Rhonda Jordan Archives - Page 2 of 6

Get Stitchy with It – and a Giveaway!

Along with the modern quilt movement, embroidery and stitching are getting a modern makeover, too. One of our favorite discoveries at Quilt Market, and the first booth we stepped into, was Red Gate Stitchery. I love having portable projects that I can take back and forth between my studio and home. It is so easy to slip hoop, needle and thread into a bag and have some hand work on the go. The only problem with this is I let these projects pile up and the lovely little embroidery work just needs to be turned into a finished project. That doesn’t always happen. Susan Fitzgerald, the designer behind Red Gate Stitchery, felt the same way.

Red Gate Stitchery at Quilt Market - Fall 2014 — Red Gate Stitchery at Quilt Market – Fall 2014. Her booth was busy!

Susan played around with unconventional materials like leather, acrylic and bamboo to make substrates for embroidery and cross stitch that do not require finishing. It is instant gratification after the stitching is done! These projects also stitch up really fast! My favorite are from her straight stitch collection which are a series of hand stitched bamboo necklaces.

The Straight Stitch Collection. Image courtesy of Red Gate Stitchery.

I started working up this kit with two threads (the included instructions called for one). The pendant, floss, needle and instructions were all included in the kit. The only thing you need on hand are a little pair of thread snips. Love it!

She also offers bamboo pendant blanks in her Etsy shop so you can branch out and design your own. She has templates on her website so you can doodle up a design before you start stitching.

The other OMG find at market was from Aurifil. Their threads have always been the go to for thread snobs like us. In addition to machine weight cotton, they also have 12 wt cotton, linen and wool for handwork. It is absolutely delicious! To make an embroidery girl’s dreams come true they have 6 strand floss on lovely little wooden spools that will make you want to cry. I have piles of old school DMC at home but this little spools of love are just fabulous. They are a little pricier than the old standard but each spool has 18 yards of floss instead of the usually 8. The presentation is just perfect, too.

A peak inside the Linen and Lace box! It could be yours! — A peak inside the Linen and Lace box!

Want to try your “hand” at embroidery with Aurifil threads?! Leave a comment here and we will give away this collection box! We will end the comments at midnight ET on Sunday, November 16th and announce the winner on Monday!

Good luck and Happy Stitching!

Seeing Red – The Houston International Quilt Festival Ruby Jubilee Quilts

This year The Houston International Quilt Festival celebrated its 40th anniversary with a special exhibit “The Ruby Jubilee”. Rubies are a traditional anniversary gift celebrating forty years of marriage. The strong textile tradition of red and white quilts made this years exhibition a fitting and awe inspiring choice.

Red and white quilts became popular in the 1850s because of an expensive but colorfast and bleed proof fabric dyed with madder that came to be known as turkey red. The cloth was not of Turkish origin but was named so because of its origins in the East. The reds held their color and stood the test of time with wear and tear.

The popularity of red and white quilts, and the fact that they still retained their color over time, has made them highly collectable quilts. A prolific collector, Joanna Rose, shared her collection of 651 red and white quilts in an exhibition, “Infinite Variety,Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts” with the American Folk Art Museum in 2011. This exhibition served as the inspiration for the Ruby Jubilee.

Infinite Variety, March 2011 Photo credit - Gavin Ashworth / Courtesy of American Folk Art Museum. — Infinite Variety, March 2011
Photo credit – Gavin Ashworth / Courtesy of American Folk Art Museum.

The collection of quilts hung in Houston mirrored the same format at Rose’s collection. The Ruby Jubilee quilts span from 1974 to the present and encompass traditional quilts like the iconic Dear Jane all the way to more contemporary pieces with asymmetry and text. The juxtaposition of the two, side by side, made it feel like a wide community of quilters had come together and spoken the same language.

Lauren and I were lucky enough to get to see the exhibition while we were at Quilt Market, which always happens the weekend before festival. Market is a hustle and bustle of work and activity. It is exciting, overwhelming, exhilarating, and stressful all at the same time. Walking through the Market floor is a sensory overload and then you can just step over to the exhibition and it is almost as if time stands still. Voices are hushed. The frantic pace of running from booth to booth, appointment to appointment, is replaced by a slower steps to take in one of the most significant quilt exhibitions in the world.

It is really hard for me to see such a dramatic display and it not have an impact on my own work. The Infinite Variety exhibition spawned an interest in red and white quilts to the point that it inspired entire fabric lines devoted to reproduction turkey red prints. Some of those lines are still being produced. It will be interesting to see what effect this exhibition has on modern quilting.

So, now to dig out some reds in my stash.

Handmade Halloween – #TBT

We are kicking off #handmadehalloween! Today, post your best #tbt costume on Instagram. I know some of you have some awesome time warp finery to share. Tomorrow, on Halloween, show off your mad sewing skills. Don’t forget to tag us!

The holidays tend to stir up a frenzy of handmade goodies and sewing projects. In our house, Halloween was the event that launched the whole season! My mom was an amazing sewist and the great costume search probably started in the summer! No night-before stuff like I am (in)famous for. I remember being a little girl and sitting on the tall stool in the pattern section of Piece Goods, drooling and dreaming over the costume section of the McCall’s pattern book with my mom. After the pattern was picked out the fabric hunt was on an some sort of trim was always a must. Rick rack trim still makes me think of the 1970s.

Handmade Halloween has been a big deal with my own little boys. I am really grateful for my sewing skills when my kids come up with oddball stuff like King Tut and a Pileated Woodpecker (when a 3 year old asks specifically to be a Pileated Woodpecker he gets what he wants)!

Why You Should Label Your Quilts

When I was a new quilter I never thought about labeling my quilts. I made my first quilt when I was in art school for a class project and my second for my first child when I was pregnant. Both quilts never left my possession so a label seemed irrelevant. I realized how much a quilt label meant when the first child was born.

I gave birth in December of 2002 at the hospital where I worked as a labor/delivery nurse. Our local guild donated quilts to the hospital for all of the holiday babies. The nurses I worked with presented me with the most precious Christmas quilt I could ever imagine. It was a sweet little rail fence quilt in red, green and white that was hand tied with perle cotton. Every year will pull the quilt out when we decorate for the holidays and wonder who took the time to part with such a lovely treasure. It had no label. Years later when I joined our local guild, I would sometimes sit there and wonder which lovely woman made the quilt for my son. I asked around but no one seemed to be able to identify the maker!

Quilt making is a long running textile tradition that is passed down from generation to generation. The gifting of quilts also usually signifies an important event in someone’s life, such as a marriage, birth, illness, birthday or other major life event. These stories of life and relationships are lost if you do not label your quilt!

We have also all heard of at least one sad quilt story where a quilt is labored over and sent off to its destination only to somehow get lost on its way. Shipping labels can get smudged or battered. Sometimes theft of a package could be the culprit. I would like to think if a quilt had a label it would somehow find its way home.

The Quilt Alliance, a non-profit established in 1993 to document, preserve and share American quilt heritage, has done a lot of work to share quilt stories so they do not become lost. They are a great resource for how to document the quilts we make or collect, and why! You can also purchase a quilt labeling kit from them that is really quite lovely.

Ananemone Labels on Etsy | Right Sides Together — Ananemone Labels on Etsy

Labels can be as simple as printing one at home on printable fabric or using a Micron pen and making one by hand. Etsy has several sellers that offer pre-printed and custom labels. Ananemone Labels has some lovely ones.

Labels should include at least

– the name of the maker

– the name of the quilter

– the date it was made

– if it has a specific purpose, the name of the recipient and the occasion for which it was made

This textile tradition is very important. So is your work! Label your quilts, take credit for your work, and share your quilt stories.

We would love to see how you label your quilts. Share a picture of how you label your quilts on our Facebook page or Instagram. Share your quilt stories!

Slowing Down as the World Speeds Up – Hand Quilting

Modern quilting and the minimalist aesthetic that started with its birth gave rise to a lot of straight line quilting and simple design. I have heard many debates about the authenticity of quilts by older, traditional quilters based on how much of a quilt was done by hand (a dear hand quilter/sewist I know insists a quilt made on a machine is not a quilt, it’s a blanket)! We all know that the complexity of a quilt and the amount of hand work does not define the true nature of our work. Pushing aside the old school notions of how to complete a quilt, the current trend of slow sewing has brought hand quilting to the forefront in a lot of modern quilts.

Sherri Lynn Wood - hand quilting — Sherri Lynn Wood

One of the first hand quilters that really seamed to push my interest toward picking up a hand needle is Maura Ambrose of Folk Fibers. Maura uses the sashiko technique of stitching to finish her quilts with stunning results (and she will be teaching at QuiltCon)! Other quilters and designers such as Anna Maria Horner, Sherri Lynn Wood and Sarah Fielke have also brought hand quilting in the lime light. Sarah has a wonderful book, too, Hand Quilted with Love. She has a great video tutorial, too. Hand quilting also does not have to stick to the old school norms. It can be used for straight line quilting to complete a quilt. It can be used as a decorative element to embellish a quilt done by machine. The in-and-out motion of pushing a needle through fiber can be a little meditation through sewing to just kind of slow things down. It is really hard to have twitchy fingers and a distracted mind when you have a needle in hand! Have you tried hand quilting? How do you see it being incorporated into modern quilting?

Byline: Rhonda Jordan