When I thought about my requirements for those two categories, several of my projects started to change, and some dropped away. Quilts for Use have to be durable and not too precious, with no fragile embroidery or applique. Quilts for Art, on the other hand, have to be non-trivial, there has to be something special about them. And, they have to be smaller! There is nowhere in our house where you can hang a bed sized quilt on the wall.
Improv quilts will work well in both categories. My
Gwennie Medallion is something that I will be quite happy to hang on the wall...
...when it's done. ;) One of a kind, original, graphic -- improv sounds like art to me.
Two recent projects are going to the orphan block box. The first is the half scale version of
Brinton Hall that I started for my guild challenge:
I just don't think this will hold its own as an art piece. You have to be very close to see the embroidery, and when you stand back it feels drab. Plus, I still have the
big one for the bed.
The second one to bite the dust is the
150 Canadian Women quilt along, which is not feeling good to me any more. 30 blocks are done:
I was not thrilled when I realized that this quilt was excluding important women in Canadian history, such as
Laura Secord and
Elizabeth Simcoe, because they were not born in Canada. I admit I did not read that part of the introduction very carefully! But last week's inclusion of
Helen MacMurchy was the final straw for me.
The challenge of history is that when you go back far enough, you will almost always find something unpalatable by today's standards. MacMurchy was a significant figure for women's rights in Canada, so I understand why she was chosen. But she is not my choice, she does not represent the Canada that I want to live in going forward, and I don't think it is sufficient to say "those were the times then." This would be a quilt that I am making today, for the future. I don't want to spend the rest of the year turning over rocks in Canadian history, and making excuses for inexcusable things, so I'm going to let this one go.
On a brighter and completely different note, I've implemented a new plan for all my hourglass blocks.
Last time you saw this project, I was sewing the hourglasses as leaders and enders on
Allietare. That worked great, and all 896 of them were finished last year. BUT...
...the vast majority of them still required trimming. And I baulked.
I think I made a big mistake when I decided to make a large, time consuming project from fabrics I didn't like. For six months I've been thinking of ways to make it nicer. Different settings, applique... nothing seemed worth the effort.
Then last week I was thinking deep thoughts about improv, and I thought it could be a great solution for the hourglasses. Before I could change my mind again, I started to sew:
I just sewed together the untrimmed hourglasses, and used scissors to clean up the seam allowances. It turned out that a row of eight untrimmed hourglasses was about the same length as nine trimmed ones. I like those offset rows quite a bit!
My "plan" is to play around with different settings of the hourglasses, and make brick-shaped blocks like this. I've been admiring the green in
Kaja's latest work, and I think I'll use something similar for narrow sashing between the big bricks. We'll see!
I've been keeping some of the hourglasses in a project box on top of my wardrobe, for "easy access."
This has been the situation for six months. Maybe there has been some creation going on up there when I wasn't looking! The Improv box has some of my
early improv letters and words, and I've decided to stick them in this quilt with the hourglasses too. Would the embroidered roses from the Brinton mini work as well? Probably not, but we'll see.
Anyway, I'm still aiming for queen sized with this quilt. I like it so much better now, that even the fabrics don't seem so bad!
And I'm glad to be back at AHIQ. Please check out everyone else's work at the link up
right here.
