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. 

retreat with a hurricane

Molly's red house is down under the hill in a valley that leads directly to the bay side beach. 

I have had the most wonderful two weeks full of fun creative and colorful experiences. My pal Molly Ruppert and her big family have a few homes out in a community called Fairhaven Cliffs, Maryland very close to Washington DC on the Chesapeake bay. She asked me late last spring if I wanted to come have a few weeks artist retreat in one of the houses that is normally a rental that was vacant this summer. I responded that I would like nothing better! When and what were the conditions. She wrote and said I could have a house with three bedrooms and all we might have to do in return was to mow the grass once and I could bring whom ever I liked to my retreat.We choose the last three weeks of August since Keith was out of town much of July and was very busy in June. August suited me too because this time of year in the city is typically very hot and muggy and mosquitoes are king. The garden is tired and dry grass is brown and dusty but I also have my annual birthday and what better way to celebrate than a retreat to make art at the beautiful bay.
 We packed up two Sundays ago and took food, pillows, sheets, art supplies and all sorts of exciting ideas to the bay house. I even took mom's feather weight Singer sewing machine to see if I might have space to make some fabric art. I also bound a special book for my daily sketches at the bay of large pages from the spare papers I have been saving for years for other projects that have accumulated in the folios in our studio. It was a perfect beginning. We ate a big dinner at Molly's the first night after we got keys and settled into our Red house. The folks in Fairhaven call the houses by their colors not addresses. The Rupperts call them by the family member's name that owns them. 

So we had the red house the place is an old beach house that was just perfect for us to make art and not worry about messing anything up. It is more space than I think I have ever had to work for more than a few hours at a time. I had a whole bunch of rooms to live in and a yard and the bay .... it was ideal. Nature is all around the house the hills behind are covered in a vine called Kudzu which is kind of creepy but also sort of magical in that it makes everything very green like topiary trees of mysterious shapes. 

from the end of the pier looking back at the cliffs and the beach and in the distance the red house.

looking at the house and the yard and bay beyond from the roadside above. 

Kudzu grows right up to the roadside and covers everything including dead tree trunks...

at dawn the sun showed me a kudzu bear and elephant at the edge of our yard!

 first Wed. afternoon a regatta of sailboats appeared on the bay

the first crab skeleton I found on the beach 

Our resident spider named Charlotte, naturally worked on her web daily. 

Keith worked every day on amazing arrangements with materials he collected right there in Fairhaven. Gardener neighbor Juanita Foust was very supportive and offered us anything we wanted from her garden and several other yards of vacant homes up for sale. 

butterflies were abundant and posed for my camera nicely. 

dawn on the bay was spectacular as the half moon hung over head and the sun came up red as fire

Not only did I enjoy making photos and drawing and painting each day but I also undertook a big quilt project inspired by the bay windows and the many colors and patterns of the experience of being in this great place for two weeks. I saw exciting patterns and colors and went right in and added them to make up a bay window inspired work. I worked almost every day a few hours if not longer on the sewing in a room that was intended for guests none of whom ever came. I used the empty single beds as my work tables and sewed on mom's machine until it gave out. Had to drive it to the sewing machine doctor this past Monday and there I found another one older but more valued by collectors. Who collects sewing machines I wonder? Anyway I could not resist using my birthday gift money to buy the sleek 1935 Singer featherweight sewing machine to get right back to the bay and work on the project that I was so deep into by the beginning of the second week. Now I have my own and I can leave mom's at her house for projects out there... it's perfect.

my birthday gift the singer sewing machine in perfect working condition. 

for my birthday I also got these beautiful antique plates like one I had to eat on as a child. The chocolate raspberry butter cream with brown sugar whipped cream was also a real treat but tasted even better on the depression era crackle plates. 

Then Tuesday morning while eating a delicious breakfast one of my teeth broke off! It didn't hurt but I was concerned it would so I called for a dentist appointment and had to drive back to the city very early Wednesday for a walk in visit. Then later Tuesday you all know that we had a 5.8 earthquake that shook up the east coast. It didn't stop us for long but we were really scared when the oil tank alarm went off in our red house. We found it and turned it off and rushed to the land line phone to call Molly but neighbor Juanita saw us and asked us if we were OK before we got the call dialed and explained that the shaking was an earthquake not an oil tank about to explode! What a relief it was to learn that our house and this wonderful vacation was not going to blow up all our fun. I got my tooth fixed and got back to work on my bay windows project soon as I got home and settled but we had to start getting ready for the weeks next disaster headed our way. Irene a hurricane was on the way. We decided to stay as long as we could to see what it was like if the neighbors were safe we figured we could be too. We shopped for supplies, cooked frozen meats and made ice to keep things cool... filled up big bottles of water for when the power went out and we had no well water to flush toilets. It was kind of exciting but not nearly as alarming as watching the news broadcasts full of doom and gloom about the terrors approaching the east coast would be had we been able to see them. We took all needed precautions and worked to use our last hours of power before the storm.
Irene arrived on the Atlantic coast miles from the bay about eight and the winds were strong, the rain fell in sheets all afternoon and into the night. We tried to ignore the sounds but the crash of a branch through a window and the flickering lights were alarming. We fixed the broken window with a little duct tape and a black plastic bag and one of those old fashioned window screen devices that held it in place. The lights went out right after we got the glass swept up from our broken window. The next part was sitting next to the open windows listening to the wind blow the trees soggy leaves and crashing branches falling & splitting. I suggested we read by our hurricane lantern in the bay room and we did for a few hours then about 10:30 we went to bed. It was black outside so we couldn't see anything and it wasn't safe to go out to look to see what those crashing sounds were. As long as they didn't land on us we were good. We woke to lighter rain and softer winds a tree had fallen and a few branches were broken. Fallen leaves were everywhere the car was waiting and the roads were soon open. We took a last walk on the beach then a tour of the little community of houses and checked on our neighbors. Then packed up our studio and the food and headed home. The trouble is there won't be power back for days if not weeks. No water, no power and only charcoal to cook with is too much of a hardship to give us time to be creative. We had a great two weeks with some really high drama moments but many more fun hours of simple walks on the beach or visiting with Rupperts and each other. I spoke to Molly this afternoon when we got home and she says we can come back when the power is restored for the third week she promised us. I said Hooray, that is just what I was hoping we could do because a retreat this much fun is very hard to give up for any reason. So hurricane Irene wasn't so bad to us after all.

the night before the storm arrived a beautiful view of the bay. 

cliffs before the storm at low tide. 

the tree that fell by the red house covered in ivy is barely visible but the root ball shows in the mud at it's base.

Keith standing in front of the fallen tree this morning 

 cliffs at the end of the beach after the storm 

 bay after the storm

at the base of the clay cliffs leaves and balls of various colors of clay rolled in balls upon the sandy shore

across from Molly's house a real broken maple tree 

sail boat that washed up on the big beach across from Molly's house