autoquiltography.com

sometimes
if we
quietly,
tenaciously
connect the knots,
things
begin to take shape . . .

have seen in the past few weeks that some people are like these grasses: soft and graceful when viewed from afar but get close and you find their razor-sharp edges.

today, though, it was time to leave the world of grasses and create a brand new world of my own clothimation:

i spent earth day collecting red clay from spots of earth where i grew up. the house my mom and dad built where i spent my baby days – the H can still be seen in the chimney. red dirt from the land where my doting grandparent’s house once stood. red clay from the yard of the house that sheltered me during my teenage years. (also took 2 irises – with current owner’s permission, of course – to my mother, the one who planted them oh so many years ago.) red clay from the first house hubbie and i designed and built and in which we raised our tiny tots and watched them take their first steps of independence as they walked from home to yea yea and car car’s house. red dirt from the approximate area where my uncle gene was killed in a freak accident just a few years before i was born. (eugene ~ me, jeanne.)

and so it begins: autoquiltography two, the next ten years.

monday past: while continuing work on operation clear-out, happened upon the only surviving piece of clothing i wore as a baby: a teensy little corduroy jacket. washed it, dried it, hung it up as delightful reminder that i was ever once that small and reliant.

tuesday past: obeying wake up thought to check decorative stitching on baby jacket, tingled with recognition that this very decorative stitching on yoke was what appears in internal image of stitching at ankles of autoquiltography one. looked at stitching through magnifying glass and noted a knot on the outside. then noted heart-shaped flowers and thrilled because my birthday = valentine’s day. then noted that there was no tag in jacket and smiled that this baby jacket was handmade by someone. just. for. me.

thursday: asked mother about it and discovered that she made the jacket and embellished it with heart-shaped flowers for her valentine girl. sketched out decorative stitching from jacket yoke, marveling at teensy little itty bitty stitches. began replicating on autoquiltography one. eventually resigned self to fact that i just cannot make stitches that small, so there will not be an exact replication. but what did i expect? glasses have adorned my face since first grade.

friday:

Technorati Tags:
cloth, quilt, sewing

won’t be long now. autoquiltography one is almost finished:

allergies have slowed me down to the speed of cold molasses, but help’s on the way thanks to laney. if you haven’t already, go see her alaska quilt project. be sure to click on the category so you’ll get the full story.

came to counterpane today – picked up new laundry room cabinets on the way in. ripped out the old ones and have set one new one in place. we’ll (somehow) get the other 2 in tomorrow before we leave to head home, then will get home just in time to unload hubbie and pick up daughter and head further down the road for a week of mother/daughter time. because we have no internet in the condo, posts will likely be sporadic, dependent on being able to find internet cafes/wi-fi spots.

i am taking autoquiltography one with me, though, and will have much to show for it. on the way home from supper, i stopped and collected my first bag of red clay in preparation for autoquiltography two.

since i have no photos to document my progress, thought i’d share another few pieces from my quilting heritage. this is a quilt grandmother made for my doll – she made one just like it for my sister and a cousin, too. of course being as smart as she was talented, she changed one row in each doll quilt so we would be able to tell them apart.

until we reunioned in my backyard and snapped these pictures, none of us knew that our doll quilts were actually blocks from a quilt she made for one of her sons.

all those tiny little pieces. painstakingly cut, arranged, then stitched together into something bigger.

something much, much bigger.

Technorati Tags:
family, quilt, sewing, Southern

couldn’t take it any more, so ripped out all stitching on one plate at my dinner party.

doesn’t look like very much, does it? was surprised at how long it took me to rip everything out – not as long as it took to put it in not once but twice, of course. how many times have i told myself: it’s not about shortcuts or finishing quickly. it’s about pleasing myself with the work.

true, but i am so hoping that third time is the charm cause other plates are getting hungry.

~~~

finished edging on autoquiltography one. now the next fun part can begin.

reworked cup in the few minutes available tonight – the cup on the old-back-now-front/top side. added beaded saucer since granddaddy’s pet grandchild project was teaching us to sip coffee-flavored milk from a saucer. (i never acquired the taste for coffee. to this day, i don’t own a coffee pot.)

leaving steam as is cause i like it better than original idea. tomorrow we trek back across the country to home, so i’ll continue polishing up/off the star using what thread is available.
then/yesterday:

now/today:

3 days of stitching stars – count them THREE days – of stitching over previous messy stitching, ripping and snipping out stitching then just now my boy and i decide we like the backside better.

sigh.

this is a plate in my dinner party, the one for my granddaddy ballard. though the star resembles a starfish, on this plate it is actually representative of law enforcement. granddaddy was a revenue agent and a sheriff who enjoyed playing checkers, teaching grandchildren to sip coffee-flavored milk from a saucer, serving those same grandchildren vanilla ‘cream and small “co-colas” as gourmet after school snacks, playing checkers with saved co-cola bottle tops, and taking care of his favorite plowing mule.

don’t know if i’ll rip out the star yet again or just clean up stray threads and go with the wonky formerly backside version. will for sure rip out cup and redo it, but that’s a project for tomorrow ’cause tonight we’ve tickets to see the blue man group.

most of us took grandmother’s quilting for granted as just something she did to “keep busy”. but when we held the first quilt up to be photographed, there was an audible collective inhale followed by the most exquisite silence. silence of respect and appreciation and love-in-a-new-light. after a while, my cousin said quietly, “She really WAS an artist, wasn’t she.”