Minnow Peck Out and About in Internet Space

Sunny Bunch. Original design.

In the last week, I've been writing about quilting, but not here!

I've been over at the Triangle Modern Quilt Guild as their member spotlight.

And I wrote about quilting and its place in my life over at Rattle & Pen, a lovely blog that features female writers who have young children. I'm nervous about sharing this one, because the piece may be misinterpreted as belittling quilting, but I hope it ultimately doesn't come off that way. Quilting is important to me because it's a fun hobby--I've chosen not to make it a job, as many of you so beautifully have!

Fake Fives!

WARNING: These are not quilts. But this recipe for homemade Take Fives is for my IG quilty friends, so I'm putting it here! Also, this recipe makes approximately one billion pieces of candy. I gave up trying to finish out the buckeye filling and froze it because I can't have this much candy sitting around looking at me!

The buckeye recipe is here. I pretty much followed it for both the filling and the chocolate coating except that I added another 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla (and probably could have added another teaspoon on top of that--I love vanilla in sweets). I also used coconut oil instead of shortening, and it worked great. Finally, I used Ghirardelli semisweet for chocolate.

Then, when you've made the filling and the chocolate, layer the candy like this, pretzels at the bottom, chocolate at the top:

Pretzel (I used pretzel chips from Trader Joe's)

Buckeye filling

Caramel if you'd like

Roasted, salted peanuts

Chocolate spooned over

Fleur de Sel salt if you like (I also got this at Trader Joe's)

You could also probably spread it all out on a sheet, like bark, but put chocolate on the bottom then let it harden. Then layer everything in the same order and cut it when it's ready.

TA DA! FAKE FIVES!

Making The Lollypop Tree

First off, forgive my photos. They're taken with my phone for the sake of convenience, but one day I'll get my life right and take pretty ones with the fancy cam!

Anyhoo, I'm seven blocks into my 9-block version of Kim McLean's Lollypop Tree quilt. Most people do this quilt with Kaffe Fassett fabrics (as shown in the photo in the link above), which give the quilt an almost shimmery look with lots of movement and interest. Using Kaffe for a Kim McLean will always go right. So, because I'm dumb, I wanted to try it with 90% solids. I like to start all my quilts from a place of paralyzing uncertainty and abject fear, and this quilt was no exception.

Because most of quilty friends are in the modern quilting community, I thought I'd share what I'm going to call my "translation process" for the Lollypop Tree. That is, how I'm trying to negotiate making an interesting quilt of mostly solids and of approximately one billion appliqué pieces, a quilt that wasn't really meant for solids.

So here are the things I've done to help make my fabric choices:

1) When in doubt, I consult Pinterest and Google for images of nature. The fun of using Kaffe in a Kim McLean quilt is that it results in this super-fun Willy-Wonka-style carnival of color. Stems don't have to stem-colored, leaves can be made from floral fabrics, and it works. 

But I wanted my quilt to be rooted (no pun) more closely to nature: I wanted the stems and the leaves to seem more like what you'd find in the woods or in a garden, and I wanted the variation in color to seem, in a way, expected because of the expectations Nature has set up for us. 

So, if I wanted a block to be inspired by a lotus blossom, I looked at lots of photos to see color ranges for the blossoms, and also for the green that should surround them. If lotus blossoms were a bit yellow in the middle, I made sure to use yellow somewhere in that block.

2) I embrace using eight (or ten, or seventeen) versions of one color. One of the challenges with solids (and with so, so many pieces of appliqué) is that if I used the same color in more than, say, two places, it visually flattened the block pretty quickly. Again, when I went back to nature photos, I realized that leaves weren't always the same color, even if they shot out from a stem in pairs, so I started making the top leaves a different shade than the bottom leaves, so that the blocks didn't flatten too much. 

3) Pruning is okay. I wanted more negative space in my version of the quilt, so I often left off buds and leaves to make some room in each block. Where and when I decided to do that usually had to do with what was going on color-wise in that area. If I wanted more white background, and if I didn't know what color I'd make that part anyway if I kept it, it usually just went away! Doing this doesn't leave huge expanses of negative space, but it does give the eye a place to rest here and there.

4) I pretend all those border pieces don't exist. The border for the Lollypop Tree is what I call "the nursery": a collection of cute mini-plants to surround the "matured" blocks in the center grid of the quilt.  I'm going to have a border, but it will be white like the background of the blocks I've done and will be quilted in an interesting way. After looking at some vintage appliqué quilts in Robert Shaw's American Quilts: The Democratic Art, I've decided that even my binding and sashing will be white, in a deep bow to the centuries-old quilts that made me love quilts. So the only color on the quilt will be in the nine lollypop trees. I hope it ends up striking and not boring!

So those are the thoughts I keep coming back to in this (long) process. It goes to the longarmer October 1st, so I've got some serious work to do!

Hello. :)

fabric by moda

Hi there. I've finally gotten around to writing the first post, which I thought would be done in April, after SewDown Nashville, but time's a tricky thing.

My Instagram handle is @minnowpeck, and Minnow Peck is the name of my first blog. When I first started the original blog, I told my friend Katie what I would call it.

"Um, why??" she asked.

Here's why. Because a long time ago, when I more solidly identified myself as a writer, I wrote a poem that ended up being the last poem in a small collection of poetry. One of the lines is about being in the Currituck Sound and feeling minnows taking little bites of my back. The poem is about change and the line itself is, "The minnows peck—maybe they are eating the skin,/making everything worse. " About a year later, my brother Paul and I were swimming in the sound off my mother's dock, and at some point he felt a minnow peck. Then, in the manner of a Shakespearean actor, he stood up with his full 6-foot-2, 240-pound frame, stretched his arms out and proclaimed, "They are minnows!! Eating skin, CHANGING WORLDS!!" And then he laughed like a crazy person. He was (good-naturedly) making fun of me.

If I get teased about anything, it's usually poetry or quilting. People have misconceptions about both. Poets wear berets and snap instead of clap, and quilters are old and can't get out of their rocking chairs. Or something like that. I'm starting to think there may be something more than just chance that leads me to love things that have this kind of baggage, but I do know that one of the reasons I'm drawn to writing and and to quilting is because both require a lot of skill and energy, and in the end, if you're lucky (or skilled) enough, you make something that looks, in a way, effortless and easy in its beauty.

So I'm going to try to keep up these posts, keep here a quiltography of sorts, and just put back out the little gifts that sewing has given me. Thanks for stopping by.