Hello all, long time no see. I’ve been busy lately, as I bet many of you have as well, with holiday plans. I’ve also been down in Belize seeing the new house for the first time (yeah!) and up here preparing for the move.

In between I’ve started gathering up the material for the quilt for my great-great aunt Norma Hodgman Clifford, my maternal grandfather’s sister. The pattern I’ve chosen for Norma is a Contained Crazy quilt. I find this is the perfect metaphor for my life at the moment: “chaos within bounds”.

As luck would have it my mother just finished a contained crazy quilt for my sister that she had started years ago but never quite finished:

My mother finished off the last few squares, added the filler and backed it, in time for my sisters birthday around the Thanksgiving Holiday. It is roughly queen sized with a border and a solid back.

The idea of a contained crazy quilt is crazy piecing within even squares that are joined together with traditional scrap quilting techniques. This is how I am planning Norma’s quilt: 9 8″ x 8″ squares with a 2″ border. I am gathering up all of the scrap from the prior quilts and will piece them together in more or less random pieces.

My aunt Norma was an Artist. She painted primarily with watercolors. She was the first person to tell me about the Portland School of Fine Art (as it was then called, it has since changed it’s name to Maine College of Art or MECA). At her coaxing I even went down on an exploratory trip with my grandparents when I was in high school and considering colleges but at the time becoming an artist was paramount to becoming a fairy princess so I chose the far more practical path of Anthropology instead.

Norma unfortunately had the terrible habit that far too many watercolorists of her day shared of putting their water color brushes in their mouths to get them to a fine point. She unfortunately died of cancer. I’m not sure if this habit contributed to her death – many paint pigments while beautiful are made from fairly toxic compounds – Norma’s favorite color was cobalt blue I believe. The book I am using for her is Monona Rossol’s “The Artist’s Complete Health and Safety Guide” (though I think I will photocopy sections so I can save my copy!) I am also planning to cut up some of my old watercolor sketches to add in (I too am a recovering watercolorist).