Quilt Festival is over; feet rejoice

Besides being the biggest yearly convention in the city of Houston and the biggest quilt show on Earth, the Quilt Festival is awfully tough on a photo buff.  Standing next to a popular quilt was like being by the rail at the Grand Canyon.

Like most everyone else, I needed four full days to see everything properly and shop too.  I walked around all day every day until I had more blisters than I did on my first backpacking trip, and at the end of each day I was, in my stupor, greeting friends with fresh new names they'd never been called before. "Hi, Ginny!"

A lot of quilts were for sale, for a few hundred dollars up to $38,000.  That's low for a high.  Other years, quilters have asked for $50,000 and even $100,000, or so I was told at the information desk.

One of my favorites was "Cutting Down the Tall Poppies." It was a pictorial of a half-dozen brilliant multicolor poppies with tiny shadow figures trying to cut through their stems. Turns out there's an Australian custom of putting standout people back in their place, and the title is what they call it. The quilter had lots of fans among her neighbors down there. You heard more Australian accents in that corner than you would at an actors' workshop.  It was priced at $3,000.

The top prize went to another pictorial quilt showing an exhibit by an artist named Chihuly at a public garden festival.  Chihuly piled colored glass balls into small boats and set them adrift on the water there. The quilt showed one on a deep black background, and it was very pretty, but I heard a lot of complaints about it because, really, you couldn't see the workmanship. The pieces were much too small, so you couldn't see what made it a quilt. At least I couldn't.  With the ropes, you'd need binoculars to see it up close.

I had my nose three inches from the exhibits wherever the barriers let me.  No one touched them.  Quilters are all so well behaved.

Photos were another story.  SAQA, the Studio Artists Quilters Association, barred photography of its members' quilts. They'd like to make money from their work, but is someone going to go and make kitsch from their ideas?  Not likely. You'd have to be too good at manipulating cheesecloth or painting fabric to reproduce them.

Some of the SAQA quilts that were reproducible, though, would make great quilt patterns.  Flight Deck, showing skateboarders with their arms raised like birds taking off, was a standout.  A couple of quilts were throwbacks to a brassy style that showed grotesqueries representing how the quilter saw the world. Some were a lot like paintings. They were paintings.

Are visitors going to print and post these photos? Would that really be such a bad thing, to bring the artist a bit of publicity?

Other quilts in the show were barred from photography too, largely the ones from a single South Korean artist and some others in that area of the exhibits.  In any case, the quilt guardians just about tackled anyone who took a photo, and then stood there waiting while the embarrassed photographer deleted it.  I actually saw a guardian run across the wide walkway that ran down the exhibit hall shouting "Ma'am!  Ma'am!  You can't take photos there!" so that everyone turned around and looked.

Not that I'd trim those tall poppies of SAQA, but the photo thing did seem a bit giddy.

A brilliant way to mark 1/4" seams

The patterns on FieldGuidetoQuilts.com are block diagrams that you print out and cut apart to get pattern pieces.  The pattern pieces by themselves don't have seam allowances.

You can either cut the seam allowances as you go, which is fine if you never make mistakes, or you can do the wiser thing and add seam allowances to the pattern piece.

We're in awe of Mary Jo of fivegreenacres.com for coming up with a simple, convenient, and inexpensive way to do that.  Here it is:


Find two sharp, happy pencils and get them acquainted.

Officiate at the wedding.

(That's Scotch tape.)

When the pencils are taped together, the points are almost exactly 5/16th of an inch apart.

(That weird ruler is called a pica ruler.  I use mine all the time.)

Tape your quilt-pattern piece to a bigger piece of paper.  Then line up your taped-together pencils with one point on the edge of your pattern piece and one on the paper it's taped to.

Draw the lines. 

Cut along the outer line for your new, improved pattern with seam allowance.


Using two pencils takes some getting used to, but remember, for quilters:

Quiltspeak: Online abbreviations for quilters

I love online abbreviations.  In their way, B4 and gr8 and n2 are tackling the problem of unpredictable spelling that has plagued writers of the English language since before the first Musquetoe bit Merriwether Lewis*.

Acronyms are another story.  They can be impossible to figure out.  I recently saw a list of quilter acronyms that's so useful I just had to share it with you.  

Who couldn't love SABLE, for "Stash Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy?" I think my favorite, though, is "WOMBAT."  

 BOB - Black on Black 

 BOM = Block of the Month 

 DSM = Domestic Sewing Machine 

 FART = Fabric Acquisition Road Trip 

 FOB = Fear of Binding 

 FQ = Fat Quarter 

 HST = Half-Square Triangle 

 LA = Longarmer 

 LAQ= Long Arm Quilter 

 LQS = Local Quilt Shop 

 MAQ = Mid-Arm Quilter 

 OBW = One Block Wonder 

 OPAM = One Project a Month 

 PhD = Projects Half Done 

 PIGS = Projects in Grocery Sacks 

 PP = Paper Piecing 

 QAYG = Quilt As You Go 

 QST = Quarter Square Triangle 

 RR = Round Robin 

 SABLE = Stash Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy 

 SEX = Stash Enhancing eXperience (or eXcursion) 

 SID = Stitch In the Ditch 

 SnW = Stack and Whack    

 Squishy = Mailing envelopes full of fabric swaps/gifts

 STASH = Special Treasures All Secretly Hidden  

 TGIF = Thank God It's Finished!  

 TOT = Tone-on-Tone 

 UFO = UnFinished Object 

 VIP = Very Important Project 

 WHIMM = Works Hidden In My Mind 

 WIP = Work In Progress 

 WISP = Work In Slow Progress 

 WWIT = What Was I Thinking 

 WOF = Width of Fabric 

 WOMBAT = Waste of Money, Batting, and Time 

 WOW = White On White

I'm not sure where the list got started; I got it from a post on quiltinghaven.com.  

Please contact me if you know of any more abbreviations and I'll add them to the list. 

_________________________________________

*In fact, I hear that it was John Clark who invented 19 different spellings of the word. 

This is your brain on quilt pox

Ever since Tetris was the only video game that women really liked, I've been wondering if Tetris Pox and Quilt Pox are related.

Shortly after Tetris was released in 1984, video-game developers figured out that forty percent of Tetris players were women, compared to just one percent for the typical video game.

In Tetris, little squares would float down from the top of the screen, and you had to grab them and set them in the correct column before they landed. This video from August 2013 will give you an idea of how it's played.  

Game developers leaped into studying the woman question with a hilarious "What hath God wrought?" obtuseness. Women, they deduced, didn't like games that were violent or insufficiently pink. Soon there were rosy, no-kill, wretched games that made the typical woman want to put Hello Kitty's head on a pike.  Then there was the "not enough women game developers" phase, followed by the girl-gamer-led "all we want is good games!" backlash.  

There was one sensible comment.  "Tetris is different from many other kinds of video games which appeal to boys and men," said one (female) consultant hired by Gameboy.  "It's more of a pattern recognition game.  It's not a conquest game or a get-rid-of-the-enemy game.  Instead, it appeals to women's sense of order." 

Pattern recognition and a sense of order:
Sixteen Goose in the Pond blocks  (1897)

Pattern recognition.  A sense of order.  What could be more characteristic of traditional quilting?

A good scientific study on Tetris and quilt pox could tell us a lot about the hardwiring of women's minds.

It's easy to see why no such study has happened.  As a group, quilters are as far from the video-game marketplace as a flock of pigeons.  The only people who have a foot in both worlds are--well, you and me.  We don't know many researchers, unless you do.  

Gee's Bend aside, traditional quilting is overwhelmingly the province of aging, middle-income white grandmothers who are focused on their families.  

It's hard nowadays even to find young people who have sewing machines.  Their moms lacked the skills too.  That's probably because our clothing is made so cheaply overseas.   

Wired:  Playing Tetris is
like folding sheets

Still, we quilters can take some of the blame.  From the 19th century on, quilting has been awash in nostalgia about mothers and grandmothers stitching away in their  little houses on the prairie and so forth until you'd think that no one had ever electrified a sewing machine.  Today, a vanishingly small number of Americans can remember having grandmothers who grew up on a farm.  

We aren't fossils yet, but give us time.  So if scientists are ever going to discover the elusive link between pattern recognition, quilt pox, and Tetris, they'd better get a move on.  

In 2009, in "This is Your Brain on Tetris," Jeffrey Goldsmith of Wired wrote:

The Tetris effect is a ... metaphor, if you will, for curiosity, invention, the creative urge.  To fit shapes together is to organize, to build, to make deals, to fix, to understand, to fold sheets.  

To fold sheets?  Grandma, is that you?  


________________________________________________________________________________

Note:  In 2012, women made up 47% of all gamers, or so the Entertainment Software Association said.  

Note:  In 2009, a bunch of scientists from Oxford, for heaven's sake, suggested that someone who had been traumatized might avoid terrifying flashbacks if he or she played Tetris shortly afterward, although they refrained from suggesting that ambulances be equipped with Gameboys. 

http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2012.pdf
http://www.plosone.org/article/authors/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004153
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1994-05-31/lifestyle/9405281067_1_tetris-video-game-developed
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/06/tetris/
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.05/tetris.html#previouspost
http://www.stlbeds.com/articles/2013/05/23/tips-for-properly-washing-and-storing-your-sheets-and-pillows/

How to make the Kansas City Star's Interlocked Squares block

Interlocked Squares block

Interlocked Squares was published in 1932 in the Kansas City Star*.  

I'm ridiculously proud of the diagram below.  Reason:  I figured out an easy way to make the block, and that's by putting in an extra seam (splitting "3" into "3a" and "3b").

The simplest way to piece this block is to split one of
 the #2 or #3 quadrilaterals into a triangle and a diamond.

Without that extra seam, you're stuck sewing really awkward acute angles where the pieces fit together -- when you join a piece 2 to a piece 3 in the diagram above. 

Instead, you can start with the center piece and build it log-cabin style.  That way you only have to do one weird-angled seam for the entire block.  The sequence is shown in this diagram: 

Sequence for putting together the parts of an Interlocked Squares block. 

There's a giant version of the block diagram on fieldguidetoquilts.com.  There's supposed to be a link when you click on either diagram, but just in case, it's here:

http://fieldguidetoquilts.com/9Recbar/9CWoven/9EWovenblockdiagrams.html   

You print out that diagram in any size you like, cut the pieces apart, and use them as pattern pieces.  You have to add a 1/4" seam allowance to each piece, just as quilters did back in the 1930s.  (There's actually a brilliantly simple way to do that, but it's going to have to wait for another post.)

Other instructions for the block are on the web in a couple of different variations. They either cost money, which means they don't belong on the fieldguidetoquilts.com site, or else they're not quite the same block.  Here are a few: 

• A "cathedral windows" style, which means that there are heavy black outlines around every piece.  https://equiltpatterns.com/Stained-Glass-Interlocked-Squares-Quilt-Block-Pattern

• Here's one that uses a special set of templates.  http://dancingstitcher.com/2011/11/18/tip-16-interlocked-squares-12-block-made-easy/

• Here's one with a fancy star in the middle:  http://www.etsy.com/listing/156609821/interlocked-squares-paper-pieced-quilt?ref=shop_home_active

• This one is free,  but it has a bunch of small blocks in the middle:  http://www.ludlowquiltandsew.co.uk/quilt-block-patterns/interlocking-squares-quilt-block/

• This one is also free, but it isn't quite the same block, and it has flying geese in the corners.  Still, it's supposed to be easy to make. http://www.amc-quilts.com/uploads/Interlocking_Squares.pdf

•••••••

*The Star, for whatever reason, does not enforce copyright on its blocks, although there are tons of books based on Star patterns at a company called Pickle Dish, aka "Kansas City Star Quilts" (pickledish.com).  

Quilting, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, and the Language of Flowers

Among the many ways Victorians drove themselves crazy was by assigning sentiments to flowers.

The unjustly maligned Cardinal flower 

Imagine filling a vase when your choices include the cardinal flower (Malevolence), oleander (Beware!), columbine (Desertion) or foxglove (Insincerity).  Not even roses were safe: the "York and Lancaster" variety meant War.

Imagine planning a flower garden that includes only positive sentiments.  Imagine a bachelor consulting a book when he picked out flowers to give to a girl.  And how fast he'd would forget what the flowers meant when he got married.  He might even pick up some York and Lancasters for your anniversary.

You'd think that nobody would pay attention to such goofy ideas. But remember, these were people who made a big deal out of grape scissors.  

Sarah Josepha Buell Hale,
arbiter of taste

The Grande Dame of the fashion was Mrs. Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, editress of Godey's Lady's Book.  Her Flora's Interpreter was published in 1835. It's thanks to her that we send white roses to funeral homes.  Hale may not have invented the idea, but she put it on paper and sold it.

Hale was the Grande Dame of all fashions involving female behavior for a good chunk of the 19th century. She was three decades ahead of Queen Victoria in wearing black for the rest of her life after her husband died.  Hale may be the single person most responsible for the close-order drill that was Victorian social manners.

This Sarah Hale for the 21st century will
set you back $80 at bobblesgalore.com  

Even now, when elegant women ignore a gauche remark in a conversation, they're echoing Sarah Hale. Her Godey's Lady's Book also ignored unpleasantries, including the entire Civil War.

That was partly because Hale thought that politics was not a woman's sphere. Still, it was a bit much even for Godey's readers.  In the years after the war, Petersen's Magazine, Harper's, and The Atlantic were all founded and flourished.

Hale, Godey's' owner, and the magazine itself all shriveled up and died around 1878. More accurately, the magazine was on life support until 1898, when it was absorbed into a magazine called The Puritan.  The choice was fitting, because in Hale's view, New England values were the source of all good things.

Flora's Interpreter included 146 flowers and plants, and it was indexed both by flower and by sentiment.  Each is memorialized with yompity-yomp poetry.

Grapes meant Mirth, but it wasn't funny if you didn't
know how to use grape scissors 

In Flora Fortuna, Hale laid out plant sentiments for each day of every month, along with a monthly reminder of the Four Humors that still guided medicine back then. The gloss of science was part of Flora's Interpreter too:  The book included the plants' Latin names, class, and genus, not to mention the names for all the parts of a flower.  

Paying attention to these books is like crawling into a tiny cage and closing the door behind you.
Victorian women wore corsets, which is much the same thing.

We quilters don't.  No, not even Baltimore Album fans.  That's why, when people bring up the Language of Flowers as if it's a new and wonderful discovery, those in the know say No.   

The language of the flowers isn't cute, people. We should forget Flora's Interpreter, and fast.

To quote Dorothy Parker, "This book should not be cast aside lightly, but hurled with great force."  

****************************
For Hale's books, click here:  

http://ia700301.us.archive.org/14/items/florasinterprete00haleiala/florasinterprete00haleiala.pdf

The flower interpretations aren't precisely the same as Hale's, but  The Flower Vase; Containing the Language of Flowers and Their Poetic Sentiments (1844) is mercifully short.  Its author was "Miss S. C. Edgarton." It's here:  http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/pub/PDF/Edgarton-Flower_Vase-1.pdf and http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/pub/PDF/Edgarton-Flower_Vase-2.pdf


Our sources include:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Josepha_Hale; http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/252304/Sarah-Josepha-Hale; http://books.google.com/books?id=Sld1Jj0jM7cC&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=godey's+Hale+%22The+puritan%22&source=bl&ots=SV8-607afY&sig=uKaxA3CeQKV1uv9De1nkIrWvDCg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iBs3Ur6zBoaA2wWon4D4DA&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=godey's%20Hale%20%22The%20puritan%22&f=false; http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/hale1.html; Hale's and Edgarton's books; and The Sheffield Directory and Guide (1828).  Photos:  cardinal flower by R. W. Smith from http://www.wildflower.org/gallery/result.php?id_image=30936. Grapes:  Photographer uncredited, from  http://www.extension.org/pages/31133/vinifera-or-european-wine-grapes Hale bobblehead:  http://historiccookery.com/tag/sarah-josepha-buell-hale-1788-1879/

Quilter bazaar bizarre: The International Quilt Festival 2013

Jazz Dog

It's less than a week from Autumn, and here in Houston, where it's still above 90 degrees, all quilters can think about is Festival.  (Not "The Festival," but "Festival." Don't ask me why.)

Festival, with its convoys of friends riding $70-a-day scooters, all wearing matching hats, all trundling in single file past more clusters of friends wearing more matching hats.

Festival, filling the George Brown Convention Center's first floor from one end to the other, half its second floor, and who knows how much of the third? There'll be back-to-back classes in back-to-back classrooms up there.  

There will be some amazing quilts. There'll also be gadgets.  If it takes two days to get through the quilts, it takes two days to get through the quilter bazaar bizarre.

Every third quilter is fanatical enough to put down, say, $80 for the right quilting or embroidery hoop.  We all know that quilting is not for the thrifty.  Hasn't been for more than half a century.

The Pin Peddlers will be there for Festival to fill your heart's every need, if what your heart needs is lapel pins from previous Festivals. There are buttons by the each and templates by the ton.  Chatelaines.  Featherweights. Hand-dyed cottons and silks.  Brazilian embroidery thread.  Fabric paint.  Mini-irons.  Vintage kimonos.

Put a sweater on this. 

At last year's Quilt Market, before the Festival, there were patterns for quilted concealed-weapon handbags--just the thing for gun-totin' Texans.  Look for it in your local quilt shop.

Meanwhile, Pokey's Pet Postcards are stacking up.  For the second year, fabric postcards donated by quilters will be sold to benefit local pet shelters.

The postcard shown above is "Jazz Dog" by Grace Sim, a local quilter whose art quilt, "Fragments of my Childhood Memories [of growing up in Borneo]," is a finalist at the Festival this year.

In Houston, the first chill of the year is due around the end of October, "So the kids will have to wear sweaters over their costumes," a cheerful friend tells me.

As far as we're concerned, only one thing happens on October 31:  the Festival opens.