Quilting with a Modern Slant: People, Patterns, and Techniques Inspiring the Modern Quilt Community
224
Quilting with a Modern Slant: People, Patterns, and Techniques Inspiring the Modern Quilt Community
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Overview
Modern quilting allows artists the freedom to expand on traditions and use fabrics, patterns, colors, and stitching innovatively to create exciting fresh designs. In Quilting with a Modern Slant, Rachel May introduces you to more than 70 modern quilters who have developed their own styles, methods, and aesthetics. Their ideas, quilts, tips, tutorials, and techniques will inspire you to try something new and follow your own creativity — wherever it leads.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781603428941 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Storey Publishing, LLC |
| Publication date: | 01/28/2014 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 38 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Rachel May is an organizing member of the Boston chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild and a lifelong crafter who has focused her energy on quilting for the past 6 years. She teaches writing classes and is currently a Ph.D. student of English and Cultural Studies with a focus on quilts and narrative at the University of Rhode Island. Her writing has received multiple awards, including two Pushcart Prize nominations. She lives in Rhode Island.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A SENSE OF PLAY
From those who have pushed the bounds of quilting, to the first to define what a "modern" quilt could look like, to those who teach kids to quilt, this section celebrates all that we do to innovate and play as we sew. All art rises, at least in part, out of a sense of play, of trying something new and creating new worlds. While quilting and sewing are challenging at times (especially in the beginning, when you're just mastering basic skills), try to take it slow, be patient with yourself, and keep on trying new ideas and techniques. Playing with fabric, form, and design will lead you to find your own way of creating quilts that express who you are, as Jacquie Gering (page 164) proves here with her Broken Cogs. You're going to have those frustrating moments when you realize you need to pull out a row of stitches, or that your seams don't match up at all. That's what your quilting friends are there for — the venting and encouragement! But as you sew, try to hold onto your sense of fun and exploration. Try new patterns and skills, experiment with new techniques. Just see what happens. You'll surprise yourself.
WEEKS RINGLE & BILL KERR
EXPRESSING THE TIMES
Our understanding of "modern" quilts today — the very use of the term, in fact — comes from the collaborative, vivacious team of Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr, who were the first to apply the word "modern" to these new-looking quilts. Weeks called Nancy Crow "our mitochondrial Eve," the one who birthed us all — art quilters, modern quilters, innovative traditional quilters, improv-piecers, and everyone in between. But if that's the case, then Weeks and Bill are quilting's great-grandparents (in metaphor only, not in age!).
Weeks and Bill emphasize that modern quilting, for them, is "a philosophy, not a style." As Bill says, their quilts "are expressive of the time in which we live. That doesn't describe what they look like. What I make tomorrow may bear no resemblance to what I made yesterday." Their definition of modern quilting is an expansive one that allows for possibilities, with a push for inclusion rather than exclusion. "We're not ego-driven designers. What drives us is the excitement of concepts. So, if we're teaching a design workshop, what will get me so jazzed is talking one-on-one with students about the visions they have. It's a back and forth. One of the women in my workshops said that our discussions about the quilt she was working on drove many of the ideas in a book she has coming out. And that's exciting! Something is getting pushed forward."
This ebullience, a clear love of design and quilting, as well as their sense of acceptance and inclusion, reflects the best of the modern quilting community. This is what first drew me and many others to this world, and it's Bill and Weeks who have helped to foster what the community is today.
Both quilters hold graduate degrees in design and together have published five books, launched a magazine and fabric line with Andover Fabrics, made custom quilts, and taught workshops. They published their first book in 2002, Color Harmony for Quilts, illustrating quilts made with solids and the "fresh" composition that has come to be known as "modern quilting." When their second book, The Modern Quilt Workshop, came out in 2005, this new aesthetic was thus named and had already begun to take hold; it flourished as new quilters found one another online and published books in a similar vein. It's Weeks's and Bill's drive to continue creating quilts and talking about color and composition that has pushed modern quilters to think about design in new ways and to focus on developing sewing and quilting skills.
As much as they've loved writing their books, they're clearly delighted with the process of creating a magazine. "What's fun about the magazine and what's challenging, is that we want it not to be just about the quilts but about the whole way of communicating and teaching and the graphic presentation, understanding how people think about the making process.
"The quilt world, whether it's contemporary or traditional, has followed the lead of the publishing industry. People figured out long ago that there's a way you can make patterns legible and flow — books are pretty much templated. And we wanted to challenge that notion. If every quilt is different, each quilt needs a different approach. The magazine is a way to explore, for our own sake and for our readers', different ways of doing things. Some may work, some may not work as well. We're not doing new for the sake of new, we're doing new for the sake of discovery."
Weeks began making quilts in Tokyo in 1987, when she was studying Japanese flower arranging. "I didn't know anybody who quilted. There was nobody in my family, nobody among my friends, nobody I knew in Japan — I had never had a conversation with anybody who had made a quilt. And then I went to this quilt show, where there were quilts made by Japanese quilters, and they were all made of indigo fabrics. When you walked into this show, it was all indigos, and their craftsmanship was incredible — but they looked so different. And I realized at the time that sometimes you have to live in another country to get a perspective on your own heritage.
"I did have this preconceived notion that quilts were very old-fashioned and Sunbonnet Sue and that whole thing." She pauses to tell me, laughingly, about the Sunbonnet Sue spin-offs that people have created. Sunbonnet Sue gone mad. "There's a whole series of Sunbonnet Sue Death Quilts. They're kind of like Edward Gorey meets Sunbonnet Sue, hysterical black humor." (They are really funny — I had to look them up.) "Anyway, I had this vision that that's what quilts were. And, I was studying Japanese flower arranging at the time, so I was deeply involved in a craft that had already had a modern branch develop. So, when I exhibited my flower arrangements in Tokyo, there would be a traditional part of the show and a modern part of the show. And seeing these indigo quilts made me realize, 'Oh, there could be a modern approach to quilting.' The flower arranging was very helpful to me because I could see that this is how an art form evolves."
She goes on to say that she was an investment banker at the time, and that she'd never seen herself as someone who was artistic. (I've heard this echoed many times when talking with other quilters.) "I was of that era where art teachers told you, if you didn't have an artistic talent by the time you were five, you were not going to get it. I put that constraint on myself, and thought, 'Well, I couldn't paint, because that's a creative art, and I'm not that person. But, you know, quilting is just sewing. You don't have to know how to draw, you can just sew. I can sew. So, I gathered all of these modern Japanese textiles — blue and white fabrics that were contemporary Japanese designs with traditional inspirations. And, I made this quilt that was very, very contemporary, I had never seen anything like it. I was sewing without any influence."
It's fascinating to hear this story, since modern quilting owes such a debt to Japanese textiles and quilting, too: the use of indigos, the sense of minimalist design. It makes sense that Weeks was there, designing from her flower-arranging inspiration, and then bringing her aesthetic to the community here in the States. When Weeks and Bill met, they started making quilts together, first as gifts (one was a Hawaiian shirt quilt, which they laugh about now; one thing you should know about Weeks and Bill is that they're also very, very funny). Bill had a background in design, of course, and his mother was a weaver. So, Weeks says, he was comfortable with this kind of work. As they made quilts for friends, their interests began to evolve, and their collaboration as the designers behind their books, and the site Modern Quilt Studio (née Fun Quilts) was born.
PROJECT
BROADBAND
by Weeks Ringle & Bill Kerr
Modern Quilt Studio
From Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr comes a pattern that exemplifies their vision. Spare, clean, fresh — use any adjectives you like; this is certainly modern. With teeny-tiny pieced stripes, it also poses a welcome challenge in consistent piecing and corner alignment.
Finished size 18" × 25"
What You'll Need
* 1 yard of blue solid for field and backing
* 1 fat quarter of gray solid
* 1 fat quarter of white solid
* 19 ½" × 26 ½" piece of batting
Cut Out the Fabric
1. From blue fabric, cut:
* One piece for backing 19 ½" × 26 ½" piece
* A piece, 19 ½" × 12 ¾"
* B piece, 19 ½" × 6"
* C piece, 7 ½" × 2"
* D piece, 4 ¼" × 2"
* E piece, 19 ½" × 16"
3. 2. From white fabric, cut:
* F piece, 8 ¾" × 15"
* G piece, 8 ¾" × 2"
5. 3. From gray fabric, cut:
* H piece, 7 ½" × 15"
* I piece, 4 ¼" × 15"
Piece the Quilt
1. Sew together C-G-D. Press the seams open.
2. Sew together H-F-I. Press the seams open.
3. Sew C-G-D to bottom of A. Press the seams open.
4. Trim C-G-D ½" from seam with A.
5. Sew E splicing piece to bottom of C-G-D in step 4.
6. Trim E ½" from seam with C-G-D. Press the seams open.
7. Sew C-G-D to top of B. Press the seams open.
8. Trim C-G-D ½" from seam with B.
9. Sew H-F-I to bottom of A/C-G-D/E unit. Press the seams open.
10. Trim H-F-I ½" from seam with A/C-G-D/E unit. Press the seams open.
11. Sew E splicing piece to bottom of H-F-I in step 10. Press the seams open.
12. Trim E ½" from seam with H-F-I. Press the seams open.
13. Repeat steps 9–12 fourteen more times, making sure to align the white stripes as you go.
14. Sew the top part of the wall hanging you've just pieced to C-G-D/B. Press the seams open.
Assemble the Quilt
1. Layer the top and backing, with right sides together, then align batting on top. Make sure all edges are flush.
2. Stitch these three layers together ½" from the edge on three sides, leaving the top edge open.
3. Carefully trim batting flush with the seam on three sides and ½" from the top edge.
4. Turn right side out through the top opening, easing out the corners.
5. Fold in the top edges ½" and then hand-sew the opening closed.
Quilt the Layers
We quilted Broadband in a dense, allover spiral pattern using light blue thread that matches the background fabric.
RASHIDA COLEMAN-HALE
ZAKKA STYLE
Rashida's first book, I Love Patchwork: 21 Irresistible Zakka Projects to Sew, came out in 2009, and it's been quickly followed up by her second, Zakka Style, out in 2011. She laughs about bringing her kids to her sewing space with a babysitter to help out, and how she managed to juggle everything as she wrote. She's now designing her own fabric lines and was picked up to design for Cloud9 Fabrics, which she says is a dream come true.
"My mom decided one summer when I was a teenager that I needed to know how to sew. 'I was like, oookay, Mom.' We went to a fabric store and picked out some fabric, which was hideous." She laughs. "Then we picked out a pattern, which was equally hideous. I picked the craziest fabric! It looked like a clown suit. It was terrible." Rashida took to sewing, though, and her mother helped her step by step. It was her mother's being discovered by a fashion designer that took them to Japan. "It's definitely helped my design eye," Rashida says, and thus grew her Zakka style.
ANDREW MOWBRAY
REUSE, REIMAGINE, REDESIGN
"Where we live now, there's a lot of construction, and I saw men putting Tyvek up, and it looked like a giant quilt wrapped around a building." From there, Andrew Mowbray began thinking about the relationship between the insulation the Tyvek provides, versus the warmth and comfort of a quilt — and "how quilts function and what they do, in the context of history."
The obvious next step? To make quilts with the plastic that's used to cover houses.
"We've had the Bronze Age, the Stone Age. Today, we're in the Plastic Age. Half of what's in your house is made out of polyethylene, and you work on your computer all day and it's made of plastic." Andrew is interested in playing with the medium that has taken over our lives, questioning its function and place in our culture — and asking why we'll venerate art of other mediums but not necessarily plastic.
Most of his quilts are about four feet square, but he's working on one right now that's eight feet square, which is about as big as he can go on his machine (it's hard to roll Tyvek as you move it through the machine). He combines the patterns and shapes of the word Tyvek to form interesting geometric patterns and images. My favorite is his Saturday Night Fever quilt, with a picture of John Travolta dancing in the center.
YOSHIKO JINZENJI
THE BEAUTY OF THE WHITE SPACE
White quilts with intricately "embossed" designs, or small blocks of color jumping across a cream- colored surface: these are the deceptively simple designs of Yoshiko Jinzenji, a Japanese quilter and weaver who has been working with fiber for more than 30 years. Many people are drawn to what looks "modern" in her designs. The spare use of color, for example. But step closer to one of her quilts, and you'll see its beautiful intricacies — the depth of the quilting (or, in some cases, what she calls embossment) and the play of small, varied shapes of color against the texture of the stitching. Her work has inspired many quilters; she was certainly mentioned many times over by other people in this book. She's published several books of her own, so you can learn more about her work and techniques there. If you want to take a class with her, you'll have to voyage to Japan or Bali.
ANGELA WALTERS
PLAYING WITH THE LONG-ARM
Angela can work in either traditional or modern modes; she doesn't identify herself with one or the other. But, modern quilters have found her quilting style and imagination to be the perfect match for her quilts. Ships at sea, spiders nesting in pieced corners, a wide range of quilting styles within one piece — what's not to love?
After learning to quilt from her grandfather, Angela took his suggestion to buy a quilting machine; once she did that, she was sold. "I knew pretty early on that I loved that part of quilting the best." She quilted traditional quilts for nine or ten years, and now that she's also quilted for modern sewers, she's "in a good place to teach modern quilters to machine quilt."
In her two fabulous books, she describes how to create different patterns, updating traditional designs, such as pebbling, by varying the sizes of the pebbles, or applying the patterns differently across the quilts. "For years, I've been teaching classes in my mind as I sew. That was part of the conception of the first book. It's also really conversational — that's how I am when I teach, so that's how I wanted the book to be." She illustrates ways that quilters can "use designs they already know to add to the composition, for example using the quilting to add movement or color. ... I feel with some of the quilters I work with, the quilts are up here [she raises her arm up high]. I want my quilting to rise to that."
TUTORIAL
Free-Motion Quilting Paisleys
By Angela Walters
Free-motion quilting happens to be my favorite part of making a quilt, and one of my favorite go-to designs is the paisley design. This quilting design is so versatile and will work in many different kinds of quilts, from modern to traditional. This particular design is a meander, which means you will quilt the same shape repeatedly to fill in an area on the quilt, whether it is a block or the whole quilt top!
1. Start by quilting a teardrop shape and echo around to add another layer.
2. Here is where you can add your own flair to the quilting design! You can make the curve to the side or make it more symmetrical. The more you quilt it, the more you will add your own flair to it.
3. You can echo the design again or quilt another paisley. In this example, I have quilted another paisley and echoed around it.
4. As you quilt, the most important thing is that you fill the area consistently, alternating between paisleys and echoing.
5. Continue quilting until you fill the whole area with the quilting design.
6. If you are struggling with quilting the design (or any design for that matter), try drawing it on a piece of paper. The most important thing in quilting is knowing where to go next. Drawing the design will help your mind figure out how the design flows.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Quilting with a Modern Slant"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Rachel May.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Six Steps to a Quilt
What You'll Need
Find Your People
What is Modern Quilting?
1: A Sense of Play
Weeks Ringle & Bill Kerr
Quilters Unite!
Broadband
Rashida Coleman-Hale
Andrew Mowbray
Yoshiko Jinzenji
Angela Walters
Free-Motion Quilting Paisleys
Jagged
David Butler
Miriam Blaich
Kathy Mack
Rebecca Loren
Grandmother's Fan Variation
Anna Williams
2: Improv
Rossie Hutchinson
Credit Where Credit Is Due
Fraction Quilt
Gee's Bend Quilts
Katie Pedersen
Kyoung Ae Cho
Rayna Gillman
Improv Piecing with Scraps
Nancy Crow
Victoria Findlay Wolfe
Curvy Dresden Improv Piecing
Denyse Schmidt
Curved Piecing
Sherri Lynn Wood
Modern Memory Lane T-Shirt Quilt
Danielle Krcmar
3: The Personal is Political
Kristin Link
Chawne Kimber
Denise Burge
Michelle Engel Bencsko & Gina Pantastico
Betz White
Line Bruntse
Alice Webb Greer
Finishing Your Quilt
Jan Johnson
Bullion Stitch
Museums Discover Quilts
Laurel Krynock
Alexandra Ledgerwood
Donating Quilts
Lee Heinrich
Blogging Advice
Thomas Knauer
4: Quilting From Tradition
Anna Maria Horner
Bouquet
Reading Up on Quilt History
Pepper Cory
Log Cabin Block
Allison Harris
Amish Quilts
Aneela Hoey
Hand-Quilting Basics
Kathreen Ricketson
Tacha Bruecher
Paper-Pieced Pillow
Katie Blakesley
Katy Jones
Vanessa Christenson
Cynthia Mann
Starting a Business
5: For The Love Of Color
Amy Butler
Elizabeth Hartman
Alexis Deise
Amy Keefer's Color Culture
Natural Dyes
Elizabeth Barton
Kaffe Fassett
Malka Dubrawsky
Resist Dyeing
Pieces-of-Eight Pillow
Sonia Delaunay
Monica Ripley
Dyeing with Avocado Pits
Red & White Quilts
Creating Your Own Fabric
Kim Eichler-Messmer
Kelle Boyd
6: Practicing Scale(s)
Jane Sassaman
Jacquie Gering
Ashley Newcomb
Paper-Pieced Heart
Heather Grant
The Modern Quilt Guild
Debbie Grifka
Star Variations
Milky Way
Valori Wells
Jessica Kovach
Aimee Raymond
Caro Sheridan
The Four-Patch Trick
7: Coming Full Circle
Valerie Maser-Flanagan
Geta Grama
Stacey Shrontz
Fusible Web Applique
Quilting with Kids
Laurie Matthews
Lisa Mason
Caroline Mason
John Q. Adams
Men Who Quilt
Summer Twist Quilt
Inspiration
Maritza Soto
Pippa Eccles Armbrester
Reverse Appliqueing Ovals
Virginia B. Johnson
Opening a Shop
Sarah Fielke
Melody Miller
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Bibliography
Metric Conversion Chart
Photography Credits
Index