Think Pink!

Ideas are funny things. They come to you at the weirdest times.  Yesterday, just before I got ready to leave for work, I had an idea about the pink quilt I want to make for my July table cover.  (Remember I want all the quilts to be different.)

 

So I texted my pal Julie. 

For those of you who don't know what I am talking about, I am planning on making a quilt like this one, in pink:

 

Then last night I went shopping for the big prints for the big diamonds.

I  bought some of this, and a couple of others. I'm teaching a Birds class at Quilted Threads this coming Saturday (there is still space left in the class if you want to join us) and I will do more pink shopping then.

Somebody wrote to me once and asked if I was going to write a tutorial for this class. I'm not sure that's possible, because I design these diamond quilts one piece of fabric at a time. Anyway, first you need some big prints to fill out the big diamonds. As you can see from the picture of the quilt above, you don't need to slavishly use only one color. That quilt, which I think of in my head as a yellow quilt, has big diamonds that are blue and pink.

I am thinking pink and having fun! Can't wait to make this one.

Progress on Dark Majesty

My pal Julie comes up with THE BEST quilt names ever. It was she who came up with "Dark Majesty" and so it will be!

I've been tinkering since I finished the four patch diamonds. I want this quilt to be wider than the others so I have been cutting extra pieces. I think I will make it bigger as I start sewing it together - which won't be for another few days as I have been very busy lately, and the house just got to Critical Mess, and I have so much fabric strewn around the studio I have to stop and clean that up so I can get my bearings and work on this beauty.

This layout of colors and fabrics is by no means final, but I am very happy I persevered with this idea.

And just so you know the genesis of this quilt, here is the first version I made in October of 2015 for my niece:

And here is the second one I did just last month:

Chartreuse

Acid Green, or Yellow Green, or Chartreuse is the color of the next series of scrap slabs.

There are 30 here. That brings my total to 128. I need forty more. Actually I'll need more than that. I like to have options when I design my quilts.

 Ahh, Perfection!


(When my son texted me this picture yesterday I commented, "Ahh, the power of a quilt." He replied, "You misspelled 'the persistence of Dad.')

Diamond Jubilee, Gifted

So, do you think my niece likes her quilt?

Yup, she loves it.



I'm going to be off line for about a week, so if I don't post between now and then, don't worry. I've got something big I've been meaning to do for a while and it's going to take all my attention. I'll be back about June 27th or so.

Diamond Jubilee Beauty Shots

You can plan these shots, but sometimes the ones you don't think will work turn out better than you expected. This is the entry to the shed in my yard, including all the mess around it, yet I think this is one of the best photos I took of Diamond Jubilee this morning.

This was taken in my driveway, looking over the front yard and the "large landscape rock" that sits in the middle of it. I call it "Crocodile Rock."

This was taken on my front steps with the flowering planters.

Now the quilt will take a trip through the washer and dryer and then I'll squeeze it in a box and send it across the USA to my niece.


By the way, it's my friend Julie Sefton, author of Build-A-Barn, who got me started on taking these so-called "beauty shots" of my quilts. She thinks these photos are much more interesting, and she's right! So now I take all my quilts out for beauty shots before I give them away.

Diamond Jubilee is Finished!

Here it is. It came out spectacularly well.

I'll take beauty shots of it this weekend, then put it through the washer and dryer so it gets soft and crinkly and then it will fly away across the country to my lucky niece.

 

 Where I am sure it will get a lot of love.

Oops.

I noticed this after I had ended and tied off one thread and started another. So I decided to leave them. The stitches are very tiny and almost impossible to detect.

I'm good, but I never said I was perfect. I only have about 60" left of binding to sew and the quilt will be finished.

Boring Binding...

I had my hair cut last night after work, then came home and made dinner, cleaned up and finished adding the binding to Diamond Jubilee. I wasn't quite sure how I'd like the dark binding on this light quilt, but I think it will be fine.

Looking at this photo I am reminded of a comment my pal Julie made when she visited me a couple of years ago. We were sewing and when I noticed she was watching me while I pinned two pieces of fabric together I said, "Yeah, I use pins."

"You use a LOT of pins."

Well, if I don't want the fabric to shift, I use pins. And frankly, if I want my binding to stay where I put it, and to stay even all around the quilt, I have to use pins. (I own some of those clips, and I have to say they bug me. I don't use them.)

Binding Diamond Jubilee

I'm getting there. The binding is sewn to three sides of the quilt. Tonight I'll sew down the last side and start folding the edge over to the front and pin it there.

Regular readers know I hand sew my binding to the FRONT of my quilts. My Mom taught me to blindstitch many years ago. I used to sew my binding down on the back, but an experience over 30 years ago changed my mind. You can read about that here.

I never thought much about my blindstitching, but three certified quilt appraisers (including the vaunted Gerald Roy) have missed it when appraising my quilts. The first time I said something about it when Gerry was appraising my quilts he popped out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box to go back to the quilt and check.

"Why did he do that?" I asked my pal Julie later.

"Because he missed it," she said. "He's not supposed to miss stuff like that."

"Yeah, but so what? What's so special about my blindstitching?"

"Lynne, not only can nobody see your stitches, but your binding lies so flat and it's so even, that it just doesn't look like it was done by hand."

"Isn't that the way it's supposed to look?" I asked.

Got Binding?

I got home last night, finished a book I was reading while I watched tennis, made dinner, did the dishes and then made the binding for Diamond Jubilee. I'll attach the binding over the next few evenings and sew it down this weekend.

Diamond Jubilee, Quilted

Here is the Diamond Jubilee quilt quilted and trimmed. I will make the binding tonight.

If you want to know why I've been absent the last few days, you'll have to visit Millie's blog and see what I've been doing out in the garden.  One big decision I made was to hire an exterminator to spray my property against ticks and mosquitoes this summer. Regular readers know I got Lyme Disease last year and am unwilling to go through that again.

Remember Diamond Jubilee?

 Do you remember this quilt? Diamond Jubilee?

Well, it's back from being quilted, and I have to add the binding and take beauty shots of it before I send it across the US to my niece for her graduation on June 10.

Diamond Jubilee Backing

I bought eight yards of this gigantic print for the backing of the Diamond Jubilee quilt. I cut it in half and seamed it together to make a giant square, then realized two things.

1. I did not need eight yards, I only needed six, so my backing was 36" too long. Oh well, better to have too much than not enough.

2. I forgot to add my niece's name to the back of the quilt.

Fortunately, having too much meant I could chop off a yard and make the name. Which I did, no problem. I had originally chosen yellows and yellow oranges, but when I set those fabrics on the backing fabric I came to my senses and changed my mind. Pink it would be.

So I made her name, and then added fabric around it, and sewed it to the rest of the backing fabric. The ruler in the photo above shows just how big this name is. It's a 24" ruler (61cm).

Now, adding a name to the back of a quilt is harder than it looks. Per Chris's request, all my backings are 6" bigger all the way around. So I have to place the name inside that area, and then I want to place it as close the the center as possible, so if the quilt does not get precisely centered (which it never will) the letters won't get chopped off when I trimmed the edges of the quilt after quilting. (That would be BAD!) And sticking something in the middle of something else is a royal PITA, especially when you are working with six plus yards of fabric.

So I decided to sew the name under a 12" tall strip of the backing fabric at the TOP of the backing. I know from long experience working with Chris that she usually starts quilting about four inches from the top, not six, so my name panel would be far enough down not to be a problem, and although I didn't center it horizontally (because, hey, I like asymmetrical) there is plenty of space on either side of the name panel

You will notice the letters aren't aligned on the same baseline. No, that's not a mistake, I did that on purpose.

Now every quilt I have made since August has a backing ready for it. That's five, for those of you keeping count. (The Petals quilt and the Comfort quilt are flying away today. The Blue Boy was born two weeks early and his quilt has yet to be gifted.)

I am going to take a break. Thanksgiving is coming up, and I host that dinner each year. (Let's hope I cook it at my house this year. Snow and a power outage moved the feast to my sister's last year.) I have to deal with the avalanche of paperwork on my desk, and I still have to put the front garden to bed for the winter (I filled eleven large lawn and leaf bags with leaves on Saturday from the back and side yards.)

I'll get back to sewing, of course. I still have the twirling triangles and the tumblers to do, and I've got a special project related to last year's secret project percolating in my head. I couldn't tell you about it then, and I can't tell you about it now, either. When it's time to let the cat out of the bag, I'll tell you.

I've added another page on my blog, it's called Word Quilts 2010. It shows my arty word quilts I made from 2009 to 2010. Eventually I'll have them all up there for easy reference. I'll be working on that too.

I'm not going anywhere. If you know me, you know I have always got stuff going on, but I won't be posting regularly for a while, so don't worry.

Binding Selection for Diamond Jubilee

It's funny how things work out. When I was straightening out the stash for the big stash post last weekend, I pulled out this batik (on the upper right) and threw it on the chair behind me because I thought the colors might work well with the backing for the binding of Diamond Jubilee.  When I turned around and looked I couldn't believe how perfect a match it really was.

What's REALLY funny is that I bought it earlier this year for no particular reason. Which is the kind of thing I don't usually do.

Valerie Has Questions... I Have Answers

The internet can be a wonderful place. I met three of my best friends over the internet, from all over the country and the world.  It's also where I meet quilters I have inspired. This is the most wondrous.

One of them is Valerie from Purple Boots and Pigtails. She wrote me a letter about a year ago saying I had reawakened her love of quilting. You can read it here. Someday I gotta meet this girl.  Valerie is the quilter I made the Kona solid word JUNGLE for.

Anyway.

 
On yesterday's post, Valerie asked a few questions and they made me think. Although I showed you how I designed the quilt, I didn't show you how I made it.  So here are Valerie's questions.

 "...are you planning to have a straight edge for binding or leave all those delicious diamonds as they are?"
 I'm planning on having a straight edge. I plan to cut it outside the vertical rows of small diamonds.

"Which leads me to ... if you square it off, will you cut it before or after Chris works her magic?"
I'll cut it off after Chris quilts it. I find that it helps to not make a decision to trim a quilt before it's quilted. Chris often makes magic happen where I didn't see it earlier, so I don't rush. I can always trim a quilt down, I can't add.

"This top will be super stretchy with all those bias cuts, so I wonder if trimming after might be helpful?"
Absolutely. In fact Valerie's most recent post talked about a quilt with mitered corners that got stretched out.  My quilt is made with a few hundred diamonds and each piece has two bias edges. I don't want it to stretch, so I haven't showed it off to anybody because I don't want to stretch those edges. Right now the quilt is folded up so it can't stretch. I won't be holding it up until it's quilted.

"I like the back, it reinforces that my eye is drawn first to all the littlest diamonds that act like stripes. Those are the colours in your backing fabric."
It's funny, but that's what good design does. It makes you see connections. The colors of my tiny diamonds are actually all colors - yellow, orange, red, hot pink, purple, blue, green and teal.

"Glad you steered away from the predictable creams, yellows and golds...much too matchy matchy."
 Me too. As I've said before, the quilt usually tells you what it wants, and if you're smart, you'll listen. This quilt did not want yellow or anything tiny.



 "Lastly, did you have a 60° diamond ruler or did you cut with a straight ruler?"

 I used this ruler, which is the one you used to make your Gravity quilt. I used blue tape to outline the 4" diamonds and the 2" diamonds. I ordered a 4" diamond template from another company online, and it never arrived until after the quilt was finished, so I cut all my pieces - one by one - with this template. It was a royal pain in the patootie. For the small four patch diamonds, I sewed together a pair of 2-1/2" strips and then used the template to cut pairs which I then sewed together.

I only had a yard of this fabric, and couldn't get as many perfect diamonds as I needed, so for a couple of them, I pieced them together, matching the pattern.

You all watched as I designed the quilt on the wall, putting something up, stepping back (with my glasses OFF so the fine details wouldn't distract me, but so I could still see the masses of color. I tried to avoid "blobs" of  dark areas and "holes" of too many light ones. I tried to distribute the colors and not make things too repetitious. I inverted some of the fussy cut blocks so they all wouldn't point in the same direction.

I literally cut one piece, put it up on the wall, stepped back, decided if it was OK or not, and then cut another. When the fabrics I had pulled looked too dark, I went through my stash to find something better. Piece by piece the quilt grew. I didn't get too bogged down with details, and tried to keep it fresh and vibrant. It didn't need to be perfect, and yet I think it is.

I am really, really happy with it, and am looking forward to making my next quilt, and hope I can keep it as loosey-goosey as this one.

And Pat, I find if I know I'm making a quilt to give away, I don't get attached to it.

Valerie, thanks for the questions. I enjoyed answering them. Anybody else?

Backing for the Jubilee

After all my crock about how this quilt had to have a subdued backing, I shopped several online fabric sites and found absolutely NOTHING that (in my hairdresser's words) "lifted my skirt."

Until I found this Kaffe print. A version of this in a different colorway is in the quilt itself, but this fabric just screamed "ME! Pick ME!"

So I did.  Of course it isn't quite this gigantic, but eight yards are on their way to me even as you read this.

And at this stage of the game, the binding might be a blue or a green or a teal. That will change, undoubtedly, when I get the quilt back from Chris. And since I put my nephew's name on the back of his quilt, my niece's name will have to go on the back of hers.  Guess what I'll be doing this weekend?