Making Lemonade

Whinge

All week I have been suffering with a cold. It probably began sometime over last weekend but symptoms began to appear late on Monday. On Tuesday morning when I rolled out my mat, plopped down my head cushion, and crawled down onto them for my Pilates session, all I wanted to do was be transported back to a kindergarten class where a nice teacher would say "Now I want you all to close your eyes and take a nice nap." I was sooooo ready, (and it was only 10:30 am). I did get through the Pilates session but slept 2 hours that afternoon. Then when I got up, I sat for 2 hours in a chair and read the paper. I had zero energy although I did go to the initial book group meeting Tuesday night.

On Wednesday I worked in the studio a bit and made an ink-jet printed photo transfer and text label for the quilt pictured above. I continued working in the studio Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The usual cold symptoms haven't been too bad, just an occasional headache, a nose that is, by turns, either stuffed up or running or sneezing, watery eyes, but no cough to speak of and no sore throat (knock wood). The lethargy, however, has been almost overwhelming. Today is the first day I've felt like expending any energy and I must say that this morning's walk to the newsagents for the Sunday paper felt really good. I hope that means I'm on the mend. Don has been super at doing the marketing and cooking for us. For example, last night we had the most wonderful beef stiffado, a rich Greek beef and onion stew, over noodles with rustic bread and a tossed salad.

Anatomy of a Quilt

On Friday I finished the beading on "By the Waters of Babylon," which was inspired by the biblical text used by Sir William Walton in "Belshazzar's Feast." This composition for orchestra, baritone solo, and double chorus tells the story from whence comes the quote: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." As a member of the Jacksonville Concert Chorale, I sang this thrilling and dramatic work with the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra over 20 years ago. So how did a quilt get landed with such a weighty subject?

I began the quilt with a piece of fabric that I had dye-painted perhaps 5 or 6 years ago. The dye was a few days old and had lost most of its strength and so the colour was muted and the design, quite indistinct. I liked the colours and the movement, however, (I think I even sprinkled it with some salt which created little bursts of colour where it landed) and so when I came across it a couple of weeks ago, I put it on my cutting table and began thinking of how I could use it in a quilt. I had also been toying with the idea of placing some sort of grid on the top of a quilt so that a pattern beneath it would be viewed as though through some sort of screen. As an experiment, I took a piece of dark purple-to-dark teal hand-dye of Marion's which was about a third the size of the dye-painted fabric and cut it into sort of diamond shapes with my rotary cutter. Then I tried out various patterns of placing the diamonds on top of my dye-painted background. I'd let it sit for a day, looking at it each time I walked by. I liked the contrast and the effect of seeing the design underneath the "grid" but the patterns of the diamonds were uninteresting and too static. I thought perhaps it might be the fabric, so I cut diamonds out of another fabric and auditioned those but after a short while realized the drama was totally missing with the second fabric. When I put the darker diamonds back on the quilt, I didn't use all of them and attempted to create a sort of swoop from upper left down to the bottom and back up at the upper right. (I'm left-handed, can you tell?) Bingo! I liked the design and the way it gave the piece movement and energy.

As is typical of the way I work, here I was with a very promising quilt top with lots of little loose pieces on it. How to tack them down? In fact, how to even move the piece to the sewing machine without messing up the arrangement? Aha! Tulle is always the fast and easy answer. My "sheers and shimmers" had already been packed away in anticipation of having to move out of the studio but the box was still handy, so I rifled through, found a slightly bluish-green that was the right size, pressed it, and lay it on top of the quilt. Perfect! It didn't change the colour very much and certainly didn't dull the effect. Using silk pins, I pinned down about a third of the diamonds. With Don's help, I slipped pieces of backing and batting underneath carefully took the quilt to the sewing machine. Using a variegated medium-value thread, I quilted curvy lines that basically followed the "swoop" of the diamonds achieving the dual task of holding the diamonds down and quilting the top at the same time. Voila!

When I put this up on the design wall and stepped back for a look, I instantly thought "weeping willows." But something was missing. Perhaps it needed a sun. I had a small piece of gold lame nearby from which I cut a small sun. I called Don in. He didn't like the sun. But I felt the piece really needed something. I took a photo and e-mailed my quilter friend Floris for her opinion. She agreed that it needed something but felt the little sun was too small. Using graphic software, Floris "floated" a transparent orange sun over the image I had sent her and returned it to me with the suggestion that a nylon organza might work. Happily, I found an irridescent orange-gold synthetic organza at the quilt show in Edinburgh last Friday which worked perfectly.

The next work session, I added the sun and then some more quilting lines interspersed among the original ones, using the same curvy pattern only this time with a pastel variegated metallic thread. It was as I was quilting these lines that the tune and words from the opening of Walton's "Belshazzar's Feast" came to mind:

By the waters of Babylon
There we sat down
And wept, yea wept
And hung our harps
Upon the willows.

I had the willows and the river, the metallic quilting lines would represent the harp strings, and this left only the tears to be added, hence the beads (which you can see in the detail photo). The quilt 20" x 17" and isn't as squint as it looks in the photo. (The next quilt was taking up the usual photo space on the design wall, so I had to tack this one up down near the floor and had difficulty getting down there to snap the photo.)

What about that lemonade?

All last week, perhaps a total of one whole day's work got done on our renovations because of the roofer not showing up until Thursday and the weather being too cold most of the week for the brickies. No one showed up on Friday. Unfortunately, next week's weather looks even worse than this week's with the high temperatures for the next 5 days hovering between 37 and 42 and the lows between 15 and 32. Worse, sleet is predicted for Monday through Wednesday. I don't hold out a lot of hope for much progress.

So when nothing much is happening on the renovations and I have a cold or it's too cold to go anywhere, i.e., life hands me lemons, I make lemonade (quilts--the perfect activity for someone with low energy, mild cold symptoms, the mully-grumps, scaffolding all over their house, and building materials and debris all over their garden).

Donald has been able to golf all week even though it's been too cold for construction activities because it has at least been dry and sunny. He's out there right now, as usual, with Gordon. But I'm not sure how much he'll get to play during the upcoming week. Perhaps this weather report will be as incorrect as the one that said we'd have heavy snow last Thursday, the day when we got flurries for about 15 minutes and otherwise had full sunshine, but I fear the cold will persist even if we don't get all that sleet. Oh well, back to the studio to finish appliqueing the circles onto my next quilt top.