Cat's Quillt is Finished!

 Cat's quilt is finished. Cat is her nickname, by the way. I first met her 18 years ago when she was two years old. I am her "honorary auntie." 

She's moving into her own apartment soon, and I wanted to get this right out to her to enjoy so I machine stitched the binding in place. It's black, and the thread was black, so it was much faster and easier by machine, but at my age it's getting harder to hand sew dark things.

I'll take this out for beauty shots when the weather permits. We've had some fresh snow and I think it would be fun to see this on the snow.

Cat's Quilt

 

I picked up Cat's quilt from Janet-Lee yesterday. This is a quilt for a hip 20 year old girl. She chose the colors.

Here's a close up of the quilting.

A bigger detail shot.

I've got the binding all ready made for this, so I should get to it soon.

I'm doing a lot of behind the scenes work to protect my tutorials. The best thing I can tell anyone is to purchase my tutes on my Etsy shop. That is the ONLY place I sell them. One of the advantages is if you have an Etsy account and your copy of a tutorial gets corrupted or damaged, or lost, or your computer or device dies, you can simply log into your Etsy account and download it again. It will ALWAYS be there for you! Pretty cool, huh?

I have to set up a professional Facebook page and that's taking up some valuable brain cells. Since this whole scammer/stealing experience is causing me sleepless nights, it's taking a bit longer than I'd like. Bear with me. That's on my To-Do list for today.

Cat's Quilt, Flimsy Complete

Once I figured this quilt out it didn't take long to sew it up.

Here is the finished flimsy.

Or rather it would have been finished had I not felt so awkward about it.

 

So I decided to add a border of black with the colors of the quilt. I think it really finishes it off.

Here's a close-up. 

A Quarter of Cat

 

This is a quarter of Cat's quilt. I like the way this is turning out. It's perfect for a college kid.

I've been spending WAY too much time in the studio. I haven't been doing much of anything else, so I decided to set out a jigsaw puzzle.

Cat's Quilt, continued

 

I replaced the green blocks I didn't like, and I like this a lot better.

Then I thought, well, why do I have to have the inserts alternating horizontally, then vertically? So I arranged the blocks so the inserts were all vertical. I liked it. But that meant more rearranging, since I did not want the inserts to connect from one block to the other.

I like this a lot better. And you can see I added another "green" on black. To get to this point, I had to remake several other blocks - some pinks as well as some blues.

This is ready to start sewing together.

Working it Out

 

I kinda sorta knew this would be hard to put together so it wouldn't look choppy. And I kinda sorta knew that the large range of value in the green blocks wouldn't work all that well, but dummy me, I made them anyway. (Hope springs eternal.)

I decided to arrange the blocks Blue-Green-Pink. this would create diagonal rows of the same color. I would consider the fabrics with the black backgrounds to be whatever color they were. I liked that better, but it was clear some blocks were simply too dark. I identified those blocks by tilting them at an angle. I will make new ones (duh).

A Quilt for Cat

The day after the election I was chatting with a dear friend whose family refers to me as an honorary "Auntie". My friend's college age daughter ("Cat") is what is now considered "non-binary." She asked her mother if she would have to marry a man so she could get health care and other benefits. What a hell of a question! I asked if her daughter needed a quilt, because I couldn't give her a hug.

After going back and forth a bit, I got the following list of colors. "Pink, Green, Blue and Black." OK, I thought, I can work with that.

I decided to use the same pattern I used for the Cobblestones quilt. I gathered up some fabrics and got to work.

These are the green, pink and blue blocks.

For the black, I decided not to make the same kind of blocks, but use large prints of pink, green and blue on a black background.

Bright Cobblestones

 

There's a quote that an art school in Florida uses in its advertising: "A great idea is only an idea until you make it real."

And just because you make the idea real doesn't make it great. The IDEA for a brightly colored cobblestones quilt sounded great, but once I got all the blocks on the design wall I was decidedly unimpressed. There's too much of this that just looks like mush to me.

Now, that "to me" is the operative term here. Just because most folks think it's OK doesn't mean that I do.

I shall continue wrestling.

This is the view when I eat my lunch on the front porch. Quite nice, listening to the birds and the leaves rustle in the breeze.

A Variation on a Theme

One of the tasks I need to do is to straighten up the fabrics in my stash. Since I am between quilts, I figured it would be a good task to start. I worked on the White on Whites, and then sorted out the white with colors and the creams with colors. I took the fabrics off the shelf, ironed them, refolded them, and put them back on the shelf.

I decided to work on the fabrics I call "colors on a white background." As I was pressing one piece I thought. "Gee, it would be interesting to make a cobblestones quilt with these bright fabrics, and have bright bold colors slashed through them." ***

Then I thought, well, fart. What am I waiting for? So I went through the stack and chose 24 fabrics, then pressed them cut 6-1/2" WOF strips.

Then I cut the first set of blocks, and inserted the strips and trimmed them. Whenever possible, I try to insert the contrasting strip and reassemble the block so the pattern continues from one piece to the other as in the photo above. It helps keep the quilt cohesive.

.

Here are the 24 fabrics with a strip inserted. I thought you'd get a kick out of seeing them together. Now, I just threw these up on the design wall. I haven't arranged them to their best advantage, but you can see some of the challenges I will face. 

No, I am not in the least worried. I can make this work too.

And yeah, I did continue to work on organizing the fabrics.

*** Remember how I keep telling you that inspiration can be found anywhere? Well, this ought to show you.