Blue Ice Becomes Making Waves

 I always tell my students to push beyond something that they think looks good.

Breaking apart the central medallion style of one version yielded something interesting.

The nice thing about digital photography is that you can take pictures to store an interesting variation for future review. I really liked this, but didn't want to make a lot more blocks to fully explore the idea so I cheated (improvised). 

This is not my design wall. I took pictures, then printed them on paper, made copies, cut apart the blocks and started playing.

By the time I got this far I knew it was a design I would sew together.

This arrangement is a bit too "regular" for my taste. I will have to break it up a bit more, but that shouldn't be a problem.

I'm still wrestling with how to arrange the fabrics, but I know I don't want something with this much contrast. When I feel ready, I will go in the studio and start cutting up fabric. It's been cold lately and being in there when I am cold is not much fun.

AT ANY RATE...

I can hear some of you.. "BUT LYNNE, you were thinking about long rectangles, and blue ice. This is squares and it looks like waves of water..."

And this is when I tell you to STOP BEING SO DARN LITERAL and to GO WITH THE FLOW. Just because you started with one idea, doesn't mean you're married to it. You should see what happens when you play. You find a new direction and follow that. It is called being creative. Do I know where this will lead? I do not. Do I worry I will screw up? No. What if it doesn't work? I will fix it. I will come up with another idea and try that. Does this frighten me? No. Will I waste fabric? That depends on your definition of waste. If it helps me figure out where I am going and I end up making a killer quilt, working up to that idea will not be wasteful, so my answer is no. Your fabric isn't doing you any good on the shelf.

WHAT I WILL PROBABLY DO... Is just play with these ideas, and then put them all away and start cutting fabric and making blocks and putting them up on the design wall and go from there. I don't want this to be overworked and too fussy.

Loose Ends!

1. The replacement 3' x 4' mat arrived today.

2. I will never, ever, ever use EQ to design my quilts. I can design quilts without it. Besides things look different on a design wall to scale that a computer image cannot duplicate.

3. The fabrics for the 58 Carats quilt were collected over a period of 30 years. They come from different designers, different manufacturers and many of them are in the 10 - 30 year old range. They are not available now, and most certainly do not come in "a set." There are Philip Jacobs, Kaffe Fassett and Tula Pink, along with a host of others I do not know. Most are unavailable now.

4. The Waltzing Matilda quilt will eventually live with a friend in Sydney, Australia.

A Man, a Plan, a Canal... Panama

On the design wall.
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Translated into fabric. I -try- to get the edges on the straight of the grain, but sometimes I just get tired.

Four panels trimmed. The yellow and green are sewn together. The two green asterisks should have been farther apart, but they are OK. The overall "feeling" of how they float together is more important than following my guide to a "T."
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What I have sewn into panels is colored on my guide.

What it all looks like on the design wall. There is one thing I don't like and will change later.

*Gail, that seam you saw on the edge of that panel is there because I tend to leave these bigger than I need them. It allows me a bit more flexibility when I start sewing them together. It's always better to have too much fabric than too little. (Ask me how I know this.) I will do the final trimming down to size when I start sewing them all together.

*Mickey, I live alone. If the house is clean, the dishes are done, the bills are paid and Millie is fed, the litter box is clean and the laundry is done, then I head into the studio and sew. Working in the studio is what I love to do best, so you seeing me "work fast" is really me using all the available time I have to do what I love.

* "A man..." is a pangram palindrome (Thanks, abelian. I really did know that but it slipped my mind). It reads the same backwards and forwards. It also loosely describes my process, and so I thought it was a fitting title to today's post.

 

Flight of Fancy Wrap Up

Before I show you the next thing I'm working on, I thought I'd answer some questions and comments I've received since I started the birds quilt.

 First, the scale. Here is my hand next to a typical bird block. These are not small.

 For my readers outside the US, the ruler above marks the size of the block in centimeters.

Here you can see the size in inches.

I'll make the bird bigger, if I want to accommodate a particular print.

The birds aren't my creation. I don't know where they came from. I saw a photo somewhere in 2009 or so, and figured out how to make them on my own. I have a tutorial for them here. It's pretty basic, but you should be able to work it out on your own. In this photo you can several of the triangles I used to make the bird wings. I always find fabric that looks "wingy." The tutorial gives you a way to look for "wingy" stuff.

I don't mind hard work, but I hate doing "busy" work, or what I call "stupid work." So when I know I'm going to make a lot of birds, I make a big strip of  "legs" and then just cut off what I want.

And if you think I cut a strip of fabric 3/4" wide for a 1/4" finished leg, you are crazy. I sew a wide piece to the white, then trim some off, as you can see in the photo above. It makes for a much cleaner edge, and it's a lot easier to iron. No burnt fingers!

 I don't make the beaks all the same size. (That would be boring and predictable, which isn't very interesting to look at.) Sometimes I want them small, and sometimes I want them bigger. I always "audition" different fabrics, and then test where I want them to go.

I never use plain white as a background for my quilts. (In fact, I don't use solids at all.) I always use a variety of White on White (WOW) fabrics. You can see them in the Black and White Crayons quilt, above. This quilt, by the way, will be in AQS shows in Daytona Beach FL, Phoenix AZ, and Lancaster PA later this year. This quilt also has six black and white birds, which just goes to show you how flexible they really are.

 Pat, years ago I bought a very large cutting mat, 48" x 96", but I cut it down to fit on my worktable and had this long piece left over. It's useful for cutting long things. It's the green underneath the panel above. The long ruler came from one of the "big box" hardware stores (Cees: that means it's a GIANT store.) Sometimes the best tools don't come from a fabric store. And the great big 45-45-90 triangle right next to the ruler on the lower right came from an art supply store.

Because I "fussy cut" fabric for my wings (to get them to look just the way I want), people always ask if I cut a piece right out of the middle of a piece of fabric.  Well, yes!

I find it amusing when I see bloggers show off how many empty spools of thread they used in one year. I sew ALL my quilts using medium-gray thread. I buy a giant spool of it at the quilt shop, and it lasts about a year. I keep a little container near my sewing machine with 20 bobbins pre-wound with this gray thread. It's not fun to have to stop in the middle of a seam and wind a bobbin.

Before I forget, the finished flimsy measures 62" x 78" (or 157 x 198 cm).


I should probably also mention that I do not use any patterns or templates when I make my birds or letters, and they are NOT paper-pieced. It should go without saying that all my quilts are completely original and designed by me, and no, there won't be any patterns for my quilts. Ever.

However I have absolutely no problem sharing any and all information about how I make what I make, and why I make the choices I do. And you could never get all that in a pattern.

Besides, I think you should make your own quilts and not anybody else's. You all get yourselves dressed in the morning without help, you can make your own quilts too. It's not rocket science.

If I missed anything, leave a comment or email me. I'm always happy to hear from readers. You all help and inspire me more than you know.