Do you think it doesn’t matter where you are, you can still be creative? Not so, or at least not completely so. And just to be clear, I’m not talking about your creativity, I’m talking (or grousing, as the case may be) about mine. My creative energy level is heavily dependent on my location. Here’s the vicious cycle: The design and construction process on the quilt is going well, a new idea hatches, experiments take place and the experiments look good, until I realize that I need x, y or z to really make it all work, and I can’t get my hands on x, y or z (because of my current location here in Germany) without ordering it from the States and waiting a week (or more) for it to arrive so I can continue on my merry creative way. Much angst and gnashing of teeth ensues while trying to find a way to avoid ordering x, y or z, but still make the new idea work. No good, and creativity comes to a screeching halt and the energy and enthusiasm levels plummet. Rinse, repeat, ad nauseam.

In this particular instance, x happens to be Sulky rayon embroidery thread in colors that are evidently not sold in Germany. Why this should be since the dang stuff is made here is completely beyond me. Maybe I could try a different brand of rayon, but I already have lots of Sulky, and it comes in spools of a reasonable size for someone like me, who just dabbles in the machine embroidery thing. I have some spools of Isacord, and they’re so huge, I’ll probably not get through them before it rots, and they’re more expensive anyway. And yes, it’s The Misery Quilt, again. If it ever gets to the quilting part, I’ll believe in miracles. I guess I’ll go pack it all up, and try to find something else to work on until my thread gets here. /grousing done now, thank you.

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I had another whole post planned and mostly written for today, but then I saw Kristen’s wonderful Independence post, and decided to be a copycat and share pics of my own Americana themed quilts. While they are in no way as awesome as her king size Service Star quilt, I thought you might enjoy seeing them today. I do have a very large soft spot in me for Americana-ish quilts, so I have to keep one room in the house decorated properly so they’ll fit in. At the moment, that room is the dining room, and ITMan’s display case with his Military medals and awards and the American flag presented to him on his retirement lives there too, along with most of my Longaberger baskets with red and blue weaving.

The oldest one is from 1997. A bit of back story: I joined the Black Forest Quilt Guild in 1995, and sometime that year, probably in June, the Block of the Month was Marching Band, in red, blue and tan fabrics. I won half of the blocks (there were so many that we divvied them up) and someone else got the other half, but I can’t remember who it was. The blocks sat around in a box for a while, because I didn’t really like them all that much. Sometime in 1996, I put it together with the sashing and borders, and I still wasn’t thrilled with it. In early 1997 I think, I wanted an Americana-looking quilt to use for decoration around the house, and I quilted it and finished it up. As soon as it was quilted, I fell in love with it, Read the rest of this entry »

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Some quilts are meant to be, and some aren’t. Some fly together in flashes of inspiration, but others can take up hours and hours of time (not to mention the yards and yards of fabric) and still fight you all the way to the last stitch on the binding. Some quilts are labors of love, while others call forth emotions of a far less complementary nature. “The Misery Quilt” is truly living up to its name at this point, inspiring those “less complimentary” emotions at every turn. Last week, I threw in the pencil and got back to the machine to stitch up what I thought would be the perfect borders for this quilt. I put two of the finished borders on it last night, and I wasn’t happy with it. Again. I decided a retreat to my bed was in order, since it was late, and I was hoping things would look better in the light of day.

Nope. Didn’t look any better this morning. It’s not that the borders are bad, they’re not. In fact, they’ll be beautiful—on some other quilt. I took a picture of it on the design wall, and played around in PhotoShop for a bit, and decided I really was back to square one (or is it square three? I’ve lost count…), needing to figure out a curved appliquéd border. *sigh*

Kristin wrote a comment on the last entry about this monster of a quilt, about whether I’d retreated into my comfort zone when I decided to make the borders with the border print instead of the curved appliqué:

Don’t think of this as a retreat to the old comfort zone, but as a confirmation that your first ideas were the right ones. Sometimes the cliché or obvious ideas are the first ones you come up with, so you need to work through the problem to get to a more interesting solution. But often, our gut instinct knows what to do right away. It’s still beneficial to work through the options though — to confirm that your gut really did know what it was talking about.

Um, where does that leave my gut instinct now? I have no idea, but I think I just heard my friend Dawn say “I told you so!” I bent her ear about what to do weeks ago (on the phone long distance with pictures, no less), and she said it needed curves in the border. Okay, you were right! Read the rest of this entry »

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