Awwww, you've gotta love Tennessee weather. Last weekend's temperatures were in the 70 degree range. Early in the week, we had a monstrous rainstorm, after which the mercury plummeted into the 20s at night. Yesterday at noon, I went outdoors dressed in a hat and a light coat and was almost too warm. Last night it snowed, blizzard-like, for about 10 minutes, then it quit.
Screw it. I'm just going to stay inside and quilt.
One of the first quilts I ever made was what we refer to as "the clan quilt." The Husband's family has ancestral roots in Scotland; their clan had a tartan pattern and a motto. I made a simple 9-patch quilt in the colors of the tartan and sewed a big, gaudy, silver lame' badge and motto applique in the middle of it. Both of my sons said, "I want that quilt when you die." Since they both can't have it, I decided to make one for each of them.
I wanted to make theirs better than mine, which should not be hard to do, considering how bad my skills were back then. Carpal tunnel syndrome discourages hand quilting these days. To compensate, I've added a short-arm quilting machine to the mix, engineering a whole new set of troubles for myself. There's a ways to go before I master that beast.
Mastery or no, I finished the first "clan quilt" earlier this month. The end result did not exactly match my original "vision." The official clan tartan colors are reportedly black, blue, green, and white. For this quilt, I used navy and dark sage for the blue and the green. As you can see, there's not enough shade variance between the navy and the black, and the chunks of white are too big. (The pattern, by the way, is called "Clay's Choice," which I chose because my son's name is Clay.) I tried to lighten the blue sections by stipple-quilting them with a blue variegated thread, but it didn't work very well. I also tried to differentiate the black from the blue by quilting with white thread on the black blocks, but that didn't work very well, either. Lightening *both* the blue and the black kind of cancelled each other out, but the idea seemed good at the time. Sorry I had to smudge out the badge (on account of cyber creeps, you know) - it's kind of the best part. It's machine embroidered in black, with our last name beneath it. I wanted to add some subtle Scottish symbols, such as thistles, but I could not figure out how to do it.
The second one, a "Walls of Jericho" pattern - I couldn't find a pattern with "Joshua" in the name - is in the frame now. (I've added some borders since this picture was taken.) I'm happier with the color choices, though the green is a bit strange. While I was working on Clay's quilt, I figured out how to do the symbols, but by then I was too far along to incorporate them. The blue squares will have Celtic knots quilted in them. The black strips will have diamonds. I think I'll pebble the white parts. I'll figure out what to do with the green when I get there. I'm quilting a stylized thistle vine ("stylized," I say, because thistles don't grow on vines) on the outmost border. In my mind, it was stunning; in reality, it's...just o-
kay..., way too much buck for the bang, but at least it's not awful. The big mistake happened on the next border. While working on the thistles, I discovered that another Scottish symbol is the unicorn. If this quilt were for a little girl, I might consider putting unicorns frolicking around the border. But this quilt is for a man who would shoot and make stew out of a unicorn if he encountered one in the woods, so I thought to use just the horn, the distinctive spiral horn, two of them, butted together end-to-end.
It was an unfortunate thought.
This thing looks like a cross between a UFO and the Michelin Man. I put some lotus flower-looking things in there, to break up the "poke-y" factor, but it's still bad. Bad. But it's staying.
