ugly block challenge results!

You might remember this block and its siblings, which I sent out to a bunch of you who wanted the challenge of reinventing it.

Three have not come back and I hope that they will at some point (ahem) so I can post them.  One block never arrived at its destination, sadly. (who would steal a piece of mail with this in the envelope??)  And seven of them came back by the deadline.   Here, in order of their arrival, are the blocks, which have been made into finished pieces.  Wow!

Isn't it fascinating to me to see the varied approaches from this international group?!! They have all imprinted their own "fingerprints" on these experimental pieces. Thanks to all of you for participating -- it CAN be done - LOL.  I'll post the last three when I get the jpgs.

Barbara Diskin -Alexandria, VA.

Cécile Trentini - Zurich, Switzerland

Karen Stiehl Osborn - Omaha, NE

Françoise Jamart - Louvain-la-Neuve,
Belgium

  

 Jennifer Beaven - Acton, MA

Sally Westcott - Tasmania, Australia

Paula Sheron - Deltona, FL

Gone!

 The star blocks are gone and so is my brain. While I was taking out the sashing, I stabbed myself with a seam ripper this morning. Luckily, I was in the doctor's office so they had band aids right there.  That's the sashing, which I realized as I was staring at it, was leftover fabric from probably the first maternity garment I sewed for myself in 1966: a sleeveless tent of some sort to get me through the summer. Ten years later, the excess finally got used in this quilt top.

I thought I had eight more blocks, I actually had ten - so everybody who asked for one (even if I thought I was out) will get one.  I sent you an e-mail with the guidelines, just so you wouldn't have to keep going back to yesterday's post.

It is ungodly late, so I will just show you that the block wasn't quite as architectural by the time I sewed it together.
 Right now, it's on my wall, turned on its side. 

I am going to turn on my side, too, since it is 2:30 a.m.  This one hour thing is really messing me up - and I have an early meeting tomorrow.  I used to go to sleep at 10:00 every night, even in college.  How times change -- or how time changes.

rearranging & juxtaposition

Ok, Barbara -those two words of yours in the comment on yesterday's post hit the nail on the head.  It's all about that.
This is true whether we're working on something new or something we have done that we're not happy with - or given up on in the middle. I would call it editing -- and we do it with our writing, so why not with our visuals?

I really didn't think it was worth my time to redo the whole quilt but I did take one block and slice it randomly last night. I added a strip or two and then tonight, took a couple of the other parts of the block, combined them with some leftovers from my treasure box and in a few minutes, without planning, voilà:
From this..(well, a different block but same batch)  

to this...

Hmmm..it has possibilities.  Anybody want one of these blocks to play with?  See what you can do to deconstruct and improve it?  Let me know; I have a whole quilt top full of them. How can you resist?  We'll post 'em all here.

more on knitted trees & trunk treasures

NJ isn't the only place with mad knitters. I got a delightful email from Amy Stockwell, a former student of mine who lives in Decatur, IL. Decatur, apparently has a better sense of joy and humor than Cape May, NJ! Here is Amy's tree hugger on the left and the recent article from the Decatur paper is here. Dollars to doughnuts, the Decatur artists didn't have to pay for permits. Did they, Amy?

This is my pink and brown log cabin top, BTW. Not bad from a distance.

I did say I'd show you what else I found in my trunk - and I have to admit I can't chop these up.  Dozens and dozens of wonderful vintage blocks from 1880s-1930s or '40s. I bought them in Florida many years ago, intending to sell them. Maybe I will do that now. Or not.
Most are machine pieced, proving that machine piecing was in use at the turn of the (last) century. No 1/4" seam for those women! Most are more like 1/8" Quite a few are hand-pieced, even within the same batch.

I don't feel too bad because those last two are sort of ugly - but they might make a great quilt put together. Maybe I'll play with them and see.

Meanwhile, I have already slashed into one of those yellow and blue star beauties from yesterday and am not going to bed tonight till I see what I can do (if anything) with it!

sidetracked again

I came across two phrases this week that I wanted to talk about.  One that I hate: "eye candy."  I especially hate when somebody's artwork is referred to with that phrase.  I think it is demeaning. Somebody referred to the book 500 Quilts as eye candy; I haven't seen the book but don't have any interest in seeing something described that way. Lots of definitions out there:

eye candy (visual images that are pleasing to see but are intellectually undemanding) "he wanted to put some eye candy on their web site"
Slang: a person or thing that is visually pleasing or superficially attractive and lacking depth of intellect or meaning.

'Nuff said.

The other phrase I heard this week was "the architecture of sleep."  It struck me as poetic, although the subject is hardly that. It refers to the sleep cycles we all go through, but I love it.

The week was a blur till yesterday, when I escaped again to my real studio. Sigh of relief!  I carried a huge bag of leftover blocks; many several decades old.  I intended  to spread them out, sort them,and see if there was fodder for reinventing them into something funky, along the lines of the Cinderella quilts I wrote about in the current issue of Art Quilting Studio.

Alas, so much for good intentions. My roommate Francesca was in and since we hadn't seen each other in weeks, we spent the first hour yakking and catching up.  Then it was lunchtime. By the time she got down to printmaking and I sorted the blocks, half the day was gone. I found, after all, that even though I don't do that stuff any more, I was too attached to the older blocks to touch them. Orphans I had made as experiments, just to see if I could make a block from the Kansas City Star.

Fabric choices a bit bizzare but I love these blocks. The left one incorporates vintage 30's fabric I used to buy at house sales, the plaid from blanket covers my Nanny made, and  some orange I think was a repro.

Some were pieced by hand, but most were machine pieced. I love these block patterns, too.  Would I ever make them again? Not likely. obviously, the one on the upper left was from my Nanny's blanket covers. The fabrics were scraps she brought home from the dress factory where she worked during and after the war.  So how can I do anything with them?  The other non-vintage ones, maybe.

I happen to love this pattern, too - and the block contains fabric from an apron my Nanny made.  But WHAT was I thinking? The colors are horrible and that green border has got to go.

Blocks with truck fabric left from Josh's first quilt; a bevy of assorted log cabin blocks, and a bunch of string pieced squares left from several quilts; scraps of the newspaper to which I had sewn them still caught in the stitching.

I threw the string blocks at the wall and then decided to trim them and sew them together.  One of my studio mates walked in, saw these blocks on the wall and said in a shocked tone, "these are so traditional!"

Maybe the center of a quilt for Miss Emma to play on?  We'll see. Two weeks old today.