The latest issue of Quilter's Home has been spotted in the wild, so head to your local quilt shop if you'd like to check out my article on killing off lingering UFOs. I'm looking forward to reading about Quiltzillas, McQuilters, and other characters from quiltland....
In the furor of sewing curtains, pillows, and other household stuff for the new apartment, I forgot to mention that I've got an article in the current issue of Quilter's Home magazine! It's about putting your fabric stash on a diet. Editor Mark Lipinski does a great job with this fun magazine, so check it out if you haven't already.
Given the disastrous death of my previous ironing board, a replacement was necessary. But Ikea's Dänka comes with the gross scribbly flower cover shown at left, which would clearly be bullied by the other decor of my burgeoning sewing room/office. So using some green and grey Pernilla fabric that will match the eventual curtains, I threw together a simple new cover using the existing one as a pattern. Here's how, in case anybody else is similarly turned off by the default cover. (And trust me! The steps look long, but it really is pretty simple.)
to fit all your templates on one or two pages. When you hit Print, you start with something like this:
The background for this block I designed for a picnic blanket is pieced; I can rotary cut the rectangles, so I don't need templates for them. I got rid of them and nudged the other pieces around until everything fit on two pages (EQ6 still showed a third blank page, but it doesn't print the blanks):
So far so good. But to print the templates again, I'd have to start with the original layout. EQ6 doesn't offer a way to save templates, but here's a workaround to do just that. As an added benefit, your templates will be universally accessible, even to people who don’t have EQ. Really, it's just printing a PDF.
Make sure your computer has a PDF printer driver installed. I use CutePDF. Macs usually let you save a PDF directly from the print dialogue, but if you had a Mac, you wouldn’t be using EQ6, would you? (That is, unless you were some kind of Parallels wizard.)
Tell EQ6 to print your templates (File | Print | Templates). Double check that the settings (line width, key block, etc.) are how you want them.
Click the Page Setup button, then click the Printer button. Choose the PDF printer.
Back on the Print Template screen, press the Preview button. Arrange your templates how you like, rotating, moving, and deleting patches as necessary (click the buttons along the top, then click the patch you want to change. For deleting, you’ll need to press the Delete key on the keyboard when the patch is highlighted). Make sure to leave an adequate margin around the edge of the page—the PDF might fit everything fine, but the printer it ultimately sends to may not.
Press Print. When the PDF driver prompts for a file name, choose a folder, name the file, and hit OK.
When you print templates from the PDF, make sure the pages print at 100%—that is, without any page scaling. Adobe Reader often defaults to scale everything down to the printer margins, but you don’t want that here. There’s a drop-down on the Print dialog box to set it right.
These templates are all set for e-mailing to a friend, taking to the copy shop, or whatever.
EQ6 does have some frustrations, but it certainly makes quilting easier. Give it a go...
The other day I reaped the rewards of fabric tourism as the Other’s friend Lydia introduced me to Fichu, which she claimed was the best fabric shop in Berlin. It's not only that; it's like a parallel universe where no fabric ever dies—floor to ceiling stacks of vintage fabric from any period you could imagine, many still on the bolt and available in whatever amount you need. (And in this parallel universe, there must not be fire marshals.) A cotton avalanche seemed imminent and in place of aisles there were a couple paths carved through the stacks, so browsing was a little tricky. Instead, you just had to let the shopkeeper know what you were looking for, and chances are he could unearth it from whatever magic rabbit hole he had at the back of the shop.
He was what really made the stop worthwhile. He’s been selling textiles for many moons, and seemed to know just about everything about them (the Berlin office of Christie’s uses him as an expert). I thought I was being clever by asking of a large-scale Finnish print was Marimekko—“Everyone knows only Marimekko,” he sighed somewhat jokingly. Keep thy cleverness to thyself, Feed Dog.
I was of course mostly looking for midcentury fabric; he noted that it’s almost always people from English-speaking countries who are looking for retro prints. Australians in particular, he said; their population didn’t boom until the Fifties, so they don’t have much native midcentury design. Germans, he said, like Op-Art and Seventies design theoretically, but “for someone else” rather than in their own homes.
It was a shame I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, because I’m sure it would have been there. I ended up buying half a metre of two fabrics—an indulgence, but worth it for the experience, which was more like visiting a museum than shopping.
They’re 100 percent linen and she reckons they’re from the mid-1960s, though they were fresh out of the original package yesterday. The colours are splendid—very vibrant, since the towels haven’t been used—and pink and orange is a particular favourite of the Other. Could make for quite a nice appliqué design, eh?
Fabric shopping in Berlin has so far yielded little; the impressive craft section at KaDeWe had a decent amount of quilting fabric (though we'd been explicitly told by someone upstairs that there was no patchwork fabric to be had in the whole store), but most was imported from America and thus 1) nothing new, and 2) inflated in price, even without figuring in exchange rates. There was, however, a flurry of childlike excitement when we discovered some German quilting magazines (from earlier this year—still looking for more current issues). I’m looking at the pictures and marking pages for the Other to translate—it was only a matter of time before I inducted him into my quilting sweatshop somehow. Bwa ha ha!
In the continuing adventures of Manquilter Misunderstood by World at Large, we also stopped by Knopfloch (“buttonhole”), a pretty basic craft shop in Alexanderplatz. When told I was looking for quilting fabric, a woman working in the shop proceeded to gesture at the bits of fabric in some sample quilts to describe to me what patchwork was. It was a valiant attempt at education and at English, but there’s just something a little silly about someone straining their communicative faculties to express what someone else already knows. I guess in any language male + quilting = clueless. And to be fair, the level of my German puts my cluefulness rather in question.
More shops further afield, so stay tuned.
:What a feast of fabrics we have today! Never before has there been such plenty, and never before has the choice been so difficult.Our options have only grown.
(1978) was a real score. The author can be a bit corny/whimsical ("Lure of the Islands, Magic of the Tropic Sun" is the name of the Hawaiian appliqué chapter), but the book has tonnes of pictures of the kind of free-form appliqué that was happening in the '70s. It covers a broad range of techniques, but the real treat is just browsing browsing for inspiration.
Riddle me this: if everybody in the 1970s quilt revival was making these wild appliqué quilts, what happened to them? OK, so maybe it wasn't everyone, but there seems to be a certain genre of appliqué quilt that you just don't see at the flea market.
I'd once toyed with the idea of doing something similar myself, but seeing it done here, I don't think I'd have the patience.
(1973), but I'm glad I did. Though I have an American edition, it's an English book, so it takes an English piecing approach (that is, paper templates are wrapped with fabric, as in a traditional Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt). Even with my Anglo-Canadian-American background, my quilting practice is American, so I've been fascinated to learn other ways of working—especially since the American quilting tradition is so strong and often independent of developments elsewhere. English piecing apparently isn't just for hexagons; all the square work in the book is done the same way. In fact, the book lists the machine-piecing so familiar to us Yanks as an "experimental" technique!
The author's real talent lies in her colour and fabric choices, particularly in composing these small pillows of tiny squares. It seems quilters had access to crazier fabrics in Europe than in America, where gingham, stripes, small florals, and the like were still the dominant prints used.
Another striking composition, and a creative way to use dot fabric. I love the asymmetry. But why on earth wouldn't you just machine-piece it??
This, on the other hand, demonstrates the versatility of English piecing. It would certainly be a trick to do this with standard machine-piecing.
(1978) aesthetically focuses on highly geometric piecing but offers a solid quiltmaking lesson. The love the cover quilt.
This is typical of the author's quilting style: a geometrical approach that isn't wholly removed from traditional quilt design but is fresh in colour and layout. The notches in the sides and at the corners (Battlestar Galactica cut corners, anyone?) are also typical of the not-quite-square quilts he shows in the book.
Another interesting shape in a nice colour palette.
I liked the dynamism of this deceptively simple quilt as well as the way it ignores traditional block structure. The allover quilting design looks ahead of its time.
(1977) in an issue of Quilter's Home, and I happened to find a copy recently. This is more of a pattern book than the others, and many of the patterns are fairly traditional, despite the cover. But there's still some modern stuff.
The colours and irregular stripes of this one reminded me of the Any Way You Slice It quilt in Denyse Schmidt's book.
Another example of the strong, colourful, graphic appliqué of the '70s. It's so rare now to see such a detailed quilt made entirely of solids.
This quilt is the cover model, a modern take on Grandmother's Flower Garden. I like the pattern's somewhat vague layout instructions; patterns today sometimes give too-precise directions to fake a haphazard appearance that's better done by eye.
(1974) gives lessons of increasing difficulty to teach a beginner various techniques. The author has some peculiar ideas—for example, she suggests using the "smaller" toe of the presser foot, which is apparently always one-eighth of an inch, to set your seam allowance, contradicting the near-universal rule of quarter-inch seam allowances. But some of the projects are worth a look.
I liked this simple quilt for its mix of print and pattern, piecing and appliqué.
These chevrons make quite a bold statement. The impressive colour gradation is in the quilt, not just a flaw of my admittedly crap camera.
Another geometric wonder.
And a word of warning: please do not subject your children to these terrifying 
by Jean Ray Laury. I didn't include it here because it wasn't part of my recent binge, but also because there's a good sampling of images from it out there somewhere. I discovered the book through another blogger who had posted a bunch of pictures from the book, but I can't find the post now. Does anybody know it? Some pics are here and here, but neither of those is the post I'm thinking of. If we can't track it down (and there's interest), I'll post some of my favourite shots here.
