Happy Independence Day! I hope everyone is enjoying their freedom today.

I'm not doing much - other than taking a day to craft - I already had my "celebration" this weekend at the concert. (And I'm not that big on things-that-go-boom.)

Several things:

1. Bloggers are silly. You know the Infinite Cat Project?

Well, here's the Infinite Sock Project.



My socks, waving to Devorah's socks, which are in turn waving to other people's socks.


2. I finished the pinwheel quilt:



I altered the pattern slightly- there are 49 blocks set in a 7 x 7 array, rather than the 6 x 8 array. (That was partly by mistake but I like the wider squarer quilt better.

A closeup of the corner, showing the border-print fabric I used. (It's all little shops: a shoe shop, a perfumerie, a cafe, a pastry shop, and, ironically given the pastry shop, a dress shop selling [apparently] only very skinny small sizes):

.

I also have to show you the back:



It is two Michael Miller dog-print fabrics (the stripe is running on both sides, but I wanted to show a close-up). I like how these fabrics work with the others. Especially since the striped fabric here was one from out of stash.

It's always nice to use up a little bit of stash.


And this brings me to point 3. Something I have noticed in the "quilting community."

I use a lot of what are called "novelty" print fabrics or "conversational" prints. I like the fabrics, they work with the simpler patterns I like to use, they make me happy.

But I've noticed - I mainly get this vibe from the "serious" quilt magazines - that there's a hierarchy of quilters.

At the top are the people who do applique, especially complex traditional applique like Baltimore Album quilts.

Next are the people who use all (or mostly all) solid fabrics, and do "art quilts" where the goal is to have very complex piecing that is not in a traditional block format.

Next come, I guess, the people who design their own "semi traditional" blocks, or the people who do the Jinny Beyer* stuff

(*Jinny Beyer is kind of the A**** St*rm*r* of the quilting world - very famous, very highly thought of, very complex patterns. AFAIK, though, Ms. Beyer isn't quite so...forceful...about "guarding" her "good name." [I originally wrote, "she's less of a buttmunch about over-reaching her copyright rights]. She doesn't, for example, shut down fan groups that use her name...)

Then there are the reproduction-fabric quilters, the ones who are really hardcore, who won't use a fabric that is a reproduction of a print first offered in 1867 if they're making a quilt that's supposed to be from 1865.

Then there are the traditional workers-in-calico.

But at the bottom of the heap - THOSE are the people who like novelty fabrics. They're the ones who are seen as the equivalent of the person who shows up to a "tasteful" Christmas party wearing felt reindeer antlers and a red sweatshirt with a spangly-Bugs-Bunny-dressed-as-Santa-Claus motif. In some cases, they're kind of excused, because you know, they can't help it, the poor dears, and bless their hearts, you know, they're not quite RIGHT somehow...because, you know, I heard a rumor that the cord was wrapped around their necks when they were born, and you KNOW what that can do to a person....

For the rest of us, we just have bad taste. Or at least, that's the assumption. Because, the general wisdom goes, if we had better taste, we'd be using Kona Bay solids to make painstaking magnolia flowers, with each stamen hand-appliqued - THAT'S a real quilter. Not someone who rotary cuts fabric with DOGS on it.

And you know? I hate that kind of snobbery and elitism. The truth is, Baltimore Album quilts pretty much leave me cold - both to do and to use. I'm much more drawn to the happy bright print quilts made out of triangles and rectangles and squares - quilts that look like the kind of things my grandma and great-grandma would make. Because my ancestresses were NOT ladies of leisure - they were farm-wives, or women raising numerous children while their husbands were off working the lumber camps. They didn't have servants, they didn't have access to lots of supplies. (My mom talks about how when she was a child, she used to wait and wait for her mother to remove a line of basting thread from something - because that was the thread that was then "okay" to be used on the doll dresses my mom made. Her family really did not have much...). Most of the quilts they made were literally from feed sacks or from the scraps left from making clothes (or the scraps left when those clothes wore out).

And while I don't think there's anything genetic, really, that makes those kind of quilts appeal to me, they do. Much more so than the "prissy lady sitting in her parlor doing needlework because everyone knows idle hands do the devil's business" sort of handwork - I like the quilts that were made to be used, that were the efforts of someone working on her porch on a hot summer evening after the other work was done* or someone sitting by the stove teaching her daughter how to sew by setting four-patches together.

(*One of the first quilts I ever pieced - which was just a simple square-patched doll quilt - I actually sewed by hand while sitting on my grandma's porch one hot summer that I was visiting her.)

Someone who was not consciously thinking of making "ART art," but someone who wanted a little prettiness and charm as well as functionality. And I think that's true of a lot of what I do. I'd rather have my cozy little "cottage style" house with its cheapie nicknacks of the 1940s purchased at resale shops than the kind of grand, psuedo-Victorian or Victorian-recreation that some of my friends here have.

I like the practicality, the devil-may-care sense of putting together colors that a more "tasteful" person might be horrified at. (One of my great regrets is that my quilts are often so "matchy" - I'm not good at looking at disparate fabric - probably because I have such an extensive stash - and going "those will work together because they HAVE TO."). And I don't mind if points are cut off or if seams don't match perfectly - because that's the humanness in it - it still works, it still holds together. It's just not PERFECT perfect.

And I'm guessing I'm not alone in my love of novelty fabrics; if all other quilters recoiled in horror at them, they wouldn't print them any more.

So if loving "conversational" prints is wrong, I don't want to be right. If the Way of the True Quilter is to do fiddly applique and rip out every block that doesn't have perfect points, I don't want to be a True Quilter.

I want to be more like my grandma, who could do a variety of things well, and who recognized that having something done and useful is often better than having something unfinished and "perfect."