The Big Girl Bed

This is my adorable granddaughter and her Dinosaur Diamonds quilt.

And this is her big girl bed. Honestly, I didn't think it was going to be so cool. I am totally and completely jealous!!

Merry Dino Christmas

Thank goodness for FaceTime! I was able to watch as my granddaughter opened her Christmas gift of the Diamond Dinosaurs quilt. She was quite pleased.

She found the hiding cats, and the roses with the dinosaurs. She found the fabric that was in her parents' quilt. She found the owl and the bunny rabbit. She was delighted to find the hummingbird, and discover that some of the dinosaur bones glowed in the dark.

 She loved the big dinosaurs on the back, and recited their names for me.

So yeah, I'd say it was a big hit.

Dino Diamonds Done!

It doesn't always happen, that a quilt comes out EXACTLY the way I had envisioned it, but this one did. This quilt is exactly what I wanted it to look like.

The quilt is bright, cheerful and colorful the way I wanted it to be, and you can see all that in these photos which were taken outside on a brisk November day. (It was 31F, just below freezing, and slightly breezy when these were taken, so I apologize if they are slightly out of focus.)

And here's the back. If my granddaughter wants to show off the big dinosaur panels, that's OK by me.

Now the quilt is taking a trip through the washing machine to get all soft and crinkly. I shall show this off to my family and friends before packing it up and sending it flying across the country for the big reveal on Christmas.

Sigh.

I can't wait.

Black Friday with Dinosaurs

I have a rule never to go shopping on Black Friday - the day after Thanksgiving. Instead I'll sit on the couch today watching whatever's good on TV while I bind the Diamonds & Dinosaurs quilt.

More Dinos!

The Dinosaur Diamonds quilt is back from the long arm quilter, and is ready for binding. As you can see the quilting is happy flowers.

It's really pretty (at least I think so.)

For the binding I am using the small dinosaur prints in 20" lengths all around the quilt.

With the long holiday weekend coming up, I'll be able to get the binding sewn down so it will be in the City of Angels for Christmas.

One of my coworkers was giving me a hard time about this quilt. "Well, you've got your marching orders there, Grandma," they teased. They don't get it. I've basically been waiting my whole life to get a request like this.

"Hey, Memere, can you make me a dinosaur diamonds quilt?" 

I mean, like, really?



Happy Thanksgiving!

Go Slow and Sew

Sewing the diamond quilts together is an exercise in dealing with bias edges. These are 60 degree diamonds, and every block has at least two sides that are on the bias. So after I sew the blocks together, I place them on the floor, so they won't stretch.

Eventually I had to move it into the living room because it was getting so big.

Ironing can be challenging.

I had to cancel the Roomba's scheduled cleaning run.

Here's the finished flimsy.

Here's the backing. I used both the big dinosaur panels, some flower fabric from my stash,

 and the green "dragon scale" fabric I bought because my granddaughter said it was "green like T-rex." As you can see from the photo above, the scale (no pun intended) was too big for a lot of things, so it was perfect for the back.

The quilt will be going to the longarm quilter soon, and the goal is to have this in my granddaughter's arms on Christmas Eve.


And YES, this has been one hell of a quilt marathon.

Dinos & Diamonds Forever

It's really funny, but with this quilt, when I think I've got it right, I remove the four patch diamonds.

This really helps me figure out if the placement of the medium diamonds works well. This photo showed me there was a block in the lower right that needed to go (lilies).

Once the four patch diamonds are gone, I replace them, one vertical row after another, focusing on how they integrate with the blocks around them.

After studying this for a while, I know this is IT. I'll be sewing this together.

Once Again, From A to B

I talk a lot about how I start a quilt without a fully formed idea in my head, and that's true, but only partly. I NEVER start if I don't know where I am going. I may not have a COMPLETE idea, but I do have an idea and I have a pretty good idea of what I want it to look like when I get started. If I am not sure, I don't start. I do something else.

For my granddaughter's quilt, I knew five things.

1. I knew it was for a little girl, 3 years old
2. I knew she loved dinosaurs
3. I knew I didn't want the dinosaurs to be overwhelming. I wanted the quilt to have longevity.
4. I knew it would include bright happy colors, flowers, animals and perhaps insects.
5. I knew it would be a diamond quilt, and I have those "wired" which means I totally understand how they go together and what makes them "tick" and how to make them "work."

It can be argued that the success or failure of a quilt depends on fabric selection. I had to do an internet search for dino fabrics, as my "usual" sources had thin options. I ended up buying five one yard pieces from Spoonflower, but they had the large scale dino fabrics I thought the quilt needed.  One of them had roses in it, which made it automatic because my granddaughter's middle name is Rose.

These were the large diamonds I already had in my leftovers bin that I wanted to use in the Dino Quilt.

But I also knew the quilt needed other things. Since I have so many leftover elements from other Diamond Quilts, I didn't think I'd need to buy more fabrics, but when I found the pink with fawn (above), owl, chipmunk, rabbit and fox, I thought it was gorgeous. But was it "too pretty" to be in a dino quilt? I wasn't sure, so I texted my DIL. You can see her reply in the screen shot above.

I placed orders with three online fabric vendors. One order arrived almost immediately, but I had to wait a week for the other two. But I could start. The diamond quilts have seven vertical rows of large diamond, evenly spaced. So I made some plumb lines, and figured out where they should hang. These would be guidelines to help keep the design straight. They are just crochet cotton with whatever I could find as a weight at one end, tied to a pushpin that got stuck at the top of the design wall. They are dead useful in designing quilts.

Here you can see the string of the plumb line as it divides this big diamond in half, keeping it straight.

I may have had to wait for SOME fabrics, I did have stuff I could work with, and I knew the small scale dino prints would work as the medium sized diamonds. So I placed the big diamonds I already had on the wall, leaving spaces for the big dino diamonds to come. And then I filled in with the medium diamonds. I can hear you thinking. Lynne, you're NUTS!

Actually, NO, I'm not, because when you fill in the design wall, that isn't a complete design, it's just a START!  You don't really know if your idea is going to float until you have all the various elements lined up in one place. Now, if you make a quilt from a kit or a published design from somebody else, then you generally don't have to worry about this because somebody else has made all those decisions for you. (If you have a block that uses five fabrics and you make a test block and the fabrics don't look the way you expected them to.. that's good to know before you make all of them. This is the same idea.)

OK, I'm gonna get on my soapbox here and a lot of you might get a bit pissed off, but here goes:

I don't care HOW GOOD you think you are. An idea in your head will NEVER look exactly the same on the design wall as it did in your head. An idea will ABSOLUTELY look different if you graphed it out on paper, colored it in, or used a computer program. YOU NEVER KNOW until you SEE the REAL THING in front of you. And a little bit of it does not equal the whole thing.

And JustGail, who asked yesterday if I used a camera to get a different view, the answer is most emphatically YES! Go read this post for the most recent example.

I told you I planned to use the smallish dinosaur prints as the medium diamonds. And that was a good idea, but it turned out the quilt was WAY TOO BUSY, so I had to replace SOME of them with other prints. You can see a few of them here in this photo of some of the blocks that have been sewn together.

I make all my design decisions as I look at what is happening on the design wall. I look at pictures in the camera (OK, my iPhone), but the decisions are made in front of the real thing.

It was my painting teacher, Armand Szainer, who told me that it was more important to BEGIN than it was to finish. Begin, begin, begin, he said. What he meant was that it was most important to look at whatever it was you were doing with a FRESH EYE, to not fall in love with it, and to BEGIN AGAIN if it was not working. You cannot get ANYWHERE unless you GET STARTED.

Success in your head doesn't mean squat. I used to tell my painting students to put more damn paint on their palettes. "It isn't doing you any good in the tube," I'd say. Same thing with quilters and their stashes, "You can't eat fabric," I tell my students. "It isn't very good at heating your house, and you already paid for it. Cut the damn stuff up and make quilts."

Any questions?

Moving On

What I didn't like about the layout at the end of yesterday's post was there were too many areas where the large and medium diamonds blended together into too dark blobs. Those dark medium diamonds had to go. I tried moving them to areas where the smaller ones weren't close to the larger ones, as you can see from the photo above, but I don't really like that either.

I also removed some of the large diamonds and replaced them. Some were "lone wolves" and needed another one to carry the design around, and some just faded into oblivion and had to go. I'll let you figure which ones changed. I also flipped some of the large diamonds upside down, because this quilt really doesn't have a top or bottom.

I can't overstate how many extra pieces I have for the diamond quilts. I'm sure I could make another one or two if I could get over my artistic tendencies and just sew stuff together willy-nilly. At any rate, I used the leftover four patch diamonds in the current layout more as placeholders than anything, and what I found out was that they were too dark and blah. This quilt is for a three year old girl so bright diamonds are required.

Fortunately I have this thing called a "stash," so I went through it, keeping an eye on the developing layout and pulled some colors and prints I thought would work well.

This allowed me to use my all-time favorite dinosaur fabric after all. This fabric is glow-in-the-dark and while it wouldn't work as medium sized diamonds, it will work perfectly as four-patch diamonds.

So while up to now the quilt has been go-go-go, now I am at slow, sew, sew as I made the estimated 60 - 70 four patch diamonds I need.

This is where it is right now and of course it will change another few times before I sew it all up.



To Rebecca and NeverBored and others who: 1. liked the pink fabric with the fawn and owl and bunny and fox, more on how I got on that tangent and 2. how I actually got started on this quilt and how "Just begin," became a mantra of mine, hold those thoughts. They will be covered in another post later.

Dino Diamonds

The dinosaur fabrics have arrived. I cut big diamonds from these, from Spoonflower.

Dinosaurs and Roses!

I cut medium diamonds out of these fabrics.

My DIL and I had decided that I would use other fabrics in the large diamonds, so this wouldn't be an overly Dino design, and would have some longevity. I cut diamonds and threw them up on the design wall until I had filled every space. I used the leftover four patch diamonds to see what it would look like.

 So here is the first pass. It needs a lot of work, and I already know what it is, so save your breath. I never quite know what I want until I see it on the design wall, and now I am pretty sure I know exactly what I want this to look like.

Remember, this is for a three year old who loves dinosaurs, animals and flowers.

Marching Orders

We all know there are some people for whom we would do anything.

My granddaughter at the Natural History Museum

The other day I got a text from my DIL:

"So I was taking to "Little Miss" this morning about the possibility of getting her a big girl twin size bed and I told her that I would get her a new dinosaur blanket for it. She says NO, I want one like that, and she points over at the quilt...            

"She said I want diamonds on it with dinos in them. So Lynne, if you happen to know come across any kind of dinosaur fabric you know what you can use it for."

So DIL and I went back and forth. Both of us were concerned with how quickly she might outgrow the dino thing.

"Just so you know she doesn't think any of the dinosaurs are scary. Did I show you which one she sleeps with?"

So the goal is to keep the colors bright and happy and tuck dinosaurs in to make Little Miss happy. Later that night I got on the internet and went dino fabric shopping. I literally can't wait.

But we'll save this for the back!