Charley Harper quilts—and Christmas stockings!

It might be a little late to stitch up one of these Charley Harper stockings in time for Christmas, but there’s always next year! The patterns are available from Keri Designs, who, as I was delighted to discover at the Pacific International Quilt Festival, is the official licensed designer for quilt patterns based on the ever-delightful work of Charley Harper.

Keri’s booth was my first stop at the show in October, after spying her quilted version of Harper’s Jumbrella in the show program. Since it was early, I got the chance to chat with the very friendly Keri herself and see the quilts up close.

Harper’s designs are such naturals for adaptation into applique—just look at the way Keri’s used polka dot fabric as the snowy background in Br-r-r-r-rthday, and quilting lines as the rain in Jumbrella. She even cleverly used fabric show-through to create a semi-transparent effect for the wing in Trumpeter Swan.

I’m thrilled that these patterns are available so all of us quilters can make our own little piece of Charley Harper. As for me, I picked up the Ladybug Sampler pattern, which I’m saving for some just-for-fun stitching after I get my book done.

By the way, this is a completely unsponsored plug—I was just so excited to find Charley Harper quilt patterns that I had to share my delight with you too (especially since I once thought the licensing possibility seemed remote). And Keri says there’re more Harper quilt patterns on the way!

Charley Harper ladybugs

I made this felt picture based on Charley Harper’s ladybugs a while ago as a break from quilt-size appliqué projects, but I never got around to posting it. Then I caught wind of the Charley Harper Quilt Along and thought it’d be a good time to share.

Judging by the enthusiastic interpretations people have posted to the Quilt Along pool, Harper’s illustrations are ripe for reinterpretation in fabric. My fabric for these ladybugs, wool felt, is relatively boring, but it was a fun, manageable project to stitch up on a whim, and the felt gives it a little dimension.

The Quilt Along’s got me itching to work up some more small Harper-inspired pieces—I’m almost done with a goldfinch in needlepoint that I’ll have to get a photo of. We’re moving house in a few weeks, and I’m envisioning a beautifully composed wall of Charley Harper needlework in the new place: the fused fabric pictures the Mother made for me, a quilt from this pattern I found, maybe some cross-stitch, and whatever other fibrous experiments get my needle aflutter.

Charles Harper and Eleanor Grosch

I bought these prints by local artist Eleanor Grosch last year. They immediately reminded me of Charley Harper's illustration style (especially the focus on gracefully curved birds). I wondered what she thought of his work, and then I saw on her blog that he's her favorite artist! "I'd like to thing our work has some similarities," she writes; I for one have always associated the two. Do check out her shop, where you can see more of her work, including some beautiful stuff using more pattern. And take a look at Caroline Tiger's interview with Grosch.

Charley Harper, for his part, seems to be cropping up quite a bit recently. After writing about Harper in Handmade Modern, Todd Oldham has a 420-page, $200 monograph, Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life (no, that isn't an extra zero) due out in June. Just a few days ago print & pattern ran a post on Harper, too. I saw this set of notecards at a shop yesterday and was tempted to buy it—if this set had been in stock, I would have bought it. Actually, I probably would have bought two, one to use and one to frame/admire. But for now, I'm waiting for my copy of Introducing Our Western Birds to arrive after reading about it here—it seems to be illustrated in a similar style.

All the bird business got me itching to stamp out the Feeding Frenzy pattern I've had in my head for a while now. I'd like to print yardage too, but for now I wanted to see how the crowds of pigeons looked on these book covers, as I'm thinking of starting an Etsy shop.

And Column Inches? It's still coming along, but slowly due to the slice-and-dice improvisational technique I'm improvising (no, that isn't redundant). The top looks completely pieced together from this photo, but it isn't quite wide enough. I wish some of the text strips were a bit more angled, so I'm seeing what I can do with the last few pieces.

I found a Charley Harper quilt!

I've mentioned Charles Harper a few times before, mainly in reference to the fused bird pictures The Mother made for me several birthdays ago. The geometric, draftsmen-like quality of Harper's animal illustrations have always struck me as readily translatable into a quilt, so I tittered with delight when I saw this quilt in a 1978 issue of Lady's Circle Patchwork Quilts. Here's the caption from the magazine:

Lenore Parham borrowed from a design by Charles Harper in Ranger Rick (The National Wildlife Federation children's magazine) to create this charming wall hanging.

I was at a secondhand book shop, and this picture alone moved the magazine from the "maybe" to the "definitely must have" stack. I had figured it was just a photo to go with an article on the Blue Ridge Quilters, and it wasn't till I got home that I saw they'd patterned the quilt too! So I may just have to sew up my own version. The design is especially fun since the quadrants of the circle use the same basic shape to depict three different animal as well as trees, and the quilting is quite fun too.

My first thought, though, was that something like this could never get published today (he said, pulling out the soapbox and climbing up onto it). Such "borrowing" would never get past the copyright police; a current magazine wouldn't take the chance that some lawyer somewhere might consider the quilt an infringement. I certainly understand the need for artists to protect their work, but the stifling that happens as a result of today's voracious protection of derivative works is sad. And what's the result? Other artists can't make money off the first artist's work, but lawyers and licensing agents can make a tidy sum. An original designer (or their estate, as the case would be for Harper) may or may not be willing to allow derivative quilts or other works that don't compete with the original, but the process of seeking permission is enough to kill the creative impetus. Copyrights and Copywrongs and Free Culture (available online) make the point in more detail, if you're interested. And take a look at Wendy Seltzer's article "Craft and Copyright" in volume 6 of Craft magazine for the most balanced, reasoned, sensible advice on copyright I've seen—a far cry from the many scaremongering articles that combat quilters' and crafters' myths about copyright with more myths. OK, now I can put the soapbox away.

Happy birthday to me!

My birthday was last week while I was away, and look what I got from the Mother! I've already posted some of her great quilts, and she's showing off once again with these fabric versions of Charles Harper prints. Harper did some great midcentury illustration, especially of birds. When the Mother saw them in a book I have, she thought they'd be great reinterpreted in fabric. These are the first ones, based on these prints:



The Mother dug through her stash to find the fabrics and then snipped them into shapes, which were then fused to the background fabric. The details are in pen ink. The print fabrics are a nod to the textures of Harper's prints but also lend an extra depth—the Mother searched high and low to find a scrap that replicated the warbler's shaded breast. Then she stretched the fabric around canvases.

I love them both, but my favorite of the two is the top one. It's always been one of my favorite Harper birds, and there's an extra mixed-media quality to it with the bleach splotches. I'll try to get them hung up this weekend so I can gaze at them all the time. They're be the thing that people comment on whenever they're introduced to my apartment. Is the Mother fantastic, or what? What she can do with textiles always amazes me.

As if that wasn't enough, the package also had a copy of EQ5, which is software for designing quilts. I've been playing with it for a few days to figure it out, and I'm quite excited. Modern quilts with irregular blocks are a little trickier to do than traditional grid patterns, but I'll get there (hell, I managed QuarkXPress). I've been sketching quilt ideas in a book of grid paper, but as a child of the digital age, I can't properly play with designs unless they're on the screen.

And that's still not all—the Mother also stuck in a bunch of fabric. She knew I was planning a quilt with lots of text prints, and she thought the dots would look good with my Plain Spoken quilt. Perhaps in some pillows?

So as I'm sure this blog makes apparent, I have lovely parents. Thanks Mother!

Swan boat and other Quilt Market antics

As promised, here’s Stitch editor Amber Eden and me in the swan-boat centerpiece of the Michael Miller booth at Spring Quilt Market in Portland. Fortunately it’s only a still shot, as my dismount was less than elegant. I bumped into Amber on her way in, and we had a great time checking out new fabrics together.

Market was a great reminder that the people I work with over phone and e-mail do actually exist in the real world! Here’s fellow Stitch contributing editor Linzee Kull McCray on the left with friends Jenny Gordy, Codi Josephson, and Greta Songe.

Days at Market are long, with parties going into the night after the convention itself closes. At the Portland Modern Quilt Guild’s event at Modern Domestic, I had the chance to meet Susan Beal, another Stitch contributing editor, who’s lucky enough to call Portland home. (Incidentally, at the same party, wearing the necktie I appliquéd for Stitch with Style scored me a dinner invite with the riotous trio of Rachel, Angela, and Gretchen—hi guys!)

You wouldn’t know it from the size of the convention hall, but the quilting/sewing industry is a small world—Linzee interviewed me for American Patchwork & Quilting many moons ago, I worked as a freelance editor on Susan’s book Modern Log Cabin Quilting, and now we’re all hooked up with Stitch. But I never would have expected to hear my name called across the floor by a family friend I hadn’t seen in at least 15 years—she was lending a hand with her sister’s booth, Eazy Peazy Quilts.

Meeting and catching up with people was half the fun—the other half was all the new fabric and tools being shown! I’m salivating for the Charley Harper line coming this fall from Birch Fabrics. I’ve put some other lines I’m looking forward to up on Flickr if you want a sneak peek of your own. I should have taken more photos of people and fabrics, but there were so many shiny, distracting things to see!

Crewel and unusual in California

OK, forgive the cheesy pun. I got back Saturday from visiting the Other in California and have just finished stashing all the fabric I bought (which is another story entirely). My quilting projects all require a sewing machine, but the Mother has passed on a genetic defect requiring a needlework project to be on the go at all times, so I embroidered my way across northern California. The Other likes a good flamingo, so before I left I creweled this towel for him based on a design in a Charles Harper book (more on him later, too).

Well, I say crewel, but The New Crewel defines crewel as embroidery with wool on linen twill, and since I'm using pearl cotton on a cruddy Ikea hand towel, it doesn't technically qualify. But the stitches are the same, and so is the basic look. The stretchy terry cloth was hardly ideal, though.

This grey cloth leftover from recovering my sofa works much better, as I discovered when I started embroidering these starbursts with spiderweb stitch and French knots.

The Other seemed to like my housewifely embroidering while we watched TV or drove on the freeways, though I made less of a stellar impression on the flight over. I'd decided that if I wasn't stuck right next to someone, I'd give crewel at 30,000 feet a go, and I ended up having a row to myself. So out came the embroidery hoop and I set to work. I caught the woman in the row behind staring; she quickly averted her eyes when I noticed. After the plane landed, she asked her male traveling companion if he had liked the copy of Running with Scissors she'd lent him. He had not. "Don't you like memoirs?" she said. He made a quick glance at me. "I'll tell you later." Three guesses what his objection to the book was—first two don't count. She also commented to him that my bag was cool as we trotted off the plane, but he was unresponsive. Behold the power of men with needles.

I can't be blamed entirely for the substandard nature of my materials. Despite begging the Other to stop at every craft shop in northern California, no crewel wool was to be had. We popped over a hill in San Francisco, an embroidery shop appeared, and I made one of those "STOP THE CAR NOW!!" demands. But though they had "crewel" painted across the window, there was still no crewel wool except that already packed up in kits for embroidering flowers and leaves and other grannyish patterns. So I'll either be pulling apart tapestry wool strands or sticking with pearl cotton.

In other news, just before I left I made these Denyse Schmidt oven mitts for Mintyfresh, who's just moved. She helpfully left a comment here a while back to let me know what colors she likes together. Good luck, Minty! The mitts are quite fun to make (I made one for me a couple months ago), though I've yet to bind a pair without cursing like a sailor.

Stay tuned for more on crafting and thrifting in the Bay Area....