Climbing the Walls (Part II)

... cont'd from Part I.

[Author's note:  If all goes well this evening, final installment tomorrow!]

Don’t get me wrong.  I love me some denim. Gap dark wash Long and Lean jeans are the only casual staple in my wardrobe (primarily because they have the words “long” and “lean” right there in the title).  But, sewing denim is rather akin to sewing aluminum screening (which I’ve done on my Kenmore, by the way).  It never seems to go well.  Add that to the mental anguish I conjure at the mention of denim patchwork, and let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine how this could possibly end with anything “modern.”  

 

Nevertheless, a week or so later, Dawn arrived at work with two pair of jeans belonging to her son, Jordan.  “They’re a little rough,” she said.  “He’s been doing a lot of free-running lately.”    

“Cool!” I answered.  “Not a problem.” 

A quick Wikipedia search later, and I’d discovered that free-running is a non-competitive, extreme sport in which participants maneuver their way from Point A to Point B through a series of acrobatic tricks or stunts with obstacles they experience in their urban landscape.  Such athletes will often jump from building to building or literally flip from fire escapes in an effort to express themselves and their creativity as impressively as possible. 

Free-running scene from recent James Bond movie, Casino Royale.
(http://blogs.whatsontv.co.uk/movietalk/files/2008/10/casino-royale-free_42.jpg)

Indeed, once I’d read it, I remembered being in Dawn’s office a short time before when the principal called to say that Jordan was getting detention for standing on the roof.  I thought it was strange that a student would be penalized for such a thing until Dawn explained that Jordan had actually climbed the side of the building to get there.  While there technically weren’t any rules on the books against it at the time, I suspect the “Jordan Clause” is now firmly immortalized in the local high school handbook.  

Photo courtesy of Metro, online news site in the UK.  (http://www.metro.co.uk/news/79556-free-running-teen-jumps-50-000-metres)

Suddenly fascinated with the athletic side of this nice young man I’ve only ever known to play the mellophone in the marching band, I dug open the bag to investigate.  I have a hard time imagining that denim is actually the textile of choice for this extreme sport.  On the rare occasion that I wear jeans to work, I’ve got barely enough flex to lower myself into a chair, let alone scale the side of a building.  Yet, there they were, just as Dawn described:  Ripped, stained, and enough fringe at the bottom to make Charo swoon.  Add that to the fact that Jordan weighs 98 pounds (dripping wet with rocks in his pockets), and it was clear that we were going to need more fabric.

Good pair of Jordan jeans, minus the usable parts.

A quick trip to the Goodwill store, followed by a brief stay at the laundromat (and a solid week of jean surgery) left me with this partial stack of denim fabric, and a healthy set of hand cramps.  

I’d been searching the internet for modern denim patchwork, but with the exception of a handful of rag quilts and a few high-end handbags (here and here), there wasn’t much to be found.  So, the question remained:  What to make?  Enter my talented friends from the St. Louis Modern Quilt Guild.


I had just joined the STLMQG a short time before, and was drunk with happiness scouring the Flickr feeds of my fellow members.  Two beautiful string quilts, in particular, caught my eye (here and here) created by fellow guild members Cara and Mary Claire, respectively.   I had also just received the book The Practical Guide to Patchwork, by Elizabeth Hartman , that just so happened to contain instructions for a string quilt of this type.  So, I ran my rotary cutter through a pile of aluminum foil (does anyone actually think this works?) and started stripping.    

Climbing the Walls (Part I)

[Author's note:  Check back tomorrow for the next installment...  It's kind of a long story].

A few months back, a friend from work asked if I could make her a Kevlar quilt.  Kevlar is the fiber they use to make bulletproof vests, so I was a tad curious as to what she had in mind.  I’m an organic chemist by trade, but the friend in question is not, so I didn’t automatically assume she wanted me to extrude a sheet of polymerized phenylenediamine and terephthaloyl chloride units. Maybe she picked up a sample at the army surplus store and thought a bulletproof blanket would be cool?  Or, caught a glimpse of its chemical structure and simply liked the pattern?  I suppose one could mistake that for a bunch of tessellating hexies…

The skeletal and 3-D molecular structures of Kevlar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar).

I asked her what she had in mind.

“I need…” she started to answer, but then scooped up her iPhone and began tapping away.  I stood there for a moment, assuming she would finish, but she kept tapping and clicking and swishing her finger across the screen, until my curiosity (impatience?) got the best of me.

“You neeeeeeeed…” I prompted, watching her finger scroll through a chain of photographs on the tiny screen.  She finally stopped, looked up, and said in a definite “Your-Mission-Should-You-Choose-to-Accept-It”  kind of voice:

“Protection.”

Now, Dawn is a great kidder, but she’s also much smarter than I am, so I can’t always tell whether she’s serious, or if she’s joking and I just don’t get it.  So, I mumbled a non-committal, “Uh-huh,” followed by a thoughtful, “I see,” and stared kind of blankly at her for a few moments.  “From what, exactly?” I ventured, hoping she’d crack. 

“From these!”  she smiled, turning the phone in my direction.  “Bwah-ha-haaaaaaaaaaaah!”

River and Rebel

“Yeah,” I nodded.  “Ferocious.” 

Dawn had lost an elderly pet cat to illness a few months before.  She brought these two little guys home from the Humane Society a short time after.    River and Rebel, presumably named, I suspect, for reasons best not to divulge in this particular forum.  J

   

She said they were great fun, mischievous and busy, but that they were ripping her to shreds.  Never having owned a pet before (except for Charlie, the goldfish I won at the school penny carnival that my sister poked to death on Valentine’s Day, 1984), I wasn’t sure what she meant, so she showed me.

[Wait…  You didn’t think I was going to show you a FLESH WOUND, did you?  Seriously, one of my pet peeves.  Had to un-friend a friend from Facebook because she insisted on posting progress photos of her mother’s gangrenous wound therapy…  Honestly, people…  I haven’t spoken to you since high school.  Did you really think that was going to get me to the reunion this year?]

Where was I?  Oh, right...  The flesh wound.

Her forearm was pretty scratched up, but it was her legs, she said, that caught the brunt of it.  “They’ve taken to using me as a launching pad,” she said, “And, I was hoping you could make me a lap throw for protection.”

“Happy to!”  I replied, always excited for a new project.  “But, not of Kevlar, right?”  (Just to make sure).  “That stuff stops bullets.  I’m pretty sure it can stand up to my Kenmore.”

 “No, no…” she answered.  “I was hoping you could use denim, instead.”

Denim.

Yes. 

Because that would be better.

Hammertime (aka The Quilt Formerly Known as 'Sheen')

In January of this year, our St. Louis Modern Quilt Guild kicked off its Robert Kaufman Solids Only Challenge.  Using a Kona Charm Pack in the Classics palette and only one or two additional solid fabrics, we were to design and complete a quilt with an outer perimeter between 120 and 180 inches to present in time for our June 11th meeting.  Having only joined the guild this past April, I got off to a late start, and (will gladly use that as the reason I ) was still hand-sewing my binding on at 5:15 Saturday morning.  Needless to say, one accidental nap later, and I was sprinting out the door, thirty-minutes late.  A rather inauspicious start for the girl who gets turned around the minute she crosses the Mississippi River on her way to our meetings each month to begin with.

Stupid TomTom...

At any rate, the ladies definitely came through, with 44 of our members presenting their quilts to a captive audience.  A few of the photos are up on our STLMQG Flickr page, and I hope we see many more to come.

The inspiration for this quilt was originally the sheen that you see on the back of a compact disk. Each 2.5-inch block was my less-precise version of the Endless Chain pattern available on the Quilter's Cache website, but down-sized to fit our challenge requirements.  Of course, down-sizing meant that the "spoke" corner of each block had nine layers of fabric stacked up at one point.  Once you join FOUR of those points together, that's 9...  18...  27...  A veritable BUTTload of fabric coming together at one seam.  

Photo courtesy of http://www.123rf.com/.

Thankfully for me, May brought a welcome 12-hour quilting retreat sponsored by my local quilt shop, the Quilted Garden, at St. John's United Methodist Church in Edwardsville.  As I fussed and repositioned my 144 tiny squares on the design wall, each of the lovely, God-fearing ladies around me would stop by my table, encourage my efforts, and wish me the best.  Which was all fine and good until I started sewing those mega seams together, and the under-my-breath bleeps started flying.  I was literally standing on my tip-toes, leaning with all of my might on the center of each block, willing the iron (which was steaming up a three-foot radius around me at this point) to smoosh those corners into place when a soft-spoken woman with fluffy white hair tapped me lightly on the shoulder and said, "Here, Honey.  Try this."    

Apparently, when God closes a door, he opens a tool box.

Between this divine intervention, and the spiraling, meteoric downfall of this guy, it was decided a name change was in order.  So, at last, I present to you, Sheen "Hammertime."

More information on the process behind making this quilt can be found on the WIPs tab of this blog.

Thanks for visiting!

WIP: Robert Kaufman Solids Only Challenge - "Sheen"

Photo courtesy of www.123rf.com

The idea for this quilt started with the sheen you see on the backside of a compact disk, and the Endless Chain block I spotted on the Quilter's Cache website.  The charm pack seemed to heavily favor the blue-teal-aqua-turquoise family to me, so the picture above seemed a good initial fit.

The original design called for a 6-inch, paper-pieced block, which I tinkered with until I'd worked out a 2.5-inch prototype using a few Moda prints and some old muslin (read:  thin fabric) I had laying around.  The prototype below shows four of the 2.5-inch blocks joined together, and my overall "plan" for the quilt as mapped out in PowerPoint (poor man's version of EQ).

The Challenge Rules stated that we had to use at least 21 of the 41 blocks provided in the charm pack.  From each of the 39 charm squares I chose to include in the quilt top, I cut seven 1x3-inch strips, which comes to 21 out of 25 square inches possible per charm, or 84% of 39 blocks for a total of 32.76 blocks used.  (Yes, I know...  Geeks 'R Us).

At this point, it was time to start cutting paper:  One hundred and forty-four (144) 2.5-inch squares, to be exact.  I used regular copy paper (spoiler:  BAD idea), and kept them organized in groups of twelve, because...  Frankly...  It just felt less oppressive that way.

Next came the 2.5-inch fabric squares.  Again, 144.  Each of the fabric squares was then individually cut into a kite shape, and temporarily attached to a paper square using fabric glue.

Once all of the kites had been adhered to the squares, I began sewing the colored strips onto the right-hand side of each kite (288 total:  273 from the charm pack, plus another 15 grey I added as one of my two additional colors) .  I had divided the colored strips into two piles, darks and brights.  I sewed and pressed the darks to the right, then sewed and pressed the brights to the left in an attempt to create the illusion of a less-disordered pattern overall.

Once the colored strips had been added, I sewed and pressed fabric strips (1.5x2.5-inches each, 288 total) to the outside edges of each of the colored strips to make these:

I turned each block face-down on the cutting mat and trimmed it to 2.5-inches square, to make this nifty stash of blocks...

From which I STILL needed to remove the paper.

And, there was evening...

And there was morning...

The seventh day.

After a few days' rest, I took my pile of happy little squares (aren't they pretty?) to a 12-hour quilt retreat sponsored by my local quilt shop where I sewed, steamed, and literally hammered my blocks into shape.

At this point, I was wanting to sandwich it, quilt it and bind it in a happy little rainbow print, but my outer dimensions were too small (24x24...  Fourteen years of college, right down the drain...), so I opted to put it on a stark field of white instead.

I had hoped to center a CD on each block and trace around it for quilting purposes, but at this point, the deadline loomed less than 12 hours away, so I opted to skip my first attempts at quilting circles and went with a straight-line diagonal pattern instead, with a few double-lines thrown in for good "homage-to-Film-in-the-Fridge" measure.  I marked my quilting lines with "disappearing" ink and a four-foot aluminum straight-edge my father-in-law bought me for Christmas (because I was always borrowing his).

I put the last (poorly-executed) hand stitch into the back of the binding at 5:15 AM, and promptly fell asleep.  Got up at 7:00, took a quick shower, and headed over the river (late) to the STLMQG's big reveal.  I was originally pretty upset with the quilt.  The center was a crumpled mess from all of the lumpy seams jutting out everywhere, and the stark contrast of the smooth, unwashed, all-white border only served to emphasize this (along with the scatter of pockmarks remaining from the barrage of safety pins left in the fabric up until just a few hours before).  But, once I got it home and washed it, it wasn't so bad.

All in all, it was a fun challenge.  I still need to break my procrastination curse.  And learn how to turn a proper binding.  (Seriously...  Will SOMEONE show me this stitch in person?!?)  And, the next time I make one of these (and, yes, there WILL be a next time), I'll scale the block back up, extend the pattern all the way to the edge of the quilt, and definitely bring "the hammer."  But, for now at least, I can say for certain, that it's definitely going to be a while.