Nurtured by Love

Category: Projects & Creativity

  • Temperature Blanket

    Temperature Blanket

    I knit. I don’t crochet. But when I saw a particularly fetching temperature blanket design online, I figured I could learn how to make a hexagon. Almost four hundred hexagons, actually.

    A temperature blanket uses colours to represent daily temperatures, typically over the course of a year. Mine is a 2025 record of local temperatures: the low represented in the centre of each hexagon, and the high surrounding it. Because 365 isn’t divisible by two similar factors, I am including a month-marker hexagon at the start of each month, and one at the end. By including those extra thirteen hexagons, my total will be 378, and that number can be factored by 18 and 21. So my blanket has 18 hexagons per row, and 21 rows, and because of the efficient packing of hexagons that bees know about, it’ll end up being roughly square and a perfect (large) lap blanket.

    I used divisions of 5 degrees Celsius with my coldest colour being “below minus 10” and my hottest one “above 35.” I went with Berocco Vintage yarn because of its (relative) affordability, ready availability and large colour range.

    Grey-white (8 o’clock on the wheel-of-skeins) is the coldest colour. From there they proceed clockwise through the blues, past the freezing mark to the greens, into the spring-like yellows, then the summery orange-reds, and up into the uncomfortable dog-days of the maroon and purple skeins.

    Most mornings I get up and the first thing I do upon coming downstairs is to check the Environment Canada temperature record for the previous day. Then I make my coffee, grab my yarn and make yesterday’s hex while sipping my coffee. It’s a nice twelve-minute ritual.

    The summer this year has been cooler and wetter than the past few years – thankfully! – but we did get one day with a high over 35 degrees, so I am happy that I have been able to use all the colours I planned out at least once. It has been so fun watching the design and the colour-shifts take shape, and my awareness of the back-and-forth shuffle of the seasonal temperature changes has been piqued.

    I suppose it’ll be a little less exciting as the year heads towards its conclusion, cycling through colour combinations I’ve already used. But so far my interest and energy for this project has continued. The only times I’ve gotten behind on my hexes are when we’ve been away, and I’ve caught up easily upon returning.

    Coincidentally a local friend of mine is sewing a temperature quilt. We had both started our projects before we discovered what the other was doing. It has been fun trading photos and sharing excitement as the temperature in February dipped to a previously-unseen low, or the afternoon high broke 25 for the first time in April.

  • Tiny book

    Tiny book

    Made for an online friend who “published” a series of haiku during the early phase of the pandemic, interspersed with countless other Facebook posts, so that only the observant noticed the pattern.

  • The orange pill

    The orange pill

    During the summer of 2021, Fiona was offered a job working as a veterinary assistant at a clinic 50 km away. It was a super opportunity, so I told her she should take it, and she could use my car for the commute. I would use the e-bike. We had bought a Rad Mini in 2018 to help Sophie and Fiona get around for work, school and groceries in Nelson while they were living semi-independently. They mostly walked but the bike was occasionally a huge help.

    Once Fiona moved away to university in the fall of 2020, the e-bike came home to live in the garage in New Denver and only occasionally got used. But the following spring, with my car leaving town 5 days a week, the e-bike became my primary vehicle for errands. It was suprisingly enjoyable. It could pack a fair bit of payload, and I felt much less guilty making my little runs up and down the hill to the post office or grocery store most days. So when she went back to Toronto for her second year of university, I decided to see if I could keep using the bike for local trips, at least until the cold rain started in October.

    I decided that for every tank of gas I didn’t have to buy, I would flesh out my cycle-commuter kit. I got myself some rain pants and I made it through October. I figured I’d keep going until the snow was flying. I was surprised to discover that the tire tread was pretty good in the first skiff of snow. I added an under-helmet balaclava, a set of warm waterproof gloves, some goggles, and a hi-vis jacket.

    Suddenly it was April. I had ridden through the whole winter.

    And so I kept going. I lent my car out to people who needed a car. I used it myself for trips of over 100 km (for orchestra gigs, to retrieve various children from airports to bring them home or to dispatch them, for appointments in Nelson) but for everything local, meaning everything within 15-20 kilometres, I used the bike.

    It was addictive! I was thrilled with how fun and easy it was. And then I discovered NotJustBikes and swallowed the orange pill for once and for all.

    NJB is a YouTube channel by a Canadian guy who grew up in the same general area of the country that I did, and who now lives in Amsterdam. His dryly sarcastic video essays talk about the differences in transportation norms and urban design between North American cities and those in the area he now lives.

    Spoiler: we don’t come out looking very good.

    I fell down the rabbit hole of his YouTube channel and found myself alternately inspired and frustrated by the contrasts. It was a sort of “I never thought about it, but the way we live really sucks, and there is no good reason we can’t radically change things” experience. And a lot of “omg, why do we still insist on doing things so stupidly, when so much of the rest of the world has been doing them so much better?” And repeated sentiments of “why do we just accept this shit?” This is the orange (Dutch) pill.

    I don’t know what the magic sauce is that makes the orange pill go down so smoothly, but I cannot recommend his channel highly enough. It is definitely a gateway drug.

    So here I am another winter later, still only using the bike for local transportation. I now have a cargo trailer, made out of the old kids’ Burley D-Lite trailer, which I can hook on for bulky loads. I have pogies (bar mitts) and a better high-visibility winter jacket. I have the bike tricked out with a go-mug holder, tire chains for the icy days, slick tires for the summer, a phone mount and rear blinkies that function as turn signals. It’s getting close to the 4000-kilometre point on the odometer, which isn’t all that much compared to the mileage I put on my road bike, but it is a ton of riding when you take into account that it is made up almost entirely of 3.5-kilometre trips up and down the hill between our property and town.

    And I am now a passionate advocate for active transportation options. I organized an e-bike event at the local market last summer to encourage other people to look to e-bikes as a transportation option. (Several have since done so!)

    I have also taken on the challenge of trying to develop a shared-use active transportation trail between our village and the next one over, something that has been tried repeatedly over the years. They’re only 4 km apart but the highway is so dangerous for anything but motor vehicles that everyone is car dependent as a result. I’ve waded into the worlds of municipal politics, public advocacy and grant applications as a result, places I would ordinarily avoid like the plague, but the orange pill is making me do it.

  • Spinning

    Spinning

    I bought a little spinning wheel. It’s about the size of an SLR camera and weighs a fraction as much. It came from a Kickstarter campaign I backed. I paid about $50 and like my other favourite Kickstarter reward, it delivered not just on time but early! It runs off DC power with a tiny little motor. Years ago I spent a couple of days experimenting with a borrowed treadle spinning wheel and some (in retrospect) appallingly poor-quality fleece. The result was some ‘rustic yarn,’ and the sense of gratification was short-lived. This time around I have used proper spinning-quality roving I purchased, and have made more of an effort to finesse my skills. I am doing much better, and am entirely smitten with the process. What’s most fascinating to me is the way the colours meld.

    The photo above shows the first stages of the progression. I start with a big pillow of fleece dyed in swaths of different colours, some quite bright and prominent. As I spin one strand at a time onto the bobbin the colours take turns, sometimes blending a bit as they do. Then, when I ply the strands together into a ball of yarn, the dark and light colours entwine each other as often as not, and the brights become tempered.

    And then, finally, when the yarn is knitted up into a small project, the knitting creates even more blending and muting. This Scrunchable Scarf ended up being an amazing dapple of forest colours: moss, leaves, humus, lichen, bark and twigs. I would never have guessed how muted it would turn out from looking at the bold brights in the original roving.

    When I chose fleece for my second project, I decided to try for something a bit lighter and brighter. I found some fun glittery stuff, but I could tell from my previous experience that the purples were likely to overwhelm the lighter oranges, pinks and silvers. So I paired it with half as much plain sunflower fleece. Here are the pre- and post-spinning results. It looks like an awful lot of yellow:

    But here’s the result: still predominantly purple-pink, but with proper yellows peeking out from time to time. It is just about what I was expecting!

    Here’s another thing: I YouTube-taught myself to solder, in order to install a reverse switch. The original way to reverse the direction (necessary for plying) was to put a figure-eight in the drive belt, but that was causing a fair bit of friction and was unnecessarily fiddly. So I Amazon’d me a DPTP switch and got all the wires going to the right places. And … it worked!

    But I burned the motor out after just a few weeks. It’s a known issue with this little wheel if the uptake tension isn’t kept very low, exacerbated by the figure-eight drive belt issue I mentioned. They’re sending me a free replacement which is great, and I think I can avoid problems now that I have the reverse switch and know to minimize the tension. I hope it gets here soon; I’m missing the daily meditative colour-play.

    Also, it’s obvious I need a full-size traditional wheel as well. Need. Yeah.

  • Post-asbestos progress

    Post-asbestos progress

    First the roof came off. Then it poured rain all weekend. Of course.

    There were tarps up, but they leaked. It could have been worse. We lost a light fixture. Some old drywall got wet in a few places and will eventually need to be replaced. The bathroom mats were sopping. The house survived.

    It set us back about three weeks and cost a lot of money, but the asbestos is gone, and the renovation is moving ahead again.

    The new roof went up. And the old part of the roof got two skylights and a new skin of dark grey shingles. The addition has dramatically changed the overall appearance of the house. It’s not longer a squat 1940s gable-and-shed-roofed block. Now the roofline appears more interesting and broken up from all angles.

    As the crew throws up partition walls and roughs in for fixtures, we’re starting to get a sense of how the interior will feel. The airy height of the staircase and hallway is great. We’ll probably be tucking a reading/study area in against the wall, which will eventually have a row of four small windows under the eaves on the right.

    We’re now at the point of ordering tile and flooring, which is exciting. It will be another couple of weeks before it goes down, but reaching this point was enough to inspire me to start assembling the IKEA cabinetry.

    The stairs themselves feel immense. They used to be narrow, enclosed and more ladder-like, with lean-back-and-duck head clearance and irregularly-sized treads. Now they are completely to code, which makes them about 50% longer and a dream to climb. They also have natural light from the skylight, and are open to the living room for the bottom five steps which also gives them a sense of spaciousness. Getting upstairs no longer feels like a trip to a maltreated servant’s garret.

    The bathroom is harder to appreciate properly at this point without the fixtures, cabinets or window. It seems much bigger than it will be eventually.

  • HazMat Adventures

    HazMat Adventures

    img_3241Our Nelson place is the eyesore on the block. We bought it because of that. It was affordable and well situated, and that created the possibility of bringing it up to neighbourhood standards and eventually reselling it for a price more in keeping with the rest of the strong housing market.

    The house has four bedrooms that would make it a great choice for a family with children attending any of the very nearby schools, but it has only one bathroom, off the kitchen. That’s not exactly the way 21st-century homes allocate their square footage. More typical would be two or three bathrooms for a four-bedroom house.

    img_3234So we decided on a two-phase home improvement project. For the first phase we would increase the height of part of the upper story to allow for the installation of a full second bathroom. We would then turn the upper story into a master bedroom suite. This photo shows the south end of the upper floor as it was when we moved in. There is a dangerous steep staircase which pops up into a long dark space with limited headroom. Behind the camera is a bedroom defined by the same sorts of ancient walls and ceiling: uninsulated, smelly and with an “attic” aesthetic.

    We got a great local architect, very experienced with building codes, local construction and local architecture to draw us up some plans. This end will have the roof elevated on the left side of the photo, and that’s where the bathroom will go. The stairs will be replaced and the remainder of the space will be gutted, insulated and re-drywalled with the addition of skylights and extra windows.

    It took all summer to get a building permit. The city apparently considers the addition of headroom to equate the addition of floor space. The floor space is actually the same, of course. “Oh, but you’re increasing your finished floor space,” they said. No actually we’re not; it has been finished (panelled, carpeted) for decades. “Oh, but you’re increasing your usable finished floor space,” they countered. Okay, whatever; you can’t fight city hall, right? An engineer had to be involved. A major expense. But she worked quickly and efficiently, and finally it all came together. The contractor showed up at the end of September and got to work.

    img_3269The gutting of the space proceeded really quickly. Footings were poured in the basement. New beams and supports were retrofitted into the basement and main floor to support the new portion of the roof. New joists went into the upper floor to support the tub. Fortunately old vermiculite and cellulose found in the knee wall tested negative for asbestos. Things were very exciting for a while.

    But then WorkSafeBC showed up with information for our contractor about a new policy on hazardous materials testing for all homes built prior to 1990. This involved much more extensive testing of any materials being disturbed. Work had to stop until a certified person completed a full site review. Another big unanticipated expense.

    Because this policy is new and sweeping, the system and the people serving it are swamped. It took a while to get a certified guy in to collect the samples, and even longer to get the results of the tests back from the lab. “Same day turnaround” turned out to mean “different week turnaround.”

    The first results looked great: the flooring and vermiculite upstairs were completely clear of asbestos. But then the last few tests came back showing problems. The greenish stuff stuck to the chimney, some of the vinyl flooring that was a couple of layers deep on the old stairs and all of the drywall joint compound were found to contain asbestos.

    So that is where we’re stuck now. It means another wait. Now there’s a HazMat removal company that has to review the tests, look at the site, quote a price and do the removal. Presumably they’ll be wearing full-body hazmat suits and swanky respirators and will terrify our neighbours … and maybe we’ll have to vacate for the duration, I don’t know.

    This new WorkSafe policy didn’t kick in until the summer, well after when we had expected to have the renovation underway, but while we were still held up by the building permit and Land Title glitches. No one knew that we would soon be faced with a huge additional cost. When we did find out we were at the point of no return, with our upper story gutted and partly open to the elements. So I guess we just have to eat the cost, and put up with the delays. Fortunately so far the construction crew has been excellent at containing the mess and keeping the parts of the house we have to live in clean and habitable.

    img_3289A little bit of new siding will be going up as we complete the modifications upstairs, so we figured it would make sense to consider the second stage of our remodelling, which will be exterior upgrades. We had fun imagining all sorts of Nelson-esque colour schemes, surveying the neighbourhood and looking for houses we really liked the look of. We settled on blue, with cream trim and purple-red accents. I painted one side of the garage in the last snatches of fall sunshine and warmth to make sure we were going to be happy with it. I think we are. It sure beats the peeling 1970s white and barn-red.

    This part, at least, has been straightforward and enjoyable.

     

  • Web Development

    Screenshot 2016-07-02 23.10.25 Screenshot 2016-07-02 23.09.46I’ve been working on a couple of Udemy courses for the past month or so. I signed up for one in April but I didn’t really dig in for a while. Once I did I decided I needed more so I’m working through both in parallel.

    The Bootcamp course is the better of the two. It has more emphasis on the concepts underlying the code, and the increments and exercises are more carefully and sensibly laid out. But the Complete course has some interesting exercises and some additional content areas. Doing the two together is helping reinforce the learning and allowing me to make connections that I might not otherwise get.

    When I was in high school there were no computers. The year after I graduated they began offering a course that used Fortran on a university mainframe. In the summer of 1987 I bought myself a Commodore 64 and did a ton of programming in Basic. In 1992 I did a university distance education course in TurboPascal on my first PC.  I first got into building websites in about 1995. I worked from scratch in a text editor and got pretty good with HTML3. I could edit little bits of javascript to do mouseOver effects and could build framesets (ew, remember those?) and nice layouts with tables. But when CSS came into vogue and browsers began getting more powerful, I had moved onto blogging platforms for my day to day web work, and I no longer stayed current on the scripting side. I could hack my way through php installations of bulletin board scripts and got fairly good with WordPress plugins. But there was so much beneath the admin interface that I didn’t have a clue about.

    Because I manage the Valhalla Fine Arts website I decided I should get a more robust understanding how it really works. Sooner or later something will break or need a major overhaul, and I’d like to be able to upgrade it with something more customized and up-to-date when the time comes. It is currently based on a root Wordpress installation, with a php-based registration module that was installed by someone else which I don’t have a clue about.

    If I’d stayed on the crest of the wave of web development back in the early 2000s I would have been fine. But a decade and half of neglect has left me in a deep hole. I’m not sure how long it will take me to climb out, but I’m going to keep trying. I’m wrapping up my learning about front-end javascript right now. While I don’t find programming easy to learn, I do enjoy the satisfaction of cracking a problem and getting my code to run so it’s good stuff.

  • Upgrading the trail

    Upgrading the trail

    I began working on a connecting trail from our property to the linear park below almost three years ago. I hacked in a goat-path of sorts: narrow and full of switchbacks. It changed my life, in that it made one of my favourite running trails a mere 3-minute scrabble from my door.

    Yeller McLeod, my birthday present to myself. He's a combination of tamper, rake and hoe.
    Yeller McLeod, my birthday present to myself. He’s a combination of a tamper, rake and hoe.

    But it wasn’t a great trail, technically speaking. Parts had a grade of more than 15%, it was narrow, there were a couple of places that were subject to erosion and the tight switchbacks meant that you couldn’t ride a mountain bike on it.

    Last summer I did an IMBA trail-building workshop and learned more about how to lay out ride-able, sustainable trails. Armed with this knowledge and my new McLeod rake, I set out to improve my trail. I laid out a new route at the top, eliminating three of the most problematic tight turns. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks working on that portion, about 75 metres in length.

    Now I’m dealing with one of the three remaining switchbacks that can’t be edited out. Ideally it should be a loopy turn with a loop diameter of about 25 feet. The problem, of course, is how one creates a relatively level 7-metre-wide platter of earth on the side of a mountain with a grade of 30-40 degrees, made of clay, roots and rock, with nothing more than a mattock and my trusty fire rake. I’m figuring high-speed flowy bike turns will have to be compromised in the name of preserving my sanity. I’m shooting for a 4-metre radius, something that will require  and even that is going to require a herculean effort. I think I’ll be able to snake my way through that at lower speed without falling over. I’m about a quarter of the way through my first such turn, and have spent probably 10 hours at it. So … yeah … this trail may end up being a lifetime’s work.

    Still, I am having fun riding my bike up and down the piddly first 150 metres.

  • Front Room

    Front Room

    Old plaster-and-lath and gaping fir flooring in the front room.
    Old plaster-and-lath, upside-down receptacle and gaping fir flooring in the front room.

    Oh look. I did some things. The front bedroom was uninhabitable when we took possession of the Nelson house. Over the summer Noah, Sophie and friends stripped and then repainted the two gyproc walls, but the ceiling was flaky acoustic tile and two of the walls were this stuff: plaster and lath with a bit of vermiculite behind it, being held together by many layers of paint, wallpaper and press-board panelling. At the suggestion of our building inspector we chose not to investigate asbestos status but simply to leave everything intact and seal it off. The safest way, really. So I cleaned loose plaster away, shimmed the places where it was gone completely and got the walls passably flat.

    New drywall, and electrical receptacle now right-side-up
    New drywall, and electrical receptacle now right-side-up

    Then I drywalled over it. The ceiling required ten-foot sheets. Chuck and I did those together with a single step-ladder and, among other things, a baseball bat. Not too many corners (or arms or toes) got damaged.

    I actually kind of like taping and mudding drywall. Not that I’d want to do that for a living, but a single room is a gratifying project. I’ve done it before, but it had been years. I got better at it as I went. In the end I didn’t get obsessive and do a full skim coat, since the two walls that had been done by a previous owner weren’t perfect either. But I got a pretty decent finish in the end.

    Walls painted, hickory flooring and moldings done.
    Walls painted, hickory flooring and moldings done.

    From there it was on to painting. I went with what was marketed as a sort of chic tan-grey but turned out to be not that far off the colour of raw drywall, but whatever. Neutral, so that redecorating won’t require repainting, since we’re not really sure what this room will be for over the medium-term, and may not own the house for all that long anyway.

    Then the flooring went in. That was really fun. I had picked up enough surplus engineered hickory via the regional buy & sell website for a nice price. I floated it over an underlayment, gluing the tongue-and-groove together, staggering the joints. It took me about 5 hours, and this was where the room really began to pop for me. Adding the mouldings was a time-consuming final step but brought everything up to the next level.

    Looking the other way, mountain dusk in the distance.
    Looking the other way, mountain dusk in the distance.

    Sophie liked the room enough to move into it, vacating the larger, slightly more private room on the other side of the house. Which prompted Fiona to move across into the now-empty “blue room” that had been Sophie’s.  All of which is good because it means that the room she was in, which Noah repainted during the summer, is now empty and can get a bunch of finishing details done. Then I can move into that, meaning the entire upstairs will be empty and we can start looking towards a major renovation up there in the spring. The plan for upstairs is to add a dormer with a bathroom in it, and turn the rest into a master bedroom. The extra bathroom is definitely needed in a house with four bedrooms. Last weekend during the choral festival we had Sophie’s friend plus four billets staying with us. The eight of us had enough space, but sharing one bathroom eight ways was nuts. The girls were great about it but … yeah, it was crazy.

  • House progress

    I really love our Nelson house. When we bought it I was sold on it as an investment, a fixer-upper, but I think I’m falling in love now. It has a really nice feel to the living space. It’s open and light and airy during the day, and yet at night it feels cosy and welcoming: the best of both worlds! I love the absence of clutter and the simplicity of the space. I know it’s probably just a matter of time, but I’m determined to do whatever I can to keep the junk from accumulating. (Maybe it will help that Chuck doesn’t actually live there!)

    Now that we’re establishing a fall routine of back and forth-ing, I’m love having repair and renovation projects I can pick away at when I’m there, rather than just feeling like I’m killing time during the girls’ activities. This week I did a fair bit of outdoor work, dealt with a couple of filthy floors and completed the stripping of a white bookcase in preparation for repainting it black. I’ve also been researching historical colour schemes for the exterior. The big project for next week will hopefully be drywalling the front bedroom. I’ve been making extensive use of Kijiji (our version of Craigslist) and have scored some lovely hand-scraped hickory to re-do the flooring in there too. Sophie is hosting three choir festival billets the first weekend of November, so I hope to have that room finished by then!

    • Finished converting my 1989 black Stumpjumper into a mountain city cruiser

  • Pergola

    • A little help from Limpet
    Our “new” deck is almost five years old now. I always had bigger dreams for the square apron that extends towards the trees, but at the time we opted to put up a minimalist railing for safety reasons. Of course that had the effect of eliminating all the urgency of doing something else with the space.

    A couple of weeks ago at Fiona’s behest I ordered some nice globe lights to string over the apron. We spend a lot of time walking around Nelson and, being new to the whole business of neighbourhood rambles, we enjoy noticing the neat things people have done with their homes and businesses. We were admiring a lovely lighted patio and suddenly the push was on to enact some similar ambiance at home.

    Over the Easter long weekend, with all four of us home and available, we decided it would be an opportune time to push to get the project both started and [hopefully] completed. I had spent a few hours the previous week digging the screws and bolts out of the under-inner-side of the old uprights. Chuck had got busy reclaiming lumber from the remains of our old carport, cutting it down to the right dimensions.

    When we got home from Nelson mid-day on Friday the girls immediately got busy with the measuring tape, some cardboard templates and the jigsaw. Spring is still toying with us: while the sun shows up from time to time, temperatures tend to otherwise hover just above the freezing point, and today was definitely on the cool side. The fire pit helped warm our hands up when we needed. Between them Sophie and Fiona did almost all the 40-odd decorative ends for the beams.

    The first afternoon we got all the beams prepped and ready for assembly.

    Then we hit a couple of snags. First … it snowed overnight. It took a few hours for the snow to melt. And then we realized that the 8″ lag bolts weren’t quite long enough to anchor the two corner posts that had to be mounted into diagonal braces. Eyeballs and guesses had been substituted for trigonometry. That’ll teach us! The building supply store was closed for the holidays, so we were stuck.

    We did still manage to do a fair bit of assembly, using clamps and braces and gravity and what hardware we had. We got to the point of having the main structure standing, with the cross-beams laid overtop but not secured. The next time we have a chance to do some work, we’ll substitute in the proper bolts, attach the cross-beams, work on wattle railings and attach the light strings.

  • Shibori

    Inspired by the introduction to shibori that Fiona got at her homeschoolers’ art class, I began sewing and tying a couple of dozen squares of cotton fabric to do my own experiment with the technique. I started this in July of 2012 and then set it aside, about two-thirds completed. I recently dug it out, finishing sewing and tying the last few squares, and then did the dyeing. It was so exciting to pull out the threads I had tied almost two years ago, not remembering what I’d had in mind at the time, not knowing what designs and patterns I’d used.

    Shibori is an old Japanese resist technique for fabric dyeing. It was originally developed by peasants who hadn’t the means to purchase woven patterned fabric. Traditionally indigo dye is used. In my case I have an idea for a quilt sashed with various washes of indigo-dyed recycled denim, punctuated by bright eye-catching squares of various shibori patterns, so I chose a deep red for the dyeing. I will probably regret my choice of denim, because of its heavy weight and the technical problems that will create when piecing a quilt top, but I suppose if it ends up feeling impossible I can buy some chambray and use that instead.

    There are numerous shibori stitching, folding and tying patterns. I gleaned some of my ideas from the internet, and invented or adapted others. Perhaps the quilt top will take another couple of years to come together, but I’ve had a lot of fun already and feel really satisfied with the results.

  • Shibori

    I’ve decided that the time has come to make a quilt. I made quilts for each of my children, around the time they graduated to big beds of their own. Erin got my first quilt ever: appliquéd jungle animals in the main squares. Noah was given a community quilt by a host of my friends, a colourful alphabet quilt. I later made him a more “grown-up” quilt, a repeating stars motif with black and turquoise whale printed fabric. For Sophie I made a quilt of drawings the older two children had made, embroidering a replica of each picture (Noah was very into dinosaurs at the time!) onto a square of muslin. Fiona got a tie-dye quilt: the older three kids and I tie-dyed individual squares in a rainbow of colours and designs, and added black-and-bold sashing.
    Who will get the next quilt? Perhaps it will belong to the grown-ups. Perhaps it will be a “spare bed” quilt. Not that we have a spare bed, but it never hurts to have an extra quilt around. 
    I have a vision of a quilt-top made of denim. I know this is a really challenging vision: denim is nasty to work with once you get more than two thicknesses of it. As you inevitably do piecing a quilt. But I have a good sewing machine, and a fair bit of ingenuity and experience. We’ll see. 
    I’ve been harvesting used-up jeans for years, and the local donation store is a ready repository of plus-sized jeans in a beautiful array of indigos. Denim will be easy to find.
    The striking element in my quilt will be the shibori sampler blocks. Shibori is a Japanese textile art. It’s a form of resist dyeing traditionally done with folding and stitching, using indigo. I first saw it years ago in a quilting book I bought. Then my kids were able to experiment with it during their art workshops with a local textile artist:
    The central motif here is done with cherry pits. The pits are pinched in the fabric and the “neck” of the pinch is wound with thread. The upper and lower patterns are what is called “mokume,” or wood-grain. they’re made by pleating the fabric with multiple parallel running stitches which are then tightened. The muslin above has been dyed with a fibre-reactive dye, exactly the same stuff we use for tie-dyeing. Lots of it lives in our basement. 
    My quilt will not use indigo either, except in the denim, nor will it use a traditional blue colour for the shibori. Instead the shibori blocks will be done in fire-engine red. I intend to make each of the two dozen blocks using a different shibori pattern or technique. Here are a few of my first dozen samples. The sewing is shown on the left, and the right panel shows the same sample with the thread drawn and tied as tightly as I could manage.
    Top: a fine-grained mokume. 
    Middle: Komu, a geometrically pleated technique using stitched squares and twist-tied cherry pits
    Bottom: Maki-agi, a stitched shape resist. 

    I have a dozen or so ready for the dye bath now. I’ve done a traditional arashi (diagonal pole-pleated resist), a heart in maki-agi, some itajime (folded shape-resist), some meandering ori-nui, and various other experiments. I have some extra fabric, so if a few of the squares don’t work out that will be fine.

    But I’m so excited to be accumulating all these surprises-in-waiting! It will take me another week or so to finish a couple of dozen samples. Then it will be dye time … and the big reveal!