at the guild as it always does in Sept. We have 100 quilts for Kids as a challenge and I had a pal to help me assemble these into a quilt at our all day guild sewing day. Virgil, I met him over the summer, quilts but doesn't have much experience he says. We joined forces at the guild meeting and with his help we put it together in a top that measures about 40 x 64 inches. A nap quilt for a toddler or a throw for some one feeling the season chill. Our quilts this year are going to the Washington DC homeless family shelter at the old DC General Hospital I believe. Once the top was all sewn together and nicely pressed I was lucky to find a nice piece of blue and white tartan in a box of donated fabric large enough to cover the back. I brought the blue tartan yardage and our top home to finish with batting quilting and all the usual parts.

Since this quilt is going to be a donation, I did the straight line quilting on my featherweight Singer sewing machine so it was faster than by hand. I did a diagonal design to echo the wedges. Then on a visit to Manassas I whipped up a personalized label for the back and added the solid blue to bind the edges. 

front, back and label 

Long walks are part of my aspiration every day. It is good to get away from the sewing and in Manassas while I was working on the blue and white wedge's label this image of a local lake surrounded by white asters and blue sky and white clouds becomes a photo equivalent to the blue and white quilt. Guess I didn't get that far away from the project on my long walk seeing the same colors by the lake. 

May full of flowers

This month is so full of flowers and things to do. It is like nature woke up for us and put on a lovely show and we are busy doing the same. All sorts of invitations and activities come rolling in and sadly so many have to be left unattended but the ones we do get to participate in are rich and colorful.

Phyllis (mom) with her purple iris and one black iris lower right corner.

I have been lucky to have visited my mother in Manassas twice this month which allows me to see the results of the flower planting I have done over the years. Things like iris that bloom and are gone in two weeks I get to see this year. I surprised to see the black iris from Fairhaven Cliffs on the Chesapeake Bay bloom in her iris bed.  I thought I planted the black iris  and then it didn't bloom but the yellow one did last year... Those iris are tricky to predict sometimes they bloom the first year like my black iris did in DC and sometimes it takes two years for them to flower after transplanting. It was a delight to find them taking hold with three stalks! Juanita and Molly said they were "very hardy" when I was gifted a half dozen plants year before last from Juanita's garden.

darkest purple red iris is called "Black" by Juanita who gave them to us. 

Another richly colored delight is the gift from brother David of a red rhododendron which has tripled in size since we planted it and gave a big show of color this year. It's planted on the north side of the house which used to be home to a huge lavender colored rhododendron that had to be removed for some reason that is forgotten over the years. There is an empty spot there now where a tall hemlock evergreen tree met the same fate earlier this year. The tree was split at the top by a storm so it had to be cut down and we are still trying to decide what to plant in this bed. 

Finally the front porch planters are looking swift with hot pink geraniums, dianthus in red white and pink, magenta celosia and a pink with yellow striped calibrachoa and some trailing silvery gray vines. My photos barely show the colors but to the visitor it's a very pretty collection. 

Last today the hanging pot is filled with calibrachoa in hot pink and blue lobelia and one I don't know that is pale pink. 

It's fun to have a second garden to visit and help plant and plan. The hard part is for mom, she is there keeping it watered in the hot weather and watching for flowers which seem to take so long to appear then vanish before you can blink an eye. 

Next week I am excited to see the two peonies we planted two years ago bloom for the first time. Stay tuned for updates or visit my flickr.com page to see more as they are coming in from both our gardens and all around. 

Easter, Flowers wild and domesticated and loosing Tom

 Busy when spring comes we get going after our extra long snowy winter. Gardens perk up and the trees start to flower and Easter gives us a chance to get together with family for good food and company. We visited my mother and brother in Virginia for a night and saw a pretty sunset, ate home made coconut cake among other goodies and enjoyed the great tulips, flowering dogwood and, redbud in the yard. Mom always decks the halls for the season...

 Keith had a nice piece in the third week of the Ikebana exhibition at the Bonsai Museum so we took a minute to go see the wild flowers over in the Fern Valley Forest of the Arboretum. Virginia Blue bells, white and red Trillium, Yellow Rue and Trout Lilies were all flowering and the fiddle heads of ferns were unfurling. A chance sighting of a ground hog in the hollow was a treat and a chance to try my new camera's zoom lens. I was over 100 feet away and got his head in my view finder. These woodland wild flowers bloom and vanish so quickly you have to race out to see them. Only blooming in the short window between warming spring weather and the leaves coming out on the trees. It's about 2-3 weeks window of glory that changes from day to day.

 This morning I found the chill after heat wave hasn't hurt anything in our garden and after a couple years of no flowers the ancient lilac has a few blooms which we have been hoping to see again. With spring came some sad news yesterday. My friend Tom Palmer gave up his struggle with HIV and Cancer after a very long battle last Sunday. The call was a surprise to me because sadly, I wasn't in touch with him very often after he began the treatments for cancer which are so debilitating that having visitors is difficult.
He was a great guy for so many reasons and I am proud have been one of his friends and supporters. We coped with AIDS or HIV and both nearly died back in the middle 1990s We both were artists who loved drawing and the figure. He came and drew with my male figure drawing group and even posed for us a few times with his great figure and handsome face and generous personality it was a delight to have him join the group. He inspired so many people in different ways and for me it was a mutual support for making more art and living life fully with our health difficulties. He was a big fan of my metro character sketches and photos of flowers, hostas leaves and more recently the quilts. What a rich feeling it is to have had his love in my life, my heart aches at the thought of this loss but I know I was very fortunate to have Tom Palmer as my friend.

Taken by one of Tom's close friend Michael Pipitone on the 1997 AIDS bicycle ride where we riders all hoped to get to know the handsome Water boy!

ten minute sketch of Tom from 1998 using reed pen and ink wash on toned paper 

2007 on a visit Tom takes a tour of my iMac, he's  showing off his big warm smile. 

Aprils look

 This week it is beginning to appear like spring is going to actually happen. The snow of the last winter season was a record for DC in that it was the 3rd snowiest. Over 30 inches this winter and they came in bouts of small coatings so school was  and even government offices shut down often. Everyone seems to be over and done with snowy streets and sidewalks and the bursts of super cold weather seem inevitable since they keep coming back after lots of little micro bursts of spring. The ground hog was way off this year.

All done showing quilts at Anacostia Arts Center and the doris-mae gallery which was so much fun. All the quilts are home now leaving me to work on a couple of new projects, the first of this year. I was inspired by the log cabin blocks for a while now and began making them in a purple orange combination of scraps and added fabrics as I found them. The first is a throw sized quilt that might be suitable for hanging as wall art. The colors make me feel good, bright and cheerful with a rich intensity that reminds me of the "Orange Explains it" quilt. Everyone knows about me and those oranges and reds but blues and purples are appealing in fact any color is a delight in the right moment. I wrote about the orange log cabin project a while back and I decided to go for pure intense color in that first version but all the likes received on the white, orange and gray version led me to set those blocks aside. Now playing around with them in a new composition using some ideas I heard during a lecture on what modern quilting as defined by one of the founders of the Modern Quilt Guild. The results made me feel more like going graphic and playing with larger open spaces in my quilt designs. I love the minute details in building quilt blocks but sometimes it is fun to step back and spread them on a field to see what happens.

Saint Patricks day snow

 There is  snow everywhere, on St. Patrick's day it's kind of unusual for us to see snow in Washington, D.C. The neighbors on Twitter say we got eight inches in Brookland this morning. I have not been out to measure with a ruler but in the back it sure looks eight inches deep on our table and chairs. Yesterday I spent a warm Sunday working on my quilts and reading about the Irish Great Famine of 1845-52 and how the English landlords took tons of food and profits out of Ireland, as capitalists do, they just looked to their own bottom line, ignoring the misery. Millions died of starvation and a few million more left and immigrated all around the world. Many came to Boston and New York where they had food available and work to earn a living for their families. Feels like everyone has some Irish roots or at least on St. Patrick's day they enjoy trying to feel Irish. Wikipedia has a great page describing the whole horrible history in detail.
Being an orange sort of guy, I always wondered about the colors of this holiday. It seems that Orange is the color of the protestants in Ireland the English allies and that comes from the Dutch King William of Orange who ruled the English with his English wife Mary from 1788-1794. The same King William Williamsburg Va. is named for and the college called William & Mary honors. Mixed up world of history and colors so my orange isn't my political statement, it's simply my color preference. I think green is a nice color too and I have several green quilts in my folio and a great grandmother who traced her roots to Ireland most likely from the famine years.

 

The past few days I am struggling with my current project of log cabin blocks. I thought I was going to do a very modern open design but the call of the repeat is winning out. I might have to do a couple different versions in the end but I sure feel the need to go all orange purple on this one today. 

In the 2nd picture it looks OK but on my wall those white and gray bits kind of feel out of place. Maybe it's just that I like the way the color dances when it's all bright and strong versus the softer areas. I love the subtle white and gray shifts but they are such high contrast to the orange purple it makes me want to separate them. You can see in these pictures I was heading toward an orange purple mix originally then shifted to mixed blocks of orange and gray then white on white... I didn't start out with a clear idea of where I would end up. I just go with the flow of each day's inspirations.

 Perhaps my problem is being too slavish to the log cabin block and not adding bigger areas of simple whites like I started doing in the earlier version when I didn't have so many orange blocks. I did reach a point where the plain bits of white and off white fabric felt too difficult to assemble in a way that did not distract from the log cabin construction so I sent them aside. I will have to take it all apart  and see what happens if I mix it up again. So hang in there and wait to see where I go next? I am not sure and nothing is settled until it is done.
Meanwhile spring is trying to arrive so those lovely crocus in our gardens are just below a big blanket of protective snow. Inside we had a nice surprise this weekend. Keith's orchid has been blooming and his walking iris bloomed yesterday! We also forced some quince collected from Phyllis' garden in the wilds of Manassas. Walking iris is a tropical and grows like the spider plant so many of us had in the 1970s when it was discovered to be good for our indoor air to grow house plants. This iris gets shoots that develop flowers and they turn into new plants right on the leaf meaning we get babies every spring. The flower is open one day and smells so sweet it's like a gardenia. All it needs is some light and a little water now and then.

Happy St. Patrick's Snow day to all my Irish friends. Please let me know if I got any of this history wrong or if you have ideas about where my quilt could go. An

other quilt project brewing is a pin wheel quilt top that might be kind of a rainbow affair.