What I'm Reading Wednesday

Every so often I see a movie where I want to grab people and say, "You've really got to see this movie." In the last couple of weeks, I've seen two of those movies (thank you, Netflix!). Both are about people living in dangerous times under tyrannical regimes. In both movies, most of the characters are struggling with questions concerning how much of their sense of SELF they can give up in order to survive and not become someone else.

The first movie, which I saw this past weekend, is The Lives of Others (German, with English subtitles). It came out in 2006, and I meant to see it in the theater, and .... anyway. It won all sorts of awards, including the Oscar for best foreign film of the year. The movie concerns the Stasi (secret police) in East Germany in the 1980s, and the surveillance of "enemies of the state." There are SO many places where this movie could have gone seriously offtrack - violence, torture, sentimentality, big dramatic scenes - and it doesn't go those places. It is a quiet, carefully controlled film where one really gets inside the heads of the characters. Put this in your queue, borrow it from the library, whatever. Just see it.

The second movie, which I saw the weekend before last, is The Black Book (Dutch, with English subtitles). It also came out in 2006. I had never heard of it, and I'm not entirely sure how it got in my queue, but I'm glad it did. The film is set in The Netherlands in the last few months of the Second World War and is centered on a young Jewish woman who has been hiding from the Nazis through the duration of the war. The film starts with her losing her hiding place and having to find another way to survive. This is also a very intense movie, filled with lots of places where the movie makers could have gone seriously off track, but the movie stays close to the heroine as she struggles to make it out alive.

Both of these movies have been accompanying me on my daily rounds as I think through some of the decisions the characters made and why they made them. I like movies that do that to me. That's what I've been reading - subtitles!!

On a crafty note, I bound, sleeved (for the show), and labeled the Scraptastic quilt this past weekend, around my other activities. You'll see that I went with a different fabric for the binding. I had wanted to use this fabric, but I didn't think I had enough until I came across another piece of it in a different cupboard.

This weekend, the quilt guild had a "garage sale" where folks brought in stuff they don't want any more, and the rest of us buy it. I found a piece of fabric, at least 4 yards, possibly 5, for $1 that will make a great dress!

Isn't that pretty!!

The next few days will be taken up with The Ann Arbor Art Fairs. There are four official fairs and a couple of unofficial ones, and the closest to my office starts just across the street from the building where I work. Woo hoo!! Of course, I love to stroll the streets and look at the pretty stuff and talk to artists and buy special items; but, get real, the one constant every year is this:

A dinner-plate sized piece of fried dough sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar and eaten hot .... gotta run!

Scraptastic #7

It's quilted! A long weekend at the sewing machine, and I have achieved what seemed impossible. Here are some shots of the front:

and the back:

and the binding-to-be:

Keeping with the spirit of the rest of the quilt, this left over from a previous project (and was given me by a friend who'd received it from a friend of her mother and felt guilty that after 15 years, it was still sitting in her stash).

Later this week, I'll be taking workshops on Friday and Sunday with Vikki Pignatelli through our local guild. Yay!!

Scraptastic #6

I set an ambitious goal for this past weekend: get the top done. I figured it was an outrageous goal, and that I'd be asking my boss for some days off near the end of the month.....

Well, here is some "leaf" fabric (made up from squares left over from a previous project):

Here is a leaf prior to pressing and topstitching:

Here is a collection of leaves, pressed and stitched. (Gee, I wonder which first-grade skill I used in freehand cutting of these?)

And, amazingly, here is a completed top:

(The best place to take the picture was over the stair railing, which meant draping over the back of the couch, where Big Guy was napping; he was still half-asleep, wondering why he'd been disturbed.)

Now for the part I dread: Quilting the darn thing. I have some variegated blue and purple thread, and some variegated yellow and orange thread and some variegated green thread. I will be echo quilting, probably at about one-inch each round. I keep wishing I could just magically skip this step. Oh, well.

Scraptastic #5

I went back through my posts, and this is approximately the fifth post about my Scraptastic obsession. This all began last fall when I had lost my quilting mojo and was feeling overwhelmed by the scraps in the sewing room. I had finished at least three or four big projects and was feeling uninspired. So, I started sorting my scraps into color families and sewing them together at random. For pictures of that early part of the process, please go here.

Then, I made a couple of test pieces (and ended up quilting and binding the green one for a silent auction at my husband's workplace). Then, I made a larger piece for the silent auction that my quilt guild will have at its show this summer. Then in June, I dyed the background for the big quilt I'll put in the show - it's the scrunched blue near the top of the post. As of this morning, after a weekend of working on the quilt, I am pleased to show some real progress.

First off, the idea is a field of flowers under a sun. Last month, I created "dirt" from my brown scraps:

As you can see, I pressed the edges of the triangles under and topstitched all around. I then moved the triangles around on the quilt until I had them in a layout that pleased me. The end triangles are left and right isosceles triangles rather than regular isosceles triangles - to form edges.

In my last post, I was unhappy about the way the sun looked. At about midnight Friday night/Saturday morning, I couldn't sleep and went into the sewing room, hauled the thing down from the design wall and started scribbling on it with Prismacolor pencils.

I am pleased with how it looks. It's a little messy, but much less obviously BRIGHT YELLOW.

I cut down the very large diamonds I had cut out, and made several smaller flowers. I pressed the edges under, starched, and topstitched.

Once I had enough flowers, I could then start laying them out. When I was in college 30 years ago, I edited the student newspaper for a year and a half and learned basic layout skills. To this day, I start in the upper left corner of a "page" and move diagonally downward to the right and then put something interesting in the upper right. You can see this in the Brat Cat quilt. You can see this in this quilt.

That's the sun in the upper right corner. The faint orange lines are pieces of novelty yarn used to show the locations of the flower stems. Next, I went into the scrap box and pulled out stem-shaped pieces of green fabrics and laid those down.

Then, I trimmed, sewed together, pressed under the edges of the stems, and pinned the stems into place:

After I had the layout right, I started sewing down the stems and flowers to the quilt. At this point, the dirt is held in place with a single line of stitching across the bottom and pins the rest of the way. When I get the stems and flowers sewn down, I'll create leaves from squares left over from a previous quilt (the red, green, and yellow one shown here). I'll have more pictures soon, probably tomorrow.

In other news, I have been spinning 20-30 minutes each day of the Tour de France/Fleece. Here is two days' worth of spinning:

Friday Fill Ins - and lots more

1. When it's quiet I can read in peace.
2. I haven't rested in what seems like a month.
3. My heart is racing from all of the deadlines in July.
4. I want to survive July.
5. In the town where I was born there's a really pretty lighthouse.
6. Making dinner most evenings is something I really love about my significant other / friend.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to laundry, tomorrow my plans include baking Communion bread for the church and then going to the Independence Day parade in Ypsilanti, and Sunday, I want to make serious progress on my quilt for the guild's show at the end of July!

On to other news, since I have taken the process pledge to show my works in progress, here is where I am with a quilt that I've promised for the guild's show at the end of July:

Yeah. They're only pinned on (except the sun). This was going to be a queen-sized quilt until I got real. Now, it's twin-sized. Right. The "flowers" are not staying; they'll be replaced with smaller flowers. Here's the sun in close-up:

I am going to run to the art supply store today and get some PrismaColor pencils in yellows and oranges and see if I can't scribble out that weird yellow line in the upper corner.

As for the too-big flowers, I'm going to make pillows out of them. They are SO cute!

My plan at this point is to sew on the "dirt" I've got ready (pix soon, I promise), and then create "stems" and smaller "flowers." For those new to this blog, here is where I showed the beginnings of this process.

Because I don't have enough going on, I have also decided to be part of the "Tour de Fleece," and I am pledging to spin at least 20 minutes per day from July 3 to July 25. I'm hoping to take this:

to this:

It is Louet 50% wool, 50% soysilk. July will be a very interesting month....

Finished Objects Friday

Today, I am pleased to show off the two small quilts I have finished for the silent auction that will happen at our guild's quilt show this summer.

First up comes from a small top that someone else pieced, and I backed with a soft cotton jersey fabric. I thought this might work as a baby blanket. You can see that I did pretty minimal quilting in the ditch of the blue patches. In the sashing, I did simple diagonal lines, twisting the quilt 90 degrees each time I got to the edge of the sash. (Quilting is my least favorite part of the process.)

Yeah, the edges of the quilt are a little wavy. I'll steam it a little this weekend and see if I can straighten it that way. (Totally cheating, but I am NOT rebinding!)

I also quilted and bound one of the Scraptastic quilts. You'll see that I did echo quilting of all of the elements, putting the lines about 3/8" apart. For the binding, I simply folded over the back, straightened as I went, tucking as necessary (ooh!! naughty! The quilt police will catch that for sure!), and making it work.

It is not as wonky as it appears here, although I may go in and tack down the centers of those flowers a bit more.

I hope you all have a nice weekend.

Revisiting Past Finished Objects

This has nothing to do with knitting or crocheting, but of all of the projects I’ve done in the last couple of years, my favorite is the Cherry Lemonade quilt (not my name, but I like it). (73" x 95") I have been fascinated by the optical tricks that come from randomly strewing a lot of little squares of similar colors around. This probably comes out of my adventures in hand dyeing fabric and getting mottled effects. I also love the strong contrast of the yellow and green against dark red. I am thinking of making another piece like this, but with adding some scrappy flowers on top (see my previous Scraptastic posts for pictures of where I'm heading on this).

In terms of projects from which I learned a lot, it has to be my Cosmic Pluto top-down raglan sweater. It is a very comfy sweater, but my failure to measure correctly (that has resulted in a lot of swearing and resewing when doing garment work) really bit me on this project. I simply didn't make the sweater long enough, or the collar small enough. Within the past month, I added a collar in order to stiffen the neckline and keep the sweater on, and I am also lengthening the sweater, including throwing in about an inch of short rows (to compensate for a generous bum).

I'm Still Here!!

I am going to wrench the TV away from the NFL draft in a few minutes and claim it for "Project Runway." So, this will be a very quick post.

This past weekend, I pulled out the fabric paints and painted a canvas bag to use for schlepping my stuff (lunch, book, knitting, etc.) to and from work. I also used some of my Scraptastic pieces to really personalize it.

It has been so much fun lugging my stuff around in this bag this week.

This is the piece I made on Sunday. I like the look of several flowers, different sizes. I want to make more of these!! (This is about 20 inches by 35 inches)

This piece hangs over my cutting table, and it serves as both inspiration and reminder: (When I like a passage in a book, I pull out the watercolors and paint the words into a small poster. I have a few of these around.)

Finally, the Brat Cat was annoyed that I was in the sewing room, playing with a cat, and that she was not that cat. Here she is, looking peeved.

I plan to post something every day next week as part of a special blog around. See you then!

Scraptastic #2

When I posted the first Scraptastic pics a couple of weeks ago, I said that I had some ideas in mind about where to go. This is where I wanted to start. I keep looking at these, and I am not sure if I like them or not. I think I want to keep playing with this idea. The pieces below are 19" x 19". I am going to cut a larger background this weekend and put multiple flowers. What do YOU think about where this is going?

Trust me, these are reasonably square. The distortion comes from the angle of the camera.

In order to take these pictures, I had to move a certain someone whose nickname is "Baby Boy." When I got through taking the pictures, I put the cover back on the work and set him back on the cover. He wanted to cuddle.....

I said, "Okay...."

 Then, of course, I had to send a picture to Hubby Dearest for his entertainment.

Last evening, I finished reading Anne Tyler's "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" (1982). I spent about four days in this book, and I don't know whether I liked it. I am quite fond of her novels, but there was a character in the book who reminded me so strongly of someone in my life that it colored the way I read the book. The character, Cody, had such a warped understanding of his life and held such intense, unreasonable grudges that every time he came back on stage, my skin crawled. I kept wanting to shake him and say, "Please take about three steps back. Try to understand where everyone else is coming from." Of course, the tragic, fatal flaw in such characters is that they are incapable of doing so, and that flaw blinds them to the goodness around them, and it changes the way that other people in their lives relate to them. When people are trying very hard to not upset someone who flies off the handle at seemingly random times about even the most casual of remarks, it drains the energy of everyone around them.

On the list of the most influential books of my life is Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine." In the introduction to the paperback version of the book, he talks about "going around back and coming up and looking at the world through someone else's eyes and saying, 'Oh! So THAT'S how you see it!'" That sentence is probably the single most important sentence I ever read. It has governed every relationship I've had, and every time I've messed up a relationship, it's because I lost sight of the truth of that sentence. I think that's why a character like Cody in Tyler's "Dinner" affects me so much - because he never encounters that idea, and great suffering results from that absence.

So, what books or sentences have affected YOU?

Scraptastic Project

Since November, I have been working on a project with my scraps. Now, if you sew, you create scraps. If you're a quilter, those scraps are elements of your work. So, I had boxes and bags scattered around my sewing room with project leftovers. Something like the first picture. My brilliant idea was to sort the pieces by color family and sew them together at random into large pieces.

This past weekend, I started cutting the pieces into diamond shapes.

I have several ideas of where I can take the project from here, but the fact of the matter is, that I'm not really certain where I'm going. This has been such a fun project.