Celebrate Doilies Crowd-Fundraiser Launched Today Please Contribute
Exciting news! Today, I launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to cover the remaining expenses of the Celebrate Doilies! exhibit you’ve been reading about on this blog. Donation levels start at just $5.00, and there are rewards for each level. The more you donate, the better the rewards.
(This is a screenshot of the Kickstarter page, so the video isn’t available. A live link is below the picture.)
Please donate for art, for poetry, and for our crochet heritage at the Celebrate Doilies! Kickstarter page.
And to give you a little extra incentive to donate, the first ten people to contribute $24 or more to Celebrate Doilies! will receive a unique package of crocheted flowers or leaves, crocheted by me!
A few of these items are designer originals from my crochet flower books. The tape measure is in the photos so you can get an idea of how big these flowers and leaves are. Inches on top, centimeters below.
This is the Paisley and Friends collection:
Here’s Fleur-di-Lys and Friends:
Big Orange Flower and Friends:
Maple Leaf Collection:
Purples Plus:
Pineapple, Pomegranate, and Friends:
Sweet and Simple:
Pink Plus:
Three Dimensional Flowers:
Sparkle Collection (see close-up at the end of this post):
Orange Collection with Leafy Spray:
Wait! Why are there eleven packages for only ten contributors? Two reasons: even the 10th person to donate $24 or over will have a choice; and I’m very curious to see which one is left.
Celebrate Doilies Kickstarter Campaign to Launch May 28–Please Donate!
Sunday, May 28, at 12:30 p.m. Central Time, I will launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to cover the remaining expenses of the Celebrate Doilies! exhibit you’ve been reading about on this blog.
Donation levels start at just $5.00, and there are rewards for each level. The more you donate, the better the rewards.
Please visit my Kickstarter page, and donate for art, for poetry, for heritage!
Celebrate Doilies! is a three-part exhibit. First there are doily-inspired art quilts by me. Here’s one called Winter Blues.
Find in-progress photos of this wall hanging here.
Part two of Celebrate Doilies! is poetry by Sandi Horton. She was inspired by the crochet-work of her mother and grandmothers. Read her poem about this pretty green and white doily here (scroll down a bit).
The third section of Celebrate Doilies! includes stories and photos of doily crocheters past and present, and their work. Here’s one of the stories that will be in the show:
The show will be beautiful, and your contribution will ensure that all the heritage posters and poems are printed and hung, and more.
I appreciate your support, and I look forward to sending your rewards!
Free for Two Days Only! Oak Leaf Pattern
Fiber artists Alyssa Arney and Liz Flynn (@thread.winners) called for community donations of crocheted or knitted oak leaves for “Reveries,” an exhibit they are putting on this summer.
Well, I felt quite a connection there, since I’m also putting on an exhibit this summer.
AND I had a few crocheted oak leaves in my stash of crocheted flowers and leaves. So I’m sending these. Most are “Gambel Oak” leaves from Crochet Garden.
Alyssa and Liz’s project motivated me to dust off a different oak leaf pattern and publish it. The red and green leaves below are now available in my shop on Ravelry (link below).
You can download the pattern FREE only on May 9 and 10, 2017. After that, the price will be $1.00.
Alyssa and Liz are offering a free crocheted oak leaf pattern as well. Find the link at their Instagram account (@thread.winners). They wrote about their project here.
I look forward to seeing their finished project!
How Crochet Comets Started
At our 2015 Dublin Rippers quilting retreat, my friend Donna challenged us. She had a black plastic bag full of fabric. We had to close our eyes and reach into the bag. We had until the next year’s retreat to make something from the fabric we drew from the bag. She said we could make anything we wanted. It didn’t have to be a quilt.
My fabric was a tiny print that gave an overall impression of a kind of pinkish gray. It reminded me of the night sky.
Weren’t there a couple of yellow and white doilies in my collection at home that might make good comets? I went home to my doily collection and, yes! There they were.
To get an idea of scale, I photographed the doilies and the gray fabric, plus some yellow fabrics that I planned to use for the comet tails. I used Adobe Photoshop Elements to digitally build the wall hanging, cutting and pasting the images of doilies and fabric.
I put several stars in the sky, just to give me an idea of how they would look. In the real wall hanging, I would use more stars and they would be a lot fancier. And I’d sew on a bunch of buttons as smaller stars.
Photoshop Elements has a click-and-drag tool for drawing boxes and circles and, hey–stars! I clicked on the star shape and dragged the first one. It was black, because that was the last color I had used. I changed the color, and the next stars were yellow.
The sketch was pretty rough, but it served its purpose. I could tell that the quilt would have to be about five feet wide to give the doily comets and their tails enough room. The horizon and a few houses gave me an idea of proportions between sky and earth.
I started laying out the quilt top, stopping only to buy a length of fabric to go between the dark earth and the lighter sky. As I worked and laid out the doilies and houses and moon, I got a feeling. It was definitely located in my chest. It was a feeling of inevitability that seemed to squeeze my heart.
The feeling was that the sketch might be rough, but it was perfect the way it was. Any attempt on my part to fancy things up, would not make the finished product look any better. As I worked I came to know this without a doubt.
So the quilt is as close to the sketch as possible. I did fancy up the comet tails with buttons and beads, but the sky is plain, except for the appliqued stars, including a black one.
The back is made from scraps, many of which were giveaways from my quilting friends. It is quilted in mostly parallel, curving lines. That took a long time.
This was my first mostly-fabric quilt with raw-edge applique and very simple piecing, and I learned a lot. It is also the biggest quilt I have made so far.
Crochet Comets is on display at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, Colorado, until April 23, 2017. Starting July 1, it will be part of the Celebrate Doilies! exhibit, making its debut in Stephenville, Texas, at the Cross Timbers Fine Arts Council River North Gallery. (Details here.)
Flowers of Winterling
It’s great to have a stash of ready-crocheted flowers, because you may need them for a wall hanging. Here’s a rundown of the crocheted flowers in Winterling.
Flower Number 1: In the summer of 2006, I pitched a book idea to Lark Crafts, a subsidiary of Sterling Publishing. That book idea became Crochet Bouquet. Flower number 1, the buttony sunflower, was one of the sample flowers in my proposal.
Crochet Bouquet and Crochet Garden readers will recognize all of these flowers.
From Crochet Bouquet:
2 These deep purple leaves and their antique gold partners are “Small One-Row Leaves” from pp. 120-121.
3 The yellow flowers with black button centers are “Small Petals Around,” p. 36.
4 “Circles within Circles,” pp. 22-23. Here’s a step-by-step photo-tutorial.
5 The medium sized “Primrose Layers,” pp. 90-91. Hints and photos for crocheting the flower here.
6 You can make several versions of “Five Point,” pp. 85-86. This is rounds 1 and 2 only.Here’s a tutorial.
From Crochet Garden:
7 “Rafflesita,” pp. 122-123. This step-by-step photo-tutorial will help. The Rafflesita in the middle of the bouquet is an original flower from the book.
8 “Samarkand Sunflower,” in all its sizes, pp. 60-61. The yellow beads really brighten these flowers.
9 “Forget Me Not,” pp. 86-87. Here’s a tutorial.
10 “Twirl Center Rose,” pp. 116-117.
11 “Any Color Pinks,” bud and full flower, pp. 96-97. Bud and flower are designer originals.
12 “Anatolian King Flower,” pp. 104-105. The bright King Flower is a designer original.
13 “Russian Spoke Flower,” pp. 100-101, another original from the book.
14 “Turkestani Star,” p. 70, another designer original.
15 “Perspective Daisy,” pp. 56-57, inspired by the Winterling china factory’s Zwiebelmuster.
And finally, a motif I made for Crochet Garden, but it didn’t make it into the book:
16 A variation on “Leaf and Berries Spray,” Free pattern here.
Winterling will be among the doily-themed quilts at the Celebrate Doilies exhibition, opening July 1, 2017 at the Cross Timbers Fine Arts Council in Stephenville, TX.
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.