Mostly thinking of a quilt cutting weekend
Good morning. This is me. It's been a while again since we've written. We are wrestling with ourselves now in that there are parts of us that really would like to be working on the next quilt. We started it last night ... the first one was one for "All Seasons" and second is a quilt from the Laura Ingall's series. Both of them seem to be samplers.We're just so excited by them ... can't describe my feelings well, but it is like a flood of happiness. I always appreciated that my grandmother was such a good seamstress, but in comparison from my grandma and sister in their devotion to quilts, CS is doing much more with it. At least in the respect of beauty and art. My grandmother must have been able to do so much more, because I remember some of the wedding quilts up in her attic. They were very detailed and beautiful. The quilts I saw my grandmother make though were her square patchwork quilts ... they basically had 3 to 4 colors, were most often flannel and all symmetrical so the colored squares showed diagonally.
When we were kids, we were so proud when my grandmother made "our" quilt for us. She made one for everyone in the family. My grandmother made hundreds of quilts for the American Cancer Society, through the church or through the Jaycees. A lot of those quilts were baby blankets. I think this is where CS gets her thoughts on donating her work. I'm proud of her for it though there's another part of us that would like to see her financially compensated at least for materials if not labor. I think that is a conversation that will evolve over time.
I'm very excited to be going back to WI, but I know I have time left on my hand. We won't be going next weekend, but we'll be going to the one after that. That gives me about two weeks to be cutting yet. I think we're going to try doing more cutting during the week. CS warned me about not getting burned out, but we're pretty psyched. I know though that we didn't work on CARF as we would have liked. But, when push came to shove, we really needed to do something relaxing and we'd felt behind ... there's so much to be doing.
We are finding that there is a lot of extra material left over from this quilt, so we are making two at the same time. I lost track of our counts yesterday when we'd gotten more tired, but I counted and recounted to make sure we'd done enough. A little of what's complicating it is that this pattern, they don't total up the counts and they are all 1/2" short. So if the pattern calls for 1", we need to add a half inch. That's not too big a deal, but it is extra thinking. It also doesn't total the pieces so we're doing more counting to make sure we get things done properly. The directions called for cutting as if one piece at a time around a plastic stencil you are supposed to make. But, CS has shown me using the cutting board and so things need to be transformed to that.
There are a few other things as well. There is no specific directions saying which cloths to use, so that we need to work things through to use a variety of the patterns offered and ok, lost thoughts here, but to finalize this part ... there are a lot of challenges. I feel that each one I've done I've learned a lot and I'm really excited about doing this.
One of the things I didn't know what would happen is how happy I am to be working on the pieces of cloth. There's something very gratifying as to feeling the material, and then there's the visual part where we are appreciating the colors offered and how things go together. I got really excited when I found there were 6 little swatches of light flannel. It was like oh man I found a spring well. I'm trying to make the most of all the varieties of material. It excites me that I don't know how it's going to look all together. It's just something terrific.
I remember when we were younger, my grandmother had given me some swatches in a box and we had worked on sewing them together by hand. At that time it was too much and I think we were confused that the cutting pieces and my sewing lines were not cohesive enough. I don't know what happened to that material, but it had been a big deal at the time. Doing the quilts now is like some deep part of me and my traditional history coming through. My grandmother and great grandmother and who knows that much before were quilt makers. That's not something all families have grown up with.
I still don't have the parts accomplished where we are actually doing the sewing. Just think all this excitement is just about the cutting and coordinating of materials. I am not ready for the actual sewing, but something tells me that it might come down the line. Eventually maybe we'll ask CS if it would be ok to take back the sewing machine I'd given her of mine long time ago. I'm pretty far away from that now though. Too much to be handling right now. Better that we let CS do that part.
But, in all ... we're pretty excited. One more part too? I'm very happy to be working with CS on something this cool together. I'm really impressed with her ability to focus and concentrate. She's really exciting to get to know. I'm very happy that I feel more calm and accepting of her now than I ever had before. Before there was a lot of tension due the family dynamics. We'd survived through rebelling, where she's survived by being compilable. Somewhere now we're hitting the best parts of our years I believe. We've both grown through our experiences and for the first time we're both at the same time appreciating having a relationship with the other. I think during our youth's our personalities were set against our means of surviving. I think it was due to complicated relationships with the parents. Now things are better ... and I'm that much more exceptionally pleased to be getting to know her almost as if the first time in our lives.
I think I'm doing good for her too. That makes me happy!
posted by Ann Marie @ 8/31/2009 06:22:00 AM
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