Thing-a-day.com

So we bought this amazing piece of property, ten acres, two years ago with the plan to build in a few years. It is in the north Georgia Mountains, on a ridge surrounded 360 degrees by mountains. Our entire north view (which is what you want in the south) is protected. It’s less than 1/4 mile from a scenic overlook. Magical place.

Problem is no house plan worked for us and it. So, as usual, I did it myself. Started from scarth three times to get it right. My plan has been vetted by a house designer and most every detail has been researched and decided, so tomorrow we are meeting with the builder to give him a fat package of plans, photos, drawings, etc. so he can cost it out.

The design part has been full of elation and dread (”How the heck am I going to figure out a window plan?”) creative highs and paralysis. But I’ve been there done that so many times in my life (cried during breaks when I filmed my first TV show, “What made me think I wanted to do this?” a number of awards later and many hours of taping I’m so glad I forged through the scariness.) that I bit the bullet and kept going. No nial had been struck yet, I figured.

 It’s funny though how everything distills itself into the same thing. I am a quilt designer, with 30 books to my credit. I have stopped saying it to those who know me, but truly everything comes down to designing and making a quilt. The inspiration comes. You make a first sketch, rehearse fabric, stop, start, backwards, forwards. then start sewing. it goes along swimmingly and then you get stuck. You leave it on your design board and walk by it for days, “Please tell me what you want to be?” It does; you just have to be patient and open to it, and trusting. Sound familiar? Everything in life is like making a quilt.

And the more you exercise that creative muscle the better you get at it. (Thing-a-day!)

Although, then you step out on another limb and wobble precariously. Like having the nerve to design a house.

Here are the plan and supporting materaiss, plus my mockups for the stairs and cabinet handles all ready to go to the builder tomorrow. And the quilt–still in prgress as is the house design. The quilt has been my way of letting the house speak.

P.S. Appropriately enough, the center of the house is an aviary.

Okay, so we may not be able to afford to add the fourth floor, the turret. If so,  a pitty since we have a 360 degree view of mountains. (Our property is less than 1/4 mile from a scenic pull off in the Georgia mountains–yes, we have mountains!) Then we’d have only three floors, a main floor media room, an aviary at the center of the house, and my fabulous studio.

 These are the blueprint printouts from Plan3D. I had invested a lot of time in using it before I learned of Google Sketchup. For a floorplan I’d go with Plan3d, but for a whole house Skecthup is going to catchup (sorry!) in usability real fast. Both have steep learning curves. What’s amazing is being able to walk through your house. That is invaluable.

This weekend I was determined to do nothing but work on our house plan so we can deliver it to the builder by my self-imposed deadline of March 1. Designing a house from scratch and putting all the details into a coherent form on paper is a huge undertaking. especially for one who has never done such a thing. (The nerve!) We’re looking for a good, solid preliminary price, then we’ll get a real house designer to make real plans. The task here is to find out if this thing costs X, 2X or 10X!

Between the living room and dining room of our house will be a bar area on the LR side and a serving counter on the DR side. Over the back of the bar/serving area will be lit open wood shelves. In the bar we have a curved tiled (I’ll paint the tiles) counter on the bar, with the back bar having our Kegerator (I make beer), a sink, beverage center, and counter. Saturday I finished up in the floor plan and worked out the detailed sheets that are below. As I said, I did nothing but work on the house this weekend (and excercise and make a fabulous pumpkin shrimp bisque and veal picatta) so I am tardy in posting this.

I included in the picture a photo of our front door, a window seat that will be in the kitchen, and the NE side of the house (studio below and DR above, and bedroom above that) that I’ve designed in Plan3d.

This would have been my Feb 23rd post.

Here’s my reason for not posting yesterday:

Rimsky the Siberian Forest Cat followed me up to my studio and made himself at home as I prepared tree branches for the quilt. No, I couldn’t disrupt his nap to put the branchs on the quilt and take a picture. So today I am reporting two rounds of 20-minute sessions.

I had decided that making the branches brown would be better, and sure enough, it proves to be so. Today I made some leaves by first seaming two piece of fabric together, then ironing freezer paper leaf shaped cutouts onto the wrong side of the fabrcis, trimming about 1/4″ seam allowance and pressing, then gluing it to the backside.

Now I’m thinking I need real trees rather than the sapling sized trees I have now. Which brings up the question of whether I want the trees to stop within the frame of the quilt, or go past as if one is looking through the trees. I’ll mull over that. Lots more leaves to make anyway. And more birds. I did hear a Pileated Woodpecket while I was last at the property. Not to mention the Sandhill Cranes migrating overhead…

I added yet another row to the background of my house study bird quilt today. Now it’s ready for the applique!

Am making headway on this scarf I started this week. have learned knitted cast on. Learning anything takes putting time into it.

Thing-a_day was down last night so i didn’t get to post this:

The new batch of batik fabrics arrived from Hancock’s of Paducah yesterday, so today I turned my attention back to this quilt. I am hoping to get it done in time for a hanging at a quilt show in New York State at the end of March. They have requested an exhibit of my bird quilts. I wrote a book of paper pieced bird quilts, but this is quite different, so it’d be fun to add it to the mix.

I made two more background strips–the top two. And I quickly made a piece of bias for a tree just to give my brain a beginning taste of what it is looking like. I’m thinking I’ll switch from green to bark colors, but at this point, it gives me insight into how it is coming along. I’ll make one more row of background–at least that was the original plan.

Making things involves traial and error and tweaking and trying again. Even with commercial clothing patterns. Variances in fabrics, the bod it’s on and the phase of the moon converge to make finished garments often look different from those on the pattern envelope.

This blouse turned out a little differently than I expected from the drawing on the pattern envelope. (Patterns with photos show better what the garment will look like than drawings.) The elastic fell at the waist, which seemed okay starting out, but in reality it needed to be higher–at least for me. So tonight I added a row of elastic above the one the pattern called for at the waist. Better. When I make it again I’ll probbably put three rows of elastic and maybe even forget the waist and move them up a few inches. It’ll make it fall better as well.

 Moral of the story: make a trial garment. That’s what this is.

Here’s the blouse with a sweater my mom gave me. I made the necklace as well.

This is a scarf I started today so as to learn a few more knitting skills. It’s a knit/purl pattern with fingers at the edges. The fingers are made by making 5 knit caston stitches at the end of a row, then binding the 5 stitches off.

The traditional quilt made in a beginner class is a sampler. The variety of blocks starts the student off learning the most basic skills and she works her way along with a bit more of a challenge with each new block. And in the end she has a finished quilt and has made many of the traditional favorite block designs.

But samplers are looking a little, um, dated these days, so I sketched up an Updated Sampler to play with. I made up three blocks, but have decided that they need to be bigger. I’m going to redo them as 16″ blocks rather than the 12″ shown here. The larger scale I believe is one element in giving it a fresh look. It will also require fewer blcoks thus making it a faster projetc. I’m thinking I’ll stick with eight solid fabrics for the quilt, though it may need a taste of a zinger here or there. We’ll see.

Back to the cutting table…

Today I made another row for the background of my birds-in-the-woods quilt that is a color and feeling study for the new house we’re building this spring. I had made the pieces for the birds last week 9eyes and beaks to come), so a laid them down to get an idea of how the quilt is becoming. (Sounds awkward, but I mean what I wrote.) I ordered fabrics for a greener row below and then three rows above to work into blues, so the color choices for the birds will still work on other sections of the background whereas they melt into these. As per an earlier “thing” post, there will be vertical branches for the birds to sit on once I get the backgound pieces down and put together.

 P.S. I went up to the cabinet shop which is on the way to our property today for my first serious decision-making venture. Afterwards I drove up to the property. saw a pileated Woodpecker, herard Nuthatches and most likely Downies, and heard and then saw Sandhill Cranes flying over the mountain. Makes the heart soar!

This evening I added the lavendar outer border to my Shop Window Quilt.

It was easy to make. The pies are first sewn together–just striaght seams. And then I ironed them to freezer paper rings and pressed the raw inside and outside edges of the rings to the back. The freezer paper makes it easy. Then I set up my Bernina to sew a stitch that makes two straight stitches and then one to the side to sew the ring to the background. Using invisible thread, you can hardly see it. With the rings sewn to the blocks, I sewed the blaocks together and added the borders.

Now the quilt top is ready to go off to Mavis Rosbach of Quiltbird Studio who will work her magic in long arm quilting it.

Inspired by a pillow I saw in a shop window in Atlanta, this quilt is ready for the addition of borders. So, I’m auditioning fabrics.

I’ll be making the inner border 3″-wide, then an inserted strip (middle fabric) to finish 1″-wide, and then the outer border will be 7.”

 The yellow is so much bright than the other two colors that it needs to be in the middle of them. Plus there’ll be much less of the middle color–just an accent.

So there you have it. Decision made! Tomorrow night I’ll come home from my meetings and stitch it up!

Thing-a-Day is a great excuse to finish up some projects. So this evening after dinner I turned my attention to binding a little paper pieced wall hanging. I cut  fabric strips, stitched them together, pressed them in half, and sewed them to the edges of this little quilt top that’s been waiting in the “Finish me!” queue.

Here’s the quilted quilt and the strips I just cut.

And the finished bound quilt.

The waves are inserted into the blocks before they are sewn together so they are 3-dimensional as are the duckies’ beaks.

You can see more of my rubber duckie craziness by visiting my blog, Diary of a Rubber Duckie Designer.

Weekends are for working on the design for the new house, so here’s my second house project for Thing-a-Day. First a quilt, now a painted plate. As you’ll see, I’m working out the bird theme to get to the essence of the house.

As I did for the quilt, I first sketched the plate design. I then transferred it to the bisque plate and found my box of ceramics paints. I am NOT a painter and used the colors I had, so I don’t expect this to be a work of art. The intention is for it to be a stage in the process. I’ll glaze it before taking it to the ceramics studio for firing. Firing will change the look immensely.

Now back to watching the Super Bowl. Go Patriots!

Today I worked on the cabinet layout for the kitchen for our new house in preparation for next week’s visit with a cabinet supplier. We’ve designed this house from scratch so, it’s amazing to have preliminary plans in hand. Now we’re working on every detail so our prospective builder can give us a price. Yikes!

While I’ve designed the house in 3D software complete with an substantial amount of detail and the ability to walk through the house, quilts are my design medium: I work out my thinking in fabric. To me it’s all about how this house will feel and the best way for me to visualize and express this is to make things. Therefore, I sketched up a rough for my House Inspiration Quilt a few days ago.

The idea for the backgroud is to arrange horizontal strips of fabric depicting the forest in which our house will live, starting with the browns and beiges of the leaf litter floor, up through the canopy and the mountain behind to the sky. I will applique branches and birds over the pieced background. Our house will sit on a high ridge between two mountains, so the strips will give that sense of loft. (At least that’s the plan!)

There was no discussion in my head as to what fabrics to use. BATIKS of course! Here’s the pile I pulled out of my batik stash to use in the quilt.

Today’s task was to make a pieced strip. I glued three pieces of newsprint together along their 8 1/2″ edges. I then cut strips of fabric about 9-11″-wide and started paper piecing them. Here’s how the first strip came out all trimmed up.

My 20-minutes were up (I fudged a little since it took time to take pictures and I chronicled the process in more detail for a later how-to on my blog) but I kept going and made another strip with darker browns and golds and some green, to be the bottom row of the quilt. I am extremely pleased with how it’s coming along!

But I realized my stash is lean on blue batiks so I placed an order with Hancock’s of Paducah to replenish my stock.

I love to make things!

I am in the extremely fortunate position of having making things in my job description. So, I will be setting 20 minutes aside each day for a particular Thing-a-Day so as to follow the rules.

Most of my Things will have to do with quilting as that is my profession and my profession, but I also am learning to knit and am in the last throes of designing a house my husband and I are building this summer. Yes, it involves quilting, ceramics and even mosaics to figure out what this house wants to be. In life everything is like making a quilt and quilts are the way I work through design and color. More of that this month in my Things.

 For today’s 20-minutes I felted a purse I had knit. It’s perfect to hold my current knitting project. The picture above shows it before felting; below shows it after its trip through the washing machine.

You can read the details about how I knit this on my blog. This is so fun!