Getting Registered

Yesterday I took the quilt I made for my daughter to the Quebec Quilt Registry. My Daughter gave me a funny look and asked "why do you do that?" I was dumbfounded.

Years ago, no one even knew that a woman had lived unless she made and signed a quilt. In an age when women were not taught mathematics, they were creating these incredibly complex geometric patterns out of used clothing and scraps of fabric gleaned from various sources. Creating art.

I answered my Daughter that it was like getting a piece of art catalogued.

I know that I would love to be able to find out who made the one quilt I have left to me from my grandparents' house in the country. The house burned down years ago, and I just happened to have brought this lovely quilt home with me. Nobody in my family knows who made it, and it's not signed. I like it because it reminds me of the country house where I spent my summers when I was growing up. But if there had been a quilt registry, I might be able to find out who had made the quilt, and what the inspiration was.

I was informed that the Registry's information is kept in a database at Concordia University, and that there are actually students using some of the information for their theses!

The registration was an incredibly detailed experience. They measured how many stitches to the inch my hand-stitching was! Apparently I sew a respectable eight stitches to the inch! I didn't know that. They listed all the details I had forgotten about. Quarter-inch border stitching, row stitching... They measured the size of the blocks, listed each color.

I told the story of the quilt to at least three different groups of ladies. When my Daughter was born, I received a congratulatory card with a picture of this lovely giraffe nibbling at the leaves on a tree. I made a crayon enlargement of the card, framed it, and it hung on her wall as decoration for years. When she asked me to make her a quilt, I immediately thought of the giraffe. So I found a pattern called "Tree of Life" for the tree and machine appliquéd the giraffe on top. I hand-quilted the Tree - it, with the giraffe, became the central medallion of the quilt.

I had asked Daughter what colors she wanted, and she said pink and purple. So around the central medallion it is a dark pink, and row by row the colors get lighter till it's white, then purple begins to appear in light tones, and it finally ends in dark purple at the borders.

I call the quilt "Transitions" because of the color transitions in the quilt, and because both Daughter and I were going through major life changes while I was making the quilt.

But there is now a new meaning for the name Transitions for me. While the quilt was being photographed, one of the most famous of the ladies came and had a good long look at it. Adair Schattler is one of Canada's "Who's Who!" of quilters. She's won so many awards, I wouldn't know where to begin.

She pronounced my quilt "lovely."

I was on cloud nine! This would be the equivalent of Steven Spielberg telling you you're a good actor, or Margaret Atwood telling you you're a good writer! Adair Schattler told me my quilt was lovely, and therein lies my new interpretation of "Transitions:" I feel I have arrived as a quilter, transitioned from inept struggler to actual quilter now.

A kind word really does go a long way!

A weekend Spent Quilting

I have just completed a full weekend by myself, which I spent quilting. It was a make-or-break situation: I have to now decide whether to go ahead and try to finish this quilt top by November 10, or whether to let it drop till after then. November 11 and 12, you see, is my guild's show.

That leaves me 18 days. In that time, besides working, I need to do baking for the bake table and tea room, quilt a baby quilt, and make a sleeve for the king-size quilt that's finished.

The project I was working on has been hanging around (my neck) for some time now. Once upon a time, about 5 years ago, I taught the basics of quilting to three elementary school classes. One of the young boys in one of the classes experienced a trauma - his father passed away. He got his mother to ask me to make a quilt out of his father's clothes.

Gulp.

Not just one quilt, mind you, three. There's a little girl as well, and mommy.

Being relatively new to quilting at the time, I accepted the challenge.

That's because I had no idea how difficult it was going to be!

They were in no hurry - and just as well, because it's been five years and three moves since I started lugging around the bags and boxes of the deceased gentleman's clothing. In the meantime I've learned a fair bit more about quilting - enough to know I should have never agreed to do this project!

I have trouble making my seams line up in designer quilting cottons, where all the fabric is the same density and the same thickness.

This gentleman wore sweaters (thick ones) and tee-shirts. Jeans. He owned one pair of dress pants and one dress shirt. Everything else, absolutely everything, is stretch fabric.

Uh-oh. Time to shoot myself.

My friend D gave me two bottles of spray sizing to help with controlling the stretch. She advised me to sew a stretchy fabric next to a non-stretchy one. She also told me to cut ruthlessly, turning all those clothes into rectangles and throwing away everything else.

It was a formidable task. Not to mention depressing - every time I'd get started cutting away at the garments, I'd start thinking about the men in my life - father, husband, boyfriend, friends, cousins - and start to choke up thinking about how much I would miss them if they were gone.

So it took me a long time to get to the point of even starting to look for a pattern. At first, all I could think of was straight blocks - but it soon became apparent while I was cutting that I simply didn't have enough non-stretchy material to pair blocks up as per my friend's suggestion. At one quilt retreat, where all I brought to work on was the clothes to cut up, another pal, C, came over to look at it and said "Oh my, that is dreary!" She suggested I mix in some proper quilting fabrics with some color in them.

So that led to me thinking perhaps straight blocks with sashing all around them would work. But when I tried to picture it, it seemed still too plain, very un-quilt-like. Not artistic.

Off to the internet, then, where I finally found my pattern. It's by Janet Wickell and it's called "Turning Nines into Sevens." Well, that's what the pattern started out as - I altered it. What I liked about this pattern was the central "cross" - which I've made out of quilting cotton. This helps control the stretch. I quickly discovered I had to make the small square in the center of the cross out of quilting cotton as well, otherwise there was no way to get the seams to line up.

Instead of making small nine-patches, I cut strips the width of two squares and sewed them onto strips the width of a single square. I need eight of these for every block. I used two of the non-stretchy garment fabrics for the middle section of each nine-patch. This means that within each nine-patch I'm sewing the stretchy strip to the (relatively) non-stretch strip, then putting sashing in between each of the nine-patches.

Finally, I put sashing around all the sides: dark fabric on the top and left sides, and light fabric on the bottom and right sides. And then a second layer of sashing, in a contrasting color, with lights and darks opposite the first layer of sashing.

This is what the sashing is supposed to look like.

It takes between 40 minutes and an hour to complete one block. The thinner fabrics, like tee-shirt material, go together quickly. The thicker ones, like fabric from sweatshirts, take longer because I have to fight with them.

Every single seam I sew has to be trimmed, because even though I'm using a walking foot and have lowered the pressure, the seams distort at the beginnings and the ends. So a good deal of the time it takes to make a block is time spent trimming.

By now you're wondering how I can predict the size of the blocks, since I have to trim them constantly. Ah - it's that inner layer of sashing that saves me. I start out with strips 2 inches wide, but once they're attached to the block I trim to a standard size. This means my inner layer of sashing varies in width from block to block, even from side to side. But the finished size remains constant. After that, I add the second layer of sashing, usually without incident.

Well, I got eight blocks done this weekend. That may not sound like much, but in order to get those eight blocks I had to cut and sew hundreds of strips from the fabric, because I've got three quilts to plan for, not just the one I'm working on. I'd make three sets of strip sets, but only be able to use one. And I needed 35 blocks to make a decent-sized quilt.

Of course, it's not like when you go to a quilt store, pattern in hand, and say "I need twenty fat quarters to make this quilt." My strip sets vary in length, so I don't know how many pieces I'll get from each of them. And until I make a set, cut it, and try it in a block, I don't know how the fabric with react, how much it will stretch, or what problems it'll cause. Once I've used it in one block, I know how long it'll take me to do another from the same set, but that's about all I can predict.

I keep asking myself why I'm doing this project. I can't decide if it's karmic debt, an inability to say "no," or blatant stupidity. I'm pretty sure the young man who made the request has no idea how much work is involved, since I didn't even know myself till I got in the middle of it. His mom has no way of paying me - she's been on welfare since her husband died. And after I finally get the quilt top made, then I've got to figure out how the quilt the blessed thing!

The answer is, I don't have a clue why I'm doing it. But I do expect that, once I'm done, I'm so going to enjoy quilting with real, genuine quilting cottons - and I expect each and every seam to line up easily, by comparison with this behemoth!

Make your own pantographs

There is nothing mysterious about a pantograph. It's a pattern. Oh sure, it's a LARGE pattern - if you own a longarm or shortarm quilting machine, it's on a stand six to twelve feet wide. There's a shelf that runs over the entire sewing area - a shelf that doesn't support much weight, because it's only meant to support the pantograph - a long piece of paper, basically!

But you cans use all the old-fashioned techniques to make your own pantographs: From hand-tracing your pattern, to sewing without thread in your machine through layers of paper, to stamping and photocopying.

Just measure the size of your quilt block. (If you're not using blocks, just measure the size or sizes of the areas you want to fill with quilting.)

If your finished block is ten inches wide, and you have a four-inch stencil or pattern that you really like, you can use any method you like to enlarge the pattern to five inches, or to just below five inches if you want to leave some space.

These days, a lot of people scan a pattern and print it out at different sizes. You tell your computer (or your husband or teenager) to make you printouts at 125%, 137%, or 0.92%.... Start with 125%, 150%, 175%, see if any of them fit. It's like playing the "higher or lower" game on The Price is Right. Just keep doggedly printing different sizes till you get one that fits.

Then cut it out exactly edge-to-edge and double-check. Once you have your first pattern that fits, all you have to do is get multiples of it and tape them together.

Now, if you want to get fancy, you can draw a line along the top or bottom, or both if you're seriously obsessive. That way you can line up each of the copies. Use your quilting rulers to make sure they're "square", meaning 90 degrees, not tilted slightly.

But all you have to do is get them all in a straight line that lies edge-to-edge with your quilt, and presto! You have your very own pantograph.

I'm not overly-fond of the pantograph myself - I'm comfortable with a "meander". Meandering is like an aimless walk - there's no particular pattern or direction. But I have a good eye and I'm confident that if I watch what I'm doing it'll turn out all right. Others aren't so confident and prefer to follow a pattern, so the pantograph is excellent for them. No guessing!

Oh, and when you're finished you first line, you can flip your pantograph upside-down to get a mirrored pattern if you like.

But rest assured it's not rocket science. It's just measuring and duplicating. Tedious, painstaking, and dull - but if you're a quilter, you've already got those skills nailed!