At Least Someone is Making Use of the Quilt

Since the king-sized Storm at Sea quilt was too big to machine quilt on my rack, I've been hand-quilting it in a hoop.  Scrappy likes to burrow under the hoop and snooze.

Sandwich Phase

I finally finished the last 16 Storm at Sea blocks needed to get the top of my king-sized bed quilt to a comparable size to the backing.  The backing is still 6 to 8 inches longer around the edges, but that's okay, because I'm planning on using that extra backing fabric for a border.

There's just one problem...

The entire quilt is wider than my quilt rack.  Here you can see fabric overflowing down the side of the quilt rack.  Normally, I would pin the backing and quilt top to muslin leaders and roll them up on rods, but that won't work in this case.

Plan B?

Put the sewing machine away and hand quilt, just using the rack as a place to drape the fabric. I'll probably start by tying the backing, the batting and the top together just to keep it stable, and then I will use a wooden hoop to draw sections of fabric taut for more intricate hand-quilting. Any guesses on how many more years this phase will take?

TOWN FOR THE TREES by Justin Evans

Though this is my quilting blog, I felt it was appropriate to post my review of a poetry book.  Read on and you'll see why...

I had the pleasure of reading Town for the Trees, a book of poems by Justin Evans.  Mr. Evans holds a Master's Degree in Literacy Studies, and this latest book contains a collection of poems that were mostly set in Springville, Utah, a place that comes across in his poems as being a peaceful, quiet space where one has room to think.  Mountains, valleys, a creek and the moon hold special meaning here.

It has been a while since I've read poetry that has inspired me.  I admit I am partial to poems that immerse the reader into nature since I am currently surrounded by sirens, construction workers, and honking car horns in my home environment.  I moved to Northern Nevada 22 years ago from a big city, and back then my Nevada home was in what was called a rural community in which everyone owned livestock and kept quiet and still enough that one could hear nothing other than cows mooing softly, birds chirping, and frogs singing.  Some days I could swear that I heard butterfly wings flapping, but those days are gone now.  I have to turn to poetry to commune with nature.

Lines like "The letters N E W S were derived / from the four winds..." and "the past is a thief / escaping on the wings of blackbirds" are stated succinctly, yet contain enough power to make me pause.  You know you are reading fine poetry when you give each line a few extra seconds to sink in before moving to the next.

In the poem "Pre-Dawn:  Three Sisters", Evans writes the following stanza:

Whenever I come back to this place

after years of absence, it is the mountains

which startle me the most, their size

always shrinking in my mind

like the old memory of a broken arm.

I know how haunting it can be to return to the place of one's childhood, as I am about to embark on one such journey myself to settle my mother's estate after her passing.  The environment seems alien, yet still contains triggers to memories we thought were long gone.  Having broken my arm, along many other injuries, I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can be in so much pain one day, and barely remember the agony the next.  The intensity of life fades, and comparing that to how mountains shrink within our memory is divine.

Though Evans grew up in Utah, he now lives in Nevada and having studied and worked with Nevada poets for much of my adult life, I do see how some of his peers have influenced his writing.  It didn't surprise me when he included an epigraph from one of Gary Short's poems, as Short is one of my favorite poets and I could see similarities between their works.

I think my favorite stanza comes through in the poem "Song":

Infinite stars

piercing the deep blue of night

like needles wielded by my grandmother

to a make a quilt.

This stanza offers such a strong sense of time.  Obviously, time plays a huge role in the study of astronomy.  Scientists are always searching for clues to how long stars live, how long they have been in existence.  Being a quilter myself, I know the time and patience that is required to piece together fabric and quilt by hand.  Sewing machines speed up the process probably ten-fold or more, and I can tell you that I have been machine-piecing a bed quilt for over two years now.  It feels like there is no end in sight. Drawing the similarity between stars and not just needles, but needles used in quilting by his grandmother -- perfect in so many ways.  Perhaps the night sky is a quilt being made just for him.

In today's frantic, fast-paced society, it is rare to find moments of solitude where one can reflect on where life has taken us, how a river has changed its course, how an entire summer "evaporated in a single breath."  If you need a break, I recommend that you sit down and pick up Town for the Trees.  It will help you learn to breathe again.

For more information on this book, visit the author's website.

The Photography Studio Window Coverings are Complete

My goal with this project was functionality, not beauty. I didn't bother to try to hide the liner behind the sheer fabric. Everything is uneven, but I'm just happy that I was able to use all my fabric and still get it to cover the windows and sliding glass doors. Because of the amount of fabric I had, and the dimensions I needed to cut creating a minimum number of seams, the windows ended up with less draping than the sliding glass doors. I looked for some neutral gray or silver fabric to sew around the edges as a border to allow more top to bottom coverage as well as side-to-side draping, but I was unable to find any fabric that would work with the one I already had.

Here's an example of what it looks like with both the sheer fabric and liners together, blocking out all the light...

Here are a couple of examples showing one side of the window having both the block out liner and fabric together and the other side of the window just having the sheer fabric covering...

You can see that the extra draping over the door lets in less light.  Since the rings on the rods are clip-ons, I can just rearrange the fabric how I want to let in more or less light through the sheer fabric.

Here are a couple of examples of one side of the window having both coverings pulled aside, letting in full light while leaving the sheer fabric over the other side of the window...

As you can see, there are a lot of options for lighting, especially when you add in the strobe lights, the reflective umbrella, the soft box, and the camera flash to the variations in natural lighting.

The Nicest Surprise

My window covering project for my photography studio is coming along, though somewhat slowly.  It's amazing how long it takes to blind stitch one hem for drapery.  This was my first attempt at the blind stitch and I made a lot of mistakes on the first round.  I started out placing the guide right smack on the edge of the fold of the fabric, and the needle didn't pick up the fold in several sections.  I corrected that by placing the guide onto the fold.

I managed to break two needles while sewing the blackout liner at the corner where several layers of the fabric were folded.  Once all the blackout liners were sewn and hung, I started on the sheer white fabric curtains.  Normally, you sew the liner into the drapery fabric, but I wanted to have the option of either blocking the light all together with the blackout liner or giving the room a softbox effect by just hanging the sheer white fabric over the windows.  In the picture below, I have both the sheer fabric and the blackout liner hanging together.

The curtains seemed easy enough since they were short, but the draperies for the sliding glass doors were awkward and bulky to handle.

During this project I must have cursed more times than usual, because yesterday I found this big box on my doorstep.  Inside was a gift from my husband:  A Singer Heavy Duty 4411 sewing machine.

He said he wanted me to have a simple mechanical machine with no bells and whistles that is less likely to break down and give me headaches.  I must have oiled, adjusted the tension, and re-threaded my old machine dozens of times during this project because the thread kept getting tangled.  Looking at the new Singer machine, the first thing I noticed was that the spindle for the thread was horizontal instead of vertical.

I instantly knew this would solve the number one problem I have with my old machine, and that is the thread getting wrapped around the spindle underneath the spool, and then breaking.  This horizontal spindle allows for the thread to be pulled off the spool without getting hung up on the spindle.  The next thing I noticed were all the diagram markings directly on the machine showing you how to thread it.  I thought this was brilliant, because with my old machine, I always had to consult the manual when too much time passed between me using it. 

The next thing I noticed was the top loading bobbin case.  No more removing the toolbox to get underneath the machine each time I need to adjust the bobbin.

Sewing machines have come a long way in solving some of their inherent problems.  If you have an old machine that gives you trouble, I suggest looking into getting a new one.  I was worried about the cost, but it turns out that sewing machines are very affordable at the moment.  I even found a portable mini machine for $20 on the Internet.  Many basic sewing machines are around $100.  I also found this new step stool in the market on sale for $6 today.  No more tripping over the bars on the chair I'd been standing on to hang the curtains.  Yippee!

Lessons Learned Installing Curtain and Drapery Rods

I have begun a project that involves hanging curtains over two windows and drapes over two sliding glass doors in my photography studio.  I bought some Levlor rods at JoAnn Fabrics.  The instructions on the box were very simple and any instructions you may find on the Internet appear to be simple as well, but don't let it fool you.  There is nothing easy about installing curtain and drapery rods.

It looks like you might be able to get them all installed in an hour, but this project took me all day.  It took all morning to install the rods over the two windows, and all afternoon to install the rods over the two sliding glass doors.  Believe me when I tell you that I made every mistake in the book, and if anything at all could go wrong, it did.  When all was said and done, I had a bad case of tennis elbow.

First off, if you install them into wood, you just use the screws.  If you install them into drywall, you use the plastic anchors and the screws.  You are supposed to drill a hole the size of the anchor, hammer the anchor into the wall, place the bracket over the anchor, and drill in the screw.  However, that didn't work for me.  It turned out the majority of the wall was drywall, but the last quarter inch was solid wood.  It's impossible to hammer a plastic anchor into hard wood. 

So, I had to improvise.  I placed the bracket against the wall first, hammered in the plastic anchor as far as it would go, and then drilled in the screw.  The brackets ended up being a bit unstable, but if worse comes to worse, there's always Super Glue.  You can see in the picture below, how the plastic anchor refused to push past the wood, and the screw wouldn't go in all the way either, because the drill stripped the head before I could get it in further.

My biggest mistake was that one window required that I install the brackets into wood.  I had been so intent on installing the plastic anchors into the drywall, that I drilled for the size of the plastic anchors into the wood.  The anchors are much larger than the screws, so by the time I realized my mistake, the holes were too big for the screws and there was no room on either side of the strip of wood to drill new holes.  I was essentially drilling into a trellis. 

I ended up having to force the plastic anchors into those bigger holes, which isn't easy, and I almost split the wood.  I recommend planning everything out on paper before laying a hand on your tools.

My next big mystery was that despite measuring exactly three inches above the window and one inch above the window frame, the rods were uneven.  I could clearly see that they were lower on one side than the other.  In the picture below, the rod is lower on the left than on the right.

After paying closer attention to the rod itself, I realized that had I studied the rod ahead of time, I might I have noticed that one side of the rod is thinner than the other side.  That's how they get one side to slide inside of the other side with metal rods.  So, if you are installing metal rods, I recommend that you install one bracket an eighth of an inch higher than the bracket on the far end.  Better yet, get solid wood rods.

Lastly, for some reason, I was provided with four brackets. I wondered why, because you can't slide the rings past the brackets. I only installed three of the brackets, one on each end and one in the middle where the curtains and draperies meet, but had I mindlessly installed all four brackets spaced out evenly for the sake of stability, I would have regretted it. I suppose I could have placed two brackets side-by-side in the middle, but what's the point?

As you can tell, I'm not a carpenter. In upcoming posts, I'll share my experiences in constructing homemade curtains and drapes.