Quilt Show

I took a quick trip to Columbus, Ohio, last week to go to a quilt show. (I told you when I dive into something I really am totally in it!) I got a non-stop flight with frequent flyer miles, and stayed one night at the convention center hotel at a (relatively) cheap conference rate. The Columbus airport was twelve minutes and a $20 Uber ride from the convention center.  The whole trip was easy-peasy and not too costly, and I wanted to see more of the world of quilts! 

I figured if the quilt show was a bust, I could walk around Columbus, which I had last visited 40 years ago when I lived in Ohio. A favorite young blogger I follow, Athena Scalzi, lives in rural Ohio and has blogged several times about trips to Columbus and places there she has visited. I took notes from her blog along with me. As it turns out, the convention center was in one of the neighborhoods she frequents. I walked around and saw several spots she mentions, but didn't actually eat in any of them. Instead, I found a food hall a couple of blocks away and visited that for a couple of meals (Turkish rice bowl, and then bao buns), very satisfying. Forty years ago, in my not-so-distant part of Ohio, zucchini was found in the foreign vegetable section of the supermarket, and at a restaurant when I asked for a rare steak, they said they didn't know how to do that. I appreciate modern life!

Many variations on traditional forms

The quilt show was anything but a bust! There were a couple of hundred displayed quilts, between several themed competitions and those displayed in vendor booths. This was the main reason I wanted to go. I'm trying to refine my tastes and also understand the possibilities, as I start to make my own quilts. I took many photos, standing back to get a sense of the designs, and close up to understand the fabric piecing and the quilting approach. I'm only just now beginning to understand how the quilting itself (the visible top-stitching through the layers) contributes to the overall design - it's not all about the colors and shapes of the fabric of the quilt top, though that was what first drew me to the art form.

This very painterly quilt is a masterpiece!

A detail from the bridge above.
Each square is about a half an inch
Note how the quilting helps define the design

The range of the displays was amazing! There were many many variations of traditional forms, most prominently the stars. But there were also pointillist/pixelated renditions of photos, people and landscapes, abstract colors and shapes, cutesy animals, baby activity blankets, and many many smaller things twee and kitsch. There were also many different types of vendor booths, with giant computerized sewing machines and many workaday models. There were lots of gadgets ("notions" in sewing lingo). My local quilting store is lovely but tiny, and there were things I had seen on-line that I hadn't seen in real life, and I was anxious to seek them out. I went with a list. There was also lots and lots of fabric available there, which I expected, but also whole booths dedicated to thread, which I hadn't expected. With visible quilting stitching such a big part of a quilt, that makes sense. Fabric is sold in specialty fabric stores by the yard from big bolts on a shelf, but often for a quilt project you only need a small amount each of several different colors or designs. Sometimes an on-line vendor bundles a bunch of smaller pieces into a curated collection selected for a color and/or theme story. But at this show, there were also individual small pieces available to put together your own designs. I knew to expect that - I also found prices were roughly the same as on-line, not a great deal. But seeing the colors in real life, picking exactly what I want, is very satisfying.

Some more modern designs

I was quite taken with this guy
detail from a much bigger piece
I love the piecing and quilting 

It took a couple of hours to get the lay of the land, and I was glad I had decided to stay long enough and close enough that I could make several separate forays into the exhibit hall. The hall was as far away from my hotel room as it was possible to be while staying inside the giant convention complex. It took me almost 15 minutes to walk there! Also holding events in the same convention center were a mid-west bitcoin organization, an Ohio cannabis group, and some large industrial group that I think was something to do with HVAC. While waiting for the elevator in the hotel, a young man in a company-logo polo shirt and chinos wearing some meeting badge around his neck asked me, with mid-western politeness, "Are you enjoying the quilt show?". I laughed out loud, acknowledging how squarely I fit into the demographic! If anything, I was on the younger end of quilters. (Actually, TBH, upon reflection, I wasn't any younger. I just felt like I must be younger, always wondering at being in the middle of a crowd of old people.)

This is a "long-arm quilter". 
The quilt is attached to the machine,
and the computerized head moves and sews the programmed design

One of many thread vendors
Between display quilts, fabrics, and thread, 
I felt totally drunk with color.

The convention center complex was at the edge of a newly gentrifying area of Columbus, the Short North. I walked around and enjoyed the vibe, as the sun came out and I could finally shed my sweater. It was restaurants and art galleries, some thrift shops. The buildings were older, two and three stories high. The 'hood was clearly established, as they were just finishing up a project to put in new curbs and curb cuts at intersections - it's been my observation that usually lags the raising up of property values. But they plopped the convention center into a corner made by many expressways. Whoever the Robert Moses of Columbus was, he was very unkind to this part of the city. The convention center was soundproofed to highway noise, so not a bad choice to put it there, but the streets surrounding it vibrated with traffic and noise. I don't think the original design contemplated integrating convention visitors into the cityscape, but rather keeping them in the enclosed complex (including three attached hotels with a range of restaurants).

View from a hotel window, 20th floor edition

My hotel room was on the top 20th floor of the hotel, with a view of flat roofed industrial buildings and several highway interchanges. I marveled at the flatness of the landscape, as far as the horizon. The large window faced northeast, and I left the curtains open as there was no way anyone could see in. I don't need to worry about room darkening at night, as I sleep with an eye mask. I woke just before sunrise, and took my eye mask off to be treated to a glowing ruby, then pink, horizon across the whole view, that gradually turned yellow and finally faded into white as the sun came up. Quite a show, across an otherwise uninspiring landscape. 

What I bought

The whole trip was really worthwhile. I learned so much, and I'm firming up my intentions for my future quilting projects.

Girl with a pearl onion earring
(and a slice of pizza)

My Newest Passion

When I get into something, I go all in for a while. When I got bit by the flying bug and went and got a pilot's license, I did it in four months. And for over a year, nearly 100% of the books I read and movies I watched (tapes from Blockbuster!) were aviation related. In the early 2000's, home for a solo weekend working on a home improvement project while listening to NPR (no such things as podcasts in those days!) I had the pleasure of listening to Car Talk four times. The much-repeated episode had a caller with a Vespa. That Monday, I researched online how to get a motorcycle license, that Saturday I took the written test, and I bought my first little scoot a week later. 

This time it has been a slower burn. Last October, I attended a quilt show put on by a local guild. I was astounded! Just blown away! I wanted to do this!

I've always been attracted to fiber arts, for viewing more than doing. When I lived in Ohio, a friend came to visit for a weekend and we went to many Amish stores in the area, looking for a quilt he wanted for a wedding present for friends. We went a number of places (I found a helpful tourist map of Ohio's Amish country that listed the stores, important in those pre-internet days) and we looked at nearly 100 quilts. I was blown away by their sophistication. There were traditional quilts, pieced with tiny pieces of patterned calico to make intricate designs. But there were also bold and striking patterns, expanding my mind with what a quilt could be. Where we bought the quilt finally was the real thing, a store with kerosene lamps and two teenage girls that spoke to each other in soft German dialect. (And which symbolized some of what neighbors to the Amish deride as hypocrisy: God allows 19th century technology (kerosene) to support commerce, but not 20th century technology to ease the burden at home, where they use homemade candles. And even electric lights in chicken coops where regulating light and dark can increase egg production, and diesel tractors in the fields. But women's work at home, that doesn't bring in cash, doesn't get automated.) (Gratuitous ranting digression over for now.)

My father's family actually were from a related German-derived sect, and I have some fragile family quilts from that side of the family. My mother's immigrant family arrived at the turn of the twentieth century, but also made quilts when they arrived. When I lived in Chicago, one of the family quilts in a traditional pattern hung on the wall behind my bed. 

I have actually made a couple of quilts, long long ago. One in grad school, using the sewing machine I bought with college graduation money and many scraps of actual clothes I had lying around. I still have that one in a closet. And the second was baby-sized for the birth of one of my nephews, before I moved to Maryland. That one disappeared long ago. I have a shelf of quilt books from those earlier eras, with many traditional patchwork patterns and layouts. Each quilt I made involved cutting the fabric into squares and shapes with scissors and stitching each piece one at a time. Then I quilted them on my basic machine, bunching up the blanket-sized fabric to feed it through the machine as I stitched straight(ish) lines.

The quilt show last year had some traditional patterned quilts, beautiful in their intricacy, but I was most struck by those with abstract or impressionistic bold designs. Take a look:

This is titled "Beautiful Colorado"
This is the one I keep coming back to. 
I aspire to be able to design and execute something on this scale, abstract yet not.

Detail of the quilting

This wall hanging is abstracted from
architectural photography:
it's a building
I love abstract shapes made in the real world
it's the kind of photography I tried to do

Another wall hanging

Fabric art, not meant to be used
I love this and would display it lovingly, but it's not my cup of tea for making

A detail of an abstract design on a 
queen-sized quilt meant to be used
How fabrics can blend and define

 

I've been mulling about attempting to make something again myself. I've always sewed, but not a lot. The last time I put real effort into it was making cloth masks early in the pandemic before good quality disposable masks were available to buy. I so enjoyed the work - it involved engineering - making a 3-d shape from 2-d objects, building an outside layer, a middle filter, an inside comfortable layer, always studying what seemed currently most effective, design - choosing the fabrics for other and inner layers, and construction - some hours at the end of which I had useful, tangible, products. 

But I doubted my skills and my stamina to take on a project like this. Finally, with my big vacations this year behind me and autumn vibes in the air, I decided to stick my toe in the water. 

My go-to social media these days is Reddit. Of course there are sewing and quilting subreddits. But it was actually a post in a local group, about local fabric stores, that alerted me to my local little quilt shop, Three Little Birds. I went on a field trip, determined to at least give it a try. I picked up a little bit of cool fabric, and a great big book. Because of course I got another book.

 As it turns out, this seems pretty much the best book ever. It turns up recommended in the forums online, though I didn't know that when I got it. I sat down and read it cover to cover. What a revelation! Tools and techniques! Designs! Design principles! Short cuts! And, of course, gadgets! Many gadgets!

And YouTube tutorials! Recommended on Reddit was The Ultimate Beginners Guide series, a dozen videos each from twenty to ninety minutes long, showing step by progressively more complicated step how to cut, stitch, quilt, and bind an entire quilt. I watched it all, though most of on 1.5x speed because each one got repetitive as a pattern was put together.

Guess what, guys? No-one uses scissors to cut fabric any more! Get yourself a cutting mat, some thick plastic rulers, and a very very sharp radial cutter (kind of like a pizza cutter). Line up your fabric - stack up your fabric, measure twice, measure again, and slice that stuff up! In a few minutes you have dozens of pieces. And maybe they are the wrong size, because you read the wrong side of your reversible ruler three times in a row. No matter, toss them in the "future projects" bin, and slice up more fabrics.

And sewing? None of this 3 stitches forward, 3 back, finally sew your seam, cut the thread, bring another piece over and do it again. Instead, design your pieces so that sewing a couple of seams in a big square can yield four sets of joined small triangles to use in your design. And pin and bring several pieces to your machine and just keep going without cutting the thread between them until they are all done. 

Pro tip: radial cutters and needles and pins are sharp. Keep band-aids handy, but if a drop of blood gets on your fabric, saliva is reputed to get it out. 

Also, who knew there was so much to learn about the right way to iron? Some say "sewing" is really just "ironing, with a few breaks at the stitching machine". 

So far, I'm trying to build up my physical skills with some small projects, while mulling designs for big projects. What do I like? What kind of project can I reasonably tackle at this point? Design patterns are available on the internet for downloading. They have cutting and piecing instructions which at this point I find very useful. The subreddits have a lot of people with "look what I made" and I'm studying and thinking about what about it I like and what it takes to do it. A purely traditional patchwork? Not for me, right now. But I'm downloading patterns and putting my own fabrics and colors to them mentally, thinking about how it's going to go. 

So far, I've made two placemats. The first, all rectangles. But even with the rectangles, figuring out the piecing, including seam allowances, is surprisingly complex to put together. Yes, some seams were ripped out and re-done before it was over.

The top shows the individual pieces, 
the bottom is the finished and quilted mat

 

This second one is more complex - it has triangles rather than just rectangles. Precision in matching points of corners is everything in getting a quilt to come out right.

These pieces will come together to make the placemat

The almost-finished placemat. 
Quilted, but still needs trimming and binding (will use the dark blue)
(This is a fabric I bought in Congo, I have a shirt I made years ago that matches)

My next project will be either yet another placemat, with still more intricate piecing, or a comparably intricate pillow cover. Still noodling. I've got ideas for some big projects, but I don't want to go buy stuff for a big one yet, I want to have some stuff completely finished first. And I want to think things through before I start. My ambition is to design something, but I'll probably just use my fabric choices in someone else's pattern first. But I'm looking at my photographs for inspiration for where I want to go with this.

BTW, I work on these in the basement where I've got stuff set up and can leave it. I have a little TV down there, where I'm running the Great British Baking Show. During most operations, I glance at the TV but mostly just listen. My sore neck means I have to get up and stretch and run through some exercises regularly. Three times in the hour-ish long show, and then again at the end, they are judging the bakes and the contestants. I use those intervals to stand up and stretch while actually watching the screen, it's a good interlude.

The Organ Recital

What I look like

Did I learn this term from one of you, my faithful readers? It refers to what happens every time old people get together. "Have you heard the latest on my gall bladder?" "What's up with your heart?" I have a small list of things derived from an essay I once read about "things old people do that I swear I never will" and oversharing on bodily functions (and dis-functions) is prominent on my list. However, health is certainly a concern, and vital to our well being, and fundamentally, keeping track of my health is the main reason I started this blog. I very much appreciate updates from my friends about their health, because I care. There's a time and place for everything, and here is my current organ recital.

Weight loss 

I continue with my weekly 5.0 Zepbound injections. After my July hiatus, weight loss has resumed. It is, however, slower than at the beginning. This is to be expected in any weight loss, and no reason why this should be different. It takes fewer calories to maintain my smaller body, after all. There is no prize for remaining on low doses of the drug, and if I totally stall I will increase. But it takes weeks or months for a stall to be real, so I kind of have a major checkpoint/ assessment in mind for November as we go into winter.

I've learned some things while being on the drug, and re-learned other lessons. I've been eating all my life, and off-and-on dieting for at least forty of those years. The big thing is, when I don't pay attention, my weight will go up. That seems somewhat true even with the effects of the drug. I will drift towards eating too much of things that don't further my goals. I don't way overeat like I have in the past, I'm less inclined to finish what's on my plate, and at the margin I'm more inclined to choose healthier things, but I still love chocolate ice cream!

For decades, I've set my preferred tastes and food choices. I find with the drug, some of these are not so great anymore. High fat and greasy things don't sit well in my stomach. Even, to my surprise, some sweets don't feel so great. I'll go to a restaurant, automatically choose from the menu the same way I would before, and then it doesn't always feel great. This is feedback after I've eaten it, because from habit my desire for certain foods is the same, and while I'm eating it the taste is generally good. During my disastrous Intuitive Eating phase, I would pay attention after eating something. I often regretted something, but that was intellectual - I knew it would not further my weight loss goals. But it was almost never a physical regret. The exercise of "keep eating those cookies until they make you feel sick" never ever made me feel sick. That's not true now. I am more prone to nausea is general now (though I've not actually gotten sick). Sometimes, after overeating something, my regret includes a physical regret. When that happens, I'm trying to sit with that feeling for a while. I want to inhabit this feeling, so that I learn on a really visceral level that different choices will make me feel better in the short term, not just further what seems a distant and remote goal.

But I'm down 25 pounds! With daily weighing, at least once a week I'm seeing a number lower than any before on this current loss trajectory. So progress, for sure. I'm shopping my closet, as I'm now weighing less than the day I retired - I'm in the range of clothes I already own that have been sitting for while.

 My eyes

 I have had a condition for almost a year now where my left eye is oozing sticky stuff in an annoying and unattractive way. This predates my cataract operations. (The operations themselves went well and I continue to be thrilled with not wearing glasses, but not having them to hide behind makes the ooze even less attractive.) I learned long ago the ooze is just tears, not an infection. My eye doctor has given me drops and referred me to an eye micro-surgeon. My primary care doc speculated it was an artifact of allergies and tested me extensively and had me get a sinus CT. I have a mild allergy to dogs (thanks, Bixby, who is currently on the back of my chair leaning against me) and take a daily claritin, but the CT did not show any evidence of chronic inflammation. I finally saw the eye surgeon, and she confirmed it's just tears, my drainage is blocked, and she wants to bore a new hole from my eye socket to my nose. Yuck, but it will eventually prevent a lot of daily yuck (constant wiping and washing of my eye has led to irritated skin around my eye and nose). And, she will remove some ugly (to me) skin tags and a keritosis on my lid at the same time. And, after this is done and healed, she wants to go ahead and do an eyelid lift, which she thinks is (borderline) medically necessary, the magic words for insurance! The boring operation will be in November. I might have a black eye at Thanksgiving, but there are few other risks.

My neck

I have a pain in my neck, literally. My range of motion is somewhat limited, and it hurts most of the time. This has been going on for some months, because I always assume aches and pains come and go, but it hasn't gone yet. The limited range of motion is partly why I haven't been hot to ride the Vespa - doing visual checks over both shoulders is vital to staying alive on a motorcycle, and I can't do them well, and it hurts to do them at all.  I went for a PT assessment, and now I do a series of stretches multiple times a day, with a weekly visit to the facility, where they massage it. I bought a stand that can hold my kindle or even my ipad up at eye level, keeping me from bending over a device in my lap. I still use my hands to turn pages or scroll or click, but it's surprisingly comfortable and was easy to get used to. I also got a microwaveable wrap that covers my shoulders with a stand-up neck collar, so nice to have warm heat. Also, many more frequent breaks from whatever activity. Staying in any one position for a long time isn't great. The PT is just a week old, jury out on how it gets better.

Exercise 

Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, all is well! I am grateful every day for health and strength. I remain faithful to my 2x weekly strength training, but have fallen away from the more vigorous cardio. Every day, I have an excuse why not. I'm working on that, because I do believe, down in my body, that it makes a huge difference to everything. 

I bought an ebike, and it is SO FUN! Riding it is weather dependent, of course, and I'm timid about traffic on roads and tight slow speed maneuvering on crowded paths and trails, so I'm not riding it that much yet. I live at the top of a short steep hill, and climbing back up at the end of every ride was a deterrent to riding a normal bike, and that barrier is gone now. Except for the steep hills, I keep the electric pedal assist at the lowest (but not off) setting for most of my rides. I've done some exploring of parks, and ridden the twelve miles that are the whole length of the parkway by my house up and back. As we get into fall, I hope to ride more. The bulk of any indoor cardio is on my BIL's old stationary bike, usually with blasting loud music. This will help with getting outdoors on the actual bike too.