The Design Wall Limitations

The design wall in my studio is 64" wide by 83" tall. When I show you photos of what's on it, I generally crop out the floor, and extra stuff around the design wall, like the door at left, the wall of the bookcase at the right (that's a long green cutting mat that hangs on the side of the bookcase) and the area above the design wall.

I also try to straighten the photo. This one, above, is a bit crooked. And I usually move the stepladder out of the way.

BTW, Thank you all for caring so much about my safety. I do indeed have to be very careful with the ladder. I have osteoporosis and arthritis and at my age balance is definitely an issue. It's why I am taking Tai Ji Quan, for better balance. It's not the "normal" Tai Chi. It's is designed for better balance. My Mom asked me the other day if I noticed any changes in my body seven weeks into the class.

"Well, my body hasn't changed. I haven't lost weight and I'm not any thinner, but the other day I put a sock on one foot while standing on the other, and no, I wasn't holding on to anything." Granted I was right next to the bed, but still. And it's only one foot. I can't do that quite as well on the other foot, but I'm better.) A few months ago I would never have even TRIED to balance on one foot. So the Tai Ji Quan class is working for me, although the change is gradual. But I am not going to risk anything on the ladder.

The Pastel Macnas quilt uses blocks that are 2-1/2" x 4-1/2". My design requires 30 of them in each row.

30 x 2.5" = 75”. Note my design wall is 64" wide, so I could only show 25 blocks across, like in the photo above. I needed to sew a lot of blocks together to make room for the extra five blocks to fit on the design wall.

Sewn together, those 30 blocks equal 60.5", which will fit just fine.

But trying to tinker with that many blocks while on a ladder is indeed foolhardy, which is why I have not bothered to fill the design wall with blocks. I'm working as high as I can comfortably reach while standing safely on the floor. Then I'll sew that all up and move it higher on the design wall and work below it.

In the photo above, you can see sorta how I'm working my way along. I've also been working to sew blocks together so I can have enough empty space on the right side to continue to add those five extra blocks to the design.

Is this ideal? Hell no. But needs must.

The size of the blocks definitely makes a difference. In the Dancing Jewels quilt, above, the top row of blocks is eight inches tall, most of the blocks are six inches wide and there are only 10 blocks in each row.

There are tricks. You might be able to see a thin sliver of silver on the green cutting mat in the photos above. That's a thin 24" long metal ruler that hangs on the same nail the long mat hangs on. If I want to remove a high block from the design wall, I just grab the ruler and slide it under the block. This disturbs the surface tension and the block loosens from the wall and flutters down to my feet. (It would be nice if I could catch them, but no such luck.) 

I also know better than to go anywhere near the stepladder when I'm tired.

Finally, Nancy: I used to be a 2D artist and I worked on paper. That means I'd put hundreds of hours into a piece of art on paper, (see the first photo in this post. )so I long ago learned to keep foods or liquids of any kind FAR AWAY from what I was working on. My cup of hot chocolate NEVER sits on my sewing, cutting, or ironing tables. I don't eat in my studio either. Snacking is also forbidden. In fact, I make sure to wash my hands BEFORE I got into the studio and get to work.

 

Pastel Macnas

 I'm less than five feet tall and have to be very careful not to fall, so designing the top of this quilt on the design wall means I'd have to use a stepladder, and that isn't a very good thing for me.

I decided to sew the top part of what I have together, then I can lower it to a comfortable height on the design wall and then I can add the  2 rows above what is shown in the photo. Since my design wall is a bit too narrow for 30 2-1/2" blocks so I decided to sew the leftmost blocks together. This will allow me to shift everything over and add the extra blocks to the right.

The Next Thing

 

I finished sewing the jewel-toned Macnas quilt together. Here it is draped over my ironing table. You can better see the fabrics and colors. A random arrangement of fabrics works well many times, but this regular arrangement has a rhythm that I like very much.

Instead of ironing the backing fabric that needs it, I went into the studio yesterday morning with my hot chocolate and looked around, wondering what to do next.

I've got a lot of fabric in the big scrap bins and I've been working my way through that, but working on the jewel toned Macnas quilt had me searching through my stash, and I discovered a lot of older stuff hidden in there.

WHAT IF... I wondered, I used all the small pieces of forgotten stuff in the stash?

So I put my hot chocolate down, (mind you I was still in my nightgown), and looked through the stash. I found several smallish pieces of a lot of light colors - pastels, really.

Something else jiggled in my brain, and I went over to where I have stacks of Macnas-sized blocks resting on trays. I brought them over to the worktable and sorted through them. I had A LOT of pastel fabrics I didn't even need to cut.

I could get started RIGHT AWAY. 

I got out the laser level and set up plumb lines and cross lines on the design wall, putting random Macnas blocks on the wall the to establish a basic grid. The plumb lines help me to line up the blocks so the design  looks more or less straight and keeps the design from going out of whack. The plumb lines are nothing more than crochet cotton tied to a push pin at the top of the design wall, and with something heavy tied to the bottom. Sometimes it's a bulldog clip with a bunch of old business cards, but anything heavy-ish will work.

It quickly became clear that this new quilt was not going to take long. I knew I wanted something low-volume, pastel, spring-ish colors. I also knew I wanted to arrange the blocks randomly, and not pair them up first.

Excited, I picked up my now empty mug and headed toward the kitchen, where I had breakfast, and then to the bedroom where I got dressed and made the bed. (A shower would come after I got home from Swim class.)

I know from experience that I need 540 pieces to make a quilt 60" x 72" and that when I cut I can get a whole lot more really quickly, so I sorted through those pieces and made a stack. Then I went through the stash and found the smaller pieces of pastels and cut some blocks. It was quickly apparent that I had enough blocks to get started, so I put blocks on the wall, and then I'd cut more.

Quite frankly, these photos look terrible. It's dark, and I have every light in the studio pointed at the design wall, and the sun is out, so you have to believe me. It is not this dark, or dull, or unexciting.

This is not going to take long.

Piece by Piece

 

I've been sewing the blocks of the Jewel toned Macnas quilt together the old fashioned way. In the photo above all the blocks are sewn together into rows and except for the bottom two, the rows are sewn together in pairs, so all, (you know, that pesky "all") I have to do is sew those together and the flimsy will be complete. This one may or may not have a home yet. I haven't quite decided. 

This is the backing fabric I have chosen for the Yellow Macnas quilt,

 and this is the one I have chosen for my nephew's quilt, Dancing Jewels. Both are quilt backings, so quite large pieces. I have to iron them and get them organized. 

This past weekend my local art museum, The Currier Museum, had a show where garden groups from throughout the state were invited to do floral arrangements based on artwork in the museum. This is one of my favorite pieces in the museum, and you can see the floral arrangement beside it. I am always interested in how artists get inspired, so this was a great show to see. I was fortunate enough to be there when the floral designers themselves were available to discuss their thought processes that led to their creations.

Decisions, Decisions

 

I shifted some of the blues, all three of the reds and two of the purples. I was happy with this.

Then I tried to zig zag the design, but I got to this point and decided it didn't bring anything at all to the party, so I put the blocks back.

Again, there's nothing wrong with the zi-zag, it just didn't ring any bells for me.

So now I'll be sewing this together.

I meant to show this photo the other day, but apparently I forgot. These are most of the fabrics in the quilt. (I see I accidentally chopped off the fabric I paired with the blue at the far right. Sorry about that.)

More More More

 

As you can see I've been making blocks and adding them to the design wall. 

There is one teeny tiny problem.

The design wall is just a bit too narrow for all the blocks to fit. You can see some of them hanging off the edge in the photo above. (They are at the far right.)

The bookcase that stores my fabric stash is right next to my design wall, but the bookcase leans forward a bit, and there is a space behind it. You can see it in the photo above - it's the dark area above and below the watermark in the photo. In theory this is not a problem, but I have had some blocks fall off the wall and slip BEHIND the bookcase, which is the equivalent of disappearing into the Pit Of Doom. Since I have a finite number of blocks and have used up every last inch of some of the fabrics, I could not afford to lose even a single block, so rather than work from the center to the right, and risk losing blocks into the POD, I went back to the far left of the quilt and worked from the left edge to the middle. Once the blocks pairs are sewn up, there will be space on the wall for the pieces to adhere and not hang off into space and be at risk of falling into the POD.

Because the pattern shifts half a block over, some of the block pairs are split up, with the dark part of the block sewn at the far right edge of the quilt, and the corresponding light part will be a the beginning of the next row. (This pattern LOOKS easy, but that's deceptive.)

I have sewn all the blocks together.  Don't get excited. I still have tinkering to do.

Growing

 

The quilt will be 60" x 72" which means eighteen rows of fifteen blocks across. So the pattern of Black-Red-Violet-Blue-Green will get repeated three times in each row. So I need 3 different prints of each color, and eighteen different lights or creams to make up each dark/light pair.

Like these.

I couldn't use scraps because I needed eighteen 2-1/2" x 4-1/2" blocks of each of 32 fabrics, so I had to use fabrics from stash. (Oh gee darn.)

I had already made some pairs and had them up on the design wall, but I wanted to know the colors and fabrics would look okay before I invested all the time in sewing up the blocks. I had already determined each pair combo had to be unique and I had had to unstitch a dozen or so blocks and I wasn't eager to have to do that again.

Once I chose my fabrics and the lights, I cut out all the pieces and then matched one pair of each color combination and lay them across the top of the design wall in the order I thought I wanted them.

That was OK, but it's time consuming to get up and down off the ladder to arrange blocks at the top of the quilt. so I arranged the cut pieces on the design where I could reach them. I set out three rows because I thought that would give me a good idea of what the design would look like.

I already knew I didn't like the way the red blocks in the long diagonal row above attracted too much attention, but I figured once I had the blocks made and the design wall covered it would be an easy enough fix to swap one red for another.

Satisfied, I cut all the pieces I needed from each fabric, and stacked them up, ready for a session of power sewing.

Stay tuned!

Oh and, yes Cherie, I might make these do some zigging and zagging, but that's another thing that's easier to do once the blocks are made.

This needs a name. Any suggestions?

Regular Rows

 I've been working on the Jewel toned Macnas quilt. The colors I am using are Red, Violet, Blue and Green. I added the Red because otherwise it would have been too dark. The Green is at the far right and it's pretty dark in the photo, but not quite as dark in real life.

I am also adding some brights on black fabric, as you can see at the left.

The pattern of colors has been established, Black, Red, Violet, Blue, Green, Black, Red, Violet, Blue, Green, etc. You can see one very bright busy light print. I shall have other bright colors on white prints in the quilt, so this won't be the only one. Also, there is no guarantee that this will be the exact arrangement of fabrics. Things may will shift.

Home Work

 We've all been there. When the house gets just a little bit messier than you can stand and you have to stop everything and clean it all up so that's what I focused on last week. 

I cleaned up the various places in the house where stuff had piled up. I tamed the paper tiger in the office and did all the shredding. I got all the paperwork together to get my taxes done, and I actually dusted all the rooms in the house!

That and I did my taxes.

After that was done, I decided to review an idea for a quilt I had that didn't work. Back in December I was making a Macnas quilt using Jewel-toned colors and grays. It just didn't work. You can see that here.

I wanted to see if I could incorporate some of those jewel-gray pairs with some of the other jewel toned blocks I had cut with some white and neutral lights. I thought it would be fun if I could arrange the blocks like the Blitzen quilt. 

I put some of the gray pairs on the wall with some the jewel toned blocks and some of the lights I had already cut. The result was underwhelming, as you can see above. I had hoped that diagonal rows of colors would work with different fabrics, but it didn't. I knew I would have to make the diagonal rows of blocks in the same fabric to get what I wanted.

In order to make the blocks the way I had wanted, I had had to take apart some of the blocks I had made previously.

Here I have removed the pieces that weren't working and I have made three diagonal rows of blocks - purple, blue and green. The photo is dark, but the idea works and I will carry on with it.

Dancing Jewels is a Flimsy

 

The Dancing Jewels quilt is now a flimsy. I am really happy with it. It's 65" x 83."

Now that the flimsy is all sewn, all the blocks fit on the design wall and you can see how the blocks play together. I really like that interplay.

Assembling Dancing Jewels

 

I've started ro assemble the blocks for the Dancing Jewels quilt. As you can see I'm pressing the seams open.

I've sewn the blocks together into half rows, because I think the longer full rows get unwieldy to work with.

As I was placing the rows on the design wall I noticed I had two edge blocks with the same fabric. Can't have that, so I removed the duplicate block.

I made a new block and put it back where it belonged.

In the photo above, the entire left side of the quilt is sewn together, and I am working on the blocks on the right side. What's nice is you can begin to see how the larger blocks on the perimeter of the quilt flow together into a really interesting pattern.  It's also nice to see it with all the blocks flat on the design wall.

The more I work on this quilt the more I like it. I've chosen a pretty terrific fabric for the backing and that's on order.

Dancing Jewels Tinkering

 

Sometimes you (well, I) make a quilt and I put blocks up on the wall and I can already tell that no matter how I arrange the blocks the quilt is going to look good. I do tinker because if I put the blocks up in an orderly fashion, then sometimes I have blocks made with the same fabrics together in one area of the quilt and I really want them distributed throughout.

So after not a lot of tinkering I had this, above, and while I liked the arrangement of the colors and fabrics, I really wanted to make the shapes "dance," so I went back and rotated many blocks.

Here is the result, and I have decided I will sew this together. 

I did not want it to be "perfect." I did not want to make the secondary shapes blend into each fabric gradually. Sometimes there is a break. This is because  I had fabrics of different values and I wanted to spread them all around. I didn't want the quilt to look forced or overworked. Part of the charm of this whole curved seam thing is that the blocks are unique and unexpected, and if you're headed down that road, you have to keep going. I wasn't going to make unique and unusual blocks and then arrange them in a traditional manner.

I make a lot of quilts with geometric shapes. It's one of the things I like best about quilts. I love the surface design, the narrow "picture space." What I mean by that is if you look at a landscape painting, you might see a foreground, a middle ground and a background. Lots of space between near and far. A narrow picture space means the design is basically two-dimensional and is "flat." This quilt is like that. 

The blue Macnas quilt also is made from essentially two colors and one alternating shape, but it doesn't feel like the purple and orange quilt. The quilts are about the same size, but you don't have a sense of a flattened picture space in the blue one. It feels like you have more space to breathe. 

I think the difference is the value. There is a big difference between white and dark blue, but a much smaller range of values between the oranges and the purples. So the purple and orange quilt seems very much "in your face."

Pretty interesting, huh?

Anyway, I love the sass and the verve of the Dancing Jewels quilt. It isn't at all what I thought it was going to be when I started, and I wasn't at all sure it was going to work, but everybody who sees pictures of it responds instantly with at "WOW" or "I love it."

Works for me.

Coincidentally, today is the Nephew's birthday!

Dancing Jewels

 I finished sewing the blocks for the purple and orange quilt, now known as DANCING JEWELS. I am very excited about this and like it very much. Now the real work begins of tinkering with this to make it better.

I love the way the shapes transform into oddly shaped diamonds. I love the way they get fatter, and then skinnier and shift from one side to the other.

Here are some details so you can see how the various fabrics play together.

I have yet to make any decisions about how I arrange the blocks.

Oddly enough, I'm not sure it will make much difference whether I tinker with this or not. We'll see, but what I love about this is the way it doesn't do anything like you think it ought to.

Get Out! See Art!

This is not a quilt. It's a painting.

This is a very close up so you can see the paint. Sometimes it's flat, sometimes it's like a blob of paint. In fact, near the (C) of the watermark, there is a small piece of mirror. When you walk past the painting, the light hits the mirrors and reflects back at you and the piece looks like it's twinkling. Truly astonishing.

Here's another by the same artist.

These were at a show called "Embellish Me" at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester NH. The pieces are part of the Pattern & Design Movement of the 1970's. I never knew that was a thing.

This was one of eight large paintings by Wendy Edwards, a New England artist, that was also on display. I love the colors in this and the colors certainly inspire me to use them in a quilt somehow.

I'm always telling people to go visit their local Art Museum, or any Art Museum in their area. There's always something very interesting to see. There were new works that have just been added to the Currier's collection that I loved, and pieces on loan from other museums I had never seen before. I was really glad I went, and I always find something exciting.

I love the way this gallery displays ceramic pieces against the window, with the neighboring buildings in the background. The juxtaposition was wonderful and very thought provoking.

So take this opportunity to get out and see Art. Don't worry about what's on exhibit, just go and walk around, look at stuff and see what strikes your fancy.