Fifty-Eight Carats

 

The Fifty-Eight Carats quilt is finished. It is named because there are 58 unique prints in the quilt. Each is used only once. It is not meant to be a colorwash quilt. I do not want the colors to blend into one another. I want you to see the edges of the diamonds that appear and disappear. One of the fabrics is from 1984. Most are from 2007-2019. I took me about ten days to design. It wasn't easy. There was a lot of grumbling. There are 58 fabrics in this, but I'm pretty sure I went through at least 100 to find the ones that worked.

Thought you'd enjoy seeing the quilt in real space, so you can get a good idea of how big it really is.

Fifty-Eight Carats

This is what I'll be sewing together. There are 58 unique fabrics, so I am going to call this quilt Fifty-Eight Carats, because carats is how you measure a gemstone, and a diamond is a gemstone.

For all of you who really want to see differences, here is the first quilt, Magic Carpet, which will be flying to my son and his family later this year.

One of Those Days

You know how you have a day filled with errands and at the end you think you didn't get anything done? So here's what I did on Saturday.

1. Picked up my Mom

2. Drove to the Portsmouth Fabric Company where I bought lots of fabric.

3. Had lunch at the Pink Bamboo right down the street.

4. I drove to Hampton Falls past the barn I love so much.

5. I picked up a couple of quilts from Janet-Lee.

6. Walked around Portsmouth stopping in a couple of shops... The Elephantine Bakery, Corks &  Curds (wine and cheese).

7. Stopped in at the Flower Kiosk and bought flowers for my house and a wreath for my Mom's door.

8. Stopped in at the Lindt store in Exeter and bought an assortment of their truffles for the bowl in my living room. 

9. Went to Staples and then to the grocery store for a few things I needed.
10. Got home and made dinner.
11. Washed all my fabric.

12. Went into the studio and cut blocks and did some rearranging. This isn't the final final final, but it's damned close. I decided to use the same dark fabric around the colored blocks. It's actually a batik with little gold squares, but I am using the wrong side.

So it was actually a pretty good day.

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!!!

Dancing Diamonds

While I was at work yesterday I thought about this quilt, and how the first one reminded everybody of overlapping diamonds. Well, I wondered, I hadn't done that on purpose, but how could I do it to THIS one? Idly I wondered if making kind of concentric rings of color might do it. I was pretty sure I didn't have enough different prints to make that happen, and I don't plan to go shopping for more fabric, but I figured I'd try. I had nothing to lose, since I had a good photo of the previous layout.

So I started in the middle. Or more or less the middle, and tried to work outward. I did not move four or five diamonds, or the triangles across the top or most of the ones at the very bottom (those will be triangles, not diamonds), but I moved all the others. Many times.

I kept moving things around, and around, and around. I rummaged through my stash to find prints that were BIG so I could try them in the quilt. In this design, a fabric that is NOT A BIG BUSY PRINT just becomes a wallflower and doesn't do the design any favors. So I kept plugging.

At the end of the night I had this, and I was so brain dead I just couldn't see whether it was an improvement over yesterday or not. I think it might be.

What I found very interesting though, was looking at the thumbnail images of all the pictures of the process I had uploaded to my computer. I could see how the colors and values had moved around, and in the latest version, they actually seem more closely packed.

But even the pictures don't help. The edges get lost because you don't know where the quilt will really end, so I did a camera crop, and this is a lot closer to what the finished quilt will be.

OK, now that I see it this way, I think I'm good. There are a couple of things I want to tinker with (I mean, like, duh!), but you get the drift.