Grandma Coco's Designs

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Illustration Friday - Duet

Friday, April 1, 2011

Practice makes if-not-perfect then, at least, not-so-bad

We're still practicing. Each day, we have to loosen up and slide into it again. It's a little bit, 2 steps forward and 1 step back. We've begun to realize that the imperfections lend a little character. All need not be perfect. In fact, we like the organic look. Here's a photo from 2 days ago. No work was accomplished yesterday so this morning's session was more like 2 steps forward, 2 steps back but that was short-lived and we were soon back on track.

We purchased the magic machine needle yesterday that promises to allow us to embroider with the blue thread. We thought we'd finish the black outlining of the text before we test that out. Stay tuned.

And now, a flash from the Nosey Nelly News .............

If you've ever thought that there might be gender biases at play in the world of art and literature, you'll find a kindred spirit over on Heather's blog. She's taking part in a blog tour for a new book that's being published by Tundra books. Apparently, Nathaniel Hawthorne....you know, the fellow who wrote The Scarlet Letter... once complained to his publisher about the annoying habit of women "scribbling". We guess he thought that writing was a man's game. Canadian writer, Marthe Jocelyn has written a book entitled Scribbling Women which tells the stories of eleven such women. Heather has undertaken an amazing project of her own. You can read about it on her blog and you can even take part if you'd like to. She's organizing a virtual quilting bee, in a sense. Check her out. It's going to be fun to watch her progress on this quilt.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

More fun with our machine

So, we decided to back slowly away from our machine yesterday after the shredding thread episode. Karen and Monika both suggested a different needle. (Sweet of them not to mention the obvious....operator error.) A new needle will be procured later this week.

Today, we loaded our machine up with black rayon on top and fine black bobbin thread for below. We spoke sweetly to him (whatever his name is....he ought to have a name, right?) and started to outline the lettering on our quilt. Now, the text is a big part of our design and our plan is to fuse the words in word-shaped blocks and then define the letters with black outlining. Sounds simple, right?

Yesterday, we were machine embroidering up a storm with the feed dogs up. Things went well until the aforementioned shredding began. Today, we started the same way but we were dismayed to find we were constantly having to stop and pivot. (We hear laughter. Guess you all saw that coming.)

We've read about machine embroidery with the feed dogs down. Seems exotic but Grandma Coco wanted to give it a go. Today's the day. Now, the really clever among us would have taken a few days to practice, we suppose. Not us. It's do or die. We keep reminding ourselves this is a fun piece. It's just for fun. Fun!

Feed dogs down!! Off we go. Not being completely foolhardy, we decided if we just did a letter here and there around the piece, our poor beginning letters would ....oh, we don't know....BLEND IN with the others? as we get better at it? That's the new plan. (Ever notice how plans conceived on the fly tend to have flaws?)

No matter....Fun is the byword and "fun" is what we're gonna have. Or else. You be the judge. How'd we do?

Mom used to say "That mistake will never be seen by someone gallopping by on a horse" (or something similar. Maybe there was something about a blind man in there, too. We forget.). Good enough for us, we say! Besides, we used Monika's secret weapon . (Thanks, Monika!) We're sure we're only going to get better from here on in. After all, we surely can't get worse.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Fusible fun with a side order of frustration

We've been busy little beavers of late. And this week has been full of interesting projects. We've been lucky to carve out some playtime though. There's always time to play.

The sweater gift tag has grown in scope to become an entire quilt. It'll be a knitting themed quilt and we have sketches planned for several other segments but it's going to be pretty spontaneous and we're going to practise our machine skills on it....ah, once we have some machine skills to practice, that is. :)

Here's part of the sweater gift tag with all the pieces fused in place. We're using Lite Steam-a-Seam 2 because we were told it's less stiff in the final product. We like the way the pieces are slightly tacky until you iron them in place. Once they're ironed, they're stuck for good. However, before you commit them with the hot iron, it's very handy to be able to move them around. And when you do decide to iron them, they can safely move to the ironing board without shifting. Seems like a great product so far.

Here we've started to machine embroider around the appliqué pieces using that lovely green rayon thread we blogged about a while ago. (We went right out and bought some other colours. They'll show up later, no doubt.) We have some 70 weight stuff in the bobbin.

Everything was going along just dandily until we changed threads for the lady's apron. We had just the right colour of poycotton sewing thread (40 weight?) and that thread is fraying and skipping stitches. (This is the frustration part.) Now, if it weren't a 45 minute drive to Taylor Sewing Centre, we'd just run right over and buy more rayon thread. For now, we're going to try a larger needle. If anyone's got a suggestion, please just leave it in the comments. This is all new to us.

Oh, and in a secondary appeal....anyone know how to get that blue marking pen ...you know....the (supposedly) water soluble stuff?....out of a quilt top? We put a quilt away for a while....do you think a 5-year time-out for bad behaviour is excessive?....and when we retrieved it, you guessed it. Those blue marks just laughed at the water. They giggled and dug in harder. Any suggestions?

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Illustration Friday - Cultivate

Cultivate makes us think of seeds and flowers

and tonight at 7:23:21 EST Spring Arrives!!

Grandma Coco's got another scoop for you. The Quilt Pattern Magazine is running a contest for anyone who belongs to a quilt guild. The prize is a free subscription to the magazine.
Get the low-down here: http://www.quiltpatternmagazine.com/program/guild.html

Good Luck!!

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Illustration Friday - Stir

Grandma Coco is not what you’d call a ‘linear thinker’. Her mind is more like one of those old-time pin ball machines where the ball bounces wildly in all directions, lights flashing and bells sounding. She gets to the same place, in the end, but it’s quite the ride.

Often one thought reminds us of something else which takes us somewhere else entirely. This is the case with this week’s Illustration Friday topic…. ‘stir’. These drawings are often streams of consciousness themselves….doodles that start out with one character and flow into something else entirely. For some reason, these ladies showed up to stir up a little something and they prompted a memory of reading about ‘Stir-up Sunday’ years and years ago.

We had to google the term to confirm our memory but yes, it’s true. Stir-up Sunday is the last Sunday before Advent (in the Anglican church). It, too, is the result of a pin ball cascade of ideas. No wonder it stuck in Grandma Coco’s mind.

In England, especially, Stir-up Sunday (which occurs about 5 weeks before Christmas Day) is the traditional day for making the Christmas pudding. It came to be because of the prayer-of-the-day which starts out: “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people …”.

Traditionally, the whole family returns home from church and is supposed to take a turn stirring the pudding and adding a good wish. Adding a good wish as you accomplish homely tasks is a cool idea. We do that when we knit or quilt for people we love. That, we understand. However, there are other traditions surrounding Christmas pudding making that are even more deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. For instance, there are supposed to be 13 ingredients, to represent Jesus and the 12 disciples. And what about this one? That the pudding needs to be stirred from East to West to honour the Three Wise Men who visited the Baby Jesus. Fascinating, no?

So, we got out our recipe box to look up our Christmas pudding recipe because, yes, we do have one. It came to us from Mr. Coco’s mother and goes by the rather uninspired name of “Economical Plum Pudding”. (For Mr. Coco’s mother, thrift was a virtue.) However, this pudding is also the best Christmas pudding we’ve ever tasted so, even though we’re a long way from Stir-up Sunday, here’s the recipe:

1 cup flour

1 cup sugar (1/2 cup is really all you need)

1 tsp. Cinnamon

1 tsp. Nutmeg

¾ tsp. Salt

1 tsp. Soda

Sift all these dry ingredients together and add:

1 cup grated apples

1 cup grated carrots

1 cup raisins

1 cup currants

Stir to mix thoroughly and add ½ cup vegetable oil or melted shortening. Fill a buttered mold (like a coffee can). Cover tightly and steam for 4 hours.

Serve this pudding with a sauce….brandy or lemon or custard, depending, we guess, on whether you're a teetotaller (as both our grandmothers were) or a lost cause.

You will notice there are only 11 ingredients in Mr. Coco’s mother’s recipe. It’s still good. As far as we know, she never worried about the directionality of her stirring. It will still be good. And one last thing…..You don’t have to wait for Stir-up Sunday (or Christmas) to enjoy a steamed pudding.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Nelly

Here’s a photo of Grandma Coco when she was a little girl having afternoon tea with her grandmother….Nelly. We only have a couple of pictures of our grandmother. She seemed old and not very approachable to us way back then but she had had a hard life. Born in 1889, she delivered her first child (our mother) during the devastating flu outbreak of 1918 and was left a widow at only 49 years of age. She had a dairy farm to manage and 2 young girls to raise and by all accounts, she just carried on. We did the math and figure she’s in her early 70’s in this photo. Not long after this photo was taken, she began her long, sad dance with Alzheimer’s. Or maybe she’d already begun. You see she isn’t wearing her wedding ring? One of the things I do remember about her is the constant losing (and finding) of that wedding band. She lived well into her 90’s ... a pathetic, shrieking parody of a woman lost to a terrible disease. Those are our genes.

Grandma Coco inherited Nelly’s treadle sewing machine. We've always intended to get it up and running but more as a conversation piece than as a useable sewing machine. It seemed like a big job. A big job that just might need an expert to tackle it. So it lived at the back of our sewing room closet for….oh, maybe the last 20 years or so.

And then, 2 things happened at pretty much the same time. Two random events, miles apart. And wham! Something great shifted in the cosmos and the light shone through. Grandma Coco ‘met’ 2 people online. (And they say the internet is full of weirdos and scary guys! Nah!)

Grandma Coco met Jeane from Saskatchewan of Samantha’s House who told her she used (actually USED!) her antique treadle sewing machine to do free motion quilting. And she met Terri from New Hampshire of Purple Moose Designs who not only uses a treadle machine but is really keen (and persuasive!) about everybody resurrecting and using their own old treadle sewing machines.

We dug our treadle out of the closet and set out to see what we had. Terri directed us to some online sites and we were able to find out from the dating service at http://www.singerco.com/ that our machine is a Singer Improved Family Machine and was manufactured on November 26, 1884.

It’s a very cool machine. Everything glides effortlessly. There’s no rust. Nothing’s seized up. We’ve begun the process of cleaning and oiling it.

The machine had been removed from the table and at first we thought the belt was broken but it’s not! It has what we think is called a Coffin lid with a lock but we haven’t got a key. We also don’t have any extra feet but we do have 5 very unusual bobbins and 1 original needle which is pretty much identical to a modern Schmetz needle (thank goodness!). The machine has a fiddle base (not rectangular) and has very faint yellow and orange decorative flowers painted on it.

If the machine was manufactured in 1884 and our grandmother was born in 1889, is it possible her mother bought the machine in order to sew for her new family? Or did my grandmother get it second-hand? Or maybe from her husband’s family? We don’t know. All we know is that we are thrilled to feel the connection with a woman we really never got to know. We are calling our machine Nelly in her honour.

If you recognize this model of Singer or have any additional information you could share, please email us.