Highlights from the Houston Quilt Show

Last weekend, I had the privilege of attending the Houston International Quilt show. These are not your ordinary quilts.  They are all original designs, executed by some of the best quilters in the business.

This quilt by Setsuko Matsushima of Japan won the Founder's Award.  I'm not generally a fan of mostly grey quilts, but this one caught my eye.  I really like how it's a fascinating mixture of both American art, in the traditional quilt blocks, and Japanese art in the depiction of the waves.  This quilt honors and offers a ray of hope to those who suffered due to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Here's  Kimberly Lacey of Colorado standing by her First Place winning quilt.  The design of this quilt was inspired by ammonites, a very extinct sea shell found as fossils.  (Who says there's no science in the fabric arts?)  The pattern was created with shimmering fabric paints on silk, rather than the more traditional pieced or appliqued fabrics.  She's just getting started at as a professional quilter, so if you like her work, check out her website here.

What to do when you know what fabric design you want, but it doesn't exist?  Why, you create it in the computer and then have it printed!  That's exactly what happened with this striking quilt by Karlee Porter of Utah.  If you like the design, she's got it for sale.

If you like more traditional piecing and applique, check out this quilt by Beth Nufer of Oregon. It was made from fabric that shades from white to grey and then solid brightly colored fabric.  The idea is to give the quilt a 3D effect.

For the mathematically inclined, there's this quilt by Claudia Pfeil of Germany.  The black shapes are inspired by the Mandelbrot set, one of the very first fractals that was discovered.  Fractals have infinitely detailed shapes, so working with them in quilting is quite a challenge.

There's some totally fun things at the show too, like this scene of Flamingos all dressed for a party by Beth Miller of Australia.

Or this fishy quilt by Tomiko Onishi of Japan.  Look carefully -- all those fish are actually vegetables!

My cousin Suzy Webster had two quilts in the show this year.  The top one, Dotville, was inspired by a class she took at last year's show.  The bottom one, Order to Chaos, is based on a design created by her father, John Shier.  His artistic explorations have resulted in a completely new way to generate fractal geometries.  You can check out Suzy's blog about quilting here and John's webpage here.

Come back next week and see how I am dealing with the challenges posed by mid-rise pants.

Micronesian Skirts

I lived in the Pacific Island nation of the Republic of the Marshall Islands for many years.  In this country and the neighboring Federated States of Micronesia, women still make many of their clothes.  They are especially well known for their skirts.

In the Micronesian cultures, women never wear pants or shorts.  It's considered very immodest to show any part of the thigh, considered the sexiest part of the female body.  Skirts must be long enough to keep the knees covered, but not so long as to get wet and dirty in an environment where there's plenty of water (salt and fresh), sand, and mud.  They also have to be something that you can work in.  Micronesian women do a lot of physical labor in addition to child care, like washing clothes by hand.  They are also traditionally the gender that works in the fields, while the men fish and gather food by the shore.  The skirts also have to be tough enough to survive a lot of wearing and trips through the laundry -- these are very poor countries and people don't have a lot of clothes.

The Micronesian skirts are all hand made and all different from each other.  They are made using simple sewing machines and polyester-cotton fabrics, although the purple skirt shown above does include some polyester satin.  The decoration is with reverse applique and creative use of a handful of built in decorative stitches.  Check out the detail on the hem of the purple skirt from the island of Pohnpei.

The skirts are designed to be very efficient in the use of fabric.  The top section is 22", half of a 45" piece of cloth.  The flounce is 11", one quarter of the 45" cloth.  There's absolutely no wasted fabric here!  Since Micronesians tend to be quite short, a skirt constructed in this way is about mid-calf length on adult women.
On the neighboring island of Korsae, they have a slightly different twist on skirt design.

Instead of a flounce at the bottom, this skirt has a slit in the side seam.  I was told this is called lava-lava style, after the wrap that men wear in Fiji.

This skirt also has extensive reverse applique at them hem.  There are many layers of fabric in the bottom 6" of the skirt, which makes it hand differently than if only a sew small pieces of fabric had been used in traditional applique.

This green skirt, also from Kosrae, steps away from the strictly floral motifs to include an image of the island itself -- the sleeping lady ridgeline that gives the island it's name "Island of the Sleeping lady".  As with the other Kosraean skirt, the side seam slit isn't hidden, it's emphasized by running the floral motifs up the side of the slit.

The edge of the skirt itself at the slit is uneven.  The many layers of fabric used for the reverse applique make it stiff enough for this technique to work.

Of course, with this skirt style taking the islands by storm, there are some copy cats.

This blue skirt is from Yap, in the western most part of the Federated States of Micronesia.  It features sections from a printed fabric appliqued to the main section of the skirt and a flounce probably from the same printed fabric.  I suspect that this skirt was made not by a Yapese, but by a Filipino worker on the island.

The Chinese are active in the islands, and they created this skirt, most likely as a factory in China.  It's not hand made, but the embroidery and applique are done by machine.  The fabrics used here are nearly 100% polyester, which cuts the cost a lot.  The Micronesians do sometimes wear the Chinese made skirts, but greatly prefer the home made ones, which have cultural significance for them.

Come back next week and see how Micronesian skirt design influenced some of my projects.

School Club Banner

The School Club Roundup, an amateur radio event where schools and other amateurs all over North America attempt to contact each other by radio, is coming up next week.  One of the participating clubs will be the amateur radio club at Monrovia Middle School in Monrovia, AL.  I made a banner for the table where we'll have all the radios to help the students at the school know what we are up to.

The first task was to decide what to put on the banner.  Obviously, the club's call sign, KD4MMS, needed to be prominent.  Then, a bit of explanation.  The school mascot is the hawks, so Hawks Amateur Radio fit in the space and explained at least a little bit.  The school colors are yellow and black, which made choosing colors for the banner easy.  I used nylon canvas, a fairly heavy material typically used for flags.

The first task was to cut out all the letters.  There's a lot of ways to do this, but I chose to use my Cricut maker and a standard font for all the cutting.  The letters sure look a lot better than if I'd tried to design or cut them.

The letters in the call sign had to be in the design individually because they are nearly at the limits of the 12"x12" cutting sheet.  The smaller letters could be done several at a time. 

I laid out all the letters and tacked them down with a spray adhesive.  They wasn't quite good enough to keep them all attached during the sewing phase, but it was a good start.

Each of the letters was individually sewn to the banner.  I used a 4mm zigzag stitch with a 2 mm stitch length.  All of the sewing was hand guided.

The finished applique of the letters looks good.

Next, I applied a back sashing to finish the banner and deal with all the raw edges. 

The last step was to put grommets in each of the corners.

Let's hope the kids get good atmospheric conditions for next week and that a bunch of them see the banner and decide to come see and hear for themselves what's going on!

Come back next week for another adventure in sewing!

Custom Dive Flag

I received a request from a friend to make a dive flag for the Wake Island Scuba Club.  This isn't something they could send out locally because Wake Island is a tiny sandbar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and a long way from anywhere.  The idea was to use embroidery and/or applique to create the design.

Here is the original design.  The essential elements are apparently the red and white "divers down" flag, the outline of the island and the shark.  This design does have details that would be hard to capture with applique or embroidery, so some modification for the new medium is required.  There's also the question of exactly what items would be best executed with embroidery vs. applique.

I started with a JPG map of Wake Island.

I was able to bring this image into my Floriani Total Control embroidery design software as a background and then digitize the outline of the island.  (Actually, there are 3 islands here.)  I was able to do the same with the shark, picking out the eyes, mouth and gills as essential details to retain.

Here's the final design.  There's some big areas to be covered in both black and grey, so I decided to do these as applique and leave the shark details and lettering as embroidery.  The island and shark have to be worked as one piece, so the maximum size of the design is set by what will fit in my Bernina Jumbo Hoop.  The shark is superimposed on the island, so the island must be appliqued first, with the shark on top.  To maximize the size of the design, the lettering is done separately from the applique, after rehooping the fabric.

The first task was to create the flag itself.   The flag and all the applique are made from heavy weight flag nylon.  Some of this was obtained locally and some of it was sourced from Sailrite, an internet retailer of anything and everything related to both boats and fabric.  Sailrite also had the special flag tape and nice grommets for finishing the flag.

There's no standard dimension for dive flags.  After some research, I found that common aspect ratios for flags include 3:2 and 5:3.   I chose to use 5:3 although on further consideration 3:2 might have been better.  With the size of the applique design set by the jumbo hoop, I elected for a 30"x18" finished size for the flag.

I used paper to create patterns for the flag.  I wanted the white stripe to be nice and visible, so it's 6" wide.  The cutting mat marked in 1" squares sure made the job of creating the pattern a lot easier.

Here's the finished flag.  The seams for the white stripe are all flat-felled seams and the three edges are hemmed.  The left edge is bound with flag tape and set with brass washer grommets.  This finish isn't strictly necessary since this is going to be a wall decoration rather than flown as a flag, but it's a good finishing touch.

With the flag complete, it's time to move on to the ornamentation.

The applique design is printed at 100% scale and then cut out.  The paper pieces are applied to the black nylon with temporary fabric adhesive.  Then the pieces are cut from the fabric.

The machine is busy appliqueing the outline of the island.  It's a very complex shape, much more suited to machine applique than hand guided applique.  Once the island is down, the shark is appliqued on top, and then the eyes, mouth and gills of the shark are embroidered.

I used just a simple tear away stabilizer for this project.  The fabric is dimensionally stable, so a sticky stabilizer is not required.  There needs to be no stabilizer remaining on the back of the flag, so the simple design a tear-away met that requirement nicely.  The top and bottom lettering was done with two different hoopings of the fabric.

This project has already been sent off to Wake Island.  My projects are certainly getting world wide exposure!

Come back next Saturday for an all new project that's also related to water.