Words for Blogger's Quilt Festival

I'm submitting words for Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival. Yes, they're on a quilt, and they represent a huge learning curve in my quiltmaking: making words of various styles from Tonya's method, and free-piecing a quilt which started with an idea  (actually a three-word sentence: "Words Fail Me") and just trusting the creative process.

Words Fail Me, 54.5 by 50 inches

machine pieced and handquilted

Since I am a journalist and a quiltmaker, it was fun to learn how to write with fabric. Each word in this maze (it starts from the middle from "Calm" and goes all the way around to "Enlighten)is a verb that can be placed in the middle of the three-word sentence. For example, "Words inspire me." And each word is made from word fabric (click for a close-up), symbolizing the layers of meaning in the words we choose.

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Wordy Monday

Words Fail Me!?!

54.5 by 50

machine pieced, hand quilted

It is done, completed, finished, except for a little pressing and blocking and I need to sew on a hanging sleeve. I'm reconsidering the name, but otherwise it's all good. It was a long road from an idea scribbled on paper to this. I'm hoping to show it at a local show at the end of May  and a national show in July, and then it will find a permanent spot in my house.

Nearing the finish line

It's hard to stay

since I'm stitching the binding

on this project that has stretched out two-and-a-half years.

Stay tuned for the finished quilt soon!

Quilting as an Olympic event

I would like to

those of you who

that although quiltmaking isn't usually a dangerous sport,

I am nursing an ongoing back injury from a car accident and so I

right now.

But stay  

.

I will

you.

I've been watching the games on TV while participating in the never-ending

quilting event.

And although there may be no gold at the end of this discipline,

I did win an international prize yesterday:

A kit from Mrs. Moen in Norway to make a house tablerunner. Thanks!

Success with Words fail me

My Words Fail Me year-long work in progress is at the flimsy stage, after some concentrated and creative sewing yesterday at my annual quilt retreat.
I posted a few pictures a week ago, and Quilt Diva Julie emailed me a design she thought would work. So I printed it out, took it with me, and laid out my words mostly according to her plan.

Her idea was to have a strip of fabric running around the words from the centre outward, sort of like a labyrinth or Grecian key design. With the help of my friend Karen from our guild Strip Piecers, we tweaked it and came up with this:

And after hours of sewing, cutting off here and adding more there liberated quilting style, asking Karen for an opinion, it is finished:

If you start at the red strip on top of the word "calm" in the centre and keep going clockwise, eventually you end up at "enlighten" at the end of it. (That was totally serendipitous, since "enlighten" was the longest word and needed to be at the outside.)

I brought my Advice from Home quilt to work on, and several other word quilts to show. So here my portion of the retreat space is overrun by words. When I left this afternoon, the woman across the aisle from me said "Goodbye, wordy lady."

I've been making word quilts over the last year -- I have two more finished ones at home, plus some with word labels on the back, and three more that I've given away. So I guess I am "wordy."

Black and white and words all over

It's time to make sentences out of my words. I've been building words for my Words Fail Me project for a year now, and I'd like to get this to a flimsy stage before I head off on a quilt retreat this weekend. (I can hardly wait. Making quilts, admiring others' work, and eating without cooking it first is so great.) Yesterday I laid it out in a sort of random log cabin style, with an oasis of calm in the middle. I didn't get all the words in this shot, but you get the idea.
Here's another go, with the lights and darks separated. It's not quite there yet either.

I've tried designing it with Wordle and those designs look great on paper, but are harder to translate to fabric. I definitely need some white space. I don't mind if the words are a bit hard to read (that's sort of the point) but I'm not sure exactly where to go with this.

So I put the words away for a bit and started cutting strips off my B/W collection to make a table runner or topper with matching tea cosy for a prize draw for my son's school. It looked too dull, so I put some orange/pink/yellow prints inside the frames for a bit more fun. What's a good size for a table runner?

Words Fail Me?

These may be the last of the words for my WIP, Words Fail Me. I'm happy with "comfort" and "isolate," less so with the top one which says "engage." I like how the letters turned out, but the contrast is bad. I knew it was risky using the white fabric with the black letters, but thought it might work. As for the shape of them, I used only 3/4 and 1.5 inch strips, and I quite like the combination of narrow and wide strips. Live and learn.

making more words

I'm enthusiastic about making words after months of not. After making the words for the basket quilt below, I got out my Words Fail Me project and started making more verbs. Here's four more -- I made a quieter version of "calm" and repurposed the M from the old calm (used in the tea cozy here) into a W for follow.
I'm making progress and the project is getting bigger. I have a long list of other words to include, and many varieties of word fabric, although some work better than others. I do get a bit lazy, and pick shorter words, or ones with easy letters, like L's and I's (follow was great, especially since I didn't make the W). But I'm making progress. I've almost got the borders done on the basket quilt too. I'm making progress on the UFO challenge!

Tea is calming

I spent a few hours today making a tea cozy for a friend's birthday. She wanted it in greens and creams, and so I decided to liberate the word "calm" from my Words Fail Me work in progress.

The fabric for the letters lists all types of tea, but the pattern was too busy for the word calm, so I turned the a upside down to make an E, turned the L into a T and added a bit to the C to make an A. The letter M will go into the parts drawer. I took short green leftovers to make a variety of Ts for the other side, pieced them together, and machine quilted around the letters.

I think it's an attractive tea cozy. Happy Birthday Marlee!

more letters and more lettered fabric

Greenmare at Mare's Nest sent me some word fabric last week, and I've started making letters with it. Thanks so much for sharing! I tried it as the main fabric in the word "guide" and the background in the word "soothe" in the bottom pix.

Here's the words I've got so far, and I have plans for another dozen. I'm having some issues around contrast with "soothe" and "calm", partly because the letter fabric is quite busy. Many letter fabrics don't read as solids, so that will be a challenge as I move forward.