My Quilting Journey

 I've been on a quilting journey. It started this fall when my friend Linda asked if I'd like to take a beginning quilting class with her. I knew I needed to do this, but I had been avoiding it. It sounded so boring. I figured it would be fun if Linda was there.

I really don't t like the pattern that the teacher uses, but it does work well as a learning exercise. And I was happy with the fabrics I chose.

The teacher shared all the "insider" tips that I had not been able to find in books or videos, like how to get the corners of squares to match up. And how to cut straight sashing. Notice I said she taught us these skills, not that I've mastered them!

That gave me the confidence to try a throw-sized quilt with precuts. This one uses Jolly Bars. I still had to square up all my units before I sewed them together. Apparently I haven't mastered cutting or sewing straight.

And now I'm working on the Market Street Quilt. This is a great beginner quilt, and I'm having fun with it. As you can see, I'm trying to get away from pretty but predictable.

I think I'll always like art quilting best, but I do want to build up my skill set. Besides, it's really nice to curl up under a quilt that you made yourself!

Finishes on Friday

I'm pleased with this mitered-square blanket. I made up the pattern to use up the colored yarn, which is the now-discontinued Julia yarn by Kristen Nicholas. The gray is that workhorse: Cascade 220. I crocheted the edges, which is a new skill for me. It's a bit wonky.

I know I should block it, but it's cold and rainy here, so I'm just going to start using it!

I finished my second coffee-cup mini-quilt. I think that having two cups is more satisfactory, 

What do you think?

I finally finished a sketch I started a month ago, when it was warm enough to draw outside. This is a gorgeous house on Lake Monona.

 And here is a very special finish I'm looking forward to:

 I eat one candy bar on the 1st and 15th of every month. When this is empty, the school year will be over! 

And since it's Friday, here's a feline. Kola enjoying HBO's "Succession" with me

Tiny Needle Tuesday

 Just a quickie. I'm working on another coffee cup mini-quilt:

Keith doesn't like the gray background (the last quilt had a very colorful background) but I think this could work.

Every Weekend Should Last Three Days

 It has been a quiet but lovely Labor Day weekend. Some socially distanced gatherings with friends, phone chats with those who are farther away. But a lot of it looked like this:

Just me and Kola hanging out. Yes, she often maintains the oddest positions. My pain levels were up and my sleep was scanty, so it was nice to relax. Students attend school for the first day tomorrow, so I need to be ready to go in the morning. 

I finished the handwork on my summer quilt, and I'm not 100% happy with it. All the fabric was hand dyed or painted by me. And I think it's pretty obvious that it is hand-quilted in the Kantha style.

But I do like the appliqued leaves, so for lack of a better name, I called it Leafing.

I picked up the Brennivin cardigan I started a year ago. I'll try to get a photo, but at this point it's just a big blue-gray blob. It's knit from the bottom up and then separated for the sleeves. I like this design, but you do end up with a big blob in the middle of the process.

I hope your holiday weekend turned out to be what you wanted.

On Sun-dying and Memories

Every year since 1972, when I met her at summer camp, Joni and I have vacationed together. She lives in California, and I live in Wisconsin, so this will be the first time in 28 years we will not see each other, which is really sad -- but better than one of us getting sick or worse from taking an airplane. Next summer, though, I will drive to California if I have to!

The rocky shore of Lake Superior near Grand Marais.

We like to do some kind of art or craft project together. Last year, I learned how to sun-dye with Dynaflow (a high-flow acrylic fabric paint from Jacquard) so we could dye cloth and make art quilts. It seemed like a reasonable project give that we were renting a cabin in the little artsy town of Grand Marias on Minnesota's North Shore (one of my favorite places on Earth).

Joni and I in front our little house. We love to dress alike!

It is super simple. (Directions at the end of the post).

Here are Joni and my quilts in progress (Mine is on the left):

And here is the finished quilt:

Those really bright images in white and black are silk-screened with Thermofax screens, which Joni and bought at a retreat with Judy Coates Perez.

DIRECTIONS:
You need: white cloth, water, sponge brushes, Dynaflow, stencils (or leaves or other objects), and a garbage bag or some other plastic surface. You wet the cloth, pat it flat on plastic (which I stretch over foamboard or a similar flat surface), and brush the cloth with paint. You can water down the paint for lighter colors. You can mix up your own colors. Then lay down the stencils/other objects and press them flat. Move the surface into the sun and let the cloth dry.

I'm just started to experiment with leaves, so I'll let you know how that goes!

Hooked on Hitchhiker

It's been a dreary weekend: cold, windy, rainy, gray skies. I'm not complaining because I needed to rest and this weather definitely helps with that. I went to Torah study yesterday and then had a nice long lunch with my mom. Last night, Keith and I started the third season of The Man in the High Castle (Amazon), and it is as good as the first two.

Today I started cleaning up my studio and then went out to lunch and Urban Sketching. I ended up drawing one of our sketchers:

The blue sky is just wishful thinking. It was quite gray.

I'm pretty happy with this sketch. The woman sort of looks like Jean, the sketcher, which is a rare accomplishment for me! I need to find some time to just play with my watercolors. It's a challenging medium and I don't put enough time into it.

This is good knitting weather. I finished my first Hitchhiker, and I love it. It only has about 39 teeth (it's supposed to have 41), but it is long enough right off the needles. After blocking, it should be a decent length.

I like the way the gradient works out when it's around my neck. I think it came out well enough to be a gift.

It was such a fun and relaxing knit, that I just had to do a stash dive and start a second one.

I have no recollection of where I got this skein of yarn. It's going to be an adventure. It's a magic ball with 15 colors of sock yarn tied together with square knots and wound into a cake. I haven't come to a knot yet, but I'm hoping that I can just leave the knots in place and have a rustic sort of shawl. Strangely, there is no company name or brand. All I know is that there are 525 yarns of Merino superwash sock yarn. 

For dinner tonight I made a delicious red lentil dish from the Oh She Glows Every Day Cookbook. The dish called for homemade mango chutney, but I cheated and bought some. I'm not vegan, but I do make a lot of Oh She Glows recipes. They are healthy and reliably good.

I noticed that the photo of my most recent quilt in my last post was fuzzy, so I just had to go on record with a better photo:

How was your weekend?

One Done; Two New

It's been a weird weekend. Snow on Saturday, but then a glorious walk on dry sidewalks with my friend Denise today -- didn't even need a sweater. Crazy! At least we didn't have to cancel dinner out with my Mom Saturday. She took us to a very nice Italian restaurant.

As promised, here is my finished quilt:

So, what I don't like about it is that it is largely based on commercial fabrics: the rooster, the eggs, the words. It was fun to make, but I don't get the kind of satisfaction that I would from something that was more original. 

The next quilt is already under way. This time, I decided to force myself to work with a different set of colors.

And do you know what this is? I bet many of you recognized it right away. It is a sprouting Hitchhiker. I didn't think much of the pattern until a saw a few of you do it with gradient yarn. Now I'm a fan. As you can see, I am doing the Line 6 variation (yo, k2tog) to spice it up a bit. 

It is going to go through quite a dramatic color change before I am finished. That should keep it interesting.

31 more days of school. Not that I'm counting.

Midweek Bits & Pieces

It's a rainy Thursday on a crazy week. I'm not sure there are any other kinds of weeks for teachers anymore. Yesterday a 12-year-old was arrested at a middle school after attacking and injuring two police officers. In my world, a lot of students are struggling, especially my students whose families do not have a lot of financial resources. I can't tell you how discouraged I get by the inequality all around me.

As long as I'm on the subject of work ... a while back many of you shared your thoughts on retirement. They were really helpful and I have revisited them many times. The decision for now is ... not retiring yet. My students and my coworkers are really amazing people and I'm not quite ready to say goodbye to them. 

Our amazing ceramics teacher, Phil Lyons, is retiring. In honor of him, we have an exhibit of his work in the school art gallery -- and all the works are for sale. What do you think of this one?

I fell in love with it. When the show closes, it's coming home with me. I've probably mentioned that I work at the high school that my children attended, so this will be a wonderful memento when I do retire.

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 I've picked up a handful of novels, but none of them have hooked me. Instead I'm glued to "1924: The Year That Made Hitler." While it's not exactly uplifting, it is well-written and interesting.

Let's end on a more cheerful note. Here is a picture of an almost-finished quilt:

I don't love it, but I'll get into that when it's finished.

I hope your week has been going well!

It's THAT Time of Year

Well, it is if you're a teacher. Today was freshman-only day, and I'm exhausted! I did stay late for an IEP meeting, so that doesn't help. But I'm excited for tomorrow when the rest of my students show up. I want to hear how their summers were.

 There hasn't been a lot of time for crafting. My weekend was busy with driving to a family gathering in Chicago and working. But I did finish a Winter Rose sock and get a start on the second one.

 And I assembled another mini-quilt. I want to go through the whole process soon -- before I forget everything I learned at the workshop in August.

And along with the start of school, the High Holy Days start at sundown on Sunday. I took this photo of our communal granddaughter at services this past weekend. I told her that we stored all the good girls on this shelf, and she climbed right in!

I'm hoping to get back to work on my Vodka Lemonade sweater this week. Do you have any projects that you've been neglecting?

Back to Stitching

On Monday, we had torrential rains in Madison like we've never seen here. Many businesses are closed; lots of basements are flooded. So far, we haven't had any water in our house. And the levels of the four lakes in the city limits are still rising. 

This is one of the roads that Keith bikes. It's hard to believe so many people don't accept climate change as real. 

With more rain predicted for tomorrow, the danger is far from over. I plan to stay home, do some cleaning, and hopefully have creative time

I do have a knitted FO to share with you. This is my second Quill, a Taproot pattern, in Cascade 220. It's a pretty fast knit.

 I just love the gansey texture.

And my workshop quilt is officially done. This is the first quilt I've successfully quilted on a machine, and I am very proud of my crooked lines.

It's not a crooked as it looks. Some of the crookedness is the way I took the photo.

I've been working a lot on this embroidery piece. It may look familiar. Actually, it's new; but its partner is being framed. One just wasn't enough.

When I'm done with the color, I'll fill in the rest with white. I love the look of fabric that is 100% embroidered.

I go back to work full time on Monday with mixed feelings. I enjoy the students and the teaching, but there's always the paperwork hanging over my head. It reminds me of being in college and having homework all the time!

Opening Celebration

The Jewish Artists Lab of Madison held the opening for our show this afternoon.

The theme for this year was: Outside/Inside: Exploring Boundaries and Otherness. My quilt is about how my grandfather was American on the outside, but carried a lot of feelings from his roots in the shtetl.

If you're interested, here is what I wrote about it:

As I thought about the theme in the early months of the cycle, my mind fixed on my paternal grandfather, Charles Kades (formerly Kadesevitz). He came to the United States from Lithuania in 1906 and grew up in Crystal Lake, Ill. He never got over the shame of his father’s refusal to assimilate. Charles himself spoke flawless English, graduated from UW-Madison, owned a successful auto parts store in Beloit, Wis., fished, and golfed. He is one of the kindest, most sensitive men I have ever known, and I was always touched by the stories he told of his childhood poverty. He spoke of how embarrassed he was that his father signed things for school with his signature in Yiddish because he refused to learn to write in English. Even though he was a prosperous American by any standard, the shtetl had made its mark on my grandfather.

The photo behind his head is a photo of downtown Beloit in the 1950s. The embroidered shtetl is based on a photo of the shtetl where Charles (then Chaskell) came from, Taureg, also known as Tavrik.

The Beloit Country Club did not admit Jews until the mid-1970s. My grandfather joined immediately.

Rejected

I actually did finish the red Rikke Hat, but I don't have a photo of it yet. Instead, I have this, which came in the mail this week:

It is a mini quilt, which I submitted to Somerset Studio magazine. This incredibly beautiful magazine has a theme for each issue. They announce the theme in advance and request submissions. I've submitted a few things over the years -- bus I have never gotten anything published that was on a theme!

One of the problems is that I don't start early enough. Looking at this now, I can see it isn't finished. Those few shells at the bottom look ridiculously random. And the sun is far too plain. No doubt those are only a few of its problems. I think I'll work on it some more, but that's going to ruin the back, which I affixed after doing all the embroidery!