3 kids, 3 t-shirt quilts

Posted on October 20, 2024 by lorrie

My first foray into t-shirt quilt making was for my son, as he was getting ready to go to college. I researched the process by reading lots of blog posts, looked at photos of lots of different styles of t-shirt quilts, and decided to make a quilt with a variety of different-sized rectangles and squares rather than the standard square grid quilt.

I had gathered up my son’s old t-shirts, designed the quilt, but hadn’t even finished cutting up the shirts when my son went off to college. I continued working on it while he was away but didn’t manage to finish it before he finished his freshman year at home due to COVID. I got distracted by all the turmoil of COVID and spent my sewing time sewing masks so I didn’t make any more progress on the quilt until after my son went back to school for his sophomore year. I managed to successfully finish the quilt by the time he came home for Thanksgiving but the quilt remains on his bed at home and never made it to school with him.

Shortly after I finished my son’s quilt, I started working on a t-shirt quilt for my middle child, who was then a high school senior. I managed to finish her quilt on time, and she brought it to college with her. It seems to be holding up well to daily use and a trip through the washing machine, and has even traveled with her to summer internships.

I intended to start my third child’s quilt a year in advance, and I did get her to select the shirts she wanted me to use almost on schedule. But between the second and third quilt I sewed a lot of garments and kept putting off the tedious step of fusing all the t-shirts to fusible interfacing. Plus child #3 requested that I sew her prom dress, and over the summer a sun dress, a cropped shirt, and a couple of pairs of pants. I finished most of the garments before she left for college, but just barely started the quilt. I decided to finish the quilt before sewing any more clothes, and also decided it was time to get my sewing machine tuned up after 15 years of not having it serviced. So after dropping my daughter off at school and spending a week in Switzerland, I came home and got to work. Five weeks later I finished the t-shirt quilt, just in time to personally deliver it to my daughter in Boston while I was in town for a business trip. We’ll start with photos of the finished quilt and happy recipient, and then for those interested in the process, I’ll detail how it was made.

The first step in my process is to select my t-shirts. For the past 10 years or so I’ve been trying to save any t-shirt that someone in my house is discarding if there is any sentimental value or there is any reason I think it might make its way into a t-shirt quilt. So for each of my kids I sorted through my bags of old t-shirts to retrieve those they wanted to include in their quilt. Then I sent them back to their rooms to find any additional shirts they wanted to donate to the cause. We talked about colors and themes and activities they wanted to make sure were included and sometimes we went back to the t-shirt pile to retrieve a few more shirts. My kids all played Dynamo soccer and we have Dynamo shirts in just about every color so I used a lot of Dynamo shirts as filler and to find pieces of a particular color. For my third t-shirt quilt, my daughter had some tie-dyed shirts and wanted a rainbow theme with the shirts arranged in a spectrum. We were short on some colors so I dug through the pile to fill in. I also added some fabric scraps from garments I recently sewed.

Once I finish selecting shirts I measure them all and make a spreadsheet including a description of the shirt, color, and smallest and largest size block that could be made from the shirt and look good on a quilt. Then I use PowerPoint to make a scale drawing of my quilt (I made all of them 60″ x 84″ to fit a twin bed) and start creating and moving around blocks of the appropriate size and color. I tend to pick a size for the block in the middle of the range to start with and then adjust as the design comes together. My third quilt has more shirts than the other two so I used smaller block sizes for most of the blocks and cropped them closer to the printed images. In the end, I had 67 blocks. Sometimes I decide to leave out a few shirts that weren’t that important to the quilt recipient and that don’t fit well in the design and sometimes I add more shirts. I add the size of each block to the PowerPoint design and then I print it out and keep it handy as a guide for cutting and sewing. Sometimes I make additional changes as I go to correct mistakes.

The next step is to wash all the t-shirts I’m going to use and rough cut them. I use a big scissors to cut them to a size bigger than I anticipate using without precisely measuring them. I save all the t-shirt scraps in case I need a piece to fill in a spot later (generally because I made a mistake). Now my big t-shirt pile is a little smaller and I have a big bag of t-shirt scraps.

Next comes the tedious step of fusing all the t-shirt pieces I plan to use onto lightweight interfacing to stabilize them. One of the blogs I read recommended Pellon 906F fusible sheerweight non-woven polyester interfacing. I buy this product by the bolt. I do my fusing on a big rectangular ironing pad. Following a suggestion from a blogger, I put a Teflon sheet on the ironing pad to keep the fusible interfacing and the t-shirt ink from sticking to my ironing pad. I put one t-shirt piece, ink-side down, on the Teflon sheet. Then I put a piece of interfacing larger than the shirt on top, fusible side down. Sometimes I do several smaller shirt pieces together and fuse them to a larger interfacing piece. I keep a bowl of water next to my ironing pad and I dip a piece of quilting cotton fabric into the bowl, wring it out, and cover the interfacing piece. Then I set my iron on the wool setting on the wet fabric and press. I hold the iron in place for about 10 seconds and then move it over and press the next section. A big t-shirt piece will take a few minutes to press using this process. I try to have something to watch or listen to while fusing as this process is fairly boring.

Once the t-shirts are fused, I lay them out on the floor according to my diagram. They are still only rough cut at this point. Then I collect them one section at a time and start working on trimming and sewing.

I refer back to my diagram and trim each piece exactly to the specified size plus half an inch for the quarter-inch seam allowance on all sides. Occasionally I realize at this point that I rough cut a piece too small or not adequately centered and this requires splicing in another piece.

For my first two quilts, I sewed the trimmed pieces together on my regular sewing machine (a Bernina Aurora 440 QE, which has been quite a workhorse for me). However, my Bernina was getting its first ever tune-up when I was ready to start sewing so I pieced this entire quilt with my Brother ST4031HD serger. The serger knife had stopped cutting and I had not yet figured out why, so I kept the knife lowered and serged without trimming. I used grey thread and adjusted the stitch width to be just under a quarter inch as I realized that the thickness of the fabric added to the seam allowance. This technique worked really well and seemed quicker than piecing with a sewing machine. I think this will result in stronger seams, which is nice for a heavy quilt that will likely get a lot of use. I pressed all of the seams in the direction that they seem to naturally want to fall (the top fabric stays straight and folds towards the bottom fabric).

I continued trimming and serging blocks together into units and then serging units together. I made a few mistakes along the way, including discovering too late that I had trimmed a block to the size on my diagram, but that size was typed incorrectly. I corrected it by adding extra strips of fabric. I try to create units that will all be able to be sewn together without having to sew partial seams or sew around corners. I made a mistake that required one partial seam to correct. In the end all the blocks fit together fairly well except in one spot, which required unsewing one seam, trimming off about a quarter inch, and resewing. The trimming and sewing part is probably my favorite part of the t-shirt quilt process. I like watching the quilt come together and all the blocks come out nice and crisp with the interfacing as backing. Here you can see the front and the back side of all the blocks sewn together.

The next step is to prepare the three Bs: backing, batting, and binding. My daughter selected a green cat gnome quilting cotton print for the backing and binding. It wasn’t wide enough for the quilt back so I sewed two pieces together. I also fused a custom-printed quilt label on the bottom right corner and later hand stitched it in place to keep all the corners down. I made 1.5-inch continuous bias binding from a square of the extra backing fabric. I think this is a particularly cool technique for making bias binding although it does require some careful measuring and a lot of cutting. I bought a queen-sized Hobbs HF90 heirloom fusible cotton blend batt so I had to cut that down to the size I need. This batt is a fairly lightweight 80% cotton and 20% polyester, which works well for t-shirt quilts without adding substantially to the weight of an already heavy quilt.

Because the batting is fusible you can put the backing on the floor (I put a large top sheet on top of the carpet first and build my quilt sandwich on top of the sheet), layer on the batting, and layer on the quilt top and then press with an iron to fuse everything in place. I bring my iron down to the floor, lie on the quilt, and do all the fusing. I start in the center and work my way out, using an organza pressing cloth to keep the t-shirt ink from melting onto my iron. After fusing the font I turn the whole thing over and check the back for wrinkles. I did a pretty good job this time and only had to peel back a little bit of the backing to remove a wrinkle. I fused that spot again after straightening it out.

Now the quilt sandwich is ready to sew! Fortunately, my Bernina was back in tip top shape so I used that for quilting with my Bernina stitch regulator (BSR) foot. I selected a spool of Isacord rainbow multicolor polyester embroidery thread that I had bought years ago and never used. I thought it went well with the rainbow theme and it kind of blends into the backing. I could have used just about any color given the range of colors in this quilt. A solid red or medium green would also have worked, and a green might have been better for the backing. I did find the Isacord kind of slippery to work with and I had some problems with skipping, especially over some of the denser ink areas. I used 50 wt cotton thread for my other t-shirt quilts and I liked working with that thread better on a heavy quilt with large-scale quilting rather than small details.

Quilting a bed quilt with a home sewing machine is challenging because you have to roll up the quilt and stuff it under the sewing machine arm, and also drag around a big heavy quilt. As t-shirt quilts are extra heavy, this was quite a challenge. Someday maybe I’ll get a long-arm quilting machine, but for now I do the best I can with the Bernina. I worked up a sweat and some shoulder pain from sliding the quilt around. I quilted this quilt entirely freehand with big meandering stipples. It’s basically doodling with a sewing machine. My stipples came out mostly smooth and round, but there are definitely a number of sharp angles and glitches too: don’t look too closely and you won’t see them!

The last step is to trim the edges of the quilt and attach the binding. I fused the french-fold binding technique, which is how I bind most of my quilts. I sewed the binding along the edge of the quilt with a quarter-inch seam allowance using my Bernina walking foot. There’s a little extra jig required at each corner for nice mitered corners, and then there’s a bit of work needed to join the beginning and end of the binding into a giant rubber band. Attaching the first side of the binding to the front of the quilt was fairly painless (especially compared to quilting the quilt). The classic french-fold binding technique requires hand stitching the binding to the back of the quilt with a slip stitch. This is a very pretty finish, but it would probably take me at least 6 hours for a quilt of this size so I have finished the binding of all my t-shirt quilts by machine. I folded over the binding, used clips to hold it in place, and used the edge foot on my sewing machine to stitch in the ditch. It took me about an hour to go all the way around the quilt.

And then I was done! I took some photos and celebrated! I also sewed up a cute pillowcase with extra backing fabric. I will use it as a bag when I deliver the quilt, and then it can be used with a standard bed pillow.

I still have a lot of t-shirts left, including a lot of shirts that used to be mine. Some day I’ll have to make a t-shirt quilt for me!

Password fashion and home decor roundup

Posted on December 19, 2014 by lorrie

I’ve been collecting images of all the cool things that I and others have made with my bad password fabric. The fabric is available from Spoonflower in three size and both with and without the naughty words. It has a purple background and includes 501 passwords. Spoonflower offers a variety of different kinds of fabrics, including a performance knit, basic cotton, and faux suede. They also will print this design on wrapping paper and wall paper.

Recapping for those who are just seeing this, I designed a series of bad password fabrics based on the most popular passwords stolen in a Rockyou.com data breach. First I made a “Security Blanket” quilt printed on basic cotton fabric in pastel colors. This quilt appeared in Science Magazine and was on display at the residence of the Carnegie Mellon University president for most of last year. Then I designed a purple version of the fabric and made a password dress with performance knit fabric. The dress has gotten some nice press on CNET, the Trib, and the Women you should know blog.

Then my friends started requesting other password apparel. Mary Ellen Zurko commissioned my friend Jen Primack of Upcycled Designs to make her a t-shirt from cotton knit fabric. Then Jeremy Epstein asked for ties, and we found Jen Knickerbocker of LoveCrushDresses and got her to offer regular ties and bow ties in her Etsy shop. The ties are made from cotton sateen.

Then Jen Primack bought an old chair and reupholstered it with my passwords fabric in heavy cotton twill. Doesn’t it look great in my living room?

Kristin Briney emailed me to tell me she had made a password dress from cotton poplin. And I just made a password infinity scarf from silky faille (a woven polyester).

Password baby quilts and couch throws made out of kona cotton are coming soon….

In the mean time, I’ve gotten many requests to wear the password dress to events. I wore it to give an invited talk at the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (where I was referred to as a “password researcher and fashion idol“). I also wore it to a couple of briefings I gave to Congressional staff on Capitol Hill.

And for those wondering about the different types of fabric. The polyester fabrics are much brighter than the cottons. They are all fairly consistently bright with nice saturated colors. My favorite is the performance polyester, which doesn’t wrinkle and has a little bit of stretch and a nice drape. But it’s not really what you want to use for a quilt or a tie. The kona cotton is a little disappointing because the colors print a little dull. The basic cotton (which is similar to the kona but slightly lighter weight and less expensive), cotton sateen, and the heavy cotton twill produce brighter colors. They aren’t as bright as the polyester, but they are noticeably brighter than the kona cotton. The cotton silk also does not produce bright colors. I think the polyester silky faille might work well for ties and some other applications where you might otherwise use a woven cotton but want brighter colors. It’s a little slippery and harder to work with than cotton though. I got samples of the polyester faux suede and polyester eco canvas. They are both lovely bright fabrics, but I haven’t made anything out of them yet.

1/22/15 update: Von Welch, Director of the Center for Applied Cyber Security at Indiana University Bloomington wore his Password tie for a local TV interview. The reporters loved the tie and commented on it at the end of the interview.

2/6/15 update: Baby quilt in kona cotton finished!

7/16/15 update: I made a password bolster pillow for the CMU ECE department head’s conference room.

6/28/20 update: Given current circumstances, password masks were required! I printed my design XX small on cotton spandex jersey and lined the inside of the mask with fabric from an old cotton spandex t-shirt (outer layer and lining each cut 10.5 x 5.5 inches; sewn together at top and bottom; left and right sides folded in and stitched to make a casing on each side; long 1-inch strip of stretchy t-shirt fabric pulled through the two casings and tied to make 2 loops to go around the back of the head). Spoonflower also sells masks already made (and lots of other things) for those of you who don’t sew. This link at Spoonflower might work: https://www.spoonflower.com/en/products/2126447-bad-passwords-clean-edition-xxsmall-by-lorrietweet?product=homegoods-kitchen-dining. See also the images and links at https://www.secmeme.com/2020/06/bad-passwords-face-mask.html.

Interleave quilts from all around

Posted on September 24, 2014 by lorrie

I haven’t had time to quilt in way too long, but I have been enjoying the photos of other people’s interleave quilts, based on my instructions.

First Monica emailed me to tell me she was experimenting with interleave quilts. She made some small ones that were lovely. Then she made a gorgeous interleave bed quilt using tartan fabric as a gift for her daughter, who graduated from CMU in May. She even taught a class on interleave quilts for a local quilt store.

Monika’s interleave bed quilt

Then Melissa emailed me a pointer to photos of her beautiful quilts including an interleave quilt in blue, black, and purple. Melissa says, “I decided to use stabilizer to draw the lines on. It worked really well and I didn’t find it took long at all.”

Melissa’s interleave quilt

I wish I had more time to make more quilts myself. But the next best thing is looking at other peoples’ wonderful quilts! Thanks for sharing!

July 2015 update: Julie from South Australia emailed me, “A huge thankyou for your online tutorial on making an interleave quilt. I found your page today, and produced this small quilt, even finishing the binding!”

Julie’s interleave quilt

August 2015 update: Sandie emailed me: “I recently took a class on interleaves and got hooked experimenting in black and white with a slight touch of color. It’s been interesting.” Sadie said she took the class from Mel Beach in a group with the Santa Clara Valley Quilt Association (check out the link above for lots of other quilts from this class).

November 2016 update: Rosemarie Waiand from Houston, Texas emailed me: “I have now made several cushion sets, and am thoroughly enamored with this technique.In fact, my samples were quite the hit at my Houston Modern Quilt Guild meeting this weekend! I am especially fond of the ombre fabrics, as the gradation seems to impart an extra set of colors to the mix.”

December 2016 update: This was posted in July but I just came across it. Mel Beach, who lives in San Jose, CA, made lots of “Intriguing Interleaves” including this one below.

September 2017 update: Just saw this blog post from the Diablo Valley Quilters who made lots of cool interleave quilts for their 2015 show.

My quilt in Science magazine

Posted on February 6, 2014 by lorrie

I’m really excited that my Security Blanket quilt won honorable mention in the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge and is featured in an article in the February 7 issue of Science magazine. No, they don’t have a category for quilts, but that didn’t stop me from entering (and winning).

The quilt is currently on loan to Carnegie Mellon University, and is being displayed in the home of our university president. My daughters and I stopped by a couple of weeks ago to check it out.

Science also did a little profile of me in their Career Magazine.

And for those of you who want to make your own security blankets, pillow, ties, curtains, or dresses, I now have a few different versions of purple “bad password” fabric available by the yard at Spoonflower.com (update: you can get ties made from this fabric too!). You can order it on wrapping paper or wall paper too. I have small and large versions of the print, with and without the naughty words. (The quilt includes all the naughty words for authenticity.)

Security Blanket, machine quilted, digitally printed cotton fabric, 63.5″x39″

How to make an Interleave quilt

Posted on January 19, 2014 by lorrie

My Interleave quilts are pieced using a quilt-as-you-go technique in which thin strips of fabric are sewn to batting and backing. The interleave design results from cutting these strips from two panels of fabric and piecing alternate strips from each panel. In my quilts, some of the panels are pieced and some are photos printed on fabric. For added interest, I often shift my strips in a wave pattern. The result of this process is a complex-looking quilt that can be pieced quickly from thin strips sewn in straight lines.

Here is a quick tutorial on how I make a small Interleave quilt. I put this together for a 1-day workshop. We will be making a roughly 18 inch square interleave quilt with .5-inch stripes that can be used as a wall hanging, placemat, or pillow top. You can make a smaller sample if you prefer, but I would not suggest going any larger for the class project.

Materials

5 fat quarters (or larger) of cotton quilting fabric – Select 4 fabrics that go well together for the top, and 1 backing fabric that can be whatever you want. There should be some contrast between the 4 top fabrics – if they all blend together too much the interleave design won’t stand out. You should have enough left over from the top fabric fat quarters to make a binding. But you are welcome to provide extra fabric for a binding or to turn the finished quilt into a pillow. You will probably be doing the binding at home after the workshop.
Gridded cutting mat, at least 18 inches long
Ruler, at least 18 inches long (you need a ruler that will allow you to easily cut 18-in long and 1-in wide strips)
Rotary cutter
Scissors
Iron
Ironing pad or towel
Sewing machine and needles with a ¼ in. foot (if you have a ¼ in foot with a guide, even better!)
Neutral cotton piecing thread (I recommend Aurifil 50/2 in grey, but whatever you like to piece with is fine)
Pencil and pen
Pins
Fat quarter of cotton/polyester fusible batting
Fat quarter of quarter-inch grid cotton fabric — available at http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/2046219
Instructions and templates

Instructions

Select four fat quarters of four fabrics for the quilt top. They should be fabrics that go well together, but have some contrast between them.

Next elect the style of interleave you want to try. The most basic shape would be straight, with no shifting. If you follow the instructions below and do not shift your fabrics, the result will be something like what you see here to the right. If you want to try this, just join your pairs of fabric on one edge rather than making tubes and skip the part about templates and cutting open the tube.

In the instructions below I used a vase shape (shown here on the left) to shift my interleave design, but there are lots of other designs you might choose.

Below are example of the following shapes: sine wave, mirrored sine wave, skewed sine wave, hour glass, helix, and marquise. These shapes are all based on sine waves of differing frequencies and amplitudes. I generated them all using a computer program that I wrote. But once you have a feel for how this process works you can adapt these designs yourself without the aid of a computer.

Once you select the shape you want to use, you will need to create a paper template. I have prepared templates for the designs you see here. You can enlarge, reduce, or adapt them to suit your needs. This template is a PDF file designed to print on 11×17 paper.

The next step is to prepare the foundation for your quilt. Since this is a quilt-as-you-go technique, we will be layering the batting with a backing and a foundation. I like to use a fusible batt so I don’t have to baste it. I also find it makes things easier if you mark your foundation fabric with parallel lines. After marking several foundations by hand with pencil, I designed a grid fabric and had it printed at spoonflower.com on basic combed cotton. I know it is a little pricey for fabric you will never see in the finished piece, but it does save a lot of time and effort. If you would prefer, you can use any white or light-colored fabric and mark it with parallel lines, .5-inch apart.

Layer backing, fusible batting, and grid fabric and fuse together.

After your foundation is prepared, follow the instructions below to cut your fabric and assemble your quilt.

Cut a 18x9.5 inch strip from each fat quarter.

Cut a 18×9.5 inch strip from each fat quarter.

Decide how to pair your strips; I suggest pairing them so the strips with highest contrast are paired together. Place a pair of strips right sides together, and sew along both long edges with a 1/4-inch seam allowance to form a tube (leave the short edges open). Repeat for the other pair of strips.

Cut out a paper template with shape you will use to shift your strips.

Lay the paper template on one of the fabric tubes and trace along the edge with a dark pen. Flip the template over and repeat on the other tube.

Cut both tubes open along the lines you just traced.

Press all the seams to one side. You should now have two panels that are cut to match the curves in your design. To make it easier to keep track of your panels, place a piece of tape on each panel and label them “1” and “2.”

Using your dark pen, draw a line down the left edge of the front side of each panel. Remember “the Line is on the Left” so that you know how to orient your panels and strips when you sew them together.

Starting at the bottom of each panel, use your ruler and rotary cutter to slice a 1-inch strip. You may want to slice several strips at a time, but if you do, I suggest numbering them along the edge so you can keep track of what order they are in.

Line up the bottom strip from panel 2 on the bottom edge of your grid fabric, aligning with the line 1-inch from the bottom edge. The strip should be face up with the edge where you marked the line on the left side. Since the edges of the strip are not perpendicular the alignment with the left and right edges will be approximate.

Line up the bottom strip from panel 1 face down on top of the strip from panel 2. Pin in place.

Using a 1/4-in foot sew along the top edge of your strips. A foot with a 1/4-in guide can make this easier. You may prefer to use a walking foot,

Press open your strips. Then cut another strip from the bottom of panel 2 and layer it face down on top of the previous strip you sewed. Sew the next strip in place.

If your strips are not precisely 1-inch thick, don’t worry. You should line up the top of each new strip with the next grid line, even if the previous strip falls a little short of that line. In the even you have a strip that goes over the line, you may want to trim it so you can see the line or use a ruler to help with alignment. You can use pins to hold the strips in place, but you may find that after some practice they are not necessary.

Continue alternating between panel 1 and panel 2 strips until you cover the grid. You may have a couple extra strips left over. (To avoid leftover strips, your grid fabric should be at least .5-inch taller than your fabric tubes.)

Once all your strips have been sewn down, your quilt is not only pieced, but also quilted.

For a little extra pizzaz you may want to do some free motion quilting or other embellishments.

For a little extra pizzazz you may want to do some free motion quilting or other embellishments.

Variations

You can achieve some interesting effects by starting with fabric panels that include interesting shapes. For example, you might cut your fabric into right triangles instead of strips, and interleave them without shifting.

You could use the same panels shown above, form them into tubes, cut them open on a curve, and produce one of the designs below, depending on the shape of the curve you use.

You might also start with panels that have three or more shapes and interleave them as shown on the right below.

I used this approach to make Interleave #1.

For Interleave #2 I assembled five diagonal strips on each panel. Instead of cutting 1-inch strips for interleaving, I used 1.5-inch strips so that they would end up 1-inch after accounting for seam allowances. In order to keep everything lined up nicely with proper spacing, I had to cut a .5-inch strip after cutting every 1.5-inch strip. These narrow strips are not actually used in the quilt, but they do make for some colorful ribbons. This approach requires more cutting, but a lot less sewing, so the quilt assembly goes faster.

Finally, interleaving large prints or photos printed on fabric, results in all sorts of interesting possibilities. Below are examples of using wavy striped fabric in Interleave #4, plaid fabric in Interleave #5, and photos printed on fabric in Interleave #6.

Have fun, and let me know how you use this technique!

February 17, 2014 Update!

I’ve been so excited to see the quilts created by some of my workshop participants as well as by a quilter in the San Francisco area, Monica Tong, who found my blog post and followed the instructions to make two quilts. Monica adapted the instructions to use three fabrics in each panel instead of two — which is exactly the idea.

: Marlene Fenoglietto’s interleave quilt, started during the workshop

: Diane Werley’s first interleave quilt, started during the workshop.

: Diane Werley’s second interleave quilt.

Quilt lecture and Interleave workshop

Posted on January 3, 2014 by lorrie

I will be giving a lecture and teaching a workshop for the Pittsburgh-area “Quilt Company East Guild” later this month. If you are interested in attending either of these events, please contact Sally Janis <SallyJanisQCE@verizon.net>.

Info on both events below from the QCE newsletter.

QCE Guild Meeting
Monday, January 20, at 7:00 pm, Beulah Presbyterian Church
Lorrie Faith Cranor
Engineering with Fabric

Question: What happens when you combine the mind of an engineer with the soul of an artist and turn them loose on fabric?

Answer: Magic!

Quilt artist Lorrie Faith Cranor has been exploring design, form, and color since she taught herself quilting as a distraction from her engineering and policy graduate studies in the mid-1990s. Her work is a treat for both the eye and the brain.

She is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS). During the 2012-2013 academic year she spent her sabbatical as a fellow in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University where she worked on fiber arts projects that combined her interests in privacy and security, quilting, computers, and technology.

Lorrie has won a number of awards in local and national quilt competitions. Several of her quilts have been featured on the covers of books and journals. She had a solo exhibit at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum in the Summer of 2013.

January Workshop
Interleave Technique
Tuesday, January 21, 9:30—2:00, First Baptist Church in Monroeville

Here’s a chance to learn Lorrie Cranor’s original Interleave technique. Lorrie’s Interleave quilts are pieced using a quilt-as-you-go technique in which thin strips of fabric are sewn to batting and backing. The images above show one of her finished quilts (left) as well as a close-up (right). The interleave design results from cutting these strips from two panels of fabric and piecing alternate strips from each panel. In Lorrie’s quilts, some of the panels are pieced and some are photos printed on fabric. For added interest, Lorrie shifts her strips in a wave pattern. The result of this process is a complex-looking quilt that can be pieced quickly from thin strips sewn in straight lines. In this workshop, Lorrie will break down her process into easy steps. Participants will create their own unique interleave wall hanging.

Non-member Workshop fee is $30 payable to QCE. There is also a $12 materials fee.

Here is a sample of a project for the Interleave workshop

For more information on Interleave quilts see the blog posts on Interleave 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

To infinity… and beyond!

Posted on December 27, 2013 by lorrie

While I often imagine myself making homemade gifts for everyone on my list, that doesn’t actually ever happen. This year I got a fun idea for one special gift, and liked it so much that I decided to make several more on a similar theme. This year was the year of the infinity scarf (a scarf with the ends sewn together in a loop). But not just any old infinity scarf…. this year I designed three original fabrics, had them digitally printed at spoonflower.com, and turned them into infinity scarves.

The first scarf was inspired by a colorful painting that my grandmother made earlier this year in her art class. The painting is framed and on display on a shelf in my kitchen. I love the bright-colored swirls and spirals, reminiscent of my own doodles, and thought it would look lovely on a scarf. I took a digital photo of the painting and loaded it into Photoshop. I played with it a bit and realized that all I needed to do was tile it in a mirror-image pattern to create an absolutely stunning design. The shapes in the painting combined with their mirror images to form new shapes and an intriguing pattern.

I uploaded the design to spoonflower and ordered two yards of performance knit fabric, a washable polyester knit. Then I waited about a week for my custom fabric to arrive in the mail (the worst part of using spoonflower is the wait!).

Two yards is enough fabric to make three infinity scarves using the free pattern from Sewn Studio’s Jersey Infinity Scarf Tutorial. The tutorial was super easy to follow. The hardest part is cutting two yards of this slippery fabric into three 24-inch pieces. I made my first scarf in less than an hour and was quite pleased with the results. The scarf can be worn long, or looped around twice. It can also be knotted in various ways for a different sort of look – although one of the great features of infinity scarves is that you don’t have to mess around with tying them. I made three scarves – one for Grandma Gladys, one for my mother, and one I kept for myself.

I decided to try my hand at some more fabric design. I went back to the Processing computer program I had used to design my Interleave quilts and adapt it for fabric design. My first design is based on my Interleave #3 quilt. I used the same pattern and color scheme, but added gradients so each bar is a lightly different color. The addition of the gradients adds dimension to an otherwise flat design, and makes it almost appear to glow.

My second design was based on my Interleave #4 quilt. Here I completely changed the colors and used gradients to not only add dimension, but also to introduce more colors. I love the way the colored stripes mix to produce the illusion of additional colors. Here you can see the fabric pattern, as well as the scarf being modeled by me as well as by my mother-in-law.

The infinity scarves were big hits. Here you can see them modeled by my grandmothers and by my mother. Grandma Gladys, second from the left below, made the painting that is featured on the fabric. (Did you guess that we all like purple?)

These fabrics are all available for sale from my shop at spoonflower. You can have them printed on your choice of fabrics (or even wallpaper or gift wrap).

Password dress

Posted on December 9, 2013 by lorrie

This is old news, but just now getting around to posting it. I made a password dress to go with the password quilt. I wore it to the opening of the Computers, Quilts & Privacy show and to give my artist’s talk. I also wore it to a faculty meeting and disrupted the meeting.

As with the Security Blanket quilt, I generated a Wordle from the RockYou password set, and then edited it in Adobe Illustrator. I selected brighter colors for the dress and had it printed at spoonflower.com on performance knit polyester fabric (UPDATE: You can purchase similar fabric on spoon flower that I created and ties made from this fabric on Easy…. and read about lots of other passwords stuff made by me and other people) I made my own pattern by tracing a store-bought dress I own that fits me well. It is just two pieces of fabric. The only tricky part was finishing the neckline and arm holes. I bought a double needle and used it to do the hem. This was my first foray into sewing with knit fabric.

And here are some more photos from the Computers, Quilts & Privacy show at the Frame. There is also a video of my talk that I will post after it is edited.

Computers, Quilts & Privacy

Posted on October 17, 2013 by lorrie

Quilts from my staybatical will be on exhibit at the Frame Gallery on the Carnegie Mellon campus October 24-November 3, 2013. The Frame Gallery is at 5200 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, on the corner of Forbes and Margaret Morrison.

Artist’s talk
Friday, November 1, 12:30-1:30 pm
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts Room 111
Lunch provided, please RSVP to studio-info@andrew.cmu.edu.

Join us for a talk by quilt artist Lorrie Faith Cranor. Lorrie is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-director of the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program. During the 2012-2013 academic year she spent her sabbatical as a fellow in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU where she worked on fiber arts projects that combine her interests in privacy and security, quilting, and computers. In this talk she will discuss these interests and how she combined them during her sabbatical. For directions or more information contact Marge Myers at 412-268-3451.

Opening Reception
Friday, October 25, 2-5:30 pm

Gallery Hours
Thursdays: Oct. 24 + 31, 5-9 pm
Fridays: Oct. 25 + Nov. 1, 2-7 pm
Saturdays: Oct. 26 + Nov. 2, Noon to 5 pm
Sundays: Oct. 27 + Nov. 3, Noon to 5 pm

Exhibit flier
Exhibit poster

Security Blanket

Posted on August 12, 2013 by lorrie

As I’ve been thinking about quilt ideas related to security and privacy during my staybatical at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry all year, the title for this quilt was obvious: Security Blanket. Less obvious was the design of a quilt that would fit this title. Ultimately, I took inspiration from the research on the security and usability of text passwords that I’ve been working on with my students and colleagues. While this quilt started out as an art project inspired by my research, what I learned from creating it will likely influence my future password research.

Security Blanket, machine quilted, digitally printed cotton fabric, 63.5″x39″

Our research group has collected tens of thousands of passwords created under controlled conditions as part of our research. Among other things, we have compared these passwords with the archives of stolen passwords that have been made public over the past few years. Perhaps the largest such archive consists of 32 million passwords stolen from social gaming website RockYou and made public in December 2009. These passwords are notably weak, having been created without the requirement to include digits or symbols or even avoid dictionary words. Security firm Imperva published an analysis of these passwords. More recent analyses of stolen passwords have found that passwords stolen in 2012 are pretty similar to those stolen in 2009.

The media had fun publishing the most common passwords from the RockYou breach. As with other breaches, password and 123456 figured prominently. But after you get past the obvious lazy choices, I find it fascinating to see what else people choose as passwords. These stolen passwords, personal secrets, offer glimpses into the collective consciousness of Internet users.

I asked my students to extract the 1000 most popular passwords from the RockYou data set and provide a list to me with frequency counts. I then went through the list and sorted them into a number of thematic groups. I assigned a color to each group and entered the passwords with weights and colors into the Wordle online word cloud generator. I then saved the output as a PDF and edited it in Adobe Illustrator to rearrange them in a shape that I liked, with some pairs of words purposefully place in close proximity. I designed a border, and had the whole thing printed on one large sheet of fabric by Spoonflower. When the fabric arrived, I layered it with batting and quilted it. I bound it with matching fabric from Spoonflower that I designed.

Sorting 1000 passwords into thematic categories took a while. While a number of themes quickly emerged, many passwords could plausibly fall into multiple categories. I tried to put myself in the mindset of a RockYou user and imagine why they selected a password. Is justin the name of the user? Their significant other? Their son? Or are they a Justin Bieber fan? Is princess a nickname for their spouse or daughter? The name of their cat? Their dog? (It shows up frequently on lists of popular pet names and a recent surveyfound that the most common way of selecting a password is using the name of a pet.) Is sexygirl self referential? What about daddysgirl? dreamer? genius?

When I didn’t recognize a password I Googled it. Most of these unknown passwords turned out to be ways to express your love in different languages. For example, I learned that mahalkita means I love you in Tagalong. Love was a strong theme in any language; there seems to be something about creating a password that inspires people to declare their love.

Not surprisingly, the top 1000 passwords list includes a fair share of swear words, insults, and adult language. However, impolite passwords are much less prevalent than the more tender love-related words, appropriate for all audiences.

There are a couple dozen food-related words in the top 1000 passwords. The most popular is chocolate and most of the others are also sweets (and potentially nicknames for a significant other), but a few fruits and vegetables, and even chicken make their way to the top as well. Among fruits, banana appears in both singular and plural.

Animals are also popular. While felines appear on the password list in a number of forms and languages, monkey is by far the most popular animal, and the fourteenth most popular password. I can’t quite figure out why, and I don’t know whether or not this is related to the popularity of “banana.”

Fictional characters are also popular, especially cartoon characters. The twenty-fifth most popular password is tigger (which might also be on the list because it is a popular name for a cat). A number of super heroes and Disney princesses also make the list, as well as another cartoon cat, hellokitty. Real life celebrities also make the list, including several actors and singers. While at first I thought booboo might refer to the reality TV star Honey Boo Boo, I realized that the date of the password breach predates the launch of that TV show.

A number of passwords relate to the names of sports, sports teams, or athletes. Soccer-related passwords are particularly popular. There are several cities on the list that I’m guessing were selected as passwords because of their sports teams, especially soccer teams.

Besides the obvious lazy password password, and also PASSWORD, password1, and password2, some more clever (but nonetheless unoriginal) variations included secret and letmein. And I love that the 84th most popular password is whatever.

Some passwords puzzled me. Why would anyone select “lipgloss” as their password. Why not “lipstick” or “mascara”? Perhaps it refers to a 2007 song by Lil Mamma? Why “moomoo”? Why “freedom”?

Even more popular than the word password were the numbers 123456, 12345, 123456789. Other numbers and keyboard patterns also appear frequently. When I laid out the 1000 passwords on the quilt, I scaled them all according to their popularity. The most popular number sequence was chosen by more than three times as many people as the next most common password and was so large that I decided to place it in the background behind the other passwords so that it wouldn’t overwhelm the composition.

I made a few mistakes when designing the quilt that I didn’t notice until I was quilting it (quilting this quilt provided an opportunity to reflect on all the passwords yet again as I stitched past them). One problem was that when I transferred the top 1000 password list to Microsoft Excel while categorizing the passwords, the spreadsheet program removed all the zeros at the beginning of passwords. As a result there are three passwords that are actually strings of zeros (5, 6, and 8 zeros) that are printed simply as 0. In addition there are three number strings that start with a 0 followed by other digits are printed without the leading 0. Another problem was that the color I selected for jesus, christian, angel, and a number of other religious words blended in with the background numbers when printed on fabric, making those words almost invisible (even though they showed up fine on my computer screen). I had carefully checked most of the colors I used against a Spoonflower color guide printed on fabric, but had inadvertently forgotten to check this particular color. I reprinted about half a dozen of these words in a darker color and sewed them onto the quilt like patches that one might add to repair a well-worn spot.

There are also some passwords that I colored according to one category, and upon further reflection I am convinced more likely were selected for a different reason and should be in a different category, but we’ll never know for sure. I invite viewers to discover the common themes represented by my color-coded categories and to speculate themselves about what users were thinking when they created these passwords. Zoom in on the thumbnail images above to see all of the smaller passwords in detail.

The colors, size, and format of this quilt were designed to be reminiscent of a baby quilt, which I imagine might become a security blanket. Like the passwords included in this piece, a security blanket offers comfort, but ultimately no real security.

Inspired!

Posted on June 16, 2013 by lorrie

I’m excited to finally reveal Interleave #6: Porto, which was presented to Ed Frank and Sarah Ratchye at a reception before the Grand Finale dinner of the Carnegie Mellon Inspire Innovation! fundraising campaign last night. I was commissioned to make this quilt to thank Ed for serving as chair of the Inspire Innovation! campaign. (The campaign was incredibly successful, raising well over the $1 billion goal. As a faculty member at a terrific university that has a much smaller endowment than most of our peer institutions, I really appreciate how this infusion of funds will benefit the university.)

I felt truly honored to be asked to make this gift, and somewhat nervous about whether I could produce something that would live up to expectations. Ed and Sarah are art collectors, and Sarah is herself an accomplished artist. The folks who approached me about making the gift were hoping for a piece that would represent the interplay of art and technology, consistent with the mission of the STUDIO. Having spent a good part of the past year working in the STUDIO, I am personally grateful to Ed and Sarah for their financial support of the STUDIO as well.

I did not have a lot of time to produce this quilt, and it involved a number of new techniques I hasn’t tried before. It all came together fairly well until the end. Last weekend I finished the binding, and when I put it up on my design wall for a photograph I realized the corners were not square. Really not square. It was a lovely rhomboid parallelogram. Because I have different prescriptions in each lens of my glasses, when I take my glasses off the world looks a bit un-square (which drives my OCD side nuts). But my glasses were on. I checked the quilt corners against the grid on my cutting mat, and there was no denying it. The quilt was not square. This was the widest Interleave quilt in the series and I realized that the longer the strips, the more room there is for the fabric to stretch as I sew – and I hadn’t noticed until that point that there was actually quite a bit of skew. I pondered the problem over night and the next day ended up removing the binding and vertical borders so I could square it up. Fortunately, I had used Aurifil 50 weight thread for piecing, which made the un-piecing a snap (my new favorite (un)piecing thread – really nice thin thread with low lint that doesn’t break while sewing but so easy to rip out without tearing your fabric when the situation calls for it). I reattached the borders and the binding and finally could declare it finished.

I already wrote up a little artist’s statement, which the CMU advancement folks had a designer incorporate into a little booklet to accompany the quilt. I will just include the statement here for those of you who want to learn more about the quilt. I’ve also included some bonus images so you can see how it was made.

Artist’s Statement

At first glance the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University appears like a good place for a computer science professor, but an odd place for a quilter. I am both a quilter and a CMU computer science and engineering professor who is spending my sabbatical as a fellow at the STUDIO.

While other faculty and students in the STUDIO spend the day creating new concepts from behind computer screens, I set up shop with an old sewing machine, an ironing blanket, a cutting mat and a huge pile of colorful fabric. At the beginning of my fellowship, I smiled politely every time someone suggested ways of attaching the old sewing machine to a robotic arm, and spent days with needle and thread hand quilting colorful lines.

Hand quilting is a process that offers one a lot of time to think, and I did spend a lot of time thinking about the art and craft of quilting, and how I might use technology in my work. For most of my piecing and quilting, I use a sewing machine, which was fairly sophisticated technology when it was invented about 200 years ago. My most recently purchased sewing machine is actually called a “sewing computer” by its manufacturer, and it has some innovative features such as a sensor that can detect the speed at which the operator is moving a piece of fabric so that the machine can automatically adjust the speed at which the needle goes up and down.

I appreciate the added value that technology can bring to my art, enabling me to create in ways that would be difficult or impossible for me unassisted. But it is not my goal to use technology to eliminate the need for me to participate in the fabrication process. Part of my attraction to quilting and fiber arts is the tactile nature of the medium. For me, part of the fun is manipulating fabric and thread with my hands. I want to use technology to enhance my skills – let me sew straighter, faster, better – or, better yet, to let me create in ways I otherwise could not.

STUDIO director Golan Levin suggested the use of digital technology that was necessary for me to create this quilt. When I started my Interleave series of quilts, I sketched the quilt designs in pencil and did some design experimentation with scissors and paper. As I started to design the third quilt in the series, I began using Microsoft PowerPoint to sketch out some ideas involving sine waves. It was a tedious process as PowerPoint was really not the right tool for the job.

Golan saw what I was doing and suggested I write a program using an arts engineering toolkit called Processing to draw my design. As a computer scientist, I wasn’t previously familiar with Processing, which was developed by artists, for artists, and is taught in CMU’s undergraduate art classes. The program I wrote allowed me to generate the sorts of designs I had been struggling with, and it included sliders to allow me to experiment with sine waves of different frequencies and amplitudes. Using this program, I was able to rapidly iterate through large numbers of design possibilities before selecting one to actually fabricate. I did some engineering to figure out how to actually construct the quilt I designed, and then adapted my program to produce full-scale templates that I could print on paper and use to cut out my fabric.

Each quilt in the Interleave series uses a variation on the technique I described, but each includes a new twist on the approach. For Interleave #6, the new twist was the inclusion of a photograph digitally printed on fabric. After considering a variety of photo ideas, I chose a photo I took in Porto, Portugal in 2009 while on a short trip with some of my colleagues to attend a meeting for the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program. Although I was there for less than three days, I managed to meet the Prime Minister José Sócrates as well as experience the city’s São João festival. Walking around the city, I took lots of pictures with my DSLR camera.

Porto is a wonderfully photogenic city, full of hundreds-of-years-old apartments with bright red-orange roofs. The city also has amazing staircases, some of which appear on maps as roads. The Duoro River runs through the city, with tall bridges stretching across it. The view of the Ribeira district from across the river is particularly spectacular, and affords a view of layer upon layer of buildings built into the steep hillside. It is a photo of this view that I selected for the Interleave #6 quilt.

Full-scale paper prototype to check that everything was in order before printing the fabric.

Before printing the photo on fabric, I manipulated it in several ways, including increasing the color vibrancy and saturation. Additionally, I created three versions of the photo at varying degrees of pixilation. Then I used my Processing program to interleave the three versions in a sine wave formation and to leave space for splicing in batik fabrics. Next, I adjusted the end result so it could be printed on fabric complete with guides for cutting and splicing. Since I wasn’t entirely sure I had calculated everything properly, before having the fabric printed at spoonflower.com, I did a trial run with paper to reassure myself that it would work as I envisioned. When the fabric finally arrived in the mail I cut it up and sewed it back together, layered with a foundation grid, batting and backing fabric. The final touch was some hand embroidery for added texture and emphasis.

This was one of the two fabric panels I had printed to make this quilt. I removed the wide yellow and blue stripes and replaced them with batik fabric before making one-inch slices along the white lines.

The quilt is designed to show a view of Porto at various levels of focus, granularity, and abstraction. If you look at the quilt up close the pixelated sections appear mostly as abstract regions of color. On the other hand, you can see the un-pixelated sections most clearly, although they are rippled, as if reflected off water. The ripples are both a design choice, and an artifact of the medium – fabric stretches as it is sewn, so perfect alignment is difficult to achieve.

Step back from the quilt until you are too far away to see the un-pixelated sections clearly, and now the pixelated sections start coming into focus. Step back further and the larger pixelated sections convey meaning. The batik fabric sections appear as regions of color taken from the scene: the most abstract representation, color without meaningful shape. I began playing with pixelated images in my earlier quilts as I explored visual representations of privacy, and have continued to use this technique, even when privacy is not the main focus of a piece.

Interleave #6: Porto
25.5″x31.5″ digitally printed cotton and commercial batik fabric, machine pieced and quilted, hand embroidered with pearl cotton

Tartan Tango

Posted on May 24, 2013 by lorrie

Some time in April a VIP visitor came to the STUDIO to talk with Golan, accompanied by an entourage of folks from CMU public relations and our central administration. While Golan entertained the visitor, members of the entourage wandered around the STUDIO, where they happened to find me surrounded by bright colorful things, working on Interleave #4. I introduced myself and showed them what I was doing. They were intrigued by the Processing program I was using to generate quilt designs, as well as the dozen or so colorful printouts of candidate quilt designs scattered on my desk. They started asking questions. Could I design a quilt like this with a CMU theme? I assured them I could come up with something. They told me they might be interested in commissioning such a quilt and would get back to me. A couple weeks later they sent me email, and asked me to describe a CMU themed quilt I might design with the Processing program. Then they asked for a mockup. They liked what they saw and I got the commission – with a very tight deadline. I got to work right away.

I had promised an Interleave quilt that would represent art and technology being woven together into the fabric of Carnegie Mellon. My design featured sine waves and CMU’s tartan fabric, which appears on graduation hoods and all sorts of official university paraphernalia. Plaid is a tricky fabric to work with, and many a hideous design has been created with CMU’s tartan plaid. I was determined to conquer the plaid. I headed to the campus store to purchase some. It turns out they sell both wool and flannel versions by the yard. I bought a yard of each. I could always make a kilt or pajamas out of whichever fabric I don’t use for the quilt.

I assembled panels of tartan and “solid” batiks and prepared to construct the quilt. From the previous Interleave quilts, I had learned that it really helps to to draw half-inch lines on a foundation fabric and line the strips up with the fabric for quilting. But it is difficult and tedious to draw so many parallel lines on fabric, so I tried to find striped fabric with half-inch or quarter-inch spacing. I asked for advice from some of my favorite online fabric stores but ultimately came up empty handed. I’m sure such a fabric is out there somewhere, but I have been unable to find it (but stay tuned….). So I marked the foundation by hand, and layered it over a sheet of batting and a cute apple print fabric I had in my stash.

The quilt construction proceeded similarly to the previous Interleave quilts. I decided to give this one a border, like a picture frame. I added a half-inch black border and a 1.5-inch tartan border. The tartan border was overwhelming so I trimmed it back to an inch for a much more pleasing effect.

After completing the quilt I photographed it. Fran Flaherty in the CMU Digital Arts Studio made 50 prints of the digital image on 11×14 archival paper. Perry Beck at the CMU art store cut 50 mats. And I hand numbered and signed 50 prints. And then Fran made 50 certificates of authenticity and I signed those too.

This past weekend the quilt was presented to Maureen Cohon, wife of the outgoing CMU president. Mrs. Cohon gave the matted prints to the partners of the board of trustee members who participated in her “partners program.”

Interleave #5: Tartan Tango
25.5×33.5″ machine pieced and quilted commercial batik cotton fabric and wool tartan fabric

After I finished this project (a few days early even), I took some of the scraps from the tartan quilt and some other recent projects and improv pieced a couple of small quilts for my two graduating PhD students.

Children’s Museum Exhibit

Posted on May 2, 2013 by lorrie

I have a solo exhibit of six quilts hanging at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, on the yellow wall opposite the “Garage” room. These quilts include: Lying on the Floor of the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum Looking At the Ceiling, De-identification , Self Portrait, Interleave #1: Venetian Lines, Interleave #3: Waveforms, Interleave #4: Sine of Spring. (Yes, I finished Interleave #4 last week, just in time to send it over to the museum.) The exhibit should be up for about a month, but I don’t have an exact end date yet. I love the Children’s Museum and am really excited to have an exhibit there.

The exhibit came about after the director of the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum attended a meeting at the STUDIO and saw some of my quilts, including a quilt I made based on a photo I took at the museum. The museum has an art installation called “More Light” by Dick Esterle in their great dome (which used to be a post office). 840 pink and orange streamers are suspended on threads. They are hanging in a grid, so in reality they are parallel. But if you lie on the floor in the very center of the dome and look up the streamers, they appear to radiate out from the center. I snapped some photos with my cell phone while my kids were working on art projects at the museum. As soon as I saw the streamers from that perspective I knew I wanted to make a quilt of that image. The radiating lines in the dome ceiling and the large dark circles are pieced. The lighter circles in the dome and the streamers are all fused on and stitched.

I was speaking at an event in downtown Pittsburgh today so I decided to skip lunch and take a walk across the river to the Children’s Museum to see my quilt exhibit. It was a lovely day for a walk — beautiful weather and blue skies. It was fun to see my quilts on the wall of the museum.

On my way back I stopped to take some photos of Cloud Arbor across the street from the museum. A little girl ran up to me and suggested that I get a little closer to the fountain so that I could get wet. As we were talking, the cloud generator turned on and the girl rushed into the fountain to get wet. If I had not been dressed up and scheduled to speak to a room full of lawyers an hour later, I probably would have followed her.

Sine of Spring

Posted on May 1, 2013 by lorrie

I was so pleased with the results of Interleave #3, that I decided to continue the series and see what else I could do to facilitate my quilt design with Processing. This time I started with some of the fabrics I wanted to use — a wonderful, colorful wavy batik fabric seemed perfect for a sine wave quilt. I matched the colors in this fabric with other fabrics in my collection, and not finding exactly the right shades, it was a good excuse to go fabric shopping. I worked on the quilt design in Processing, but couldn’t figure out how to represent the multi-colored wavy fabric in a single hue. So I enhanced my Processing program so that I could input digital images and use them to create my interleaved designs. I took digital photographs of a bunch of my fabrics with a ruler next to them (for scale). I then experimented with using these digital images in my computer-generated designs.

The addition of digital images of fabric made my computer-generated interleave designs much more vibrant, and also allowed me to visualize the placement of fabric patterns. I had lots of fun playing with different designs.

I eventually selected a design and began the process of rendering it in fabric. I used a very similar approach as I used in Interleave #3, except this time I drew 64 pencil lines spaced a half-inch apart on a piece of white fabric and layered that foundation fabric over the batting. I then sewed the colored strips to the sandwich of white fabric, batting, and backing, aligning each strip to a pencil line. I was able to use just one pin as I positioned each strip. Not having to line up each strip with a ruler and pin it in place along the whole length of the strip saved a lot of time. By the time I finished this quilt I was able to position, piece, and press each strip within about four minutes. I did run into a few problems with some of my pencil lines that were not completely straight — the fabric stretches a bit when you draw on it with a pencil if you are not careful, causing some of the lines to curve. This inspired a not-yet-successful mission to find a commercial cotton fabric with precise half-inch or quarter-inch stripes that I could use as the foundation.

I enjoyed watching the pattern unfold as I worked on this quilt, and I love these colors, which remind me of spring flowers. This quilt celebrates Spring, which after several false starts, seems finally to have come to Pittsburgh.

Interleave #4: Sine of Spring
24″x31″ machine pieced and quilted commercial batik cotton fabric

Self Portrait

Posted on April 15, 2013 by lorrie

As part of my sabbatical project, I have been continuing to contemplate ways to visualize privacy. My De-identification quilt featured digitally-printed photos de-identified by their extreme magnification and by splicing them together with other fabric. Another approach to visual de-identification is pixelation. To pixelate an image, we superimpose a grid on the image and replace each cell with a color representing the average of all the pixels in that grid cell. Although pixelation has been shown to be highly vulnerable to automated re-identification, it is a widely used method of obscuring images to make them more difficult for humans to recognize.

I have long been intrigued by the Salvador Dali paintings, Lincoln in Dalivision (1977) and Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko) (1976), which in turn were inspired by Leon Harmon’s grey photomoasic of Abraham Lincoln (1973).

Recently, Ray J released the single “I Hit it First” with a pixelated photo on the album cover. The photo was quickly recognized as a 2010 photo of bikini-clad Kim Kardashian.

Original portrait

While working on my Big Bright Pixels quilt, people kept asking me whether there was a hidden picture or message. There wasn’t. But that did get me thinking about doing a pixel quilt with a hidden image. But what image should I pixelate? I had recently used a pixelated face in the logo I designed for the Privacy Engineering masters program, and a face seemed a natural choice given that faces are commonly pixelated to protect privacy in news photos. (Other body parts are also frequently pixelated, and I love the censorship towel, but I digress.) I settled on pixelating a face, and briefly considered using a face of a famous person before deciding to use my own face. I selected a blue-haired portrait, photographed by Chuck Cranor.

Pixelated portrait

Pixelation can be done trivially with a computer using standard image processing software packages or by rolling your own. I started working on my pixelated quilt before I started programing in Processing, so I used Photoshop to pixelate a headshot of myself. The initial pixelation was nice, but I wanted something more colorful and also higher contrast so that the differences between colors would show up better when printed on fabric (digital printing on fabric tends to dull colors). I experimented with adjusting the contrast, brightness, and color settings in Photoshop until I came up with a brighter and more colorful pixelated image. This was the image I sent to Spoonflower for digital printing.

Pixelated portrait with high contrast and color manipulation

By the time the fabric arrived I had gotten busy with other quilts, and I was also a little disappointed in how the printed fabric looked, so I left the fabric sitting out on my table in the STUDIO for a while. I decided that the dulled digital print needed some more punch, so periodically I cut a fabric square to match a pixel in the fabric and pinned it in place. I cut some of these squares from translucent polyester organza, adding some vibrancy and shimmer to the pixels over which I layered them. I cut other squares from lace, commercial batiks, and printed fabrics that were more intense versions of the hues in the digital print. I ended up covering about 20% of the pixels with other fabric.

Back of quilt top with vertical lines sewed

After a few months of staring at the pixels I finally decided to sew the quilt together. I used a shortcut technique to sew the quilt together without actually cutting apart the squares in the digital print. I folded the fabric along one of the vertical lines, catching the pinned squares in the fold, and stitched along the line with a quarter-inch seam allowance. I repeated this approach to sew all the vertical lines and pressed all the seam allowances to the side. Then I folded the fabric along one of the horizontal lines and repeated this process. The end result was a pieced quilt top that appeared to have been pieced out of 130 2.25″ squares (2.75″ with seam allowances). Theoretically this approach should have resulted in precisely pieced seams; however, some of the lines are actually slightly off and the rows and columns did not come out quite as square as I had hoped they would.

Pieced quilt top

I layered the quilt top over batting and backing and used a spiral free-motion machine quilting pattern to quilt the whole thing free hand. I did the quilting in several sessions as I had time, doodling spirals until my hands got tired. I used several different thread colors to roughly match the color of the thread with the pixels I was quilting. I decided not to bind this quilt, and instead made an envelope and quilted all the way to the edge. There is a little bit of stippled hand quilting done with perl cotton surrounding my signature in the lower right corner.

So now the quilt is done and I’m pretty happy with this self portrait. Most people who have seen it do not recognize it as a self portrait, which is ok, and sort of the point. On the other hand, Golan said the blue and purple hair was a dead give away for him. I had not actually started out with the intention to make a self portrait, but ultimately I think the piece works better for me as a self portrait than any more accurate likeness would.

Self Portrait, machine pieced and quilted 23×30.75″

Computational thinking

Posted on March 15, 2013 by lorrie

I’ve been sitting in the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry for months as the only artist not using a computer to create art. I’ve deflected the numerous suggestions from the STUDIO folks to add computer power to my art by attaching my old mechanical sewing machine to a robotic arm. I also haven’t laser cut any fabric or created any Arduino-controlled blinky quilts. I still might do some of those things, but I’ve been having too much fun just spending time making quilts. The truth is also that although I am a computer science professor, computer programming is not actually a great love of mine. I can program, but I would rather supervise student programmers than do it myself.

I’ve also been doing a lot of improvisational work this year, trying to be more spontaneous in my art. Rather than pre-planning an entire quilt up front, I’ve been trying to design as I go. However, when I started working on the Interleave series I realized that some planning was going to be needed in order to develop quilts in which a third design emerges from interleaving two separate panels.

For Interleave #1 I did some paper prototyping with tape and scissors. For Interleave #3 I decided I wanted to play with creating curves from straight lines. I grabbed an image of a sine wave and pasted it into a powerpoint file and started drafting quilt designs from dozens of thin rectangular strips. Each design variation involved a tedious process. Golan Levin noticed what I was doing and suggested that I create the designs in a programming language called Processing. I mumbled something about not knowing Processing, and Golan offered to get me started. In about 10 minutes he had written a simple Processing program that drew sine waves filled with color that could be adjusted by dragging the mouse. He emailed me his code, expecting me to finish what he started.

It took me, the computer science professor, another five hours to finish what Golan, the art professor, had started. Golan is actually a much better programmer than I will ever be. But by the time I had finished I was hooked on Processing and could see the utility of writing code to produce a quilt design, even if I was ultimately going to use a traditional quilting process to make the quilt. I added lots of parameters to the program and implemented slider bars to control them — frequency, amplitude, offset, number of colors, etc. By fiddling with the slider bars I could try lots of design variants in a matter of minutes, and save copies of the designs I liked the best (annotated with the parameter values so they could be reproduced).

I started out with nice symmetrical intertwining sine waves forming footballs, slender vases, and squat snake pots where the sine waves overlap. Then I discovered new shapes that could be created by offsetting the sine waves in each panel different amounts. These asymmetrical shapes, like flames in the wind, were even more intriguing and dynamic than the snake pots. So I experimented with asymmetric design variants and eventually settled on a design to render in fabric.

Next came fabric selection. I chose nine commercial batik fabrics and one shiny woven fabric from my stash. The visual texture of the batiks provides an added dimension beyond the flat solid-color image in the computer-generated design.

The next problem was figuring out how to construct this quilt. With two previous Interleave quilts under my belt, I was starting to get a feel for what techniques are most effective. However, this is the first quilt where I attempted interleaved curves. I considered piecing two panels with sine waves and slicing them — basically the process I used for the previous two Interleave quilts, but without any curves. But curved piecing can be tricky, and it occurred to me that this quilt could be created entirely from straight lines. My approach was to cut strips of fabric a little bigger than the width of the colored bands, and a little taller than the height of the quilt. I sewed them together into two tubes with five bands each. I then created a full-scale paper template for the sine waves and used it to cut open the tubes in a stair-step sine wave pattern. Then the tubes were ready for slicing into one-inch strips and sewing to the quilt batting and backing. This time I prepared the backing with half-inch marks, carefully aligned, to make it easier to align and sew the strips. I used Fairfield Soft Touch Cotton Batting as I had in Interleave #2.

With the backing properly marked, the sewing went fairly quickly. It was exciting to watch the design emerge one row at a time.

I think the end result is quite striking. My first foray into writing code to aid my design process was successful. I don’t think I will use this approach for every quilt from now on, but I am eager to try it with some other ideas on the Interleave theme.

Interleave #3: Waveforms, 2013
24.5″x24.5″ machine pieced and quilted cotton fabric

Big Bright Pixels

Posted on March 15, 2013 by lorrie

This post is long over due. I actually finished this quilt around Thanksgiving, but I didn’t get around to sewing a hanging sleeve onto the back until a couple of weeks ago — so I couldn’t hang it up and take a photo until recently. But I got distracted with other projects, including some not-so-sabbatical-related projects. But now it is done, and photographed and posted.

I already blogged about this quilt while I was working on it, so just a brief update here. After my first blog post on this quilt, Aleecia McDonald pointed me towards Gerhard Richter’s Cologne Cathedral stained glass windows. My quilt takes a very similar approach to Richter — similar sized squares, similar colors. But besides the difference in medium (glass vs. fabric), the algorithm for selecting colors is rather different. Richter used a computer program to execute an algorithm designed to produce something that would resemble random static. My algorithm was less precise, and just executed in my head. My goal was to create something more like a color gradient with random variations. Nonetheless, these pieces strike me as rather similar. I love the scale of Richter’s windows as well as the use of glass as a medium.

So there you have it… Big Bright Pixels.

Auction Quilt

Posted on February 5, 2013 by lorrie

For the past several years I’ve donated a small quilt for the fundraising auction at the local public elementary school that my kids attend. I’ve just finished this year’s auction quilt, a small 24-inch square wall quilt called “Interleave #2: Sunset over water.” This is the second in my series of Interleave art quilts, and it seems likely there will be more. (See my last post for Interleave #1’s story.) The quilt will be auctioned off on February 16. Contact me for details if you are interested in bidding.

Interleave #1 had a lot going on, with primary-colored improv-pieced panels spliced together before being sliced into 24 pieces and sewn back together again. For Interleave #2 I made the panels out of only six pieces of fabric each, and I sliced them into only 12 pieces. But there is still a lot of texture here, as most of the fabrics I used are multi-colored commercial batiks. I cut the slices 1.5-inches wide so that they would end up 1-inch after accounting for seam allowances. In order to keep everything lined up nicely with proper spacing, I had to cut a .5-inch strip after cutting every 1.5-inch strip. These narrow strips are not actually used in the quilt, but they do make for some colorful ribbons that are too nice to throw away.

This time I used Fairfield Soft Touch Cotton Batting. I found it made the quilt-as-you-go quilting a little bit easier than the Thermore I used last time because the fibers don’t puff up as much. I also marked the ends of each row directly on the batting with a fabric marker and used my new 36″ clear plastic ruler to make it easier to keep everything lined up. Unfortunately, I made a mistake while marking that I didn’t notice until I was almost done, so gave myself a bit of an extra challenge and wondered why I had to keep correcting things that weren’t lining up. The fact that the strips were cut on the bias (and thus fairly stretchy) added to the challenge of keeping everything lined up.

This quilt is finished with some meandering free motion machine quilting in a colorful variegated thread. I debated whether or not to add the quilting to this one. I think it looked fine without it, but the quilting pulls the whole thing together nicely.

Interleave#2: Sunset over water, 24×24″ machine pieced and quilted

Winter break projects

Posted on January 5, 2013 by lorrie

In between family activities I worked on some artsy activities over winter break. My mother taught me how to crochet (but I haven’t made anything other than practice pieces), and I worked on some Spoonflower fabric for a couple of future projects (stay tuned!). I spent most of my time on a small wall quilt that involved cutting fabric into lots of small pieces, sewing those pieces together, cutting them up, and sewing them back together again.

My inspiration came from some images of quilts by Kent Williams in the January 2013 issue of American Quilter. I like the way Kent creates the illusion of shape by sewing together thin strips of fabric and I wanted to try the technique. But thin strips of fabric are hard to sew precisely. I also recently read an article in the December 2012 Quilting Arts Magazine by Ann Brauer in which she explained her quilt-as-you-go approach for making quilts out of thin strips of fabric. It occurred to me that Ann’s method might simplify the construction of the quilt I envisioned. (I’m actually not entirely sure about Kent’s method. I’ve only found tiny photos of his quilts – not enough detail to reverse engineer his process. I did observe that the short edges of his strips are all butted up against the next strip at 90 degree angles, suggesting his technique for cutting the strips is different than the one I describe below.) I worked out that with 1/4 inch seam allowances, if I cut the fabric into 1-inch strips, half of each strip would be lost to seam allowances. Thus 1-inch strips from two panels of fabric could be interleaved, allowing the designs from the two panels to be superimposed without distortion. I decided to add improvisational piecing to the mix to add an extra layer of interest to the design, and because improv piecing is fun.

This quilt was a lot of fun to make but it required some courage to keep cutting up what looked like a perfectly good composition with the expectation that when I sewed it back together according to a vision I had in my mind, the result would be even better.

The first step was to make four 26-inch single-color square panels, each improvisationally pieced from about a half-dozen fabrics. The panels were each beautiful on their own, and lovely when placed together. I hesitated to cut them up.

I did some paper prototyping to convince myself that my slicing plan was going to work, and also to experiment with some of the details. I cut up photos of the single-color panels and reassembled them into red/blue and yellow/green panels. Then I tried positioning the red/blue panel perpendicular to the yellow/green panel, and sliced them both into 24 strips. I wasn’t entirely pleased with the results – the red/blue panel didn’t show strongly because the lines separating the colors got lost between the slices (left image). I cut up another red/blue paper panel, this time rotated 90 degrees. I liked the result (center image), but now the shapes in the two panels were superimposed and didn’t interact in interesting ways. In my third attempt (right image) I shifted the red/blue strips until they created an interesting overlapping pattern (and indeed this is the effect I love in Kent Williams’ quilts).

My next challenge was figuring out exactly where to slice the single-color panels to make the red/blue and yellow/green panels. Originally I was going to slice them at somewhat random angles, but my paper prototyping convinced me that I would get better results if I selected the angles purposefully and made the panels mirror images of each other. I figured out the ratios I wanted and actually did a bit of algebra to work out exactly where to make the cuts. I did the slicing and reassembly and had four striking bi-color panels. This time I was really hesitant to slice them up again, but I sauntered on and prepared to begin cutting up two of the bi-color panels.

But before I started slicing, I needed one more prototype to test out the quilt-as-you go technique. I grabbed some scrap fabric and sliced it into one-inch strips. But what kind of batting to use? I decided I wanted a fairly light batting, and nothing fusible (lately I’ve been enjoying the convenience of Hobbs Heirloom Fusible Cotton/Poly Batting). I had some pieces of Fairfield Soft Touch Cotton Batting and Thermore Ultra Thin Polyester Batting, which both seemed like reasonable choices for the project. I cut a small sample of each and tried both. The results were fine either way. The Thermore (on the left of the above sample) resulted in a lighter weight quilt that felt less stiff than the cotton (on the right). But both looked about the same once they were inside the quilt.

I decided to use the Thermore in my quilt, mostly because I had a piece already cut that was about the right size. I cut out some backing fabric for my quilt (blue fabric with primary-colored fish that I bought years ago to make baby quilts) a little bit larger than the batting and layered the batting on top of it. I had been planning to use the edge of each previous fabric strip sewed as a guide for sewing the next strip, but my prototype revealed that would likely lead to skewed lines after a few strips. So I used a fabric pen to mark guide lines along the left and right edges of the backing fabric every half inch.

Then I setup an assembly line. I layered a red/blue panel over a yellow-green panel on my gridded cutting mat and made a one-inch slice. I then placed one fabric slice on the batting, used a straight edge to align the slice with the guide lines, and pinned it in place. For the first strip only, I did not immediately sew it, but placed the second strip in place and sewed them together. I pressed open the second strip, cut more strips, aligned the next strip, sewed, and repeated over and over again. I waited in suspense until I had sewn enough strips that the pattern started to emerge, and I could see the quilt in my mind take form in fabric. But it wasn’t until many, many hours later after all 48 strips were cut and sewn in place that I had confidence that this quilt was going to “work.”

Now, the quilt is finished and bound. Overall I’m pleased with the result. I like the interweaving images. I like the third layer of images from the improv piecing. I like the fact that it looks like you are looking through Venetian blinds. Sometimes when I look at it I think the contrast between the adjacent interleaved strips is too much and creates some visual dissonance. I would like to try this technique again with lower-contrast fabrics. I wish I had cut and sewn some of the strips straighter. Would a bigger rotary cutter, longer ruler, or different batting help? I wonder how it would look with fatter strips. What if they were cut diagonally? I’m contemplating a more purposeful placement of fabrics in the single-color panels. I’m pondering doing this with curves and with photos printed on fabric. So many ideas…. But first I have to decide what to do with the other two bi-colored panels.

Interleave #1: Venetian Lines – 23.75″x23.75″ Machine pieced and quilted cotton fabric.

Big, colorful quilt with no name

Posted on November 3, 2012 by lorrie

At the beginning of October I started a quilt project, inspired by the oh-so-colorful paintings of Loretta Grayson. I happened upon a photo of her gorgeous colorful crocheting on Facebook, and then went to her blog and finally to photos of her paintings. After a few days of being mesmerized by all that wonderful color I sorted through my fabrics and found the 40 or so brightest, most saturated, near-solid fabrics in my collection. Then I began cutting them up into piles of 4.5-inch squares. The original plan was to assemble the squares into a colorful 8×8 grid, and then superimpose some dark spirals. I started with the warm colors. Then I thought maybe I would make two 8×8 grids (one warm colors, one cool colors), cut away some shapes from one, and reverse applique it to the other. Once the two 8×8 grids were assembled, they looked quite striking sitting next to each other, taking up half my table at the STUDIO. But imagine how more striking they would look if the whole table was filled with color. So I made two more grids, and sewed them together. And then I had a 16×16, 64″ grid, and no more room on the table.

Several people have asked me how I decided which colors to put where. And why are there yellow squares and green squares off where they seem not to belong? I started with a warm quadrant and a cool quadrant. I had sorted my squares chromatically and I formed each quadrant row by row by introducing several adjacent colors into a row and then carrying them through with less frequency into the next several rows. That sounds confusing, but I had an algorithm in mind as I laid out the squares. The quadrants emerged as rough gradients, somewhat in order by hue, with some variation so as to provide more visual interest and some contrast between adjacent squares. I positioned those quadrants diagonally opposite of each other, and then constructed the remaining two quadrants to blend the warm and cool colors. But again, I wanted some contrast and I added some of those unexpected squares to help move the viewer’s eye around the quilt.

I’ve also been asked how I sewed all those squares into rows with the corners all matching up. Actually, not all the corners match up exactly, but many of them do. I do not have the patience to cut everything as exactly as I should, and I’m all for fast piecing techniques that minimize the need for pinning. I chain pieced each row of eight, first in groups of two, then sewed them into groups of four, and then finally the row of eight. The hard part was keeping the squares in order. I solved this problem by marking small numbers in the bottom right corner of each square with a ball point pen. I pressed the seam allowances all in the same direction, reversing the direction on alternating rows. Then I pinned two rows together, butting the seams together, and sewed. I added on rows until I had a quadrant. After all four quadrants were done, joining them together was just more of the same.

When you step back from the quilt, it looks large, bright, and pixelated. Was I thinking pixels when I created it? Not specifically. But I have been ruminating on some privacy-related ideas that involve pixelating faces, so maybe my subconscious was thinking about pixels. There is no hidden meaning in this one (maybe I shouldn’t tell you that, it will spoil the fun!); it is really just about color.

The STUDIO is a large room, but you can’t miss a 64″ square blast of intense, saturated color. So the quilt-in-progress started to attract attention from the various people who wandered into the room. I have had some lovely conversations with various musicians and artists who wandered by. But I was at a loss for how to quilt it. I took a photo of the quilt top, pasted it into a Powerpoint file, and auditioned various quilt patters by drawing lines over the photo. I also brought the quilt top to a Pittsburgh Fiberarts Guild meeting and asked for advice. The guild members suggested circles, swirls, anything to contrast with the regular grid. But in the end I disregarded their advice and decided to quilt straight lines. Lots of straight lines, running in every direction and in different colors. And by hand.

I do know my limits, and hand quilting little itty bitty stitches on anything larger than a handkerchief is probably not something I would have the patience to attempt. But big stitch quilting is less intimidating. I estimated I would need about 2,500 inches of quilting, which I could probably complete in 10-15 hours. So, I made plans for how to tackle this task.

But first I needed to assemble the quilt into a quilt sandwich. For a 64-inch quilt, this requires about 4 yards of fabric for the back. I hate wasting expensive fabric for the back of a wall quilt that will never be seen, so I buy clearance fabric for this purpose — the bolder and gaudier the better. My stock of backing fabric was running low so I ordered some lovely bright fabrics from Hancocks of Peducah at $3.99 a yard. It took a week or so for the fabric to arrive, and I was away for the STUDIO for much of that time anyway.

Finally back at the STUDIO I cut two 66-inch pieces of my wonderful citrus clearance fabric and sewed them together to get a wide enough piece for the quilt backing. Then I unrolled my largest piece of batting and discovered I had previously taken a big chunk out of it and now it was only about 50 inches wide. But I had just pieced the backing, so why not piece the batting as well? I dunno… never tried it, will it work? The Internet came to the rescue and I learned that piecing batting is actually pretty easy, thanks GirlReaction Crafts for a very clear photo and explanation!

Having assembled the quilt sandwich I’ve now begun quilting. Each 64-plus-inch line of stitching is taking me about 15 minutes to execute, using blue painters tape as a guide. After a few lines I switched to wider, two-inch painters tape, which was easier to lay down straight. Twelve lines in, I think this plan is going to work.

Next problem, what to call the quilt. I’m taking suggestions (if Marissa Mayer can crowd source her baby’s name, why not crowdsource naming my quilt?).

This Thing

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Category Archives: Quilts