Arranging Flowers for Winterling
It’s a good thing that arranging crocheted flowers is so much fun, because I had to try many different arrangements before finding my favorite for Winterling. Here are a few:
Hmmm. Yeah, the white flowers seem too startlingly bright. For the next try, I took the daisies off and also the big sunflower, because I thought it was too heavy and large for the composition.
How about the one on the left?—it’s kind of minimal with a more controlled color selection. Given a choice, I usually go for fancy over minimal. The next one is alright.
Thinking the sunflower might not be too heavy after all, I added it back in. Yep, I think this is the one.
After pinning all the flowers and leaves in place, it was time to sit down and sew. And I mean sew for a long time.
Something kept bothering me about the Samarkand Sunflower which has a yellow center, then a white round and a band of periwinkle blue before the round of white petals. The blue band looked too plain and big. A few bright yellow seed beads took care of that problem.
After sewing the flowers on, I appliqued a crocheted picot vine in the borders. Each picot has a seed bead on it, which is stitched in place to keep the picot from curling. Button berries grow from the vine.
That does it for Winterling!
Want to know where the flower patterns are from? Check out Flowers of Winterling.
Natcromo 2017 Celebrates Doilies
Thank you to Amy and Donna of Crochetville.com for inviting me to join this year’s National Crochet Month blog tour! This is a wonderful thing they do, in addition to providing an internet home for crocheters all year round.
Today, the love of crochet ties together thousands of people across the United States and the world. Crochet also reaches into the past to tie us to our ancestors and give us a sense of our place in history. Even for people who don’t do it themselves, crocheted items may bring back memories of happy times, visits, relatives long-gone.
I’m seeing this effect more and more as I prepare for the Celebrate Doilies! exhibit, which debuts this summer in north central Texas. (See exhibit schedule here.)
The exhibit celebrates doilies through stories and memories from families in the area and beyond, through my own art and the poetry of Sandi Horton. Let me show you!
Stories and Memories
A few years ago, Mac McKinnon, who grew up a mile or so from where I live now, told me he had doilies and other crocheted items from his grandmother who raised him. “What can I do with them?” he asked. He was one of the first people I interviewed for the exhibit.
McKinnon was orphaned as a fairly young boy. His aunt and uncle adopted him, and he went to live with them in Comanche County, Texas, where the family farmed peanuts and cotton.
McKinnon’s grandmother lived nearby. She was Jesse Pearl Craddock McKinnon, born around 1893. Jesse often took care of him, and McKinnon emphasized that she also “took time with him.” She taught him how to play games, but didn’t let him win just because he was a kid. They did all kinds of crafts together. He remembers making cork necklaces and decorating them with sequins.
After her husband died in 1942, Mrs. McKinnon made a living sitting with elderly people. They were mostly bed-ridden, so she was there to keep them company and tend to their needs. Since a large part of the job entailed just being there, Jesse filled her time by crocheting.
The two doilies above and tnis table cloth are the work of Jesse Pearl Craddock McKinnon. It’s easy to understand Mac McKinnon’s love for his grandmother and his pride in her crochet skill.
Many more crochet stories and memories are featured at the Celebrate Doilies! exhibit. (There’s still time to share your own family doily stories! I’ll tell you how in a minute.)
Art
To me, many doilies are works of art and I certainly consider doily designers to be artists. For the past year, in preparation for Celebrate Doilies!, I’ve been using doilies in my wall hangings with great pride.
Celebrate Doilies! features around twenty doily-themed TextileFusion wall hangings, like Winterling. Inspired by my mom’s Zwiebelmuster china, I created a bouquet of crocheted flowers in a blue and white china vase. And of course the vase rests on a lovely large doily!
Doilies take to the skies in Crochet Comets, which was my first fabric quilt, in contrast to my usual knitted quilts. If you can’t wait until summer to see it, Crochet Comets is on display now in Golden, Colorado, at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum through April 23, 2017. For details, visit my Exhibition Schedule.
I love home. I love to be at home. I love home- and house-themed art and crafts. What a thrill it was to find this lovely antimacassar featuring a filet crochet house! I paired it with a vintage quilt top and added crochet trim and buttons to make this quilt called House of Crochet.
(The original instructions for crocheting this cute, cute house available for purchase online at Today’s Treasures.)
See these and many more doily-rich wall hangings at the Celebrate Doilies! exhibit and at my website.
Poetry
Poet Sandi Horton and I met at the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas Weekend in 2016. I spoke about the upcoming Celebrate Doilies exhibit, and how it would include stories and memories about family heirloom crochet.
Sandi often writes ekphrastic poetry, which is about a scene or a work of art. Ekphrastic poetry might describe a painting, a piece of music, or a performance.
After my talk, Sandi told me she had doilies and other crocheted items that her mother and grandmothers made. She said, “I would like to write poems about them.”
That sounded wonderful to me! Sandi’s poems about her family’s crochet and even about my wall hangings are featured in Celebrate Doilies. Here’s a poem about her experience with crochet. It is used with permission.
Modern Girl
Copyright 2017 by Sandi Horton. All rights reserved.The young girl eyes the multitude of colors
She wants to find just the right one
Should she be practical with a neutral
Or choose a bright, modern color?Her mother and grandmother chose
Different shades of white and beige
They are so old-fashioned
The girl chooses a dazzling lime greenShe wants to represent her generation
Even though most other girls don’t crochet
The girl wants to keep the chain going
Her nimble fingers tighten from the stressLime green thread twists around and around
The hook moves slowly, in an unsteady rhythm
Her mom says, ‘Crocheting relaxes me.’
The inexperienced girl continues to struggleShe refuses to give up
A smooth pattern finally takes shape
She finishes her first and only doily
Modern girls have better things to do
Find Sandi on Facebook at My House of Poetry.
You Can Still Participate!
Do you have beloved family heirloom crochet you would like for me to show in the Celebrate Doilies! exhibit?
If you do, please visit the Doily Heritage Project page online. It will give you information and links to the Doily Interview, plus hints for photographing your doilies.
To be included in the July-August exhibit in Stephenville, Texas, I need your information and photos by May 1, 2017. The deadline for entering the next show in Granbury, Texas, is June 1, 2017.
Support the Celebrate Doilies! Exhibit and Crochet Art
I hope you like the idea of Celebrate Doilies! enough to support this effort!
For as little as $1.00 per month (that’s $12 a year), you can help me to pay for making posters and cover other expenses associated with putting on the Celebrate Doilies! exhibit. Visit my page at patreon.com to read more and donate.
You can choose one of several levels of support: $1, $3, $5, $10, $25, $50, or $100 per month. All of my patrons have access to a patrons-only feed, where I share exclusive news about my work and previews of blog posts. The rewards get better the higher the amount you pledge.
For instance, at the $5 level, you can participate in polls about names of wall hangings and design decisions, receive at least one art postcard per year, and have access to the patrons-only feed. And coming soon, at the $5 per month level, you can contribute a piece which I will use in a wall hanging.
Celebrate Doilies is Available to Travel
Celebrate Doilies! will be available to travel to other galleries and shows after October 1, 2017. Please email me at knitandcrochetwithsuzann at outlook dot com for scheduling and fees.
Small galleries and arts councils may be eligible for grant money to pay for exhibits like Celebrate Doilies!
Free Pattern for You, March 25 Only!
Thank you for reading this far! As a gift for you, today only (March 25th, 2017) you can download the patterns for these cute crocheted Turkeys and Penguins for free–normally a $2.00 value. Here’s the pattern link: Turkey and Penguin at Ravelry Store.
From March 26-28, 2017, the “Turkey and Penguin” pattern will be half-off. That’s one dollar.
Postcards for You!
This is the first of two postcards I will be mailing for the Celebrate Doilies! exhibit. If you would like to be on my list for ONLY these two postcards, email me your mailing address (U. S. addresses only, please) at knitandcrochetwithsuzann at outlook dot com. I will not share your information.
Thank You!
Thank you for stopping by! I hope you enjoyed reading about Celebrate Doilies! Will you share your doily photos and stories for the exhibit? Please do!
And remember, doilies are perfect for your glamping decor needs.
Winterling, The Vase
The Zwiebelmuster design is full of flowers, leaves, stems, and curlicues. They can all be crocheted, appliqued, beaded, and embroidered. So that’s what I did, and it took some time.
You know from reading the earlier post about the Winterling wall hanging, that I photographed a coffeepot as a model for the vase. I enlarged the photo to the size of the wall hanging and printed it. The coffeepot/vase became my pattern, which I consulted for size and shape as well as light, shadow, and the actual blue design.
For a project like this, I use the paper shape for a template. This first photo shows the paper template next to the fabric vase, which is made from knitted fabrics pieced together. The fabric vase is a little bigger than the paper, to give me room to fold under the raw edges.
Various shades of blue knitting created some highlight and shadow. But tulle or netting is the best for making shadows. More layers of tulle mean darker shadows, as you can see in this next photo.
I made a start crocheting leaves and flowers with No. 10 crochet cotton. I crochet without instructions, measuring my foundation chain against the printed template. Sometimes I have to unravel and recrochet a piece several times, but eventually it turns out alright.
We’re getting closer with this one. Usually, I try to get most of the pieces crocheted before starting to sew them in place. That’s because I have to pin, unpin, rearrange, and repin many times to get the flowers and leaves to look right.
We had a beautiful, warm day in the middle of February, so I sat at our patio table with coffee to sew the crocheted pieces in place. And sew. And sew.
It’s just about finished here. Yay! After this, I folded under the raw edges and whip stitched them down before handsewing the vase to the wall hanging.
Buttoning Up Winter Blues
My sweet friend Hazel gave me a cardigan she bought years ago in Scotland. It was a pretty example of Fair Isle knitting, done with raglan sleeves. Thank you, Hazel!
The star pattern put me in a wintery, snowy frame of mind, and luckily there were just enough complete star motifs in the sweater for me to cut the long hexagons and form the points of the resulting snowflake.
Knitted scraps from previous wall hangings filled in the background. I sewed the patches together onto a foundation fabric, which won’t be visible in the finished piece.
Next came quilting and binding, and I used fabrics from another generous person or people. The blue and white fabrics were in the estate of a lady from Germany. Her heirs wanted her fabrics to go to someone who would appreciate them.
I got to be that person! The link was the heirs’ former German teacher, who was also a friend of my mother’s. Thank you to those lovely people! I do appreciate their mother’s fabrics and laces and vintage handwork.
Embellishment is my favorite part in the process of making wall hangings. There would be lots of button-sewing in my future, so yay!
I was conflicted about which look to go for. I liked the subtle transparent and white buttons at the left of this photo and my daughter agreed. However, the bold blue buttons on the right seemed a better design choice.
Lately when in doubt, I go to Instagram. Many Instagram friends answered “Go for the bold!” Only one person agreed with Ella and me. I went with the majority. Here are the blue buttons all sewn on.
I’m still going to add transparent and white buttons around the flake. Looking forward to enjoying that zen zone of button sewing.
How Winterling Started
We don’t normally go around leaving coffeepots on the bed, but this is a special coffeepot. It’s from the now-closed Winterling chinaware factory in Schwarzenbach an der Saale in northern Bavaria. My great-grandmother, Lina Schödel, worked there. One of Winterling’s patterns was the blue and white Zwiebelmuster or onion pattern.
This coffeepot became a vase in my TextileFusion wall hanging, Winterling. But this isn’t the first time the Zwiebelmuster has inspired me: the Perspective Daisy and Curly Curlicues designs in my book Crochet Garden were inspired by the china, as well as the Leaves and Berries Spray (free pattern here).
So back to the coffeepot on the bed. I photographed this scene to help me see how light and shadow would play in my wall hanging. Sometimes I use photos to create patterns for my wall hangings. After manipulating the photos in Adobe Photoshop Elements, I print a full-sized final draft.
Orange was the best color to contrast with the blue and white pattern of the coffeepot/vase. I sorted the orange yarns into light, medium light, medium, medium dark, and dark qualities, and set to work knitting orange yardage on my Ultimate Sweater machine.
After blocking and stabilizing with fusible interfacing, the knitted yardage was smooth and even.
It was time to cut up the knitting! For the curtains and vase, I used my paper pattern. For everything else, I cut patches of knitting freehand and fitted them together to form light and shadowed areas. After pinning the patches in place, I sewed them to a foundation fabric which wouldn’t be visible in the finished piece.
I couldn’t wait to try some flower arrangements. At the International Quilt Festival in Chicago, Spring 2016, participants in my Open Studios session arranged flowers. My first idea was to use blue, violet, and yellow flowers as a contrast to the orange. They soon convinced me that more colors were better.
If you’re thinking the vase in these pictures looks funny, you’re right. It’s because I was using my paper pattern as a place holder. But before finalizing the flower arrangement, I needed to create the vase with knitted fabric. That took a while.
Curlicue Poncho Design in Love of Crochet
When I proposed the Curlicue Poncho for Love of Crochet magazine over a year ago, I thought it was a long shot.
What a happy surprise it was to receive the acceptance letter last spring!
Then the work began. Remind me never (almost never) to propose a garment in single crochet. It takes forever! But the result was worth it. I liked the finished product, and then when the magazine came out, I liked it even more because of the fantastic model, styling, and photography.
Always on the lookout for ways to promote my books, I used dark Curlicues and red Small Flowers from Crochet Garden to embellish the lower edge. There are so many ways to use crocheted flowers.
Here’s an in-progress shot of the Curlicue Poncho: blocking the curlicues and flowers. When you finish crocheting each one, leave a long yarn end for sewing. It saves weaving in extra ends AND they look very cool when you block them.
The photo in the screen shot above is copyright Love of Crochet. The Curlicue Poncho pattern is in Love of Crochet, Winter 2016 issue. For the moment, print copies of the magazine are still on the newsstand. You’ll be able to buy digital copies of the issue at the Interweave Store for a long, long time. Purchase the Curlicue Poncho Pattern here.
About A Worthy Accomplishment
A Worthy Accomplishment at the Sacred Threads exhibit, 2017
Sacred Threads exhibits quilts about spirituality, joy, grief, healing, peace, and inspiration, every two years. A Worthy Accomplishment joined the show in 2017, and I introduced the piece with a story about a friend:
At an exhibit of her art, a friend received many positive comments. She found them difficult to accept, but afterwards she told me, “I finally feel worthy.” This quilt was inspired by her and other smart, kind, and accomplished people who, for some reason, feel unworthy. I posted about this project on social media, using the tag #youareworthy. Who else might be using this hashtag? I followed the link to learn about how realizing and accepting that “you are worthy” are steps in a healing process. We are all worthy of good health, recovery from addiction, supportive relationships, and praise.
The Sacred Threads staff asked artists to record a one-minute explanation of their work. That was fun and unusual. I had to re-record several times to fit everything I wanted to say into one minute. Totally worth it!
The odd capitalization was to remind me which words to emphasize when I was speaking. It’s a useful tool for scripting the talks and workshops I give.
Hi. I’m Suzann Thompson, talking to you from rural Texas.
I’ve met a startling number of people who feel unworthy.
I think our culture feeds this perception. As a society, we seem to admire enormous wealth and power. We marvel at technology. And then we go to the movies and see heroes swooping in to save the world!
Those are BIG, IMPORTANT things.
My quilt, A Worthy Accomplishment, draws attention to the SMALL important things that most of us do every day. We take care of ourselves and others, work at home or away. We are kind and thoughtful. And sometimes, we take time to make something, like a delicious meal or a quilt.
We probably won’t become famous or rich for doing these things, but I think they are worthy accomplishments and because we do them, WE ARE worthy. I hope you think so, too.
More About A Worthy Accomplishment
“Art imitates life,” people say. A few weekends ago, I saw art holding up a mirror to life, and the mirror reflected much more than most of us can see with the unaided eye.
At the movies we saw a preview of a boy who draws a monster into life, who frightens the bullies in the boy’s life. In our main feature, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a sad, desperate, and powerless person inadvertently turned frustration into a powerful external force that destroyed buildings and killed people. This force manifested as a storm of destructive particles.
At home, we watched Star Trek Beyond, where the huge, fancy Starship Enterprise is taken down by a swarm of tiny spaceships, under the command of an unhappy former Starfleet officer.
Two takeaways for me: desperation can turn into a deadly force; lots of tiny things can take down a big thing. These are happening in our world’s population right now.
Which brings me to my latest wall hanging, A Worthy Accomplishment.
Our United States culture worships enormity. Large corporations, huge wealth and fame, amazing feats of technology are admired and given special treatment. In contrast, regular people who do regular things—raising children, cleaning, cooking, going to work every day and other essential but not very exciting or profitable things—are treated as insignificant.
I think we need a more balanced approach. It’s fine to admire amazing things, and we should also value and admire everyday work and achievement. We need to acknowledge the contribution of people who take care of all the everyday things in this country, because they are the foundation on which our society is built.
Let me bring to your attention the contribution of many thousands of women (mostly) who took the time to crochet a doily to beautify their homes, or a pretty trim to make a pillowcase or coverlet more inviting.
Many of these creators would say, “Oh that’s nothing, really. It’s just something I made.”
Well, it is something, precisely because you made it! It is something handmade, with love or curiosity, and certainly with skill. It is something to be proud of, something beautiful, something worthy.
A Worthy Accomplishment is for sale, with delivery after June 2021.
Sweet Home
In a book from childhood,* a teeny tiny woman lived in a teeny tiny house with her teeny tiny cat. I wanted to live in that house, with its pretty wall paper and cute furniture.
I hope the teeny tiny woman would find Sweet Home suitable for herself and her teeny tiny cat.
* The book was A Tiny Tale (1955), a classic story illustrated by Ben D. Williams.
* * *
I remember very well the sweetness and simplicity of childhood and the images from that time that are with me to this day. Children’s book illustrations and some idealized picture of home are strong in my memory. I think that’s where a lot of the designs for Cute Crochet World came from.
My current project is an exhibit called Celebrate Doilies which will debut at the Cross Timbers Fine Arts Council Gallery in Stephenville, Texas, in July and August 2017. In addition to a lot of doily history, the exhibit will include my art quilts made with vintage crochet.
At first I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate this thread crocheted placemat into a quilt. My mind apparently mulled over this problem while I wasn’t paying attention. Some days later, my perception of the piece suddenly shifted from a placemat to picture frame. After that, it was easy to decide what picture to frame: a childlike picture of home.
Strip-piecing left over from a previous quilt seemed perfect to frame the frame. Luckily, I still had enough cut strips to fill the gaps.
Cute Crochet World came to my aid, with patterns for crocheting the “Cozy Home,” “Cherry Blossom” (I used green instead of pink), “Summer Sun” with clubby rays, and “Cutely Cloudy.” I made several trees and two suns, before finding the right combination of size and color.
When button time came around, I turned to family and friends for input on which buttons I should sew around the edge of the placemat: mother-of-pearl or blue?
My mom thought the house looked like it was on an island, the lace edges with blue underlay seemed like a beach, and the dark blue buttons were the deep blue sea. I liked this image very well.
The consensus from Instagram and Twitter was that the blue buttons looked better than white, but some friends said they thought a lighter blue might look best.
I posted the comparison of dark blue and lighter blue buttons. @franloveswool summarized my own feelings, saying, “This is trickier than I thought.” @fairetreasures said that the dark blue gave the piece great contrast, and the lighter blue looked nice because it picked up the colors of the house.
What to do? Mix light and dark? I tried that, but meh. Wait. Why just one round of buttons? Why not a round of lighter blue and a round of darker blue? Yes, that was the solution. Thank you, friends and family!
Crochet Cotton Flowers are Perfect Quilt Embellishment
I wondered and planned and fretted about how I might strongly stabilize a quilt so it would hold up a bunch of crocheted flowers.
As the work progressed, my original vision developed. Instead of crocheting with yarn, I decided to use No. 10 crochet cotton. The flowers turned out to be so light, the quilt didn’t need extra stabilizing. Yay!
I used Aunt Lydia’s No. 10 crochet cotton to make the Five Point flower from Crochet Bouquet (above), and Forget Me Nots from Crochet Garden (below). The colors were perfect!
You can use crocheted flowers to embellish bed quilts, too. To attach them, use sewing thread to sew all around the flower’s edge. Tack down the flower center. Use your judgement whether you need to add more stitching inside the edges of the flower.
Most of the time, sewing thread disappears between the loops of crochet, but use a sewing thread that closely matches the color of your crochet thread or yarn.
The wall hanging is called Evolution of Minimalism. I’m making it to enter in a juried show with an evolution theme.
You can crochet three different sizes of flowers from the Five Point pattern, with one size growing out of the previous one. To me, that is a visual way to show how something might develop over time.
The quilt design also goes from plain to fancy, a sort of visual evolution. Here’s a peek at one of the steps in this wall hanging’s evolution.
Evolution of Minimalism
In the late 1990s, minimalism in home decor was all the rage in England–at least that’s what we read in the newspapers at the time. Minimalist homes were clean, cleaner, cleanest! They were calm, uncluttered. Any decoration not strictly necessary for function was not allowed.
Minimalism is not my style, because I like decoration and stuff within easy reach. But I can see the attraction. It’s so full of potential–lots of surfaces to fill with books, paper, pens, vases, coffee cups.
For all the functional trendiness of minimalism, I feel that human eyes crave variation and decoration. So here’s a wall hanging all about how we may enjoy the starkness of minimalism for a while, and what happens next. Its title is Evolution of Minimalism.
In the beginning, we have the most minimal nine-patch ever. Sewn with patches of the exact same plain fabric, it is totally uncluttered. It’s so calming, so clean, so–
–so, well, boring. Hey, could we vary the color a little? Just to give it some interest?
That helped. A contrasting color would perk it up even more. But don’t worry, we can hold on to our minimalist roots by using the original colors.
Oooo! That squiggly pattern in the middle is kind of fun. It might be even more interesting to have some texture.
Love that single button in the middle, and the mother-of-pearl button fabric! Very subtle, how the pearl button fabric is next to the ocean wave patterned fabric. Clever. If one button is good, four buttons are better.
The nine-patch is getting kind of old. Whoa–this log cabin block is perfect.
Do you sense a tipping point? The log cabin is turning into a log pentagon. Do I see some red? Woo hoo!
Colors and buttons and flowers are busting out all over!
This is great! Lots of color! Lots of pattern! Lots of texture! It’s wonderful!
Wow. All this stuff is wearing me out, making me tired. Let’s clean up all this clutter and get back to basics. We’re going back to the beginning.
And so the natural evolution of minimalism goes.
It’s all coded in the DNA.
