Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Milky Way


Here's our latest quilt, up on the design wall. Each fabric was selected with the aforementioned son and his desires in mind.

Today or tomorrow we'll add the four-patches into the "holes" or blank spaces and it will take on a lot more color.

The design wall is made of flannel stretched over foam core insulation. So the blocks just stick to it and stay put until we move them. Then we can see what the quilt will look like, and watch it for a while. Decide if it's really speaking to us, or if something is "yelling" that it's out of place and needs to be moved.

This part of the process is very interesting and is almost meditative. When something is out of place and the correction is made, I can feel everything begin to breathe again. The whole piece sighs in relief. In any case, this requires quiet thought, long silences, and often sweets with our coffee. Yesterday the sweets were donut holes with cinnamon sugar.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Sew or Dye

So, we do have one customer. We've been having a ball creating a quilt for her. She found us through our guild website. Her son is about to turn 21 and has had a quilt since he was a baby. He still sleeps with it.

Wrapped around his head.

It's in terrible shape. So she wants us to make a new skin for it, and put the old quilt inside a new quilt. We spent some wonderful time with her picking out fabric and a pattern. We're using a block pattern called "Milky Way" referring to her son's love of outer space. Here is a picture of the fabrics we're using:



The son is very tactile and wants the silky binding like you find on baby blankets. But they only make that in sappy baby colors. So we decided to get some silk and learn to dye it in a cool color that he likes (purple) that would match these to bind the new quilt with.

Today we began preparing the silk for dying and making the half square triangles for the main blocks in the quilt. We made the four patches two weeks ago. The quilt deadline is October 31. We'll make it.

Friday, September 12, 2008

We're Official!


This week we made it official! We're a company. We formed an LLC. We sent the paperwork to Richmond, and we got a tax ID number from da Feds and then we even got a bank account. So it's all real now. Not that it ever wasn't real, but it's really real. Does that make sense? We're excited. I hope you are too.