Food Friday--CSA Week 3

Sorry folks...last week was busy and I neglected to take pictures of my CSA adventures. Admittedly, I wasn't particularly adventuresome. I got big hunks of lettuce so I was mostly eating salads all week, although I did do roasted beets with goat cheese one night. Nummy. And I still have some green lettuce, and kale left from week 1 (boy, that stuff stores forever!).

CSA Week 3

Beets! More glorious beets! And all for me, since no one else in my family likes them. I'll try to do something marginally more creative with them this week, although I do love them roasted, and with goat cheese.










Also: 

• 1 yellow squash
• 2 zucchini
• 1 head bok choy (will the bok choy never end?)
• 1 head red lettuce
• 1 bunch carrots
• 1 head green lettuce (smaller than last week's, thankfully, since I'm still working off that one)
• 1 head Chinese cabbage

My daughter is in the process of making dinner while I'm prepping this blog post--I'm writing this on Thursday night so it can go live Friday morning. She's making penne, and will just be eating it plain with a little olive oil, garlic, and parmesan, her favorite preparation. I do believe I'll be adding some zucchini to mine. Maybe a tomato. Saut<&eacute>e it up with a little olive oil, garlic, and toss some shredded parmesan on the top, and you've got something there.

On Friday night's menu is something we do frequently around here, and I've got pictures from the last time I did it, but never ended up posting. I've talked about grilled pizza before. It bears repeating. I'm figuring this will be a good way for me to use up some of this week's CSA.

First of all, for recipes for the dough and sauce, check out my blog post on homemade pizza (with thanks, again, to Susan of The History Quilter podcast for one of the sauce recipes). Here I'm just talking about the process of doing a pizza on the grill. 

Pizza on the Grill

When you've made the dough using your favorite recipe and method, you start out rolling it just like you would to make a regular pizza. However, when I'm grilling, I like to make a thinner crust. It's easier to work with, grills more evenly, and the center will bake before the outside chars. (The dark spots in the dough are herbs. I like a flavorful crust.)

We also usually do personal-sized pizzas when grilling. Not only does that accommodate varying tastes and creativity, but it's easier to handle smaller pieces on the grill than one big pizza crust.

You oil both sides of the dough when you grill pizza, so I like to make an oil concoction with more herbs and a little garlic powder. And yes, I oil both sides before it gets on the grill. You could oil one side and then quickly oil the second while it's on the grill, but often my husband or nephew are doing the grilling part, so I'd just as soon have everything done in advance.

It's crucial to put waxed paper between the pizzas. And make sure the paper completely covers the crust. The dough will stick to itself and you'll have a nasty mess on your hands otherwise.

Hey, whatever it takes to grill. 

You'll put a couple on the grill at a time, directly on the grill. Make sure you've cleaned your grill and oiled the rack with a rag or paper towel and vegetable oil.

It's much like making pancakes. You'll see them start to look dry around the edges and then that dryness moves in towards the center, and bubbles start forming. (I like to poke the bubbles. It's fun.) When you think the bottom is ready, flip it over and do the other side. You want them to get done enough to put toppings on, but not fully done. You'll be cooking them again with the toppings, so don't do the initial grilling past a very light golden brown.

When it's done on both sides, take it off the grill and add whatever toppings flip your switch. You don't want to go too heavy on toppings--again, it won't grill evenly if it's too slushy or piled too high. But you can still be pretty generous.

When you put them back on the grill with the toppings on, do it over indirect heat to give the toppings the best chance of cooking through/melting before the bottom of the pizza burns. (If we're doing these for a crowd, I usually finish them off in the oven so some can be going on the grill while others in the oven. However, this is a tricky menu for more than about eight people.)

And then it's time to eat!

One of my favorite combinations: parmesan sauce (see that previous blog post), spinach, carmelized onions, and goat cheese. 

Tomorrow night I'm going to have to come up with a combination using something from my CSA pile instead. I'm imagining something Asian-inspired, with sauteed bok choy, chicken, onion, maybe a little pineapple, soy sauce...

I texted my nephew earlier this afternoon.

Me: "Grilled pizza tomorrow night. Coming?"

Him: "I'm so there." 

Total Color Tuesday--Fivesies and a Friend

I'm sorry, Jackie. Don't hate me.

We're still working our way through the analogous world. Last week: fivesies.

This week: fivesies with a friend.

Color Magic for Quilters refers to this as five side-by-side colors with an accent. Take five side-by-side colors, and then jump across the color wheel from any of those five and you'll have the accent.

I took it a little easy on myself again this week and turned to a package of Tonga Treats to start. (This is the Island Punch collection.) There I found my blue, blue-green, green, and yellow. I added in a yellow green from some scrap squares I have. I used some variations of some of the colors so there's more than five fabrics in that part, but they still live in the same segment of the color wheel.

I then jumped across the color wheel to find a red, and there it was, sitting in my fat quarter stash.

Here's a better picture of the fabrics.

It could work. If I were making this for realsies, I'd hunt more for a red accent that fit the milieu a little better, but this one could fly in a pinch.

Turning to the Ives (CMYK) color wheel favored by Joen Wolfrom, I pulled out Wolfrom's 3-in-1 Color Tool to see if I could do fivesies and a friend based on that wheel as well.

Unfortunately, since there are more colors on the Wolfrom-preferred color wheel, it's a lot harder to do this one from my stash. I just don't have the selection. But here's one option of what fivesies and a friend would look like if I had just the right fabrics.

Your turn!

Link up here with your own blog posts describing your playtime with fivesies and a friend. If you've already done this (because you were bored with straight analogous, perhaps), try doing a different set of colors just for fun. Looking forward to seeing your posts!

Sneak Peek...

Not to interrupt the Total Color Tuesday playtime, but I know this week's may not garner as many responses. It was a toughie.

Meanwhile, here's a sneak peek at my current work in progress...

Total Color Tuesday--Fivesies

First, a big shout-out to the following who have been my playmates on Tuesdays so far:

• Jaye
• Nonnie
• Darla
• Jackie
• AJ Dub
• Landscapelady

Thanks so much for hanging out with me. It's so much fun seeing what y'all come up with! Everyone else, time to join in--it really is a lot of fun and it's a good excuse to pet fabric for awhile. Plus, I'm finding fabric I'd forgotten I had, and I don't even have that big a stash!

This week was a little tougher for me. I didn't come up with any combinations out of my stash that I thought would actually work in a quilt that I'd want to make. This is a color harmony that, if I should choose to use it, would make me take a road trip to my LQS, color wheel in hand.

This is also one in which it really did make a difference which version of the color wheel you're using--the standard 12-point one that we're mostly all used to using (see below), or the Ives/CMYK wheel with 24 points (pictured left): Notice how many more colors the Ives wheel--used here in the Joen Wolfrom 3-in-1 color tool--gives you to work with. More about that below.

This week:  Five side-by-side colors.

Or, analogous on steroids.

Technically, Color Magic for Quilters points out, this would be called an extended analogous color harmony.

I have a mug with an illustration from the original Winnie the Pooh books and the caption, "I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me."

Fivesies it is.

Color Magic suggests that this color scheme is successful for the same reason that the standard analogous scheme is successful--the five colors all have a common root color with each color to either side, so they flow naturally from one to the next.

Depending on where you start on the wheel, you could have all warm colors, all cool colors, or a mix. However, because it moves step-by-step from warm to cool (or vice versa), it's not quite as shocking a color harmony as those that hop directly across the color wheel for an accent. It would still have a little of that feel to it, but it would be a little more of a peaceful transition.

Play time.

I struggled mightily with this one, like I said above.

I started out using the Ives/CMYK wheel (3-in-1 tool) and worked my way from blue violet to magenta. It goes: blue-violet, violet, red-violet, purple, magenta.

Issue #1: What the 3-in-1 color tool defines as purple sure looks like what I've always thought of as red-purple! Regardless of what it's named, though, I worked with the swatches on the tool itself, holding it up to my stash to find the fabrics that seemed to work best.

Issue #2: Using a 24-point color wheel means that your five colors are much closer together in nature than when you're using a 12-point color wheel. So it's harder to feel like there's much of an accent in there. It's still possible to go cool and warm, but it's going to be less of a transition from color to color.

Believe it or not, every fabric there really does match one of the swatches on each card--lighter or darker in tone/shade. I'd never make that quilt, though--which goes to show (as everyone knows) it's not just a matter of matching swatches. You really have to figure out which ones play nice together.

I bagged the purple thing--don't have enough of those five colors in my stash to find anything that was going to work.

Starting with green, and switching to the other standard 12-point color wheel, I worked my way around to orange. This was more successful, although I wasn't a fan of the dark dark green on the end.

(Technical difficulties--can't get the picture to stay rotated in position when I upload it. Sorry about that, but you can see what you need to see so hopefully the odd perspective doesn't make you woozy.)

I swapped out a couple of the greens and tried again. This one is more successful although, if I were a stickler about it, the one green has blue dots, which aren't part of this color harmony. And I still wouldn't make a quilt out of this combination. (Again, it won't rotate. Blogger is giving me fits today!)

So, your turn. Here's hoping you do a lot better than I did with this one! Can you do five side-by-side colors, or fivesies, from your stash? 

Slow Quilt Monday--and a Few Other Items

I finally broke down and bought some Bobbin Mates so that I could stop guessing at which bobbin in my little bobbin holder actually matched the thread I wanted to use. They mostly work pretty well--and you'll see in a couple of cases you can pop two bobbins onto it if, like me, you realized that for some unknown reason you never finished one bobbin before loading a second.

The only thread I own that they don't fit well is my Aurifil which, as you know, is a significant proportion of my thread stash. But balancing it on one edge and propping it up on my thread holder on the wall just so actually isn't too bad. I haven't had any fall off yet. Workable, anyway. Now my thread stash feels just a little bit more organized.

In terms of works in progress, now that I finished Joy I'm feeling the need to finish the gift for my pregnant friend and get the baby quilt done this week, if possible. So I've started making all the required half-square triangles.

This is the method I'm using: Cut two squares an inch bigger than desired finished unit; draw quarter inch seam lines on either side of the center line; sew down each drawn line; cut in half. Press the triangles open, square up/trim down to necessary size. Easy schmeasy, and you can easily chain piece a bunch of them. (By the way, I cut my squares 1" larger than my desired finished unit because I wanted some wiggle room. The standard formula is 7/8" larger but, really, who is that 1/8" going to kill? I like nice round numbers in my math whenever possible. My brain hurts less that way.)

This method is even easier when you use a tool like the Fons & Porter Quarter Inch Seam Marker. Yes, I could line up a regular ruler to draw the line on one side and flip it to draw the line on the other, but there's always the chance for variation based on exactly where you line the ruler up along that center line each time. As we all know, 1/16" here and there can make a whole big difference when multiplied by lots of blocks. I prefer to use this ruler. It comes in a package of two sizes for the one price.

Where is my slow quilting this week in all my talk about chain piecing and efficiency-building rulers? It's in my head. While I'm going through the rater mundane, rote motions of drawing lines and cutting in half, I'm designing my next quilt in my head. I'm also finding that my Total Color Tuesdays are already influencing what my plans are for that next project. (Be sure to check out the linkies on those posts! Folks are playing along!)

Also, this weekend my husband and I went hiking. How can one not be inspired to quilt?

(Taughannock Falls State Park, near Ithaca, New York.)

Food Friday--Let the CSA Adventures Begin!

I've decided to do a CSA this year for the first time. What's a CSA, you may ask? CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. When participating in a CSA, you buy "shares" in a local farm and, in return, get fresh produce each week. The farmer's markets near us are at times that are difficult for us to fit into our schedule, and although I grow my own herbs, we've had terrible luck with tomatoes in the last few years and I travel quite a bit over the summer, leaving the bulk of the responsibility for summer gardening to my husband. He enjoys gardening, but works long hours himself. So our garden attempts the last few years have been pretty sad.

I finally tracked down a CSA near enough for me to make the weekly pick-ups pretty easily. Last night was our first pick-up.

In this week's bag: peas, kale, romaine lettuce, Swiss chard, and bok choy. I was afraid we'd get too much to handle but this feels do-able.

Both my daughter and I are fans of certain raw vegetables, straight off the vine. The raw peas made a very tasty appetizer while I was washing everything and figuring out what I was going to make for dinner.

My husband was out for the evening at a work thing, so it was just my vegetarian daughter and I. We decided to go on a cooking adventure and just make it up as we went. Well, "we" being in the royal sense, as it turned out. Normally my daughter does like to help cook but she had two late nights in a row so she begged off; I stuck her with loading the dishwasher after dinner instead. Not a bad trade-off, in my mind. I got to play with new toys, so to speak, as I messed around with new-to-me-produce, and she did most of the kitchen clean-up.

Here was my resulting dinner! (My daughter skipped the salmon and ate her bok choy with some vegetarian chicken nuggets.)

I wasn't as creative with the salmon as I could've been--just sprinkled some five-spice seasoning on it and baked it. I spent too much mental energy on the bok choy. Bok choy is something I've never cooked before, although I've eaten it plenty of times in Asian foods--usually in soups, I believe, although a lot of the Burmese meals I get to eat with my new arrival friends probably have it as well.

I put together a concept in my head and then checked my ideas by some recipes online. Yep! I was in the right ballpark. And it turned out mighty tasty, if I do say so myself! So, here's my recipe for this week:

Sandy's Sauteed Bok Choy
Ingredients:
2 bunches bok choy, chopped into 1-2" pieces.
1/2 medium onion, diced or sliced thin
1 tsp grated fresh ginger
garlic to taste (garlic powder or fresh garlic)
2-3 tbsp oil
3 tbsp low-sodium soy sauce

Directions:

• Heat oil, then add onion and ginger and saute for a few minutes until onion begins to turn translucent.
• Add garlic and saute for another minute.
• Add bok choy and saute until it cooks down slightly, then add soy sauce.
• Saute for about 7-8 minutes, or until bok choy stems are crisp-tender.

 Notes:

• As usual with my own recipes, all amounts are approximate and depend on what you've got on hand, as well as personal taste. I had three or four bunches of bok choy but a couple of them were quite small, so knowing what I typically see available in the grocery story, I'm thinking two larger bunches would be the equivalent. I just used garlic powder this time but fresh garlic would be better, as fresh usually is.
• I used low-sodium soy sauce and didn't add any other salt. If you use regular soy sauce, you may want to use less. This was just about the right saltiness for me.
• The bok choy, like any leafy green when you put it in heat, cooks down quite a bit. Using all four bunches that we'd gotten gave me barely enough for my daughter and I, and you can see our servings weren't that big.

Food Friday posts are making a comeback this summer as I go on my CSA adventure! Here are two cookbooks that were highly reviewed on Amazon that I'll be consulting (although I didn't tonight):

The Farmer's Kitchen: The Ultimate Guide to Enjoying Your CSA and Farmer's Market Foods, by Julia Shanks and Brett Grohsqal (CreateSpace, 2012). Looks good, but no pictures with recipes. I miss having pictures. Looking forward to trying the recipes, though.

From Asparagus to Zucchini: A Guide to Cooking Farm-Fresh Seasonal Produce, by Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition (Jones Books, 2004). Again with the no-pictures-thing. When I'm trying to identify produce, a nice color picture would be extremely helpful.

Both of these books have good tips on storage, as well as a wealth of recipes. I have another book I've requested through my public library that was recommended by a friend--I'll let you know about that one when I get it.

I'll leave you with a moment of quilting inspiration...Swiss chard stems. 

(Match those up to your color wheels, why don't you?)

Total Color Tuesday--Analogous with an Accent

...and I don't mean a color scheme with a drawl. Ar ar.

This week we're looking at three side-by-side colors again, although this time we're twisting it up by jumping across the color wheel to the opposite side of any of the original three colors and choosing an accent color. Some legalists might suggest that you have to go opposite of the color in the middle, but really, you don't. The opposite color of any of the original analogous buddies will work just fine as an accent.

This has traditionally been referred to as "the pop of color," or "the zinger." I remember in my early quilting days a more experienced quilter told me, "You always have to have a zinger in your quilt." Well, you know how I feel about absolutes like "always" and "never." Really, you don't always have to. And, in fact, we've already dealt with two color harmonies that distinctly don't have a zinger. But it is a very effective color harmony to use and one that I do tend to find myself using fairly frequently. Things looking a little dull in your color choices? Take a quick hop across the color wheel and see what happens!

Color Magic for Quilters also points out that part of the reason that this works so well is because you're now automatically blending warm and cool colors in a single quilt. No matter where you are in the color wheel, the opposite side will be the opposite heat factor, so to speak. And that just makes things cook.

Let's Play!

I started out my experiments by going back to my analogous choices from last week, and hopping across the color wheel. Well, that was really too easy, since that same collection had already done that for me with one of the other fabrics in the same line.

Yellow-green, green, and blue-green--skippity hoppity and you've got red in any of its shades or tones. In this case, a nice dusty rose/pink.

Lots of prints use this color harmony, by the way. It's pretty easy to find a print and then pull fabrics with colors from that print, and discover you've done an "analogous with an accent" color scheme without even trying.

But I wanted to try. So I put those fabrics away and started over.

I got this poppy little fabric on sale from Hancock's of Paducah last week. It looked fun to play with, since I'm working smaller scale now and could get any number of color combinations or textural elements if I use little bitty pieces from this.

I got out Joen Wolfrom's 3-in-1 Color Tool and checked the fabric--yep, analogous with an accent. Although a little trickier since she uses the Ives Wheel (aka CMYK) and there are a whole lot more divisions. So I was generous with myself and decided that yellow, orange yellow, and magenta were more or less analogous if you compared it with the smaller standard color wheel of yellow, orange, and red. (So I wasn't quite as much a stickler with myself this week. Sue me.) Jump across, and there's blue-green.

This is the first set I came up with. Technically, it all works. Next to the print is a yellow-to-yellow-orange-ish fabric, followed by a very, very light teal (or blue-green) batik, followed by an orange solid, followed by a magenta batik, closing out with a teal batik.

While it works by the color wheel, it wasn't working for me. Something about it wasn't jazzing me, so I kept going.

I tried swapping out the yellow (second from the left) with a brighter yellow/orange batik print.

The other yellow matched the color better, but this one matches the mood better, I think.

But I'm still not entirely happy, so I play on...

This time I tried changing the magenta (second from right) with a different magenta that reads a little more to the orange. I do think that one works better than the other magenta.

So, yes, this could make a quilt.

Still, I'm not positive this is a quilt I'd make.

But it was fun to play.

Your turn!

Link up your playtime! What does three colors side-by-side with an accent mean to you?

Slow Quilt Monday--The Word

For some of us, of course, the phrase "The Word" has distinctly religious connotations. For others of us who make our livings by the written or spoken word, it may also have slightly spiritual connotations. For me, language is fascinating and irritating at the same time. So many nuances...and yet, like cable channels, still there are times when despite the myriad choices we can't find the word to express exactly what we are thinking or experiencing.

Still n' all, we may not particularly equate words with quilting. In fact, I've often stated that for me, quilting is a great relief after spending an entire day in the world of words. Instead, I get to play with color, shape, line, and all those other non-verbal things.

But lately I've been giving a lot of thought to using words to inspire design. I mentioned this in passing in the podcast episode that just went live on Sunday--how the word "Joy" came to be the guiding principle in the work I just finished, and how I'm already working on another piece inspired by a single word. Our Design Study Group just completed a session on using words as inspiration from the Lorraine Torrence book as well.

When you look at a quilt you're working on, do you find that there's a word that becomes your guiding principle, your theme, the touchstone you keep going back to? "Does this color match my word? Would this piece better exemplify my word?"

If not, is that something you'd like to play with?

Sometimes slow quilting is simply playing with ideas in your head. Choose a word that would have meaning to you, and then imagine what kind of quilt you might design that would express that word in some way to others. What colors would you use? What shapes would appear? What kind of borders might best carry the word through to the outermost edges? You can just play in your head, or with colored pencils, or your fingertip and a touchscreen tablet...whatever way you like to doodle.

You may never make any of the quilts that you play with in your head or on paper, but each one still influences whatever you do actually make later!

Randomness and a Finish

1. My friend Lori from guild took my left-over baby receiving blanket flannel scraps and turned them into adorable stuffed bunnies. Bunny is now a spring decoration in my home. He makes me smile.

2. I need a pedicure. Not at all related to #1.

3. It's officially summer by my clock. I got in the pool for the first time today. Hence noticing #2.

 4. Stonyfield Organic Low-Fat Vanilla Yogurt, frozen pineapple chunks, frozen mango chunks, a fresh banana, and a splash of orange juice make for a wonderful, vacation-y-feeling breakfast smoothie. A little beach time without the beach. Or the time. But we'll take what we can get. Puts me in the mood for #3 and, by extension, #2. Maybe I'll bring #1 with me to cuddle too.

5. I finally finished "Joy"! It started out just playing with shapes, but that word kept coming to me and became the guiding principle.


5a. It's the joy that I've witnessed in the lives of so many women. Women who have been through Some Stuff. And yet, joy abounds.

5b. I learned how to let go.

5c. I discovered the fun of just cutting shapes and seeing what happens.

5d. I learned to be okay with the fact that a fern suddenly looked a whole lot more like a big speckled bird. Conversation piece.

5e. I listened when my quilt told me it needed another fern peeking out from the side, behind the border. "Okay. Whatever you say. You're the boss."

5f. I took my time, redoing a figure several times over until I got one that was more or less the shape I was going for. I found fascination in noticing the slight changes in line that could create a whole different sense of movement.

5g. I had fun using some great fat quarters I've had kicking around for awhile and never quite knew how to use.

5h. Some pieces are just too dang small. Even for fusible, raw-edge applique. I'll cuff myself upside the head next time I start doing little bitty feet or arms. (Note the woman bending over in the back of the top picture. Her appendages gave me fits.)

5h. I learned when to say "enough is enough," let a project call itself done, and get ready to move onto the next in the series.

Total Color Tuesday--Analogous

Before we start--some quick business to take care of.

1. Have you checked out the linkies to last week's Total Color Tuesday post? Several folks have linked up with their own monochromatic (aka "single color harmonies") quilts or their own exploration of stash. Yay! Thanks for playing along, everyone! I had a great time looking at what you had come up with, and we had a really interesting cross-blog conversation about green going on. Great stuff.

2. I've been asked if I could post at the end of one post what next week's color harmony is going to be so folks could start working on that. The reason I'm not doing that is because pretty soon we're likely to be getting into color harmonies that are less familiar so I need to do some 'splainin' first, which is what each week's blog post is about anyway. Clear as mud? The bottom line is, each time you've got a whole week to link up before the next week's post.

Three Side-by-Side Colors, AKA Analogous

creative commons license

This week's exploration: Three side-by-side colors, also known as "analogous."

By the way, I'm assuming we're all using the fairly standard 12-color version of the color wheel. Some color wheels have as many as 24 (see Joen Wolfrom's poster version). So picture the 12-color when you're thinking about what colors sit next to one another on the color wheel.

Analogous is three colors side-by-side on the color wheel. Hence:

• Green, Blue-green (or teal), Blue
• Orange, red-orange, red
• Yellow-green, yellow, orange-yellow...

You get the picture. Analogous, or three side-by-side color, harmonies work well because each color shares something in common with the one next to it. According to Color Magic for Quilters, "Because the colors are closely related, your eye travels easily from color to color. The result is a color scheme that is peaceful and balanced, even when warmer colors are involved," (p. 31). 

In analogous schemes, the colors can be used in equal amounts or varied. And, of course, as usual, you can use neutrals.

Let's Play!

This one took awhile for me to put together. I had at least four different piles working as I tried to find an analogous scheme that I could actually imagine putting into a quilt. I finally landed on this one.

The large butterfly print was my starter print for this set--it has yellow-green, green, and blue-green in it so it's analogous all by itself. Gray and black are the only other colors.

A couple of the other fabrics are from the same collection, but I added in a others to complete the analogous theme. The yellow-green in the center and the green at the top wouldn't necessarily look right next to each other. But with the rest of the fabrics buffering them, I do think it works. And I'd probably keep that yellow-green only as a minimal accent anyway. If I were really making this quilt, I'd look for another very light fabric--probably an extremely light gray or teal. (And yes, what might look blue on your monitor really is clearly teal under my Ott light.)

Your turn! 

Linky up with your blog post playing with analogous color schemes (or to quilts you've made in the past using an analogous scheme).

Slow Quilt Monday--The Quilt Whisperer

Are you a Quilt Whisperer? 

Do you let your quilts talk to you? Let you know what they want? What they need?

Do you let them just hang out with you for awhile? Lounging on your cutting table? Leaning casually on your design wall, watching you as you go about your day? Do you hear them occasionally trying to get your attention?

"Hey. Have you thought about pink? I'm sorta in the mood for some pink. Right here, halfway down my right side. I don't see pink on anything else that you've made lately. Might make me different. I like being different."

"Could you put down that rotary cutter for a minute and come here? We need to talk. I'm just not feeling this border. Makes me look fat."

And what about...

"Hey. Over here. No. Inside here. I'm that quilt in your brain. I'm the one that woke you up yesterday--remember? I came to you in a dream--really, I did! You woke up and were sort of excited about me, and then your kid needed your help figuring out what to wear to school and then you needed to get your coffee because we all know what you're like before caffeine and then you decided you'd really better get a load of wash in before getting ready for work then you had two back-to-back meetings right away and thousands of emails and phone calls and by the time you got home your kid needed help with her homework and you can't really remember seventh grade math very well anymore and trying to do that while getting dinner ready was a real trial and by the time you--or she--was done with her homework you crashed on the couch in front of bad sitcoms then dragged yourself up to bed and...well...you sort of forgot all about me. But I'm still here. Waiting. See that sketchpad over there? Why don't you at least make some notes about me before you forget me again. I might start taking it personally."

Quilts can actually be quite entertaining company if we just take the time to get to know them. 

Excellent senses of humor.

Very understanding and patient.

But, like petulant teenagers, they can
get very pouty and annoying if we ignore what they're trying to say to us.

I've had quilts work my very last nerve. 

But that's usually because I wasn't listening in the first place.

Total Color Tuesday (Launch post!)

As I've mentioned, I've been doing a lot of reading on design principles and the like. Lately, I've been reading Color Magic for Quilters by Ann Seely and Joyce Stewart. Now, there are a ton of books out there on color for quilters. I just happen to be using this one. I'll do a full review on an upcoming episode of my podcast. But for now, suffice it to say that the book spends a chapter on each color scheme of the color wheel and talks about applying it to quilts. And it goes far beyond the usual monochromatic, analagous, split-complementary and other schemes we're used to seeing in these kinds of books.

I thought I'd play with it, and suggest you play too. What I'm doing to do is go through the color schemes in the book, one per week (on Tuesdays), and see if I can pull fabrics from my stash that might fit that scheme. So each week, I'll imagine, "If I were to make a quilt entirely from my stash using this scheme, what might that look like?

And then I'll post a linky on that blog post for you to do the same--once you see the color scheme of the week, try it for yourself and link up to my blog with your attempts. If you have tiny stashes, go ahead and use EQ or something like that--but it is important to use actual fabric or fabric images. It's much harder that way than just putting some plain colors onto a computer monitor!

So, this week we're starting with one color. Color Magic refers to this as "single color harmony," and, of course, it's more widely known as monochromatic. 

Monochromatic use a single color--but you can use shades, tints, and tones within that color. You can also add neutral fabrics if you'd like--white, gray, black, for example, don't add actual (technical) color to a monochromatic scheme so they're legal, if you like to think in those terms. 

Contrast and scale are crucial here. If all of your fabrics are the same value and all the same scale of print, it'll most likely be a less exciting quilt than if you're able to have nice contrast, and a nice contrast of scale as well (large prints, small prints, "read-as-solids," etc.).

Play time.

BTW, I had to work very hard to find prints that had no other colors in them. That was probably the trickiest part. (A multi-colored print is no longer monochromatic, right? At least, if we're being legalistic about it, which for the purposes of this play time I chose to be.)

I started with greens. This one took me awhile to find a set I thought might actually work. My stash of greens didn't want to play nicely together for some reason.

I don't think there's quite enough variety of scale of print in this one. Not my favorite, but it could work.

The blues feel a little more successful because I have a wider variety of scale of print, and some of the blues are less muted than the greens were, so there is more variation of saturation (if that's the right term).

The blues were a little more social. It didn't take me as long to find a set that I could easily see being made into a quilt.

And here we have pinky-orange. Or orangey-pink. I have very few pinks in my stash and was surprised to find that several of them were actually this same type of pink--sort of salmon, or coral, or whatever you'd call it.

The fabric in the center is interesting--it looks purple when you put it next to some fabrics, pink when you put it next to others. That's probably one of the biggest things I've taken away from this exercise so far. As value is a relative thing, so can be color. What color seems to be dominant in a fabric can be just as relative as its value. Try to do this with taupes and see what I'm talking about! (Taupe is probably one of the most chameleon-like of the color families.)

So, play with your own stash. How would you make a monochromatic quilt with what you have? Link to the specific blog post, please! (If you've already made a monochromatic quilt, you can link back to that blog post as well.)

Slow Quilt Monday--The Crappy First Draft

I took a rather unintentional hiatus from my blog schedule of Slow Quilt Monday, Donation Quilt Wednesdays, and Food Fridays because I needed some time to regroup after getting back into my workaday schedule. However, that hiatus also gave me some time to ponder and process, so it turned out to be a good thing!

One of the things I worked on mentally while I was on sabbatical was, with credit to Anne Lamott for the wording, the concept of the "crappy first draft." (I apologize to any for whom that may be a distasteful word, but it's the best one to really describe the concept!) Lamott's book about writing, Bird by Bird, can apply to our entire creative lives, really. She talks about how our first responsibility is to get the story on the page, let the characters tell us who they want to be, and let the plot reveal itself to us--no matter how messy it is to start. That when we start worrying about who will want to read it, or whether it'll ever get published, we stymie ourselves and the creative spirit within us. First things first. Just write that crappy first draft, and worry about everything else later.

That really spoke to me.

I do have perfectionist tendencies but, then, I think most of us do. We don't like to start something unless we're pretty sure it'll turn out well in the end. When it comes to making quilts, we convince ourselves that fabric is too expensive to waste, so we shouldn't cut into it unless we know the color combination is just right, or the design will have exactly the impact we want, or whatever. And so, there are a lot of quilts in our heads that never come into being because we don't have enough faith in ourselves that they'll actually work.

I have since developed a remarkably devil-may-care attitude towards my fabric.

I have come to the following understandings of my quilting:

• There are a lot of projects that will hit the trash can. I'm okay with that, because they will have been valuable learning tools. (General wisdom always says those projects should be saved into a book with copious notes about what worked and what didn't. But I have limited space, so probably not.)
• There are a lot of projects I'll make that I'll really like but no one else will "get." I'm okay with that too. If I enjoy it, that's the main thing. As for everything else, see next items.
• I'm not making projects to get applause at my guild's show n' tell. (Although I'll get that applause--they're very kind that way, fortunately. Everyone gets cheered on. Love my quilt peeps.)
• I'm not making projects to put in a show. I might decide to do that later, but that's not why I set out to make them in the first place.
• I'm not making projects to turn out a masterpiece. One might become that eventually. But I don't need that pressure in my head.
• I'm making projects to have fun. I'm making projects to play with a new technique, color combination, design principle, or whatever. (Note the very intentional use of the word "play.")
• I'm also a storyteller. I want my quilts, more than anything, to tell a story. Or convey a mood or a concept.
• And, yes, my quilts will be made slowly.

Awhile back, there was some conversation that floated around between a few of our quilty podcasts (mine and others) about the difference between product and process in the quilting world, and whether or not you're a product or process quilter. I'm definitely in the process camp now.

Slow quilting doesn't necessarily mean you can't get a project done because you're really busy--although if that's the case with you, cut yourself some slack. Who's got a timer on you, anyway? We create within ourselves a sense of obligation because we think people expect things of us (that perhaps they're not really expecting), or we can't say no. That's a topic for another blog.

Slow quilting, rather, means allowing a quilt time to breathe, time to reveal itself to you.

It means making thirty-five sketches of something before one jumps out at you and you get that little tingle down the back of your neck: "Me! I'm the one you need to make! Make me me me me!"

It means having fabrics laying on your cutting table or design wall for several days in a row as you audition one to another, collecting, editing, collecting again, until a particular combination reveals itself as the one.

It means buying a lot of fabric. You need a lot of options for all that, don't you?

I've been working on a project for the last five months. I started out one night just cutting shapes out of fabric and laying them down to see what they'd turn into. It has become a quilt that tells a story. It does have several problems with it. Awhile back, I'd have set it aside--or thrown it aside in frustration--because it wasn't "good enough." Now, rather than seeing it as the enemy, I'm looking at it as a friend who is encouraging me to move forward, to experiment, to have faith in myself. I'm still working away at it, looking at it as a chance to continue learning, to continue trying new things, to continue to experiment with techniques or methods to see how they turn out. The end result may still end up hitting the trash can, but it may not. It might work itself out. In either case, it's a slow process but an extremely valuable one. That quilt has told me, every step of the way, what I needed to do next. I still don't entirely know what the end product will look like. And that's the fun of it.

Would it help you in your quiltmaking if you could accept the concept of "the crappy first draft?" Can you be okay with something that doesn't turn out perfectly but helped you learn along the way? Is there a project in your head that you've been afraid to start because, frankly, you're afraid you'll screw it up? Could you use a little slow quilting in your life?

Episode 92 In Which We Talk Scraps with Charlotte

Episode 92 In Which We Talk Scraps with Charlotte, a set on Flickr.

Here is the photo gallery that accompanies Episode 92 In Which We Talk Scraps with Charlotte.

It starts with pictures of her organizational system. You'll see her bulletin board with ziploc baggies organized by size, and her white board where she keeps charts, and her project bags where she keeps detailed notes about where she is with each project.

Then you'll be treated to the eye-candy of her quilts--beautiful! Hopefully you'll get some good ideas for using up your own scraps!

So Stinkin' Cute

Receiving blanket #2
Originally uploaded by sandyquiltz

I finished the second receiving blanket tonight. I was taking my time, listening to an episode of Crafty Garden Mom podcast, which seemed very appropriate since she's got a couple of little bitties in her house. I was just puttering along in no rush, so it was sort of a very zen process.

These are just about the cutest darn receiving blankets I ever did see. If you need a baby gift, I strongly recommend you check it out!

My Guild Retreat pics

If you're interested in seeing pictures of what happened at my guild retreat last weekend, you may want to check out our Canal Country Quilters blog. My quilty peep Lori and I administrate it, although she does the lion's share of the work. (Thanks, Lori!) She's working on getting the pictures from the weekend posted--she's gotten the first day, including our paintstik class, done so far. She's hoping to have the rest up this week.

You can find it at http://canalcq.wordpress.com/.

Consider subscribing! We always post pictures of our show n' tell there now, plus periodically other helpful information. I'll have a post about paintstiks going up in a couple of days that give a lot of information about how to use them (more than I've posted here, I believe).

As you know, I love love love my guild. We have a blast. So, you're welcome to have fun with us vicariously! (And if you live in the area, consider coming for a visit. There's an "about" page that lists our meeting times and locations.)

Another finish and some homework

 I finished the first of two receiving blankets tonight. These are going to be for a friend of mine who is expecting her first baby, a little girl, this July. I'm also going to be making her a quilt but just couldn't resist making a couple of these really cute receiving blankets using the same Missouri Star Quilt Company technique I used for all the donation quilts I helped new sewers make back in March.

I'll finish the second one tomorrow or Wednesday--it's all cut and ready to go.

Tomorrow night is our quilt design study group. Since we had to shuffle our schedule around a bit in April to accommodate travel schedules, we ended up with a six-week stretch between meetings. I suggested we do homework, which is supposed to be a regular part of our experience but we've been skipping a lot. (We do a lot more in-session, however, so it's sort of a toss-up.) I figured with six weeks, it wouldn't be a problem. Of course, I left it to tonight to do. Yes, I can spell procrastination.

We had just done a segment on color and Vicki, who led the session, had prepped all the materials for us to each make our own fabric color wheel and it contains little spinny cards to put in the center with a variety of color schemes on them. Our homework was supposed to be to choose a color scheme we wouldn't normally use and do something with it.

So, tonight, I pulled out the color wheel and threw all the little center spinny cards face down on my table and shuffled them up. Drawing one at random, I then put it in the center of the color wheel and, eyes closed, spun it around a few times then landed it somewhere. Opening my eyes, this is what I found:

(The writing says, "4 points on a square.")

Yep, that's definitely a color scheme I wouldn't normally use. Yellow, blue-green, purple, red-orange. My first thought was, "ick."

I burrowed through my scraps for awhile, still thinking at that point that I might just do a little fused something-or-other, so I didn't want to commit whole pieces of fabric. I found the blue-green and purple pretty easily--those are colors I do drift towards on occasion. Red-orange was a little trickier mostly because it's hard to find something truly red-orange and not red or orange. I finally landed on one. But yellow? Wow. That was a toughy. I've discovered I don't actually have a lot of yellow in my stash. I had a few random yellow scraps but they were all a lot more shaded (and I use that word in its official artistic sense) than I wanted to go with the other colors. Finally, I dug into my fat quarters and there it was. The perfect yellow. 

And, in fact, a lovely combination altogether. Bright, admittedly, but just imagine it with a some white thrown in there to calm it down. I'm picturing festive appliqued flowers on a white background with the yellow as a border. Or cute little mini-stars pieced into that yellow as a background in a mini-quilt.

But, to be honest, that's an image that will never get made into reality. I've got too many other more pushy designs in my head demanding my attention. It was a fun project, though, finding those colors. And now I do have some new color combination possibilities in my head. Try it yourself sometime!

Retreat Report

...And a good time was had by all.

Actually, a fabulous time was had by all! Have I mentioned before how much I enjoy my guild peeps? And there's a handful of women who aren't members of our guild but are linked through friends and such, so they come to our retreats on a pretty regular basis as well. Might I say, they fit right in. Very, very entertaining women.

I didn't bring the kitchen sink.

However, after a few years of going on retreat, the furniture I pack seems to grow each time. I just get a lot more done if I have a decent set-up. My Sew-Ezi table (somewhere under the bins on the left, there) is a godsend. Love that thing. I also have a lightweight, foldable craft table that's only an inch or so shorter than the Sew-Ezi. I brought that this time and mostly used it as a small pressing station with my travel iron, but sometimes moved it over to sit next to the Sew-Ezi to hold the extra bulk of larger projects while I worked. Also extremely useful, so that's now made it to my list of "always pack" items.

This time I'd also volunteered to bring my ironing board and iron as one of our four communal pressing stations, so that added just a bit to the stacks. Everything else pictured here are projects. My clothes? Last packed, least planned, lightest weight.

Sadly, the one project I really wanted to work on--a baby quilt for a friend--I stymied myself by packing all the fabric but forgetting to print off my EQ7 design and cutting instructions. Dang. Couldn't touch it. But I got a lot else done!

First, the setting...

A nice Methodist church camp/conference center on Silver Lake in Western New York. It was about 85 degrees most of the weekend. Gorgeous!

(Forgot to take a picture before I left so this one was shot out my car window as I was driving away--sorry about the rotten composition.)

This was the building we pretty much lived in for the weekend, although our bedrooms were in another building. The lower floor was our sewing room, the upper floor the dining room. There were a couple of other groups there that weekend but we only saw them briefly during meals. It's a nice space, although we can't plug too many irons in at once or we blow a fuse. Hence the communal pressing stations. However, we've also got fewer women going these days than a few years ago so we've been able to loosen up the restrictions on small travel irons. The conference center cook, Becky, is excellent. I probably gained five pounds.

Ah, but on to the quilting! What did I get done?

I got the binding put together and sewed onto the front of Fortune. All I have to do now is the hand-sewing on the back, a good TV project. (Planning on doing that tonight after I get this blog posted.)

And yes, our tradition is to tape our finishes to the wall as we go. Wall space gets slim by the end of the weekend!

(That's my little craft table with my pressing station on the left, btw, if you're curious. And our retreat schedule taped above it so I could keep track of when we were going to have our ice cream social so I didn't disappear at the wrong time. Priorities.)

I also finally found fabric (more about shopping trips below) for the third border on my medallion challenge quilt and was able to get that done. The colors are a complete departure from what I'd initially imagined, but the store didn't have what I'd thought I'd wanted and at this point, frankly, I was tired of trying to figure this out. So with guild-mate Florence consulting, I decided to go with this set of a light gray-with-blue/green speckles background, and a green and blue deconstructed star. The blue fabric is the same as the lighter blue fabric in the center block, so that was a happy find. Now I just have to do the last border, which will be that same black/gray as the other narrower border--if I still have enough! (I designed the border as paper pieced blocks in EQ7.)

...and I put borders on Paintstik Peacock. I'd made borders with blue/green/turquoise fat quarters using the stack n' slash method. I wasn't sure I wanted those borders all the way around because I was afraid they'd overwhelm the peacock. I had it all laid out on one of our communal cutting tables and a few folks walked over to see what I was doing and offer their two cents--as we quilters like to do. It was Vicki that hit on exactly the right idea--offset the borders. Only use the blue on two sides. Finish the third border with black, and leave the top alone.

Absolutely perfect.



Peacock has now been renamed Vicki's Peacock, although I told her that didn't imply she was going to get him!









I also started some receiving blankets but didn't get far on them, so more on that later.

Onto the shopping! Of course, any good quilter's gathering always includes some visits to local shops. A few of us went to Mt. Pleasant Quilt Company on Friday, and a couple of us went to Material Rewards on Saturday. Both great shops!

Got some fat quarters, just 'cause.

Some end-of-bolt stash fabric--pretty decently discounted so, why not?

Now, for just a minute, feast your eyes on this one. Mmmm.



A white batik.



Does anyone else love some fabrics so much you just want to ingest them?



Mmmmm.



So I had to find something to go with it.

Found these to start. Very pretty.



But it needed something.

Decided it needed more contrast. So I found the dark teal (bottom of picture) to add to the stack.







Still not quite enough.

There it is. Purple.



Mmmm.......



So that's my retreat report. Guild-mate Lori will be posting pics of everyone's projects on our guild blog, so as soon as that's up, I'll post a link. There was a lot of eye-candy going on!

Finally--A Finish!

This wallhanging has been almost a year in the making--and it was supposed to be a fast, simple project. I wanted something for my dining room wall that would say "summer!" and would rotate with the flag wallhanging I have that goes up Memorial Day and Fourth of July, but that I didn't necessarily want hanging up the entire summer. So I thought, "I know! Primary colors! Pinwheels!"

The basic pinwheel part was done pretty quickly. Then I pondered borders. "I know! I'll use the Double Diamond Ruler by Kim Templin!" (See episode 41 for my interview with Kim.) I thought it would look like a cute garden fence around my pinwheels, thereby turning the pinwheels into flowers. My summer wallhanging was beginning to take on a theme.

Unfortunately, I didn't have quite enough of the fabrics I needed to use for the double diamonds to do a full border of them, so I did half borders and framed the center with them. I actually like the way that looks better, anyway.

And, of course, I couldn't leave it at that. With the more complex border, the pinwheels now looked just a little bit plain. And they had morphed into flowers--so how could I make them more flower-esque? "I know!" I thought, yet again. "I'll do yo-yos!" This required finding fabric in my stash that coordinated but didn't stick out like a sore thumb...which was a task unto itself. But I persevered...and I think I only ended up having to buy the yellow because that's not something that typically exists in my stash much.

Yo-yos made (using the Clover yo-yo tool, which makes it very easy), I realized I'd need something in the center. Wait for it.... "I know!" I decided to use buttons. The first buttons I bought were white, because I thought I'd like the clean, fresh look of white buttons unifying the different colors of the pinwheels and yo-yos. The only buttons I could find at Joanns with 16 that matched were on the small side, but I thought I could make it work.

I sat down one night and started sewing those dang yo-yos and buttons onto the pinwheels by hand. It took me almost half an hour to get one done--it ended up all cock-eyed and didn't have the clean affect I wanted, plus I had 16 of those stinking things in total to finish. At a half hour a pop I wasn't sure it was worth it. I threw it to the side in frustration.

You guessed it. By now I was sorry I'd ever started the stupid project.

"I know!".... and I pulled out my sewing machine manual to check a niggling memory I had that I could sew buttons on by machine. Sure 'nuff, there it was. I sat back down with my wallhanging and little white buttons and started on the first one, high hopes and dreams of having it done by the end of the afternoon.

Urgh. And more urgh. The buttons were too small for me to really easily hold them in place while I was sewing, and they were just high enough that my presser foot couldn't quite mash them down far enough for the needle to do its work. I finally got one sewn on, but when I pulled it out and looked it...all cock-eyed and nasty again. Threw is to the side in frustration again.

A couple of weeks later, I decided to go to Joanns and see if I could find bigger buttons. Standing in front of the collection of white buttons, I kept counting and recounting different designs in mounting frustration again--there weren't 16 of any one design. And none of them were interesting enough to warrant getting different designs.

I was just about to bag the whole yo-yo button thing as I turned to walk away when my eyes lighted on a set of buttons that were very different than anything I'd pictured in my head. Interesting. The more I thought about it, the more it tickled me. Suddenly I went from "simple, fresh summer wallhanging" to "funky hippy fun wallhanging."

The new buttons worked swimmingly. I wasn't able to get the four different designs I wanted so I held up for a bit while I tried to order one of the designs online--and ended up losing money when the secure site I'd purchased from suddenly disappeared with no trace and...no buttons. But it was only $11 so I'm not sweating it. Just yet another delay in getting this supposedly simple project done. I ended up back at Joanns buying the other set of four buttons that I hadn't liked as well the first time but can live with, because done is better than perfect.

So, all that being said, introducing "Sandy's Hippy Peace Garden."

Podcastaversary Give-Away--Week 4--American Quilter's Society Gift Certificate

If you're a long-time follower of my blog or podcast, you know that my mother gets all the credit for introducing me to the world of quilting. After her passing, as I was working on cleaning out a set of drawers in her quilt studio, I came across her collection of pins from quilt shows she'd attended through the years, and a significant number of pins indicating her long-time membership in the American Quilter's Society. Once again following in her footsteps (my mom was a smart woman!), I joined the AQS as well and have enjoyed the benefits that membership has afforded me.

 For the final week of my two year podcastaversary give-away, I'm offering up a $25 gift certificate to the American Quilter's Society. 

You can use the gift certificate to become a member of AQS for a year, buy great quilting books, or subscribe to The Quilt Life Magazine--one of my favorites. Becoming a member of AQS gives you discounts galore, including reduced registration fees at AQS-sponsored quilt shows. (Paducah, anyone?) I've enjoyed my membership and am glad to have the opportunity to pay it forward!

To enter into this drawing, leave a comment below telling me what you think you would do with the gift certificate if you were to win. It's a random drawing--I won't be "grading" your answers. Just curious!

Leave your comments by midnight Eastern time (NY) on Saturday, April 28th, 2012. I'll be using my old friend "random number generator" to choose the winner! (Don't forget to make sure your email address is in your profile or comment so I can contact you. Hate to have to skip you if your name comes up but I have no way to be in touch!)

(Please note--I will be out of the country until May 2 and will only have intermittent email access. Although I'll make my best efforts to check in and do the drawing, I may not be able to announce the winner of this giveaway until after my return. So go ahead and enter, and spread the word to all your friends by tweeting this post or pasting it into your Facebook status update or whatever--but you may need to be a little patient in hearing the results. Thanks!)