Sigmund

This is one of my drawing teachers from college, Sigmund A*****. He was a great teacher and I learned a lot from him. I thought he could draw so beautifully, that I told my friends "Sig was like God with a pencil." He wasn't a big guy, he was quiet and unassuming, but he had a terrific smile and always seemed happy. I remember him wearing jeans and a blue work shirt in class, so that's how I've represented him here.



If you want to make your own birds, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download, so you can get started right away.

Pale Blue

It's funny. When my son was in grade school, he learned Phonics. I didn't learn to read that way. He said something once, about a word that had a silent "e" at the end of it. "The E tells the A to say its name." (The word "name" is a good example of this, although I am sure many of my readers will be happy to correct me if I am wrong.) It connects to something I have long believed about the binding of a quilt.

"The binding tells the quilt what color it is."

When I wrote yesterday's post I was pretty sure I would use the light blue binding on the Sparkling Winkel quilt, above. After all, it has the greatest number of diamond shapes. I don't like any of the cream or white variations. I thought the yellow was too bright, the orange too brash and the dark blue too dark. I thought there wasn't enough red in the quilt to make the binding red.

But during the day yesterday I had my doubts, and started leaning toward the RED.

I do want the quilt to have an outer edge, to stop the design from falling off the quilt, so the light colors are out. And I don't want more busy there, so the busy cream colored fabric with the bright colored squares is also out. I wondered about the red, and thought it would be a good choice.

Now here's the thing. There are no wrong answers. I think either of the blues and the red would be good choices. But looking at the WHOLE quilt, as in the photo above, it's clear to me that the dark blue and red would be too dark and hold the energy too tightly IN. The light blue wouldn't do that. It's just dark enough to stop the design, but it almost isn't a FULL STOP. I think it would hold the design in, but tenderly.

The Sparkling Winkel isn't a RED quilt, and it isn't a DARK BLUE one. It isn't YELLOW and it isn't ORANGE either.

A LIGHT BLUE binding tells us what we already know. That the quilt has more LIGHT BLUE than any other color.

And that works for me.

Bind the Winkel

I drove out to Janet Lee's house yesterday to pick up the Sparkling Winkel and Dark Majesty quilts. What will I use for the binding of the Sparkling Winkel?

 Light blue maybe?

 Orange?

Yellow?

 Dark Blue?

Or red?

Well, I'm leaning towards one of these, but I want to try some other options.

Here's a fabric with a lot of colors, but it disappears.

This is a cream, but the quilt disappears too.

This is a black and white and when cut will look sort of like piano keys, but these disappear too.

This fabric isn't in the quilt at all, and that's usually a no-no for me, but it has a lot of the colors in the quilt. But the edges still disappear, which I don't want.

Any of the colors would probably work well, but I have made up my mind. What do you think?

Plan for Another Quilt

After creating the Colorado Quilt, I wished it didn't live so far away so I could show it off.  The more I thought about it, the more obvious the answer was - that I should make a "New Hampshire Quilt" that showed off where I lived. I could have birds that represented important people and places in my life.

The names on this page are my relatives, my friends, my most favorite teachers, artists and places. Yeah, I know these aren't photographs, but each of these names MEANS something to me, and in a quilt that is a kind of self-portrait, these are things that have influenced me and made me what I am. For me, the colors and fabrics I choose will represent the way I think of them.

This is my friend Kathy,

These are fabrics I have pulled for Kathy's block. I pulled them before I went back to look at the picture of the two of us, so I may change the stripe to a black and white stripe. But the colored one is more suited to her personality.

This is the bird block for Kathy. I needed something "wingy" for the wing, and having changed that fabric, I needed something with better contrast so I changed the breast fabric too.

Notice the purple legs.  Since many of the people I will represent in this quilt are artists of one kind or another they won't have the usual black legs.


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

Backing for Tickled Pink

Here's the backing for the Tickled Pink quilt. As you can see it is pieced with a big decorative panel and a couple of my free pieced birds.

All you really need for a backing of a quilt is that it is big enough, with enough extra for your long arm quilter. Yeah, I can measure but it's just easier to lay it out and see.

Yup. I have enough.

I am glad to be finished with this backing. Making quilt backings is my least favorite thing about making a quilt, and it's not because I don't like doing it, it's because there is so much fabric it's just more like quilt wrangling than sewing.

PS, all those points are going away.

A Bird on Pink

Sometimes I get home from work too tired to do much. Last night I fed Millie then sat on the couch to read for a bit before I made dinner. It was past 9 when I finally dragged myself into the sewing studio.  Of course I couldn't do anything until the pink fabric I ordered for the backing of the quilt completed its run through the washer and dryer. 

I decided to use contrasting pink fabric to separate center the bird on the back panel of the quilt.

Here's what it's going to look like on the bottom part of the backing. I'll use the pink backing on each side of the panel, and then I'll do something similar on the top too.

A Little Cleaning Up

It's amazing what you can do in an hour. I didn't have the energy to give the studio the big cleaning it needed, so I set a timer for an hour and started at one end of the room.

I added some pinks to the big decorative panel I ordered. It will be part of the backing for the Tickled Pink quilt.

I made a couple of pink birds.

I like the great big beak on this one, and his pink striped legs!

I spent a lot of time figuring out how to incorporate all these elements in the backing of the Tickled Pink quilt. That wasn't the hard part. It was calculating exactly how much fabric I needed to order that was giving me trouble. Finally I got fed up and ordered a yard or two extra. 

I don't usually prepare the backing of a quilt right after I finish it, and in fact, just before I started, I prepared the backing for the Wavelength quilt. I made it easy on myself on that one and ordered some "quilt backing" at 108" wide.


If you would like to make your own free pieced birds, you can get  my bird tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

Tickled Pink!

The "Tickled Pink" flimsy is complete. Yeah, I'd say this tickles my fancy but good. As it is, it measures 72" wide by 98" tall.

I have learned something about this quilt, and that is that the TINY diamonds will make or break this design. They - not the large diamonds - are the star of the show.

The colored ones determine how brightly the quilt sings, so there needs to be good contrast with the "main" color. So in this pink quilt the tiny diamonds had to be bright turquoise, blue, deep purple and bright green.

 The "background" tiny diamonds need to blend with the "main" color of the quilt, they shouldn't stick out too much, but they shouldn't be monotonous either. And they shouldn't be "dull". The most successful background prints, in my opinion, were the ones with a pink allover design on a cream background so the fabric "read" as light pink and not cream.

I am very happy with this quilt. You could say I am tickled pink!


Just a reminder that my diamond quilts are inspired by Pam Goecke Dinndorf's Harlequin Quilt. She sells a pattern for it here.

Leftovers

I always say that I do my best thinking when I'm not thinking. What that really means is that sometimes ideas come to me when I'm doing something else. This idea came to me while I was brushing my teeth after breakfast the other day. I had just been in the studio looking at the layout of the Tickled Pink quilt, and when I looked around I saw a lot of leftover pieces that had cream backgrounds.  What would I do with them?***

MAKE ANOTHER QUILT!

That night I went into the studio and gathered up some of the leftover bits and tried to see what they would look like. This could be pretty good. I won't work on this right away, and I don't think the quilt would be as big as Tickled Pink, but hey, you never know.




*** I always find it's important to pose a question when I am working out a problem. If I ask a question, particularly if I ask it to myself before I go to bed at night, I often find I've got an answer to the question the next morning. But it has to be a question.

Moving Right Along on Tickled Pink

Since the blocks of this quilt are diamonds, it means two sides are on the bias. Since bias edges stretch, I have to be very careful handling them. Once I've sewn the diamonds into long rows, I put them on the floor. (Check out this post. It shows another diamond quilt in progress.)

I've decided to call this quilt "Tickled Pink."

I've moved the piece on the upper right from the floor back on to the wall. It's sewn together.

I needed the space to lay out this long diagonal row. Just how long is it?

  120 inches! Yeah, that's 10 FEET (304 cm). There aren't that many quilts that grow to that size.

 This quilt has two long rows that size. I had to put them on the floor to organize and sew the big diamonds together. With all the bias edges, it is hard to keep these edges from stretching.

 The two big diagonal rows go in this empty space, and the rest of the quilt is the same size as the big piece on the upper right. I'll sew the remaining diamonds into a piece that size, then sew the three big pieces together and the flimsy will be complete. I should get it finished this weekend.

Here are some more closeup shots of the various fabrics in the quilt.



And I think I have a plan for the cream pieces I didn't use in this one...

Filling In

 The thing about the sides of this quilt is that it has to be filled in with extra pieces on the other side of the diamond four patches. So even though the pieces you see above to the right of the giant diamonds aren't in the layout of the finished quilt I showed you the other day, they still have to be there, and I can't just sew any old pieces.

 And sewing them together is a little bit finicky.

To assemble the rest of the flimsy, I'll make sew the four patch diamonds to the medium sized diamonds to make diamonds as big as the giant diamonds, then I'll sew them together in diagonal rows.

It's kinda boring work, but it will be relaxing to do. I'll enjoy it.

And then, of course, I'll have to clean the studio and the whole cycle will start again.

Messy Pink

I don't know how much pink fabric I bought in terms of yardage, or the number of different pink fabrics. I'm not quite sure how many different pink fabrics are in the quilt, but I do know one thing.

(The design wall is over on the right.)

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My studio is a mess. (If you want a tour of my studio, click here.)

Happy Valentine's Day.