Larkspur

 

The pink barn quilt, LARKSPUR, is finished, and now hangs above my TV. You can read more about it here.  

I made it in the fall of 2019 before the world went to hell. Can’t remember when I brought it to Janet-Lee for quilting, but I didn’t get it back until January 2021. Click that link and you will be brought to various posts when I built the barn, and then details of the terrific quilting.  You’ll also get to see pictures of the barn that inspired it.

The Colorwash quilt in yesterday’s post was made by me. I took Wanda’s online Colorwash class in the fall of 2019.

Colorwash at Home & Answers

 

 

I've finished sewing the binding and the hanging sleeve on my colorwash quilt and I hung it up in my living room.

 

 Each square is 2" and it is 20 squares across and 20 down so it is about 40" square with 400 pieces. There are about 382 unique fabrics.

If you ever have the opportunity to take Wanda Hansen's colorwash class I urge you to do it. It's a terrific class that teaches you how to use color in your quilts.

I have a lot of artwork hanging in my house. From my spot on the couch I can see into the dining room and my mom's painting on the far wall. I did the watercolors that hang above the archway, and I made the quilts on the wall and on the table.

You can see Millie in the lower right. Last week marked the 16th anniversary of her "Gotcha Day." 

Oh, I have had a couple of questions...

 

1. Yes I -always- work on the angled drafting table. Always. Everything. This blog started in July 2008, and I know there are tons of pictures of my drafting table in use.

 

2. Yes, the bulldog clips are used as weights. They are tied to string which is pinned to the top of my design wall. I have several and use them as plumb lines to keep my blocks straight when designing a quilt. I also use a laser level for keeping things perfectly horizontal.

 

3. I will update the Zebra tutorial with pictures and a design layout for the Yellow Ribbons quilt and i have also created an outline page for it in case anybody wants to color it as they work out a design (thank you Cathy.) Anybody who has bought a zebra tutorial can contact me for an updated version when it is ready. I am sewing the binding on the Firebird quilt, and want to include finished pictures of that in the update, so it won't be ready for a week or two.

 

4. Many glass companies sell and cut plexiglass, and there are custom quilting template makers on the internet. You can get your own templates made. Just think carefully about what you want. If you want a hole to hang your template, you'll have to ask for it.

5. I don't use any kind of sticky ANYTHING on the underside of my templates, ever. Any adhesive gets stickier over time and is harder to remove. The chemicals needed to remove sticky residue are very bad if they get on your skin, and into your body. Plus the edges of tape lift and get caught on fabric and drag the fabric where I don't want it to go. Really, I've thought about all this stuff.

6. I can contour draw left handed, but I don't trust my non-dominant hand with a sharp rotary cutter in it. I keep a box of band-aids in my studio for a reason.

7. I find that teaching in-person is good because you can clarify something if a student gets confused. You can go off on tangents. You can see if your students really "get it." I don't think the type of tools you use matters one way or the other. I have written eight tutorials, and these are harder. You have to be very careful about your language, you have to be very clear about your process, it has to make sense and you have to be consistent. Writing directions is very hard and few people do it well. I work very very very hard (and I have a crack team of proofreaders and testers who help me) to get it right. I've sold hundreds of tutorials, and nobody gives me grief because they can't understand what I am saying. But I don't think a tool is better for "live" or "written" or "video" learning. A tool is a tool.

8. I've said it before, and it bears saying again. Do What Works For You.

Binding and Quilting

I'm sewing the binding on the colorwash quilt. It's been so hot I've had the A/C on and I parked myself in front of the television. I don't even remember what I watched.

This is what the binding really looks like, red and red purple swirls on black and very dark gray. I worked my way around three sides before I got tired and had to stop.

I also picked up Tutti Frutti over the weekend.

Love the quilting on this too.






Hey, Valerie. Happy Birthday!

Colorwash Quilt, Quilted

I picked up three quilts from Janet-Lee yesterday.

One of them was the Colorwash quilt, so I wanted to add the hanging sleeve and binding right away.

I made my binding a lot smaller than normal. This is just over 3/8". I have pinned it all down, and now I have to hand sew it down. Since it's almost black, that will have to happen during the day when the light is brightest.

I wanted it quilted in curves. Here is a detail.

I bought all I could of the fabric I used for the backing, and used what was left for the hanging sleeve, but it wasn't quite enough, so I had to search through my stash.

Hey, you all know I love to put little jokes in my quilts!

Getting Closer...

(Remember that line from the very first "Star Wars"? If you saw it in a movie theater, like I did, after waiting in the longest line for a movie you ever saw, in the first two weeks after it came out... yeah.)

This is getting a lot closer. Ignore the diamonds that rest on the floor, they are merely placeholders for some dark fabric to be added later. I have been working on the lower corners, getting them to blend better and show off the rings. The upper left area of pinkish tones is still muddy and mushy. Hopefully my shopping excursion will yield good results.

I left these pictures VERY LARGE so you can click on them and see all the details of the fabrics.

Here is a cropped version so you can see that the finished quilt may look like.

Diamonds Dancing Like Demons!

I'm going to vent in a bit, so bear with me. I really do love being an artist and making quilts and making weird stuff, and pushing the edge of every design envelope I can find, but the going is rarely smooth.

I designed this, the first diamond quilt in one day. I was feeling pretty proud of myself. Well, we all know where THAT leads. I knew there were some things that were not working in yesterday's version, and I thought it would be an easy fix.

 After dinner last night I went into the studio and started "tinkering."

At some point I figured out I was NOT making a colorwash quilt with giant prints. I was making a quilt of diamonds, that were part of bigger, overlapping diamonds, that blended in and out of each other, and to make that happen, I had to make you see their edges, so I did NOT want them to blend. So I had to move them. After a couple of hours I had this, and I thought it was pretty much IT.

Then I looked again. SH*T, I had that bright pink at the top left edge that stuck out. Had to fix that.

Rummage through stash. Curse.

OK! Ta-da! GOT IT! Then I looked at the picture above and I saw IT! The fly in the ointment. The block that JUST WOULD NOT sit back and relax. You can find it. It's the pretty one in the lower left, with the pink flowers. CRAP! I tried moving it to a couple of places, but it just would not play nicely with me.

A bit more swearing and fabric shuffling and I have this. YES, I know I have to fill that triangular space at the bottom, but that's not all that hard to do, and it can wait. The corner is now darker than I would like it to be, but I really am running out of unique big prints. Rather I should say I have run out. I don't really want to go shopping, because I can't take my design wall with me, and you never really know what will fit until you try it.

Now I can hear some of you already. "Um, Lynne. There's more dark space on the right. Your quilt looks a little off balanced."

Um, no. That vertical row of diamonds at the far right are the edge pieces. Those will be cut in half. Here's a "camera crop" to show you. And yes, I know the two pinkish ones at the upper left don't necessarily read as "diamond" shapes, but hey, there are at least 74 unique fabrics in this thing, and though I have a really good stash, it does have it's limits and I've pretty much pushed it to the limit.

So here are 74 Diamonds Dancing Like Demons.

Here's another funny thought. This quilt is made from scraps (really) and is made from one shape. So it fits the definition of a "Charm Quilt."

ROFLMAO!!!

News

I promised this quilt to my son, but it's still in my house because I love it so much.

Then I remembered I have lots of giant diamonds left over and lots of giant prints in my stash so I figured I would make myself another one!!!

To make a quilt like this you need lot of blocks, so I spent the afternoon cutting diamonds out of my large prints.

I threw them up on the wall so I could see them.

Of course I couldn't stop from playing with them.

You get the idea. And here is where you can tell I took Wanda's Colorwash 360 class. I have more fabrics to cut, and then I'll be rearranging them.






As for the news, my Dad had a heart attack yesterday. He's anemic, losing blood and they don't know why. There is something else going on, and to treat one thing means possibly making the other worse. So we are all taking it day by day and keeping our fingers crossed. Remember he's 87.   

Back Back Back!

Yesterday I worked on backings for some quilts.

The exceptionally feminine pink barn deserved an equally feminine backing so I picked this big print from the Kaffe Collective. It's a girly barn, and as my son says, "If you're going over the top - keep going!"

The Jealousy quilt got a greenish blue border.

 I had already selected this as the backing, and I thought the red violet would make a perfect binding,

 

It looked OK, but it just didn't sing the way I wanted it to.

 The orange, on the other hand, really stood out.

Here are closeups of the border and binding.

Last but certainly not least is this Philip Jacobs fabric I chose for the backing of my Colorwash quilt.

I bought every last inch of the fabric on the bolt. It was barely 2-1/4 yards, and it involved some really fussy cutting and sewing to get it right. Binding for this will be selected later.

This Tula Pink just hopped right into my shopping bag and DEMANDED to be included in my DGD's Dino Diamonds quilt. That gorgeous owl is SO going to be fussy cut and showed off in its own big diamond!!! The final shipment of dinosaur fabrics is due today, so after those go through the washer and dryer it will be All Dinos All The Time.

Stay tuned!

Look Ma, No Pins!!

This is my 400 piece colorwash all sewn up.

and pressed, on the design wall.

I counted fourteen fabrics which are used more than once. One fabric has four blocks on the quilt. There are three or four prints that are represented in different colorways. Originally I had a fair number of "blenders" in there, but as Wanda pointed out, when they sat next to a "busy" print, they looked like flat holes. So I went through my stash and replaced them. This may be a "color" quilt, but it is the prints that carry the color from one area to the next, and they move your eye around.

If you want to learn about how color works in quilts, you should take Wanda's class. I haven't encountered ANY better way of teaching or learning color in fabric. I am really good with color. Very good. And I struggled mightily, pissing and moaning for two weeks over this. Once I got over the fact that I didn't want to be a "mini Wanda" I was able to relax and go for it.

It took about three hours to get the fabrics up on the wall for a starting point. I spent close to 40 hours "tweaking," often working four hour stretches until midnight. Then I'd get up at 6:30 the next morning, look at it before I took a shower to get ready for work, and invariably I'd move two or three pieces around.

And yes, I sewed those 400 squares together without using one damned pin. You know me, the Pin Queen. Never would have thought THAT was possible, but I'm telling you this, I'll never go back to the old way of sewing blocks together.

Years ago I showed a photograph of blue painter's tape on the linoleum floor in my dining room outlining the size of a quilt I wanted to make. (Hey, I got sick of measuring every five minutes.) One reader commented thusly ("I'm banging my head on my worktable. So. Freaking. Brilliant.")  That's how I feel about assembling the quilt this way. Never going back THERE again.

Wanda, thou art brilliant!

Scary!

Rebecca asked if I had learned anything in the colorwash quilts that I could use in my other work, and the answer is absolutely. But there was one thing that I really wanted to know, and that was how Wanda manages to put all the pieces together.

Taking the rows off the wall and grouping them like this...

is kind of a leap of faith.

Here are all the pieces of my quilt. Wanda has the most ingenious way of sewing them together I have ever seen.

And guess what, they don't sew together the way you think.

 I was glad I was doing this on a Sunday, because I sat at the sewing machine for about four hours. I would not have wanted to interrupt the process.

Here is the day's work. My shoulders were sore, so I will finish this later.

 Wanda had suggested students try a smaller 25 square version, before embarking on the real thing. This is mine, so I know how the next step works.

Lies, Lies, Lies!

You really didn't think I could keep my fingers off this thing, did you?

Well, I didn't. I have been tinkering. I tried to make the outside rows look less like dark borders and allow the color on the edges to bump out a bit. I tried to make the corners less like blobs. I have some flat spots, and not as many lively fabrics as I perhaps ought to, but I am good with this. (Yeah, I know, I've only been saying that for the last two weeks.)

This is the view from my cutting table. I have started cleaning up a bit. This also gives you an idea of the scale of the colorwash. It is 20 rows of 2-1/2" squares, so right now it is 50" across, but when it is sewn together it will be 40" square.

The sewing machine table is clear as is my ironing table. As you can see I've got fabric all over the place. I have something like three quilts to bind, but I have to have room to cut strips and pin the binding to the quilt, so I have to clean up. Plus I hate it messy.

By the way, Gail of the boxes of fabric, your green and yellow box of fabrics saved my butt on the colorwash quilt. Have I told you lately how much I love you?

After & Before...

This is the absolute latest and greatest. (Although I've said that several times during this process, I am pretty sure this really is IT.

And because it is so hard to envision the whole process...

This was the first pass. I look at it now and I can't get over how choppy it was.

Once again, I have to tell you all how incredibly difficult this is. It's not just the color, it's the value. It's the placement next to its neighbors. It's how each block fits together to get as seamless a transition from light to dark and from one color to the next. And I should tell you that in the 400 squares in the picture at the top, there are probably 396 unique fabrics.

Wanda makes it look easy, but then, Wanda has a stash like no other and she's been making colorwash quilts for a long time.

Everything is difficult before it is easy.

ON THE HOME FRONT... I got out the stepladder and went onto my roof and washed the skylights. Then I started clearing the leaves from the gutters. It was messy work. So I got ingenious and went to get the leaf blower, and back up on the roof, I used the leaf blower to clear the gutters. It was messy and stuff flew all over the place, including in my face. It was great fun!

After I coiled the long extension cord and put everything away, I emptied the planter pots and moved the empty pots behind the house, stowed the garden tools and hose and sprinklers in the shed, moved the wind chimes into the house, washed and placed the storm glass panels on the porch doors. I've already cut down the perennials and trimmed most of the plants that grew in my front yard so I didn't have to do any of that. Then I went grocery shopping, came home and made the best pizza I have ever cooked.

I sent an email to my son telling him about my day and his reply was, "Geez Mom, we just had breakfast and you've already done a whole day's work!"



By the way, I was wrong about Wanda's studio.