- Back to the Homestead: What if ... ?

I finished my stitch sampler and it is now serving its intended purpose as a kitchen towel. The three layers of cloth make it a bit bulky when folded, so I'll probably change the format to "single-wide" the next time around. I'm also becoming a two-threads of floss convert, finding it works up less tediously and shows up so much better.

Now I'm back to the Homestead towel, which needs to have trees added to it. So I'm wondering: 

What if I baste a piece of green fabric (from a finely-woven linen shirt that never did fit quite right) onto the top of the cloth and then cut away everything but the treeline and appliqué the edges?

To be continued ...

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And now a bedtime story (2)

The bed in our guest room came from my father's parents: Gertrude Elizabeth Snow and Arthur Snyder Barnett. My dad was their second son (third child) born fifteen years after his brother Ken (who never got over his younger brother being named Arthur Junior).

It made its way to my childhood bedroom at 141 Wellington Road in Mineola, where a monster took up residence underneath it each night. When we moved to East Williston the bed was relegated to basement storage where it gathered dust for a decade until Don and I rescued it along with an eclectic mix of attic-down cast-offs, taking them all in a U-Haul truck to our first home Virginia.

It moved from the master bedroom to the guest room at 127 Wilson Circle, from the garage at 260 Nina Lane to Meghan's room at 303 Hempstead Road. It survived a cross-country trek from Williamsburg to Wimberley, arriving at last in the guest room at Cascade Trail.  When we don't have any company I use it to store my growing collection of repurposed cloth for future quilting projects.

Mom's quilt fits the bed perfectly and her father's painting hangs over them both. But that's another story. 

- What if ... NOT: Inkjet printing on premounted cloth

One of the (many) things I like about Jude Hill is her "What if ...?" approach to creativity. So I had a thought:

What if I created a kitchen towel cloth that combined a polygonal map of our property with the topo contours of the neighborhood swirling around it?

It was a pretty good idea, but it went wrong when I took it one step further to:

What if I print our property map on the cotton cloth I bought and appliqué that onto a tea-dyed linen napkin?

Then stitch over the lines of elevation?

Except ... the cotton was so white (maybe some tea dye?) ... and so stiff (maybe my thumb will callous?) ... and there were so many extraneous marks (maybe they'll wash out?). There were just too many maybes.

In fact, the only thing I really liked was the back:

So it has been undone.

Lesson learned: this thing was stitched to stay on forever. Now it's back to the drawing board.

PostScript:

What if I use some packing tape to clean up all those loose threads?

Nice!

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And now a story (1) ... the first of many I hope. Because it occurred to me that the things that give us the most pleasure are meaningful because of the stories behind them. 

So I'm going to try to end each post with a story about something I love, beginning with my mother's quilt. 

The story begins at the Williamsburg Soap and Candle Factory quilt shop, where Mom picked out fabrics during a Christmas visit before our girls were even born. She worked on the quilt blocks in-between many smaller quilting projects over the course of two decades.

It actually has a part of its story inscribed on the back by the woman who ultimately quilted it:

The sad part of the story is that my mom never saw the quilt completed. Instead, the blocks that she pieced sat in a box until after her death. And after it was quilted and returned to Shelter Island, it ended up in a linen closet.

Happily, it now rests on the bed in which I slept as a child. But that's another story.

- The long and winding road: A kitchen towel stitch sampler

Never let it be said that I read and follow recipes (already well-documented in previous posts). Rather, I prefer to find my own way ... which can lead to some interesting journeys. So it is with Jude Hill's Spirit Cloth 101.

The stitch sampler that I wrote about in the last post took some unexpected turns, taking a cue from Owen Temple's recent song Make Something, in which he urges "show it to your people, don't forget to sign your name."

Fortunately, the water-erasable marker worked as intended:

I took one last look at the back (which probably would have worked as it was),

but in the spirit of Spirit Cloth, I basted a layer of loose-woven muslin to the back ...

Knowing that those long basting stitches on the back would cause some problems for a kitchen towel, I then basted a second layer of muslin (you really have to take the Spirit Cloth 101 class to find out more about how and why) and began quilting. In this photo you can see both the front (to the left) and the back (overturned corner):

As with the stitching, I am quilting some of the sampler with a single thread of floss, and then will add a second thread of floss to the rest of the sampler to see which I prefer.

It's also a great way to practice and get used to the feel of a totally new (to me) form of needlework. Ironically, I'll probably "follow the recipe" in the future by basting the first layer of backing onto the linen before stitching the front. Live and learn.

- Follow the yellow brick road: Trying out Spirit Cloth 101 stitches

After posting yesterday, my fingers started to itch. So I grabbed a cotton linen napkin and, following Jude Hill's suggestion to "scribble stitch" as a fill, made a series of random doodles with a water-erase marker (I'm not quite ready to use the permanent markers she recommends).

Then I chose a gold/green/rust variegated floss that has previously proved to be a little too variable for cross stitch samplers and decided to try out some of the stitches from Spirit Cloth 101. As each strand ran out, I ended with a thread bead (Jude's alternative to French knots).

I also let go of my judgmental attitude about my handwriting (thank you Jude) and started labeling each stitch without resorting to the rubber stamp letters I've been using lately. Much quicker ... and truer to myself.

For now, I'm working everything in a single strand of floss and taking relatively small stitches. 

It will be interesting to try these same stitches with two strands later in the piece. I've already had to let go of a beaded back stitch that simply didn't work on the single-strand scale, but I can see how using two strands will make a positive difference. Indeed, this is a becoming a sampler in the truest sense of the word.

The back reveals even more about the process:

However, since I do intend this to be a functional kitchen towel, I've been considering how to guard the back from the wear and tear that will inevitably be visited on it. Taking a cue from Jude's spirit cloth quilting and combining that knowledge with the softly-layered towels that Meg recently purchased, I'm thinking that backing the finished towel with a layer of loose-woven muslin may be a good solution.

We'll see ...

- ... Down the rabbit hole: Discovering new ways of needleworking

I know, I know ... I disappeared, but I have a really good excuse. After exploring Jude Hill's Spirit Cloth blog, I decided to register for her online workshop of the same name. It's the best $65 I've spent in a long time and is opening up new thoughts about where I want to go with quotidian cloth making.

Better yet, Jude Hill is a native Long Islander, so her voice has a cadence and timbre that takes me back to my earliest needleworking days, in a very positive sense.

Anyway, no new work to show for now. I am composting ideas and hope to turn them into something magical.

Someday.  Soon?

- Progress on The Homestead: Stitching stones and letters

My slow stitching is best summed up as a two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. And so, after spending last Friday stitching the rock walls in a zig-zag chain of variegated thread (two steps forward):

I decided the color transitions were too abrupt and spent Saturday tearing all the rock walls out (one step back).

The next step forward was changing to one strand of the variegated thread and one strand of solid gray, zigging and zagging irregularly for a more nuanced effect, much like the limestone walls themselves:

Adding the lettering was another do/undo/redo process. Fortunately, I revised the plan from an earlier post (much as I repeatedly revise recipes), choosing to stamp the lettering using a V-Clear water-erasable pen instead of the "permanent" ink markers. If a letter was misplaced, it was easily removed with a bit of damp toweling, then re-inked. I didn't go for perfect placement, however. I was especially pleased that the Stepping Stones variegated floss by Crescent Colours (one of three brands I purchased in Williamsburg) was far more subtle than the thread in the rock walls since the lettering could only be done with a single strand.

Here's the top half so far ...

and the bottom half ...

With the rock walls and most of the lettering done, I'm now starting to experiment with how to stitch the trees and grasses ... no doubt this too will change:

- The Homestead in Stitches: A needlework map emerges

I wrote about a new project earlier this month: a kitchen towel needleworked with a "map" of our property. However, the thing about slow cloth (wait for it) is that it's sorta slow. Especially when one is otherwise occupied with travel and grandchildren (both of which are not to be rushed).

Still, the newest quotidian effort has reached a point worth documenting:

This is a bird's eye view of our house and garage, trails and driveway. Note the variegated floss, which was purchased on our way out of Williamsburg last week. Dare I say good things happen when we leave the Burg? Well then, we'll have to go back more frequently, methinks.

So, to make this more truly quotidian, I'd like the stitching to be as much a part of my daily life as the end product will be. Next up (in no particular order): rock walls, trail names, grasses, and trees.

To be continued (slowly) ...

- There's something fishy going on here: Folk art fish-to-be

Blog blog blog ...

That was the text message we got from Meg last night. So without further ado, here are three metal implements (with on-hand embellishments) that Don found at Seagreen Gallery during our trip to the East Coast last week:

Of course, after I took the picture he told me I was looking at them upside down. So much for a shared vision.

Stay tuned to see how they end up ...

- Thar she blows! The newest folk art whale

The great white whale has taken its place on the breezeway wall, along with the fish detailed in a previous post.

As with the other folk art pieces Don has made, the whale has imaginative details:

Detail: Metal washers for the eye,
driftwood glazed with milk paint for the pectoral fin

Detail: Fluke cut from a rusted
pressed metal sheet found at By the Bridge Antiques, Wimberley

But what I like best about this latest addition to the breezeway is the way he "saw" the whale in the peeling white paint and the shape of the board.

Ahab would be impressed.

- Repurposed placemats

Originally posted 6/9/2013 in On The Trail

Problem: our 1990s placemats were a little too big for the table, and the scalloped edges really dated them style-wise. But they always washed up well and they were a gift from my Mom. What to do?

I poked around in my closet until I found a light weight skirt that I never wore since it didn't really fit right. After trimming the scalloped edges off of the placemats, I proceeded to cut the skirt fabric into strips ...

... then machine sewed the strips onto the placemats and "quilted" them down with wavy lines.

Problem solved!