Beth Ferrier’s Blog

Once again my tidy studio is in an uproar. The pilot system for organization (pile it here, pile it there) has gotten waaay out of hand.

It hardly seems like I’ve been home for almost a week from teaching at Road to California. I loved teaching there, the students were the very best. For a teacher, a classroom full of open, receptive students makes teaching a joy. I’m hoping they will invite me back!

The vertigo started not long after I returned from California. At first I thought it might be a reaction to the sleeping pill I took. But it’s lingered on for days and days, leaving me feeling spacy and disoriented, which, contrary to common thought, is not usual for me. Needless to say, my long to-do list has not had many ta-dones.

On February first I leave on the longest teaching trip of my career. I start with a quick visit to the Sinissippi Quilt Guild in Rockford, IL and then head to Florida for the Princess Feather Guild in Tampa. I’ll also visit guilds in Ocala, Sarasota and Punta Gorda before I come home again near the end of the month.

On the upside, I’ll be in Florida during the longest month of the winter. (We pack extra misery into fewer days, we’re efficient like that up here in the north.)  It will be nearly March when I get back, which is the beginning of the end of winter.

On the downside, there won’t be much sewing going on. Now is not a great time to be starting on anything big.

Burying the lead

It’s what newspapers call it when the most important part of the story is withheld until later. It’s like reporting on a barn fire, listing the owner, the losses, the number of firefighters before getting around to the fact (in the fourth paragraph) that the fire was started by the crash of an alien space ship.

So here’s what the big story really is: There will be no block of the month project from Applewood Farm this year. Oh, yeah, if you were quick you might have seen one posted on my website, and I might get around to it later this year. It really was a bit of wishful thinking, that I could continue to add new things to my life without giving up any of the old.

 But for now, I need to go off in a different direction.

I promised myself that this year I would take time to explore new techniques. My goal is to have another book finished by November 1, 2012. But I want to have lots of time to experiment, to have the luxury of time to make mistakes.

Plus the book I just finished still needs to be babied along, approving edits, layouts, marketing plans. (Just wait until you see the cover, it’s spectacular!)

So, for the first time in over ten years, there will be no bom from me. With so much available now on the internet, I’m not at all sure it will be missed. Perhaps, like me, you are still finishing up last year’s (or the years before).

 I hope you’ll hang in with me on the blog, and on Facebook. Who knows what silliness may pop up along the way.

After the hard push last fall for the new book, along with all the travel and family drama, by the time the holidays arrived I was ready for a long winter’s nap. Like a two week nap, or maybe even three.

I decided the best way to get my rest was to knit gifts. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I mean, really, I could park myself in front of the tv and watch old movies. Or, I could load up my iPod with audio books and listen while I stitched. Either way, it was a good excuse to be off the clock for a while.

 The gift of choice this year was fingerless mitts.

I have lost count of how many pairs of these I have made. The pattern is Susie’s Reading Mitts (possibly no longer available while they work out who owns the copyright), good thing I now know it by heart. I’m knitting them out of Blue Sky Alpaca’s Alpaca Silk. One skein makes a pair. Since everyone I know has teeny tiny sissy hands I reduced the needle size significantly.

The challenge came when it was time to block them. The pattern suggested blocking them on a 2″ tube, but where does one find a two inch tube?

Off to the hardware store. There I found two foot length of pvc piping that was 1 3/4″ in diameter (a little narrow), and a flange connector to use as a base. It was under five bucks for both pieces.

The downside of the pipe is that it’s slippery, and can’t be pinned into. So I solved both the size and pinning problem by taping a layer of Soft n Bright batting to the pipe. I used Terrifically Tacky Tape to hold it in place.

Turns out that the batting has enough texture to hold the mitts in place without pinning. And, in just a couple of hours in front of the studio fireplace/furnace, the mitts are beautifully blocked and ready to be wrapped.

 I still have a couple more pairs to knit up. Some of my friends will be getting belated Christmas gifts. Somehow I’m pretty sure that they won’t turn them down.

For my selfish knitting, I finished this shawl on New Year’s Eve. I love knitting lace, except for the part that you can’t really tell how beautiful it is until it’s blocked. Blocking is kind of like the basting step in quiltmaking. You have to do it well or the project won’t proceed successfully, and it’s not that much fun to do.

This was my first try at beaded knitting. Hooking those tiny littly beads onto the yarn really slows the progress. Shawls already require patience, with the rows getting longer and longer, making the finish seem impossibly distant. By the time I was down to the last rows they were taking almost four hours for each!

In the end, it turned out to be lovely, even though it is far from perfect. And I’ve already decided on my next shawl project for my evenings after work.

In years past I’ve been kind of bemused by folks who choose a word to sum up their goals for the new year, so artsy-fartsy, you know? It’s just a resolution in a fancy wrapper, and I gave up making new years resolutions long ago. Who needs more guilt and failure in their lives?

That’s not to say that there aren’t things I’d like to change. Lord knows I can include a lot of the standards in my list: losing weight and getting in shape would be right at the top. But there’s something else I’d like to focus on, something I’ve struggled with my whole life. 

I have always been an anxious person, the root of anxiety is fear. Imagine being an anxious person whose job requires getting on a plane to a place you’ve never been before, meeting dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of new people, all the while expecting to fail.  It exhausts me, and that’s energy I’d like to use elsewhere.

Even after years of success, every time I put out new work I expect rejection. I’m always taken by surprise when someone likes my quilts or desires my imput. Me? Really? I’ve been known to look behind me to see who they’re really talking to. Rather than approaching others to propose work (which is tantamount to torture for me), I wait for folks to come to me.

 For years I’ve battled my anxiety by being super organized. Sorry to out all you control freaks, but I’ve got your number and I’m going to narc on you! We wear our organizational skills like armor against failure. We might be feeling like a limp wash rag inside, but we can dazzle with our preparedness. The truth is, we’re all running scared and being in control helps to subdue the anxiety demon.

I’m not looking for pity or fishing for compliments. I’m just being open and honest.

So, for this year I’ve chosen BRAVE as my word for this year. Being brave is not an absence of fear, it is going forward despite our fears. It’s not just that I want to be more brave, it’s also that I need to remind myself how brave I’ve been. Fears stop people all the time, and though there have been many times when my guts have turned to jelly, I’ve pushed on and forward through it. Instead of being a just goal, my BRAVE is an affirmation, a reminder of times past when I’ve mustered my courage, taken a leap of faith and have been rewarded with success. So that when the anxiety threatens to drowned me again, I can remember that I’m brave, and I can swim.

Hello again. It’s good to be back among the living, more or less. After the giddy relief of finishing the book on time, and squeezing in two more trips before Thanksgiving, I fell into a hole. It was deep and quiet and a little dark, rather like a cocoon. I couldn’t concentrate or even string words together. I slept a lot. Clearly I had a bill to pay for the relentless pace I’ve been on this year.

 But I’m finally feeling rested, even perky, and my words are coming back, ya hoo.

Thanks for all the great comments on the 100 Blocks post.The good ole random number generator picked Regina as the winner. I think it’s cool that Regina was chosen, because we also searched for a Nativity set that had a separate baby Jesus. Our tradition was to add a small piece of straw to the manger each time we did a good deed, to cushion the place where the baby Jesus would lie. I love the idea of a tiny hand knit blanket for him. Perhaps I need to make a tiny quilt for our manger.

Now that I’ve broken my silence, I have lots to share with you. We have some catching up to do.

Welcome! If this is your first visit to my blog, or just your latest trip, welcome. It’s my honor to take part in Quiltmaker’s Blog Tour for their newest issue of 100 Blocks.

Back when I was still just a kid I fell in love with the old fashioned style of Christmas decorations called Della Robbia. Named for a family of Italian sculptors, Della Robbia mixes winter greens such as pine boughs and holly, with seasonal fruit. It was often gilded. Rich, and lush and colorful, it’s always been my favorite holiday style. So when Quiltmaker invited me to create a block for an issue coming out just before Christmas I decided that I’d go for it.

A little shameless self promotion here, I used my Hand Applique by Machine technique with Wash Away Applique Sheets to quickly and easily create the block. Let me show you how easy it is!

Start by printing out the line drawing of the applique. We can print directly onto the Wash Away Applique Sheets using an ink jet printer. Cut the shapes apart and press them to the wrong side of the fabric. Glue baste the edges. For edges that touch, we’re going to glue baste one side of the edge and leave one unbasted. You’ll see why in a minute. Here’s my guy in pieces. Looks like somebody cooked this goose! (Yikes!)

Next we’ll glue the shapes together. I like to work on a light box for this step, so I can see where the pieces fit together.

The light shining through the unbasted edge will guide the face part into position.

Here he is, all glued together. By working with a line drawing and just cutting the shapes apart we have no paper overlapping at all. This is pretty handy, if we’re working with freezer paper, when it comes time to remove it from the project. The cool thing about the Wash Away Applique Sheets is that they iron on, just as freezer paper does, but THEY WASH AWAY! No need to cut the background fabric away, or to try to tease the template out of a narrow opening. Nope, they just wash away! And, they’re acid free, so if you don’t want to, you don’t ever have to wash your quilt. How cool is that?

Once the shapes are glued together, it’s time to stitch. I’m a big fan of Superior’s MonoPoly invisible thread. Using a simple zig zag, adjusted to be short and narrow, the shapes are stitched together before they are placed on the background.

But what I love most about the WAAS is how easily I can embellish my applique. All of my embroidery stitches were completed before I put the bird on the background. The WAAS act as a stablizer for my stitching.

Well, there you have it, Hand Applique by Machine in a very tiny nutshell. And as a thank you for visiting, and reading all the way to the bottom, I have a little gift for you. Leave a comment (with a way to contact you), and I’ll draw a name for a free copy of the newest 100 Blocks magazine. Let’s see, shall we pick a topic? Hmm, how about sharing your favorite holiday tradition?

Now that I have my life back I’ve been making great progress on my Christmas Yet to Come project. It took less than a day to get all of the applique stitched to the background, that’s how close I’ve been all this time. The quilt is still in parts, so now is the time to make the final decision about how the open spaces around the center star will be treated.

My original plan was to create a motif for quilting. I’ve adjusted the corner pointsettia motif to fit the space. I really hate marking my quilt tops. Every line drawn is a line that will need to be removed. So, instead of marking, I printed out the design and stapled it to eight layers of paper Solvy (non-fusible water soluble paper). Using an old 90/14 needle, unthreaded, I free motion quilted over the design, perforating the paper, which gave me eight perfect templates to pin to the quilt top.

But then I thought, maybe instead of quilting in the design, perhaps I should embroider it. I could use the perforated template to transfer the design to the quilt top. Suddenly my distaste for marking the quilt was forgotten. I dug out the quilt pouncer out of one of my teaching kits and pounced away.

Using the same threads for the embroidery as were used to embellish the applique, I started merrily stitching away. I got this far and then the doubts set in. Is this over the top? Gilding the lilly? Or, just what it needs? I could fall back on the original plan to quilt in the design. I could quilt in the design using colored threads and the design would be there, but more subtly. Or maybe it could be trapuntoed.

Looking at it this morning, with fresh eyes, I’m back to liking the idea of the embroidery. What do you think? Yes, no, or maybe so? Help!

My new mantra: the book is done. I repeat it every time I feel my shoulders creeping up to my ears, or I think about a project that I can’t do just yet, or when I realize that I’m not being as productive as I could be. The book is done.

Yeah, the book was put together in a short time, but it’s not like I started fresh, with a newly born idea on August first. It’s on a subject that is near and dear to my heart, that I’ve already written about, repeatly, in my patterns, and even taught in my classes. Just dumping my words from other places gave me a major head start on the word count. I don’t want anyone thinking it was slapped together, if for no other reason than I just can’t do slapped together. It’s not fair to the reader.

Any way. I jumped from the book deadline to my Quilt Market deadline. I’m doing Wash Away Applique Sheet demos in C&T’s booth, and also Checker Distributor’s booth. So, the minute I called the book done, I started right back into making step out. But this time it was all about playing with fabric. The samples are teeny tiny, just the size of a page, so it was a day of instant gratification.

I write this from the Hilton, right next door to the George R. Brown convention center, which, at this time every year, becomes a mecca for quilters. By next week tens of thousands (and that’s no exageration) will descend on Houston for Market and Festival.

Today is Schoolhouse, a series of 15 or 30 minute infomercials from the vendors at the show. It’s a lot like passing classes in high school. I’m going to try to be a good blogger and take pictures, but I’m not promising.

Market opens tomorrow. It’s business, but it’s also pleasure. These are my people, other professionals in the quilt industry that I only get to see once or twice a year. I’ll be watching for new things, looking for new partners in crime and having one really great time.

Because the book is done.

There are parts of writing a book that I really love. While I enjoy putting my ideas into words, what I really love is editing those words. Getting the first draft done, getting all those words on a blank page is hard work. But editing is pure joy. Really! Instead of the struggle to find just the right word or to get the sequence of directions just so, editing is bullying those words around to make them earn their keep. I’ve just finished editing the book, and it’s so much better than it was!

Of course, sewing the projects is awfully nice as well. I’ve sewn more in this month of October than I have in all the last two years put together. It’s made me take a good look at how my time has been ordered, and helped me to decide that I truly need to spend more time at home, and especially at home sewing. The projects in the book are quilt designs that I’ve wanted to make for some time.

But, there are parts of writing a book with a publisher that are totally not fun. Perhaps it’s because I self-published first. When working on my own I could start a sequence with a partially made block and photograph it, step by step, as I finished that block. Sending the step outs off to the publisher for photography means that I have to make that same block over and over and over again, each time taking the process a little further forward in the sequence. Ugh!

And then we have to keep track of all those bits and parts, which means paperwork, and lots of it. Image logs are spreadsheets that describe the tools and the focus of each step out. Of course it makes sense to have an orderly system. I have to communicate my expectations to the publisher and their photographers. Each step out gets a designation, either <<100.tif>> for a photo or <<100.eps>> for an illustration, for example.

Each step out is photographed as we’d like it to appear in the book. My set up for making videos (yeah, like that happened this year) turned out to be just the thing for taking these “snapshots”. Once again, having self published, I was frustrated by the duplication of effort. With just a little more care (the snapshots don’t have to be top drawer, just good enough to show what I want), I could have done the photos myself. And I wouldn’t have had to make a thousand million repeats of the same block. See what I mean?

So, in addition to the Image Log, the snap shots need to be labeled and printed. More paperwork!

Finally, all the step outs need to be packaged. I started out with eight boxes of gallon sized zip top bags. I have one full box and a few left, meaning that I have prepared over a hundred individual step out samples. Here are the stepouts, bagged and ready to go off to their new home. I have one large bag for each chapter, which holds the zip top bags with each step.

Today is my last day to work on the book. My deadline to have everything to the publisher is November 1. Tomorrow I am leaving for Quilt Market, where I am scheduled to do demos showcasing the Wash Away Applique Sheets, (Which means more step outs!), so it must go out today. But, when the box is shipped I will have met all of my deadlines. I will have written a book, a book I’ve been writing in my head for years, in just three months time. Two months and a week’s time if you take out all the travel time for the teaching I have also done since the first of August.

When I return from Market next Tuesday I will be officially “AB” - after book. Yes, there will still be times when I need to interact with the publisher. There will be another editing, and page layout and book design. But that’s more my giving my approval of their work than me working. And it truly is exciting to see the book come to life.

I’m looking forward to finishing my Christmas Yet to Come quilt. And, believe it or not, starting work on the next book! But this go around, since I haven’t even proposed it yet, I’ll have all the time in the world! (Please don’t quote that back to me!)

As my infrequent posts have shown, a lot of what I do has to be hush-hush. Publishers are always concerned about having ideas scooped by some nefarious quilter with no fresh ideas of her own. Believe it or not, it does happen. Any way, it means that we have to keep things under wraps until we can spring it on you, complete and fully formed. Perhaps that’s not such a bad idea.

Quiltmaker is coming out with it’s fourth volume of 100 Blocks, and I have a block in it! I made the block way, way back in May, I think, and of course couldn’t show it to you then. (Gosh, I feel so secretive, like some sort of shadowy spy, in a wry sort of I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you sort of way.) I think this is my second time for contributing a block, though I did just mail one off for the fifth edition, and my brain is addled by editing and organizing and all things book.

And, actually, I can’t show you my block just yet. But there will be a blog tour the week of November 7-11, and all will be revealed. (Oh, so now I’m a mystical magician.)

But I can show you this:

My block didn’t make the cover, as it did for the volume one, but this time my name did! How very cool is that? Honestly, I don’t think of myself as famous enough to have my name help to sell magazines, so it’s surely a giggle when it ends up on the front! Follow your dreams, guys, relentlessly follow your dreams. They just might come true.

Well, hello.

For the last two and a half months I have been singled mindedly working on the book. Dawn to dusk, and sometimes beyond, living the book. But so far I’ve made all the deadlines, more or less.

I can’t help but wonder if I had allowed the same bravado that let me agree to this timeline carry me through the work if I’d be in better shape. I must admit that all too often my courage has failed me and I’ve considered tossing in the towel. Way too much of my energy has been spent on worry, but then I guess that’s what worriers do.

The sample quilts are done and on their way to the publisher. That’s a really big box to check off my to-d0 list. I’m quite pleased with how they turned out, I hope you will like them too. It’s been a really long time since I’ve made quits that are just piecing, no applique. I did suffer a little applique withdrawal at first, but it quickly subsided as I fell into the lovely hum of my machine.  I’ve sewn more in the last three weeks than I have in the last two years put together. And I liked it very much, thank you. 

 In the next week I will be working on the rewrite and finishing the step outs. I like editing, I like making the words sharper, cleaner. It’s so much easier to rearrange words than to string together brand new words. My editor has given me great suggestions to help me get the words into top form. Somewhere along the way I’ll show you some of the paperwork involved in writing a book with a publisher. Let’s just say that I’ve changed ring binder sizes a couple of times, and still need more room.

 So, it’s back to work for me. My final deadline is November 1, but Quilt Market (which starts on Oct. 27 or so) will cut that short for me. I just wanted to check in to let you know that I was still among the living. Finally, the light at the end of the tunnel is no longer an oncoming train!