More DGD Black White Red

 
I was eager to see the fabric combinations I had planned made up into blocks. So I made one of each. I have plans to make four each of these color combinations, but I wanted to see the blocks next to each other. These are the three combinations in the last photo from yesterday's post.

These are some darker blocks I had planned to make.

I always tell my students not to get too hung up in sorting, organizing or shopping for fabrics by category. I think making categories is a bad idea because things could get "stuck" there. I found this fabric above in the Christmas section of my local LQS. The Christmas section is often a great place to look if you want reds or greens, but often you have to hunt through the store to find it. XOXO! I mean Hello! Do you not think this is a perfect fabric to include in a quilt for someone you love?

(Incidentally ALL fabric in my stash is sorted by COLOR and COLOR only.)

I needed more red blocks, so this is what I selected when I was planning all this the other night.

But then I remembered I have a big bin full of black and white scraps. Very often fabrics in this bin wasn't of sufficient quantity to make the outer edge of the blocks, but it was a perfect place to find fabrics for the centers or even the middle section.

The XOXO red became this, which I like very much...

But I found a better option for the center of this red block. I bought and used that black and white cat fabric back in 2017...? 

You may have noticed a preponderance of cat fabrics in this quilt.

Because, like, duh!

Granddaughter Black White & Red

 

I mentioned briefly that my darling granddaughter (DGD) wants me to make her a quilt that is black, white and red. I kinda sorta knew where I was going with it, but that idea didn't thrill me so I got out my quilt books and started browsing. The quilt above is SLICED, which I made way back in 2013, from Amy Ellis's Book, Modern Neutrals. We all know how much I love neutrals (NOT!) so naturally I did some tinkering. I liked this quilt back then and I thought it would be suitable as a Black, White and Red quilt for my DGD, so I sent her a picture. (Remember she lives on the other side of the country.)

My son said she loved the design. I had another question. More BLACK than Red or more RED than Black?

The answer was MORE BLACK! 

Well all righty then. Not quite what I was expecting from an almost ten year old girl. When I told Julie she asked, "Does she know black fades fastest of all colors?"

"No, of course not," I replied, "However, you and I both have one person in our lives for whom we would do anything. I'm her grandmother, and I'll pretty much do anything she wants."

Besides, this is the quilt that is going to hide under the blankets during the day, or at least that's the theory.

I did, however, extract some concessions from DGD. I could use black and white fabrics, which she likes, and the blacks could have bright colors on them. With those two concessions I knew I was in business.  No problem. I can do that. Now that the work on the floors is all done and I have put the house back to rights, I can get into the studio and get to work. I made a couple of test blocks and then went through the stash to make combinations I thought would work. You can see some of them above.

Of course I started working before I figured out how many of each block I needed, but I wanted to see if what I had in my head would work in real life before I got too committed. But once I had these blocks on the design wall I knew I was good to go.

I did get my notebook out and I did the math. The amounts on the page above are wrong. I need 20 Red, but only 10 of the Dark "L" blocks, and I need 30 of the blocks with the dark center and Light "L."

Here are the fabrics for those ten dark L blocks. I will be making four blocks from each combination. It's always good to have a few extra.

This is to give you an idea of where this is going.

Living Room Before and After

 

This is the before photo of my living room the night before the installers came to replace the floor.

This is  an in-process photo.

This is the after. I really like the new floor and I'm very happy with it.

Here's the Silver and Pink quilt along with the backing fabric I have chosen for it.

The Blackest Black

 Black is a hard color to dye because there is no single "source" for it. Most black is a mixture of  several other dye colors, and manufacturers have to use a LOT of it to make black fabric BLACK.

So it wasn't really a surprise last week when the color catchers that came out of the wash with the black fabrics I bought were this dark (and actually they are DARKER in real life).

Now, I should tell you that I wash EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF FABRIC before I even bring it into my studio. I never used to use Color catchers when I washed new fabrics because I (erroneously) thought that washing the fabric would remove ALL the excess dye. I was mistaken, so now whenever I buy fabric I always include color catches in the wash cycle.

Since I bought these black fabrics to use in a Black, White and Red quilt for my granddaughter, I knew the blacks would bleed into the other fabrics after the quilt was complete. I didn't want that, so I decided to soak the black fabrics in detergent using Vickie Welsh's instructions, here. 

Doing the red fabrics last week showed me the faucet in the bathtub leaked, and while it was only a drip drip drip, that was enough to almost fill the tub to overflowing if I let something soak all night. (Can you say, saved by the skin of my teeth?)

So when I needed to soak the black fabrics I used one of the large plastic storage bins I have. As you can see from the photo above, taken over twelve hours later, the fabric really needed it, and a lot of black dye was released.

This is what it looked like when I drained the tub.

This is what the color catchers looked like after I washed the black fabrics again. You can see they are lighter than the light gray fabric from the pink and silver quilt and just a bit darker than the white bath towel visible in the background.

I've since ironed all the fabrics and will be ready to start on my granddaughter's quilt early next week. The guys are going to be here for the next two days replacing the carpet in my living room with Laminated Vinyl Flooring, so my house is going to be in disarray for a few days.

I have one big long seam to sew to finish the Pink and Silver quilt top. That and getting the backing ready for it will happen while the guys are working on the floor. (I'll be taking refuge in the studio.)

Red Again

 

My granddaughter has asked me to make her a black, red and white quilt. I'm pretty sure I know where I am going with it, so I ordered some fabric, because a basic black red and white quilt isn't very interesting. I want to make her quilt fun so I ordered some fabrics. Since the Big Red quilt bled I've been very careful in choosing dark fabrics, particularly for backings of my quilts.

But my DGD wanted RED and RED was what I wanted to give her. So when the fabrics arrived the other day, I ran them through the wash, as I always do. The color catchers that came out were the ones on the upper left in the photo above.

I ran them all through the washer AGAIN, and the color catchers came out are on the upper right of the photo. But I wasn't worried. I knew that I would soak the fabrics the way Vicki Welsh recommends in her "Save my bleeding quilt" post.

So I did that and let the fabrics soak for a full twelve hours 

The color catchers that came out after I ran the fabrics through the wash were the ones at the bottom of the top picture. Actually, the photo is very deceiving. The color catches were almost white.

When I washed the BLACK fabrics, the color catchers were quite dark, so I plan to give them the good soak as well. It will take a day or two or three before I get to that because the guys will be at my house this week to finish the small things in the bathroom and office and I have decided to have the rug in my living room removed and have LVF installed there too. 

I'm still working on the silver and pink quilt, and hope to have that top done this week. 

Machine is Smoking!!

 

My Mother called me the other morning about 10:30 AM. She asked what I was doing. "Sewing on the Pink and Silver Quilt," I told her. "Wow Lynne, 10:30 in the morning and you're already sewing!"

I didn't have heart to tell her I'd been sewing since 8 AM. I was awake, I got up and went directly into the studio (in my nightgown.) When I'm "deep into" a quilt, that's what happens.

Because of the layout of this quilt, there are at least nine blocks that end up in the quilt that cannot fit on the design wall. When I took the photo above, I was working on those extra blocks on the right side.

About forty minutes later I had finished that section on the upper right and was getting ready to work on the section just below.  That didn't take all that long. I did that and then stopped for lunch. After lunch I sewed the big sections together. There were about five or six of them.

Here is that big section all sewn together. I think it's about 74 or so inches wide. It's wider than I normally like, but the design wanted to be that size and I have long known that "what the quilt wants, the quilt should get."

After that I sat down on the porch to read. I read until I finished "The Art of a Lie" by Laura Shepherd-Robinson and DAMN it was good. I did NOT see the ending coming. To say I recommend it is an understatement. Go get / borrow this book and read it! The characters got so much under my skin that when I went to bed the night before I couldn't stop thinking about them, and worrying about them. I can't remember the last time that happened.

PS, when I sent photos of the day's work to my friend Susan, she texted back... "Lynne, you're on fire! Your machine is SMOKING!" 

Ergo the title of this post.

Knowing When It's Time to Stop (for the day)

 

I started sewing this together on Saturday, but didn't get much done. Sunday morning I got up and went right into the studio after breakfast and worked till noon. Then I had lunch and went back. I completed the big area outlined in red in the center. 

After a break of dealing with the bills, I went back into the studio and worked on the area at the top in the center. I wanted to finish that whole section before I stopped for the day but about 4:30 I took a bathroom break and realized my shoulders were hurting. I went back into the studio and looked at it. Nope. I was tired. The last thing I need is to fall off the ladder and hurt myself.

At my age I have to listen to my body. It was time to stop. I put my tools away, turned off the lights and went into the living room to read.

Since I cannot get the entire design up on the design wall I can't sew it together using the webbing technique. Which is fine with me as I have a love/hate relationship with it anyway. So I have been sewing it together the old fashioned way. A pair of blocks at a time. Which is still problematic because the design shifts. When I was working on the center section on Saturday I had to unsew pairs of blocks FIVE different times because I kept sewing the pieces together wrong. That was when I knew it was time to stop that day. (I made a visit to my local art museum instead.)

The next day I moved blocks from the top of the design to my ironing table and worked on one section at a time. This is the section at the upper left.

By the end of Monday I had this. The top left part is in two big chunks. The top right needs six more columns to the right. The blank area is what I am working on now. I am really happy with it.

Office Upgrade

I was interested last week when Gail asked if I would rearrange the studio into a different configuration. I did not, as I was happy with the layout I had been working with for the last eleven years. If something isn't working, I don't just put up with it, I figure out WHY it isn't working and set about fixing it. I wrote about this more than once, but you can read that whole story here.

Over the years I have figured out that I hate stopping in the middle of sewing to wind a bobbin, so I wind 20 bobbins at a time, so it's just faster. I've arranged my tools so I don't have to reach far to get anything and I have duplicates of the tools I use the most often so if I drop a seam ripper and can't find it, I don't have to tear the room apart looking. (That's another story you can read here.)

I have a "thing" about rulers. I love them. I love them as objects. I have some very pretty very specialized rulers that I don't USE at all, but I keep them because I like them. Everybody has something like this. (For my son it's flashlights.)

But I digress.

When I worked as a professional picture framer I got good at LOOKING at something and estimating the dimension of it.  It's a handy skill to have, but sometimes if I'm rummaging around the scrap bins or through the stash I want to know EXACTLY how big something is, I have to go across the room to where the rulers hang on the wall. (Read: Waste of time and steps.)

This is not very efficient. In the "old" studio I had a stick-on measuring tape that I applied to the end of my sewing table. Problem was the print wore off so it stopped being useful. I took advantage of the studio's downtime to remove the cutting mats from my worktables and reattach them with double sided tape (they were coming unstuck and stuff was getting caught on the loose edges.)

While at the hardware store to buy paint for the long shelf, I stopped at the tool section and asked if there were any stick on measuring tapes. Answer = No. The gal with the orange apron suggested I use a regular tape measure and stick that to the table. 

That was kind of a good idea, but those tapes have metal ends and would not have lain flat on the table. I thought some more about it and it occurred to me that the easiest thing to do was to simply attach a normal 24" long metal ruler to the end of my table with double sided tape, so that is what I did. Easy peasy, lemon squeezey and any time I need to measure something quickly I can just lean over and use that ruler.

I arranged it the way I did because I did NOT need the dimensions in 1/16ths. 

Yup. That works!

Silver and Pink Getting Bigger

 

I'm really happy with this, I added another "ring" and started filling in the corners.

While I knew what the layout would look like, I needed to know how much fabric to cut, especially because I knew there was at least one fabric that might run short. So I created this - which represents one quarter of the quilt.

I had an extremely limited amount of the darkest fabric, and after cutting all the strips I could, I realized I might be a bit short, so I gathered all the scraps I had and then sewed them together and cut blocks out of the leftover bits. I shall have enough - by the skin of my teeth.

Had I NOT had enough fabric, I would have had to select another fabric. Oh. Gee. Darn. Wouldn't have been the worst thing on the planet.

I kept filling in the edges, but realized I was happy enough with the layout that I could start sewing blocks together. so I started in the middle.

This is all the blocks that fit on my design wall, but not all the blocks the quilt requires. There are about three more vertical rows on each side. When the quilt is all sewn together it will fit on the design wall, but you'll just have to wait for that.

Silver & Pink, Working it Out

 

After I removed the dark gray, I felt I needed a lighter pink, so I cut a pink Charley Harper fabric with brown birds in it. Then I put them up on the design wall, swapping their positions with the pink blender. Now the gradation from light to dark pink was interrupted, but I liked it better.

Next I shifted the position of the lightest gray. Now instead of at one end of a light to dark run, I placed it in the middle of the other two darker grays. This was better.

BETTER, not great! Still a lot of work to do yet.

I had only a small amount of this gray batik. I did not have enough of it to use it the way I would have wanted to, so it had to go.

Similarly, this Ghastlies print, though I love it very much and has all the colors I want to use, had to go because if I cut it into small rectangles, the fabric wouldn't appear cohesive from block to block, so it had to go too.

Rummaging through my stash I found this, which kinda sorta worked.

I also added a very pale pink.

I was getting closer, but it wasn't quite there. I needed a dark pink. "Well, Lynne, " I thought to myself, "you know full well pink is nothing more than a light red violet, so if you need a dark pink, you're going to have to go into your violet pile and find something that will work."

To my violet pile I went.

I chose the fabric on the right to be the darkest "pink." The fabric on the left is the same value as the darker pink I had in the design before, but the print on this fabric made it more interesting.

So I made those changes and lo and behold, the design was getting better. 

During the day I had been texting Julie, and she did not like the Tula Pink Flamingo pink fabric. I was on the fence about it, as well, so back to the stash I went.

...by the way, you know the world is laughing at you when you realize the shoes you are wearing are pretty much the colors of the project you are working on....

I found a pink fabric with tulips and other flowers, pinks but also some yellows and greens. As soon as I put it up on the design wall I knew it was a keeper.

Yes, this is definitely headed where I want to go.

I filled in the areas around the edges and am happier with this by the minute.

These are the eight fabrics I have on the design wall now. Three of them are ones I started with.