Those Frenchies

French Knots, that is!

I've always been fascinated by fancy stitches. A few years ago I wandered - quite by accident - into a real live embroidery museum/store/classroom. I picked up a beautifully-colored, laminated card with about 100 embroidery stitches detailed on it. I began practising as soon as I got home. I can't remember what stitches I did succeed at right away, but I can tell you the one stitch that eluded me - the French Knot.

I was soon to find I'm not alone in being unable to master this "petit rien." Almost everyone I asked for help from rolled their eyes and said "I know - it's AWFUL! I've been trying for years and never got it yet!"

A few souls actually knew how to do them. One of my quilting Pals knew how, and she showed he how once when we were both at a quilting retreat together. I must have sewn half a dozen of them. It was thrilling, seeing those beautiful, tight little dots appear one after the other. Of course, I needed more practise, but now I knew I had licked this thing, and I'd be able to practise at home.

Mais non. That didn't happen. One single day after coming home, I found myself unable to do a French Knot. I couldn't remember how my Pal had told me to do it. The diagrams all looked alike, and none of them produced a knot. Mostly they produced tangled threads or perfect plain stitches, and after another hour or two of struggling, they produced fury in me, and I packed it up.

Every so often when I was doing some fancy quilting I'd try again to do the French Knot. I'd drag out my card of embroidery stitches, or one of the many books I own on stitching, and have a go at it for an hour or so before giving up. The French Knot had, for me, a certain "je ne sais quoi" that simply refused to cooperate with my inept attempts to (groan) tie it down.

This evening, however, I succeeded in sewing French Knots. Two rows of about 20 each - I took no chances this time that I'd forget. And when I get home from work tomorrow I'm going to do two more rows. They were uneven at first. I did five winds of the thread, instead of just three, around the needle, because they did seem small… But eventually I got the hang of it, went back to the requisite three windings and voilà! There were at least 25 perfect French Knots, the right size, lying the correct way against the quilt, looking as lovely as I had ever imagined. Formidable!

Got to hand it to those Frenchies - they can sure do some lovely things with thread. If you want to know what did the trick, here it is, written out, but it'll sound like gobbledegook, because there really is no way to communicate this skill in written or drawn form. It is a skill that must be physically seen to be learned.

So, you have your thread coming through to the front of the piece. What the diagrams don't show you, and what my quilting Pal told me, was that now you take a very tiny stitch - just two threads wide - and don't even go through to the back of the work if you're doing a quilt. Don't pull the needle all the way through - pull it till the eye of the needle is about to go through the work. So, you have all the thread on the top of the work (from the first stitch) and your needle stuck through two threads, almost pulled all the way through but not quite.

Now you slide your thumbnail along the bottom of the needle till you are holding the eye of the needle firmly with your thumbnail. With you other hand, you take the thread - the main one - and wrap it three times around the front part of the needle. Still holding the eye in place with your thumb, carefully slide the three loops down the needle till they reach the eye.

Now gently grab the loops with the thumbnail that was holding the eye and carefully slide them down till your thumb rests firmly against the eye and the work. Using the other hand, pull the needle completely through and continue pulling all the thread through till it stops. At that point you can lift your thumb and see the lovely loops all lying against the work. All you do now is put the point of the needle really close to the knot and take a stitch to 1/4 inch away.

That is how you sew a French Knot.

Bonne chance.

So Many Quilts…So Little Time

I came to a realization around the ending of 2009, namely, that I don't have enough time left to finish all the quilts I want to make.

I've been working up to closing my "business" - boy, saying it was the biggest mistake I'd ever made to open a business is the understatement of a lifetime. I have to get the ball rolling down it's last hill by the end of this month. And while I was doing all my thinking about how I'm going to close it, I realized that the quilts I currently have started will take me about six years to complete.

That was an eye-opener. I'm 52 years old. I figure I've got about 20 years of useful quilting time left to me, after which I'll simply be lucky to get anything done, quilting or otherwise.

I was supposed to make a quilt for my brother and his wife - two years ago, for their 40th birthdays. I finally bought some of the fabric and picked a design. Yay.

At long last, I've settled on a design for a quilt for my Daughter. In fact, when I get up from this computer, I'm going to start CUTTING! And I only got around to that because my Boyfriend had me over to his place for my entire four-day weekend - see, here at his place, I have no other obligations. That's why I can work on one project at a time when I'm here!

I don't want to make the mistake I fear my sweet Auntie made, and the one my darling Dad is making.

See, Auntie love to make miniatures. Not miniature chocolates, but miniature scenes. Dollhouses are one example of a miniature scene. But other miniatures include scenes inside a (cleaned-out) egg, half boxes with scenes in them. They're usually rooms, often with a theme, Christmas, for example.

I learned many helpful hints from Auntie about crafts. For example, you use the sticks they put in "Pogos" to lay a miniature hardwood floor. Popsicle sticks are too fat for their length, it doesn't give the same illusion as the thinner ones in Pogos.

But Auntie was in a terrible car accident, and it basically knocked the stuffing out of her. She "recovered" according to the doctors, but she never had the energy to really get back into her crafting again.

But that didn't stop her from collecting stuff for her crafts! (Yes, I fear Auntie had the Hoarding Gene.) When my cousin described the whole family attempting to clear out her home, apparently they discovered huge boxes full of cleaned eggs. I'm talking in the thousands! My cousin said to her mother, "What? You're never going to eat another egg?" when Auntie protested the throwing-out of all those eggs she had so carefully saved.

And my Dad, well this year he'll turn 80. And he still hasn't figured out that he's retired. He's still busy starting one (failing) business after another.

Well, that's not how I intend to go out. I've got a 20-year goal: finish every quilt I can.

So I'm no longer taking on other people's quilts - no time!

Gotta go!

Using a Basting Gun

Recently I purchased a basting gun. A woman from my guild had demonstrated its use, and said the magic words "it takes so much less time..."

I have a terrible time basting my quilts together! It once took me three hours to baste a 4' x 4' quilt! Every time we baste stuff together at the guild, I seem to keep up well enough, yet everyone is surprised to hear how long it takes me when I'm alone.

The basting gun fires tiny plastic tags through the layers of the quilt. They look like the tags that hold the prices onto garments you buy in the store, except they are only 1/4 of an inch long.

Some of the women in the guild still prefer to baste by hand, since they can stretch the backing tight and tape it to a table. With the gun, you can't do that, since you have to put a grid under the area being basted, so the basting is perhaps a little looser than most of them are accustomed to.

Well, it went together like a dream. Twenty minutes from start to finish, just over 100 darts went in and my quilt was basted and ready for action.

But taking it out - that was quite a different matter!

One hundred darts went in, but it seemed like thousands when it came to taking them out! And to add insult to injury, my backing fabric was a molleton, and about twenty of the darts had simply slipped inside the quilt, so I was only able to remove half the dart! I'm sure the other halves will eventually work themselves loose, and the recipients of this particular quilt will simply find it odd that I hadn't thought to remove these things...

Next time, I'll be more precise in my placement. Go in straight lines instead of going "pow! pow! pow!" willy-nilly!

And there still remains the problem of finding the removal tool: Nobody seems to stock it! It looks like a seam ripper with two long sides, or a cuticle pusher with a slot in the middle. I came uncomfortably close to snipping my fabric when removing the darts and am now looking high and low to find this remover tool. Funny that the quilt supply shops will sell the gun, the barbs, the grid, and replacement needles, but not the tool to remove the darts!

The Remains of the Quilting Classes

About four years ago, I was away from my job due to a severe depression. While I was recovering, I started quilting. One day I decided it would be a good idea to try and interest teenagers or pre-teens in quilting.

A girlfriend of mine happened to be a teacher in an elementary school around the corner from me. Budgets for the arts had of course been slashed, but for most of one year I got to take my friend's class once a week for an hour and try to get them interested in quilting. I had time, I had a friend to help me, I was chock full of ideas and enthusiasm.

Here in Quebec the curriculum is what they call "integrated" - has nothing to do with the color of the students... It means that in English class you learn your science vocabulary, in social studies you do mathematical trends, basically you try to integrate every subject into every other subject. The way life is.

We decided the quilts the children would make would be related to their social studies curriculum. That year the children were learning about the Inuit, so they made little 8x8 quilts with scenes depicting Inuit life.

I showed overheads and slides and movies to them, going back to the earliest know examples of quilting (ancient Egypt). I taught them "guy" stuff - like quilted armor. They learned to convert centimeters to inches, because the biggest quilt suppliers are in the States and you have to work in inches or at least know what they are - that meant they learned about market size. Once, when I was handing out small frames they needed to assemble, one girl asked me how did you know which part of the frame went into which part, and we even had a quick discussion of "male" and "female" adaptors. Half the class giggled, half the class shrieked "EEEEEW!" So I shook my head in amazement that one could even integrate sex education into the quilting class!

I had a friend come in and show off neat stuff. I brought samples in for them to see. I made them kits... oh, those kits nearly killed me!

Every student received a personalized bag with:

a piece of cloth with pre-marked half-inch lines for them to practise basting on
a piece of cloth with pre-marked quarter-inch lines for them to practise their actual quilting stitiches on
pre-cut backing, batting, and top pieces
a piece of paper with a basting needle, a quilting needle, and ten pins inserted
enough binding to finish the piece
a needle threader and cutter
floss holders wound with basting thread and quilting thread

They'd come up and select which appliqués they wanted to put in their scene. While they struggled to thread their needles, I'd hand around samples for them to look at, I'd talk about the different types of quilts and show pictures. Some of the children were faster at picking it up, because they had more developed motor skills. So we talked about how people develop at different rates, and those who finished early turned and helped the ones who were having difficulty - that's called "peer teaching."

At the end of each class they would receive a vocabulary sheet with the words they had heard in that particular session, and would give the definition in their own words. "Resolution, knit, abstract, mosaic, optical illusion, tessellation, fibre, sinew, stippling, half-square triangles... These are just a few of the terms we got through, and you can see we drew on science, photography, and math, among other subjects, to help them understand quilting.

One boy was a holy terror most of the time because he was mildly autistic, for which reason my teacher friend had a class helper. Another friend used to come with me some days, so were were usually 4 adults amongst these 30 children. But I could have kissed that annoying autistic boy the day I showed pictures of Sashiko work on Japanese Fishermen's coats. I talked about the utilitarian practicality of sewing layers of cloth together, how it came from having to spin and weave every piece of cloth you owned. And this young boy put up his hand and asked "Did they know it would come out so beautiful?" I could have cried.

Some of the funny things we adults noticed over the course of this year, and the next when I took on two classes, was that the boys seemed more interested than the girls! It also helped that one class was doing the Vikings - so there were lots of swords and armor in those scenes!

It was fun. It was exhausting! I'd walk out of each class totally drained, shaking my head and proclaiming teachers are worth every penny of their salaries, and then some!

All this comes to mind today because I'm cleaning out my "extra" bedroom, and the children's pieces and the remnants of their kits were there, waiting for me to take the pins and needles out of the papers and put their 8x8 squares together on a background so the school can hang them up for other children to see. Yes, I'm a little late! I had to return to work, then I left my husband and moved twice... I'm just getting around to it now.

But I still had a few laughs as I took the kits apart and salvaged what I could. You'd be amazed how bent a tiny quilting needle can get in the hands of an eleven-year-old! And they were always losing their needles - it averaged out to five per child. Yet I came across one paper with nine needles in it! Whatever was that child doing, I wondered - just trying to be annoying by stealing the other kid's needles?!

I can't take up a task like that again, but I'm glad I did those three classes. I think my proudest moment came when a young boy showed me how he had repaired his torn jeans by himself. He had asked his mother to fix them, and she had replied that she didn't know how to sew. Then he realized he had learned how to sew - so he fixed them himself. It was atrocious, but he was pleased with the results, and I was so proud I could have popped!

I don't know if any of those children will grow up to be quilters, but they all seemed to have more or less a good time making their pieces, and I have wonderful memories.

Broken Threads

My guild, this year, is going to have an event, just for our members, where we bring in our first quilts to show and talk about.

I have several "first" quilts. I have the first quilt I ever started, which was for my Mother, and thereby hangs a tale...

I have a small wallhanging I made, while I was also making my Mom's quilt, which was the first project I ever completed. It only took me about two days, I was proud of it because it's a Celtic Knot and I didn't have a pattern... Plus, I did machine stippling all over and it's perfect, and it was the first time I'd ever dropped a feed dog...

And I have another wallhanging I did, for my Father, again, done during the period I was also making my Mom's quilt. This wallhanging was a very sentimental and poignant project for me, because the subject was my grandparents' country home, where I spent every summer of my childhood, and then some.

I knew nothing about quilts when I designed any of these items, I simply forged ahead. The wallhanging for my dad, entitled "Glengar Cottage" had me sobbing almost every time I worked on it - not because of the work, but because of the memories.

It's not a particularly beautiful wallhanging, and it's not even clear what all the items are that are on it. To go with it, I made a booklet, describing each section and what it meant.

There is a representation of the house, as I knew it. When I was busy talking to my dad, he told me how the place used to look, when he was younger, because he grew up there. But I did it as I remembered it. You saw the outside of the house from the west side. There was a kitchen off the main section, a porch behind that, and grandpa's workshop behind that. To the right was the 100 year-old maple tree, which I thought of as "my" tree, because my swing was in it. It was two fat bristly ropes and a plank of wood, and I spent hours of every day in that swing, imagining all sorts of things.

Then I made what I now know are called "thread paintings" of all the particular little things I remembered or loved about that house.

There was the doorstep - a piece of cement, with the Canadian Air Force logo carefully etched into it, and the latin phrase, "Per Ardua ad Astra" - "Through adversity to the stars" - the motto of the Air Force, at least back when my grandpa and father made that particular front step.

My hammock. It had a metal frame, and it swung. It was made of bright red canvas with white rope fringe, and the pillow was attached to it. It smelled so musty - years and years of being pulled into the house because of rain, or being left out in the rain, rolled up in a ball and put in a corner or behind the couch... Nowadays nobody would let a kid near anything like that! Eew! Mold!

Well, I loved that hammock. I napped it in every sunny day. From the swing to the hammock...

Then out to pick wild strawberries, or draw water from the well...

I made thread paintings of those strawberries, the well and bucket, the pot-bellied stove, the mice that were rampant, the groundhogs that lived nearby, whip-or-wills, jigsaw puzzles, the waist-high grasses, the old piano, the hen house...

All the thread paintings circled the depiction of the house. I did a family tree, right along the top edge of the quilt. And in the corners I put log-cabin sections of the Dewar tartan.

Well, it isn't a particularly organized quilt, but I put my soul into it. And spent a ton of money getting it down to my dad and stepmom - they live in Louisiana - by special delivery on a Christmas Eve. And they both wept, looking at it. My Stepmom said how many memories it was bringing back, what a treasure I had given them. I had made a sleeve for the back, so all they had to do was get a dowel through it and put two nails in the wall to hang it up.

I approached the topic of borrowing it back very gingerly, because I knew it gave my ailing stepmom so much joy to see it. Nevertheless, I did take a deep breath and ask my dad if he would lend it back to me for this particular event, and he said,

"Oh sure. If I can find it."

Gulp.

And today, two weeks after I first made the request, he said, "I still haven't found your quilt. I know I put it somewhere, I remember doing something specific with it, I just don't remember what..."

My stomach did a few flips. It's still doing them, if I think about it at all.

I want to say, "How could you? How could you lose it?" But I think I know.

Because I've inherited my father's short temper. I know, when I want to clean up, I don't always put things which I find in my way at the time where I should put them. I shove them somewhere. I'm pretty sure this is what's happened to my quilt. He wanted to move furniture around, which meant the wallhanging was being obscured by a piece of furniture, and he took it down and rolled or folded it up and put it away somewhere "safe", till he could "get around to" putting it back up...

Now, I'm only 52, and I know that "somewhere safe" means you'll never find it again, and I also know that people almost NEVER "get around to it." Dad is nearing 80 years of age, and he's more disorganized that I am. We'll be very lucky if it hasn't been put in the bottom of a plastic bag to go to Goodwill, or some such fate.

I love my dad very much, but I don't get along with him. He's never been a patient man, and he's gotten a lot worse since leaving his sixties behind him. We don't see eye-to-eye about politics, religion, television, children, movies, books... Actually, about the only thing we have still in common is our shared experience of that house in the country!

His memory is going - not of things long ago, but his short-term memory. Like threads breaking, worn out with use, exposure to sunlight, chemicals... I can see him failing, as I see myself failing.

I made that quilt to hold together the memories of three generations of people who lived in that country home. I hope it isn't lost.