The first was a crinkle square. I don’t actually have a photo. I ruined the one that I made for the occasion, and had to draw on a backup. I do have an innovation to share, though: crinkle squares shouldn’t be a suffocation hazard to begin with, considering their small size and the fabric layer preventing a seal from forming, but for an additional point of reassurance you can hole-punch the plastic.

I tried something new for the rest of the gift: burp cloths made by backing cloth diapers with flannel. The diapers are quite absorbent and the flannel clings to your clothes, preventing the burp cloth from slithering down off your shoulder mid-spit-up. This was not my idea originally but apparently I did not bookmark the site I found it on (which was also not the origin of the idea, so I don’t feel too guilty). I got a package of 10 diapers by Gerber and washed them all twice (the first time their edges were quite crumply and I thought that might indicate they were mid-shrink – sure enough a second wash smoothed them out a bit). They seemed rather thin so I doubled them up.

The first three burp cloths were large: fabric cut 16″x18″, sewn face down to a pair of diapers at 3/8″ (i.e., presser foot at the edge of the fabric but needle ticked over to the left) with an opening for turning, then diapers trimmed around the edge and the whole thing turned right-side-out. After a good press I topstitched around the edge and did a little quilting to keep the diapers from sagging on the flannel. For the mushroomy one and the elephants I outlined parts of the design, and for the fruit I made some jagged lines. I had a lot of trouble with catching strands of the diaper cloth and shoving them down into the bobbin housing instead of piercing them, even with a brand new fine needle. Fortunately nothing was ruined.

After I made those three I put one on my shoulder and found it was rather large for its use (though the parents to be are both taller than I am and might not find them quite as overlarge), so with the remaining four diapers I made smaller cloths. Two of them had shrunk enough in the wash that they didn’t have a 16″x18″ flat region anyway, so theirs would have had to be reduced. I ended up making two with fabric that was 9.5″x16″ (out of the two diapers that hadn’t shrunk as much) and one with 15″x15″ fabric (out of the smaller pair). Their quilting was simple: for the checkerboard one, a sort of zigzag the long way, outlining the boxes, for the zebras wavy diagonal lines, and for the monkeys a single continuous stitch line from top to bottom that looped around the monkeys nearest its path.

I tried one other new thing as well: making my own card. I have a Cricut die-cutting machine that mostly sits on a shelf, and it was time to start really using it. The card took an unreasonable length of time given its simplicity (three die cuts on a purchased blank card with a colored border), but most of it was set-up. I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

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This month we start my ambitious First Friday efforts with art journaling. “Art journal” is a difficult idea to pin down (read: search for), and can mean a lot of things:

• A record of art projects (dates, materials, patterns, etc)
• A book in which to try out artistic techniques and materials
• A book-scale version of a vision board, or an active meditation
• A diary in which words are augmented by or replaced with images

All but the first are typically included in blogs and advice sites about art journaling. The last idea is the one I want to focus on, though with “diary” meaning any remembrance or meditation on your life – so the third version is intertwined with it. The important bits are that it is personal, drawn from and expressing your thoughts and experiences, and visual, in addition to or in place of being verbal. This allows you to engage with your feelings in a different way, or express the parts of your life that just don’t want to be put into words. It will almost certainly also be distilled or abstracted; instead of a story of all the details of the day, experiences will be presented figuratively, or individual pieces drawn out and given special prominence.

I feel safe saying that most people who art journal do so with drawing, painting, or collage. The fiber arts seem likely to be adopted only by people who feel a special connection to them. One such person is Susan of Plays with Needles, the inspiration for this month’s topic. I was fortunate to happen across her blog about the time of her first post about her Scotland travel journal. It is a work in progress, and I get excited whenever a Gaelic title shows up in my feed reader, knowing she’s sharing another part of her trip or her book. She’s given me permission to share photos.

The book itself has Scotland-themed fabric pages with pockets, places for needles, scissors, and floss, and a paper notebook tucked in the back. She made it in advance of her trip, to collect ideas and materials specifically for needlework, and is now turning it into a memento of the trip.

The photos come from a post preceding her trip where she describes her intent, and one since her return in which she also talks about how she made it – click through for many more views. Susan is also posting about “fiber tourism,” we might call it, including an antique needlework exhibit and Harris Tweed. You can see them all here.

Although it is nothing like a book, Melanie Testa’s project to journal via embroidering her clothing and bags is closely related; a shirt in that article has embroidery related to a trip she took, and on her personal journal she follows up with many posts about small bags she’s embroidering with skylines she sees, a profile of her cat, and other personal images.

I’m a slow embroiderer, but I love it, and now that I’ve discovered the joys of non-cross-stitch embroidery on evenweave I could see undertaking a project like Susan’s or Melanie’s. Or something smaller scale, like Jennifer Hunold’s daily journal embroidery on a single piece of fabric.

Thinking about fiber journaling reminded me of a daily quilting project I read about over a year ago. After a lot of frustrated searching (where is that website?!?), I determined it was “Quilting Day by Day,” an article by Nancy Halpern in the May 1997 issue of Threads magazine. I no longer have the magazine and the article is not available online (the part of me that never wants to get rid of anything began cackling triumphantly at this point), but I know she made a square every single day for a year, even if it was nothing more than a piece of appropriate fabric. I remember in particular a pieced airplane, tilted slightly upward, that she made several times for days taken up in travel, in different orientations to represent the direction. At the end she sewed the squares into a large irregularly-shaped sheet. It inspired me to think about doing such a thing for myself – but what a commitment! I didn’t even start. You can find other people inspired by Nancy, though, such as Laura West Kong (all posts about that quilt are here), Karen of Hat on Top, Coat Below, and Carla Louise of Oh Sew Addicted.

Fiber art journals are a difficult topic to search for, and the only other book-formed journal I found besides Susan’s is monthly paired mini-crazy quilts and embroidered journal panels from Million Little Stitches. In that vein, Doughty Designs made nine months of monthly journal mini-quilts, all separate. The embroiderers are in on the monthly journal projects as well, with a Flickr group begun by The Floss Box.

Of course many art journalers incorporate fiber into their paintings and collages, but I would be interested in seeing more work entirely in fiber art. The larger time commitment means some immediacy is lost, but also can make for a more thorough meditation on the topic. Have you journaled with fiber?

The stitching at the top is mine, presented to you courtesy my scanner (!) in this gloomy weather we’ve been having. “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember…” But if it looks like pine, well, that’s fine; pine symbolizes creativity.

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I took a few progress photos to give you a sense of how it went together.

The sky and water were made from pieced fabric, through a technique called texturing where you cut a slightly wavy edge, press it down a quarter inch, and topstitch it to the layer above. After trimming the lower layer to a quarter inch below the stitching, you can add the next one. Cutting a wavy edge rather than a straight one gives a more organic feeling to the piece. The perfect colors miraculously came out of Sally’s fabric stash.

The tree was black fabric on Steam-A-Seam cut out by hand with a previous copy of the photo on top of the fabric. It is on top of the sky but extends below the top edge of the water, for extra security.

The binding is one continuous strip, joined into a loop after being sewn on three sides and a couple of inches into the fourth on each side. It is turned to the back and hand-sewn down. I used corner pockets for a hanging rod; the binding is what’s called a French twist and is supposed to create its own rod casing, but the fabric I used was too narrow to accommodate anything but the tiniest of dowels, with virtually no overhang at the ends.

Unfortunately I basted by machine, which was not Sally’s intent, and couldn’t get the needle marks out. It’s a good thing I had basted with the direction of the design! I will know better next time. It was a wonderful learning experience, though, and I am more than happy with the way it came out.

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You can see the original bit of iron-on interfacing just under the image itself.

My original plan was to take the coordinating fabric and make a square frame around the center image, but I didn’t really put enough forethought into the process to do that. Instead, I sewed it to cover the partial images on two sides (sides on one coaster and top and bottom on the other), with pieces large enough that the raw edges were close to the center back, and folded another piece to match the uncovered image in front.

I think I may have swapped the two backings when I put them on, but that’s okay. They were attached with more Wonder Under. Then I found a coordinating color of bias tape (extra wide double fold, my standard kind) to cover the raw edge.

After sewing the hidden seam, I refolded the tape once, wrapped the ends around the edges of the coaster, folded the exposed corners so no raw tape edges would show, and stitched (somewhat sloppily) in the ditch with thread in two colors from the main images.

Then I mailed them to my boyfriend, who was appreciative.

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She (perhaps with assistance) made a whole bunch of four-patch quilt square kits, as shown above. The fabric varies from kit to kit. The ones I chose are a reproduction of a period calico, and a homespun-style fabric. The finished quilt will have squares divided by strips of plain fabric, plus a border, 4 squares by 7 squares for a finished size of 48″ by 84″ – they needed to be long to tuck under the foot of the cot. She cut enough kits for two full quilts.

Even with pressing and photographing it took me less than 10 minutes to sew the square. If you are interested in participating, quilt square kits are available at the front desk of the library and due back by May 29. We’ll have a little bee at the Sew-Op on June second to assemble the quilt faces, which will then go back to the librarian to be batted and backed. Later in the summer there will be a community event to tie the quilts, and then they may be displayed, raffled, or donated.

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Since I have a lot of crafts with near-term deadlines, I didn’t do any hand embroidery this round. There will be plenty more of that, but I wanted to get something completed without spending several days on it. Hence, more machine embroidery. This time I colored the page before doing the stitching, and made the page pastel and the stitching black, like scratch-off coloring pages that are black over colors. I also switched from regular zigzag to a special diamond-shaped zigzag.

That was actually the underside while I was stitching. You can tell the kind of thread I had in the needle: copper metallic. Metallic thread is hateful stuff, but I am continually drawn to it despite that. Here’s the upper side:

I worked it out and if the cover is included, I have to do a page a week from now on to finish the book on time. I’m not going to do exactly that; I’ll leave more for Thanksgiving and winter breaks. However, it was a boot to the rear to see those numbers! Starting in late November you can expect sketchbook updates to come slightly more than monthly.

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The title came before the design; I was considering a quilt of leaf-patterned fabrics but just wasn’t feeling it, and the Feeling Stitchy August stitchalong was on my brain as well. I started looking at the fabrics and seeing what I liked, and the rich, saturated colors were the ones that grabbed me. Colors are saturated when they are very far from a gray of the same lightness. I think of saturated colors as being Very: very intense, very themselves. They don’t have to be dark or primary colors, but they are not going to be neutral.

On top of the saturated colors I saturated the quilt with embroidery. I tried to find a way to put an additional level of saturation into the quilt but I didn’t want to be so literal as to make it evoke the molecular structure of a saturated fat, or the mathematical structure of a saturated bipartite graph. Two levels will do.

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Some related posts: Potholder examples 1, potholder examples 2, Embroidery for Edge Finishing (good choices for sewing down the binding).

Making faces:
The simplest way to make the fabric faces is to find a fabric you like and cut four 7″x7″ squares. There are a huge number of variations, though: you could stitch (heat safe) ribbon along a plain piece of fabric, or applique other fabric onto it, or employ any quilting technique. The two sets of potholders I made most recently were patchwork and confetti piecing.

For patchwork, I was rather imprecise: I have several 7″x7″ squares of paper, and I folded one in rough thirds diagonally, using a ruler to make sure the folds were parallel, and cut fabric with a(n unmeasured) 1/4″ seam allowance along the folded edge or edges. I had four kinds of fabric so I cut one inside third and two outside thirds of each, matched them up so no two faces had the same combination of fabrics, and sewed them together with a 1/4″ allowance. Then I pressed the seams open.

Confetti piecing may take longer but requires no measuring. You need more fabric for it than the total surface area of the finished faces, but you can also add more later if you discover you didn’t cut enough. I usually cut five to six faces’ worth of material for the four I am making. The different pieces should be sewn together with a 1/4″ seam allowance, but not necessarily squarely. You may lay one diagonally across the other, sew along the diagonal, and trim off the excess beyond the seam allowance. That excess may then be lined up with some other part of the material and sewn on. Press the seam allowance open after every seam, to minimize bulk. You may also cut a straight line across the material and stitch the halves together in a different orientation. Repeat until there is some region that looks like a good potholder face, cut out a 7″x7″ square, and sew the remainders together again as before (I think of this as “rolling out the scraps”). You can see why this takes a lot of material: lots of seam allowance, and little pointy bits sticking out unusably from the edges.

Try to continue the straight line of the template all the way across the fabric, to make using the leftover fabric easier.

“Rolling out the scraps.”

Construction:
I use fleece remnants for my padding. Any color is fine, so long as you line thinner/paler fabrics with muslin or white cotton to keep the fleece color from showing through. Cut four 7″x7″ squares and pin your fabric faces to them. Stitch around the edge at about 1/4″ and quilt them down the center in some way. My butterfly potholders had a stitched triangle somewhere in the middle, my patchwork potholders are stitched along the two seams, and my confetti-pieced potholders are stitched along some assortment of seam lines.

If the faces have an upper corner, align them so those match when you pair the halves up. Zigzag around the edges of the potholders. You could also straight stitch, but zigzagging keeps the edge from puffing unattractively under your bias tape and makes straight stitch unnecessary.

I cut a 14″x14″ square of fleece and pinned all four faces at once. I don’t think I recommend that, since it is still advisable to stitch around the edges of each face.

Edge binding:
Each pair of potholders uses about two yards of binding, or 2/3 of a package. You want extra wide double fold bias tape. Unfold it and pin one raw edge along the edge of the potholder (if the tape is folded unevenly, use the narrower half), curving around the corners. This takes a fair number of pins. Make sure you start a bit away from a corner so you don’t have to join the cut ends on a curve; to make the join, fold the right-hand raw edge (with the edge of the potholder facing away from you) in on itself and overlap the left-hand raw edge over it. See the pictures below: you want the exposed tape ends to point toward you when you sew the seam on your machine.

You want your raw edges downstream.

Stitch in the fold line all around the potholder. I often have to walk the machine with the handwheel around the corner curves, and even with that I sometimes have to redo one or two. Afterward, trim the potholder corners to match the curve of the bias tape, and zigzag around the edge again. Cut a 5″ to 5 1/4″ length of bias tape to be the hanging loop. If you have a desired top corner, make sure you pin the loop to it. Fold the bias tape in half so the open edge faces out (see picture) and pin to the opposite side of the potholder from the edging. I usually pin the edging down so it can’t get caught in the stitching. Sew the loop on in a straight line close to the corner edging stitch. Trim any bits that stick out past the edge and zigzag the loop ends down.

Fold the edging over to the loop side and pin down. At the join, unfold the original bias tape folds so that the outer layer of tape is completely wrapped around the inner layer. You may need to change the original fold on the inner layer, making the strip a little narrower, in order to get a smooth line.

There will be a separate post with my thoughts on choice of embroidery stitch for the loose end of the binding [edit: here it is!], but whatever stitch I use I proceed in the same way: start at the near edge of the loop and stitch the binding down underneath it. Proceed around the potholder until you reach the near end of the loop again. Pin the loop up, stitch across the base, and then stitch up the far side of the loop, around, and back to where you started (this is why the open edge of the bias tape should be outward: your stitches will seal it off).

I also wash the potholders in a mesh laundry bag and give them a press before wrapping them. As long as your embroidery is sturdy, there should be no problem machine-washing the finished project.

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I learned this from a lovely page on the Fibonacci numbers generally, that I found years ago while looking for teaching resources, and it came to mind when quilting friend of mine said she would love to make a Fibonacci quilt, but didn’t have a pattern.

My first design test is a stained glass quilt square. In stained glass quilting, the fabric is bordered by black or dark gray material (usually bias tape) to look like panes of stained glass. My square is 8″x8″ plus a 1/4″ allowance. Except for one corner, all of my “leading” was in straight lines, so I was able to substitute black ribbon for the bias tape I didn’t have. I attached everything with fusible web: Wonder Under for the contrast fabrics and Stitch Witchery, cut into thirds, for the ribbon. Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) kept me company.

I started at the top, and was able to hide all cut ribbon ends under other ribbon without any folding except for that lower right corner out in space. That took a fair amount of manipulating and some extra Stitch Witchery, and made me grateful for my retractable tweezer fingers.

My other ideas are more traditional quilt formats, and hence less intriguing to try out, but will follow in later installments.

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Last summer I made butterfly potholders from two calicos out of my stash and some heavier fabric (the dark green and brown) found at an antique store for a dime:

Usually I finish the edging with blanket stitch; this time I got fancy and used closed blanket:

I have two sets in progress (which of course are not going to be the sets I give at this summer’s weddings!), one casual and one more formal (sexy, even?):

The main delay on these is that the kimono and coffee appliques need to be stitched down, and I want them to be nice looking. Hence, hand embroidery, at which I am very slow.

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