November Cornucopia

 

The end of November has arrived, and so it's time for a cornucopia post. Here's a gathering of all the stuff I enjoyed reading, watching, seeing or listening to online this past month.

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A new zipper has been invented! Not for home use yet unfortunately, as it requires a special sewing machine (made by YKK and Juki) but it's super cool and inventive. 

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Probably too late for making for this year, but I thought this new twist on an advent calendar was pretty cool.

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Putting Pieowa: A Piece of America, on my to-watch list, as it sounds like a great documentary blend of quilt making and pie making.

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An Ecology of Quilts at the Folk Art Museum in NYC looks like a good exhibit to go see in person, but all the quilts you can see online are definitely worth a look.

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A great table runner design made out of big HSTs, and it's free to boot.

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A free quilt design from Art Gallery Fabrics, given as a Thanksgiving thank you, that is really quite striking, I'm putting it on my to-do list.

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I've just become a subscriber to The Flytrap, a worker-owned feminist media group. I'm enjoying the very good reporting and writing. Independent media is really so important these days.

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I think I've posted about comedian Josh Johnson before, but this interview with former Daily Show host, Trevor Noah is really worth watching. The two of them together in conversation is both hilarious and so thought-provoking. 

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I enjoyed listening to the most recent Rivers of London book (Stone & Sky) as well the most recent Thursday Murder Club (The Impossible Fortune). Both books were great, but the two narrators continue to be excellent. They're at-the-top-of-their-craft good, such a great variety of voices for the characters which really helps tell the stories. I love love love the Libby app, it works so well for me.

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Sew Share is a new sewing forum that I'm trying out, thanks to a heads up from Folkwear Patterns. You can find and friend me here.  

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I loved reading about the new discoveries found through the world-wide use of a super fun to use UC Berkeley-made app, iNaturalist. One of the world's largest biodiversity datasets is no small achievement.

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Due to the release of the second Wicked movie, here's a great post from The Internet Archive blog about The Wonderful Public Domain of Oz.

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Homeward Bound

 

Last block for Patchwork Palooza! It's an easy Log Cabin, renamed "Homeward Bound" for this quilt.

I put purple in the center, because that's our house with the purple trim. Finally I got to use the matchstick fabric, it's really a challenging print.

Here's a view of the whole group of blocks as called out in the quilt design. I will be moving them around I think.  But now on to making the sashing and cornerstones and get to assembling.

Come One, Come All

 

Happy Thanksgiving! Here's hoping that you're happy, well-fed, warm, and well today. Here's an illustration of how I'm getting to my family's celebration. And if you need some reading today, Atlas Obscura has seven Thanksgiving stories that are pretty entertaining.

I always love looking at historical illustrations of the various holidays we celebrate, this one from famous political cartoonist, Thomas Nast for Harper's Weekly in 1869. It shows what would be a very lively Thanksgiving dinner table. The words "Come One, Come All" and "Free and Equal" are written in the corners. And right in the center of the table is "Universal Suffrage" And "Self Governance". Sounds like a darned good feast to me.

Wandering Wednesday - Portland Japanese Garden

It was a real treat to get to visit the Portland Japanese Garden once again, and this time during a different season--Autumn, and with friend Jaye who hadn't been there before.

It was truly marvelous to see how different the garden looked with all the changing colors of the leaves.

This one maple was the most vibrant glowing red, it really stood out against the dark rhododendrons behind it.

There was a lot more moss happening which was lovely to see.

I loved the colorful messiness of the fallen leaves on the orderly raked gravel designs.

I really enjoyed this gorgeous artwork, Cross Currents by Anne Crumpacker, which is made of cross-cut bamboo.

Even the bonsai trees had color-changing going on.

This little leaf is So Big in this picture. It was really about an inch and half wide.

Now we come to some of the many pattern and texture pictures that I took during this visit. Honestly, I took a lot of the same pictures during my last visit with DH in the summer of 2024. I find these all very intriguing and worth examining for possible quilt designs.

Some would obviously and easily make great quilt designs.

This would be interesting piecing.

This makes me think of framing of interior quilt borders, or very heavy quilting designs. With the gorgeous colors behind of course.

This picture reads as a quilt design to me.

That's probably enough for now.

L&L Pink & White

 

Back to finishing up my fabric pull for the mystery quilt, Lupine & Laughter. The pinks are pretty and they have a huge range all the way from loud magenta to quieter peach pink and they cover all my eras of sewing as well. I think they'll work out. Are some of them maybe meant for the purple stack because they're actually a lot closer to lavender? Well, yes and we'll see how they're meant to be used.

Well, after seeing this picture, a lot of the black/white prints are really quite dark compared to everything else. I definitely do not have enough of the sort of white background prints to work with for this as was suggested by Bonnie K. Hunter in her instructions. So...I may have to substitute and use gray instead, as I have a whole lot of those that might be better. I just wanted the white/black, or W.O.W. that I had to work out. I'll have a look through my other bins to see if there are some white background with other colored prints that might be worth auditioning. I'm pretty sure that I have some but they're probably sorted with the colors.

This is a pretty good side-view picture of the whole fabric pull. I can definitely see some particular fabrics that jump out way too much to my eye that may not get used for this quilt. We shall see as I start piecing.

Lupine & Laughter

It's November, so it's time for another mystery quilt. I know, I know, it's another mystery quilt, didn't I just do one of those? Yes, I did. But it's a Bonnie K. Hunter mystery quilt again. I know from recent experience that she has great designs, and even better instructions. As you know, I took a very very long time to finish my quilt top from last year's mystery. But I really enjoyed making it, the whole process, all the piecing, learning all the tips and tricks, and coming up with something I am very proud of completing. Yes, it's not actually a completed quilt, but the top is completed. This was the most complicated quilt top I ever tried to make, and I actually finished it. So, based on that good feeling of accomplishment, I'm going to try again this year. 

And I will admit that part of my choice is based on the great title of this year's mystery quilt, Lupine & Laughter.  And even more than that, it's the colors involved, purple is one of the main ones. I love love love purple and have plenty of purple fabrics to choose from, as you can see above in my Purple Fabric Pull.

The ice blue requirement is a bit harder for me to come up with a lot of choices, but here's what I've got so far. I may swap another color out (like friend Jaye did with her mystery quilt last year). I do want to have that blue element though, because some lupines have quite a lot of blue in them. 

Pinks won't be too much of a problem, I have plenty of those. Haven't picked them yet.

Lastly will be the neutrals, in the instructions it was called out as more white than cream and fun neutrals. I liked the ones I used in last year's mystery quilt, there were quite a few black and white ones. Maybe I'll do more of those. 

So, that's the start of the start at least. 

Towel to Napkin

The beautiful rainbow toweling that I bought in Portland got washed (after I stay-stitched the raw edges. I cut the pieces apart with my gigantic pinking shears.

 And then I stay-stitched those newly-cut edges to hopefully contain the escaping fluff. That made ironing the edges into stitch-able shape much easier.

The pre-hemmed two sides of this toweling fabric makes this an easy process to turn these into nice big napkins.

I really like these new napkins, and I'm going to put them into immediate service.

Crosswalking

To keep motivated on the Patchwork Palooza front, after my recent catch-up, I decided to put them all up on the wall "in order" with the setting blocks (but not the sashing/cornerstones yet). Only two blocks left to make, and I want to make sure this scrappy thing is staying scrappy *enough* for me. Nothing says the blocks have to be in this arrangement, it's just the one the pattern designers came up with.

I did have the idea to switch this picture over to black and white, and wow, what difference this makes. The really hot one in the lower left corner is almost the same weight as the setting chain blocks.

In order to stay "caught up" with Patchwork Palooza, I jumped right on it and started making the newest one from this week, block number 20 (!), named Crosswalk. This was my initial fabric placement,

but I thought it was worth looking at alternatives. Much better.

I had to leave myself some breadcrumbs, ie labeling all the fabrics after swapping them around so many times.

The labels worked, and the block went together pretty easily.

 Just one more block to go...and the sashing/cornerstones and assembly of course.

Definitely too much of this one blue fabric down in the lower left corner, so those blocks will get sprinkled around the quilt I think, maybe in all four corners.

Checkerboard BOM

Here's my fabric pull for the BAMQ BOM that's running now through next year. I've chosen all prints in dark to light grays. Will I perhaps use some solids or even my hand-dyes? Perhaps. Will I put a little spot o' color in there? Maybe. Or maybe just maybe the quilting thread that I use will be all neon colors.

This was the first month's BOM block, a creation I came up with using HSTs. The idea was to make more than one of these, but altering the position/direction of at least one of the units that incorporates two HST blocks.

To test that idea out, I made another 12 HSTs

 out of the remainder of the 2.5" strips I'd used to make the first block. 

In this second version of it, which I also liked quite a lot. I really do find that HSTs are very very fun to play around with. See below to see how the two blocks look next to each other.

The new block this month is: Checkerboards. Which I am always drawn to (probably due to my late 70's Ska obsession). Making the checkerboard border in the Old Town Mystery quilt was very happy-making for me even though it took quite a while to accomplish. I truly love the look of it. So, here's my Checkerboard block for the BOM made out of 3" squares.
 

Market Day

 

Time to get all caught up with the most recently released Patchwork Palooza block, Market Day. Four fabrics, bright and right in the middle range of light to dark.

This was my original idea for the color arrangement. And yes, I didn't have quite enough of the orange with the little star/cross-hatch.

I liked this one a bit better.

There it is, number 19 all done. And just in time for this week's next block.

There it is! Seen with all the others way down at the bottom, it's still glowing though. It might be the "hottest" of all the block so far.

Wandering Wednesday: Tate Modern

As seen from Millennium Bridge, here's the Tate Modern. DH was calling it the Millennial Bridge was cracking me up as we walked across. This museum building is a former power station, and it's one of the best urban re-uses of an existing structure I've ever seen. And it's absolutely vast inside. 

We randomly chose which wing and floor to start on, and the very first artworks we saw just happened to a small room with this great painted quilts! What a nice surprise that was to me.

They're all works by artist Pacita Abad, and they are screen-painted, embellished and quilted works.

These are all so vibrant and beautifully done, what a great start to our visit to the museum.

Fun to see a Piet Mondrian, Composition C (number III) with Red Yellow and Blue. DH was more interested than his expression.

Andy Warhol also is very fun to see in person. They had an interesting curator video about cleaning this piece so it could be displayed.

There's a gigantic space between the two buildings, at least four storeys high called Turbine Hall, and they were installing a new exhibit. 

It looked super interesting, so I was a bit bummed we didn't get to walk through it. Fun to see the workers assembling it.

There were whole rooms that were art pieces, this one had sculptures and an anime video too.

I don't think I've ever seen the LOVE statue. Apparently there are different color combinations of it out there.

A massive Matisse colored paper collage named The Snail.

The shadow on the wall below the piece, 3Y 3B by Rasheed Araeen, shows the 3-d-ness, wonderful stuff. 

In the lower parts of the museum there are all sorts of interesting concrete structures from the former purpose of the power plant. There are several round rooms that have amazing sound design exhibits. I wish I'd taken a video to capture it, but I was too immersed in the experience (a good thing really).

So thrilled to have had a second chance to experience this awesome museum.