Dark Majesty Flimsy is Complete!

I woke up early yesterday and couldn't fall back to sleep so I got up and went into the sewing studio to sew the rows of the Dark Majesty quilt together. Here I've got it in three big sections and I'm checking to make sure I like the way the pieces are arranged.

Because these blocks have at least two edges on the bias, the rows are on a diagonal. I try to keep the bigger chunks as small as I can until I sew the great big ones together. Here I am lining them up to get ready to sew them together.

Here is the finished flimsy. It will work out to be about 76 x 80 inches. (193 x 203 cm). I'm happy with the way it came out. It's dark, but not too dark or depressing. It's got more color than I originally thought it would. I'm glad I stuck with it.

Just a reminder that my diamond quilts are inspired by Pam Goecke Dinndorf's Harlequin Quilt. She sells a pattern for it here.

Dark Majesty in Pieces

I suppose every quilt starts in pieces, but when the one you're working on spans three rooms...

you kinda sorta know you're in trouble.

Actually this quilt is in eight pieces now, and I hope by this time tomorrow it will have reached flimsy status.  It was too big to design on the design wall, and I sure do hope it works out. I don't even know what it's going to look like when it's all sewn together, but I'm pretty sure it's going to work out.

I can't wait to get back to the Colorado Barn. 



I'm going to listen to HAMILTON all day today.

In Pieces

 

I've been sewing the blocks of the Dark Majesty quilt together. Since two edges of each block are on the bias, I have to be very careful, and when a row is done, I lay it on the floor until I sew it to another row. What is on the floor now is in two big sections. 

This is what is left on the wall. The lowest long diagonal row is sewn together, but the rest isn't. I will sew the big chunks together and then it will move the the floor in the living room. I want to make this quilt wider, and to do that I need to extend some of the rows, and I don't have room on the design wall.  

I hope to have this top sewn together by the Fourth of July. Wimbledon starts next week, and I have bindings to sew on two quilts, and I will be picking up two more from the longarm quilter in the next couple of weeks, so I'll be quite busy. 

Somewhere in there I will start making another bird quilt for my brother and SIL. More about that later.

Neon at Night

My son saw a photo of this quilt and thought it looked like city lights at night, and suggested I call it Night Lights, but all I could think of was the night light in the bathroom so I told him that was out.

Then he revised that thought and suggested "Neon Lights." It's apropos, I suppose, but I still like Julie's suggestion of Dark Majesty better.  Anyway, I'm sufficiently happy with it that I can begin sewing it together.

I am happy with the lower left part of this layout, so instead of starting from the corner, I decided to start sewing a long diagonal row together.

Go figure.

So, lah-di-dah. I'm sewing merrily along. I want this to be wider, and I guess I'll add to either side (or I could add a couple of diagonal rows to the right of the one I sewed in the top photo, but I haven't quite worked that out yet.

Oh well.

Good thing things like that don't freak me out much.

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:

Diamond Quartets

It took me a while but I finally figured out how to make these diamond quartets efficiently. Here they are in all their color variations. I wanted some of these to have bright fabrics, and some darker, less intense colors.

Having these little suckers put together makes designing the quilt so much easier.

Going Fishing

There's a saying.. Fish or cut bait.

I've been wrestling with these dark diamonds for a couple of weeks.
 

I got some more large prints that didn't seem quite so dark. Here I've put fussy cut large prints in the medium sized diamonds, but I wasn't sure about them. Every time I placed the small diamonds nearby I was unsure about the dark fabric on either side of the small colored ones. I tried different fabrics, dark green, silvery gray or teal. I was spending a lot of time "cutting bait," screwing around cutting fabrics and not really getting anywhere.

But every time I'd be scrolling through my photostream and I'd pass these pictures, whoever was sitting next to me would see these and say, "OH, I like that."


Well after I heard that four or five times, I stopped and thought about it. Maybe my problem with the idea of this quilt I'm being too hard on myself.

So I pulled out most of the medium sized diamonds in big prints, and decided to go back to the blenders I had been using. I'll never forget something Mary Ellen Hopkins told me when I met her at Quilt Market in 1984. "You have to have darks in your lights, and lights in your darks."

I started making the little four patch diamonds using a couple of different dark backgrounds. It's looking better, and I'm feeling good about it, even if it looks worse in photos than it does in real life.

So I'm done messing around. I'm going fishing.

More Big Dark Diamonds

Here are some more big dark diamonds for the dark quilt.

No surprise here!

Or even this one.

I store leftover backing fabric separately from my regular stash, only because the pieces are so irregular and don't fit as well on the shelf. It's probably not a great idea, but it does make for a fun find. This is left over from the backing for The Black Box.

This is where I am at now. This is going to be a hard quilt to photograph because it is so dark. I've brightened this photo considerably so you can see the prints, but in real life it isn't this bright. Then again, it's been cloudy here every day for the last week!

I love the big diamonds, and am not quite sure what direction the medium and tiny diamonds should take. I'll work it out later. I am planning for my Barns class at Quilted Threads on Saturday.

Back to The Dark Side

Sometimes you've got an idea, but when you play around with it, you can't make it work. It's not the end of the world. Generally, the way to get it to work is to shift gears and go do something else. Doing something else gets your brain away from what isn't working and sometimes that's enough to generate new ideas.

I really liked the IDEA of a dark diamonds quilt, but no matter how much I played with it, it was just too dark. Too dark, too cold. By the time I got to this, above, I knew the bright little diamonds were too bright, and the deep dark diamonds alongside them was also too dark. In fact, those side by side little dark diamonds reminded me of the eyes you see on cartoonish space aliens, and THAT wasn't helping.

I knew I wanted the fabrics to sort of blend together, but I didn't want them to fall into the same pot and end up looking like mush. Or sludge. The big problem was that I had depleted a fair amount of my stash, and I needed to replenish it.  So I went online shopping, choosing several large Kaffe Fassett, Philip Jacobs and some other prints. When I opened the box yesterday when the fabrics arrived, I realized I had gone too heavily on more blue, but I had made a couple of out-of-the-box selections that made a big difference.  Here they are:

I picked this big Asian floral with these rust colored flowers. Rust is really a subdued orange, which is the complement (opposite) of blue, so those would immediately contrast with what I already had.

I picked this big Philip Jacobs print in a colorway that was very warm. I went back and forth when I selected this, but I'm glad I decided to go with it.

I also picked this wild Paula Nadelstern print. Fussy cut, the diamonds are quite gorgeous, and also provide a bit of color and shape contrast to the other fabrics I already had.

So I took all the smaller pieces off the design wall, leaving just the big diamonds (from the first photo.) As soon as I put just one of the Asian blocks up, I knew I was on the right track. You can see it too! Immediately the lighter values in the Asian fabric lighten up the overwhelming darkness of the others.

Here I have added more of the other fabric diamonds. I have more to cut, and a lot to rearrange, but I think I am on the right track.

I had bought some darkish blenders for the little diamonds, and I think I have to lighten some of these up as well. I don't want them too bright, but these could be a little bit too dull. At the very least I need to match the color of the Asian floral, and some of the gold, rusty orange and cranberry in the Philip Jacobs print. I've pulled some other fabrics out of my stash that will coordinate.

I should be all set after that.  For me the important thing is not to settle. I now know what I want, and I have a good idea of how to get there. As usual, things change, but that isn't a bad thing, as ideas do evolve and it's very important to let them. One thing that helped me was thinking of this as a quilt for a man. I wanted not just a DARK quilt, but a masculine one. We'll see how that works!

Getting There

 

Do you have any idea how long these four patch diamond blocks take to make? They are all I did Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.

I really need them to help work out the design.

This is where I was before I went to bed on Friday night. It's getting closer, but it's not quite there yet.

And I think I might have solved the puzzle of the dark ones.

Mumbo Jumbo

Monday night I worked on those dark diamonds. I tried medium range medium sized diamonds, I tried darkish fabrics, but the more I worked the less clear it became. Finally I looked at it and I thought to myself, "Lynne, you're making sludge. You keep telling your students not to make areas that are too dark, and that's what you have. It's ugly. Time to regroup." Yeah, I probably should have taken some pictures, but...

So I dug through my stash and found lighter (pinker!) big prints and cut and arranged those diamonds on the design wall. I really really like those remaining dark fabrics, and if they have to go, they'll go, but right now I'm leaving them there.

I started cutting more lighter middle sized diamonds, and put them up with the darker diamonds from the first version. I was pretty sure the darker, more boring ones had to go.

So I replaced them with generally lighter prints.

This is what I had when I decided it was time to pack it in for the night. I'm not quite convinced this is the way to go either, but I'll know for sure once I start adding the little diamonds that will fill in the empty spaces in the layout above.

That'll happen later, and maybe not till this weekend. I have a lot of stuff going on between now and then. And I have to tell you about a wonderful email I got from Pam.