Right Facing Birds

 I received some right facing birds from Janet and Liz,

This is from Liz, who made this bird in a class I taught way back in 2018.

This is from Janet.

Another bird from Janet.

I am always interested to see what other quilters do with my birds. I am not sure I would have used a solid black breast for this last bird, but it looks fabulous!

I've got a few mored birds flying towards my house. I'll get to work on that bird quilt just as soon as I finish assembling the Spring Fling quilt.

Later this week I'll share some photos from the bird class at NightOwl Quilt Studio.

If you want to make your own birds, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

Oh Dear!

 

There's more to life than sewing. For me, one of those things is cooking, and baking. The empty spot on my counter is where my stand mixer lived. I was kneading bread dough in it the other day and suddenly it started shrieking, then stopped.

Fortunately the dough was ready, so no harm done there. But OH! I used my mixer VERY often, which is why I gave it a place of honor on my kitchen countertop. That and the fact that it was so heavy it was just easier to leave it out all the time.

After a bit of troubleshooting, I did a bit of research. Turns out I bought the mixer 33 years ago. Yup. Thirty-three years. I probably used it once a week. I've been using it to make bread once a week since Christmas, since Julie bought me the King Arthur Baking Company's Big Book of Bread.

I've been baking bread not only for myself, by also for my Mom and Mike. The loaf, above is a Semolina Sesame bread from that cookbook. Absolutely divine. I make a loaf for them every week.

So then I went shopping.  The new mixer (still a Kitchen Aid) arrived a couple of days later,* 

and was in use not twenty minutes after it was delivered. I made my Chocolate Pecan biscotti (You can get the recipe here.)

*Bet you can tell why I got the lovely blue one!

OH! Once Mom and Mike found out my mixer died, they gave me $100 toward the new one! How kind!

All Blocks Sewn

Here are all the blocks that fit on the design wall.

Here are the ones that belong in the far right column.

Here are the blocks laid out on the floor. And I have an answer. It's worse to work on the floor than on a design wall.

Now I have to sew all these together.

 

Bird Class at Night Owl Quilt Studio Today!

 

I'm teaching a class on my birds at the Night Owl Quilting Studio in Amherst NH today. We're going to have a lot of fun.

If you want to make birds, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

More Sewing

 

I'm sewing the blocks together. I do them in groups. 

Numbering the columns is what you do when you web a quilt together.

These are the blocks that form the right-most column of blocks that won't fit on the design wall.

Sewing, Finally!

Before I can sew anything together I have to finalize the placement of the component blocks.

I've decided to web the pieces of each block together.

It's a fairly quick, no-pin process.

I work in groups. Makes it easier for me. Then I"ll press them and sew them crosswise. You can do an internet search for webbing a quilt top together. I am using that technique to sew my blocks together.

So, one thing at a time!

Since the design wall is not wide enough to accommodate all five of the blocks, so I will have to set those aside. The blue one separate from the others is the block that should be at the top right of the quilt.

And Lynne Changes Her Mind...

 

I know I thought a quilt 80 x 96 (or whatever) inches was too big but I then I thought about having leftover blocks and that really annoyed me, so I decided to take the blocks off the design wall and see what it would look like if I made the 4 x 4 block and how the transitions would work.

While Dot (who commented the other day) isn't quite sure of this, I going to go with it. I have been moving some of the colors around so the transitions will be more pleasing (remember: limited fabric options and I AM NOT CUTTING MORE FABRIC, NOR AM I SHOPPING FOR ANY.)

I'm not sure which is more uncomfortable. Working on the stepladder or working on the floor.

At least I have finally determined the arrangement of the colors.

So it is time to start sewing.

Spring Fling Design is set!

Here are all the colors on the design wall. As you can see the design wall is still too small to show all the parts of the blocks on the far right. This is enough to see the color arrangement. As you all likely know, things look different in real life from the way they do in the camera. I will be doing some shifting around.

In this photo the 3x3 blocks are shown all together, which emphasizes the "separate-ness" of each block. I wanted to show you what this looks like so you can really see the effect of what shifting one small block does to the design.

Here is the final design. One component block of each set is bumped out into an adjacent block which allows the zigzag to appear continuous. 

The transitions from green to blue, blue to violet, violet to pink and pink to orange work best. The green to yellow doesn't work as well because of the value difference between the green and yellow. My next task is to see if I can shift the colors around to make those transitions more effective or at least minimize the contrast between them. I can't make the transition invisible because of the difference in the value of the two colors.

I may need to break one or two of my internal rules about this quilt.

Oh. Gee. Darn.

 

Digging Thru the Stash

 

I found some yellows. 

And here is a result of the stash search for more dark/light pairs of Green, Blue, Violet, Pink and Orange. (I'm not quite sure about that light for the pink, but we'll see once it's on the design wall.) 

Just filling in the blanks here, but the placement will surely change. At any rate, I have found my way into this quilt, which I will call Spring Fling.

(oops, This post should have preceded yesterday's)

Win Some, Lose Some

Making the blocks for this quilt is really time consuming and it isn't my favorite thing to do.

After I make the individual pieces for the block I put them up on the design wall where I have a space, but generally I decide to shift it to another spot. Oh what fun. In the photo above, the new pink pair directly below the watermark is too pale, and I'll have to replace it. (sigh)

Gotta do what you gotta do. Still though, I'm liking where this is going.

Birds Fly In!

Mari sent me this bird for the student bird quilt. I so love seeing what quilters do with my birds.

Julie S sent this one.

I've got a couple more on the way,  but I could use another three or four, so if you're interested, please let me know. Also, email me so I can send you my mailing address. 

If you want to make your own birds, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download and you can make them out of scraps. It's a lot of fun.

I'm teaching the birds at Night Owl Quilt Studio in Amherst NH on Friday April 17. Alas, the class is full, but email the shop if you are interested in attending a future session.

Size Matters

IF I inserted yellow blocks between the green and the orange, I'd have to shift things around, so here I did that, leaving space for the yellow blocks to go. (I still had to find yellow fabrics for those blocks, but let's leave that aside for the moment...)
 

The rail fence blocks I've been making from Sujata Shah's book, Cultural Fusion Quilts, (which is a really good book, by the way, and it's still in print, so go get one...) Anyway, the finished blocks measure sixteen inches square. A quilt four blocks by five is 64" x 80".  But for the design to work best, the quilt would have to be FIVE blocks by SIX. I'd need to make FIVE yellow blocks, and one extra block each of PINK, ORANGE, BLUE, PURPLE AND GREEN. That equals 30 blocks in total.

DETOUR AHEAD!

Now you may have noticed that in the previous posts I had four pairs each of Blue, Green, Purple, Pink and Orange. Each fabric is unique, so that means 40 unique fabrics. If I were to make 30 blocks, that would mean I'd need TWENTY more unique fabrics. And lemme tell ya, even with MY really terrific stash, that can be tricky. Not that I don't have the fabrics, but that I may or may not have sufficient YARDAGE to make really good pairs that meet the requirements I have already set for myself. Remember, I'm trying to DEPLETE the stash, not add to it by going fabric shopping. So stash hunting I will go. I'm a big believer that my best creative decisions come when my proverbial back is against the wall.

BACK TO THE SIZE...

If I add yellow blocks, which I am planning to do, then the size thing gets cuckoo. Thirty blocks arrange FIVE rows of SIX yields a quilt 80" x 96", which I think is way too freaking big. 

HOWEVER....

If I keep the blocks 3x3 (instead of 4x4) then the blocks are 12" square. And an arrangement of 5 rows of 6 yields a quilt.... 60" x 72" which I think is just peachy keen fine and dandy. That's within my comfort zone, but when I think about why I am making this quilt, and the overarching project, then clearly I don't want extra blocks left over. So a big quilt this shall eventually be. 

AND AS TO THE DESIGN...

I really like the idea that simply moving around a small block in each of the larger blocks, and then arranging the colors and prints just right will allow me to have my cake and eat it too. I can keep the zigzags of each color WHILE keeping the colors more or less in their own 3x3 block.  

In other words, I get to play with my viewer's heads, which is something I really like doing.

Yeah I know, I'm a bad woman.

What If?

This is the last photo from my last post.. 

I swapped two of the pinks and two of the purples. The orange pair in the top row is too blah and doesn't work. I'll have to replace it. Bear in mind all the fabrics came from my stash and I haven't shopped for any fabrics for this project.

Here I have replaced the errant orange block.

I had an idea. Since what bothered me was the blocks seemed to be very distinct and didn't flow into each other, so I wondered if I could arrange the blocks to make the design less rigid. I replaced the blocks in the  corners of some of the blocks so I could get long diagonal zigzags of some of the colors. There's a long purple zig, a blue one and a pink one, but I didn't like the connection between the green and the orange.

In the color wheel, what goes between green and orange is yellow, a color for which I did not create any blocks.

Hmmm... this throws so much of this out of whack.

More Wonky Blocks

 

I'm moving right along making the components for each color, but it's annoying I can't see them all on the design wall. 

Well, this kinda sorta works, but not really. I'm pretty sure one of the oranges doesn't work, but it's hard to tell. There has to be a better way.

It occurred to me that I could lay out how I would like the individual colors arranged by using one block from each pair. I arranged them in diagonal rows, while trying to keep larger prints separated. As I did this it occurred to me that I could arrange the blocks, instead of all sixteen on the wall, that I could use just nine of each color pair. That way all the blocks would fit on the design wall and I could see what they would look like.

This is OK. Nothing more.

NOW, I can't say this is much of a surprise to me. As I was making the components I wasn't quite sure how well they would work together, because the fabrics were kind of bland and rather predictable, but when I get stuck my modus operandi is to:

"Break it! Break it good!"

I already have some ideas.

Stay tuned.