Beauty Shots

 

I finally got beauty shots of a few quilts and here they are. This is Needle in a Haystack, so named because I hid a purple triangle in the quilt.

This is the Blue Ribbon quilt.

This is the Carnelian quilt. It was an overcast day, so the colors are really true in these photos.

I've also been adding the binding to the Nonchalant quilt.

Assembling the Blue Macnas

 

When I have a long row of blocks to sew together, I break it up into smaller chunks. 

I've been sewing the Blue Macnas quilt together and you can see what I have sewn together at the left.

It's pretty funny. I've already chosen the border for this quilt (the white) and the binding (the blue.) I don;t usually do that before I have completely assembled the top.

And I've even chosen and ordered the backing for it! 

This is going to be a table quilt, and I'll put it on the table when I have the Needle in a Haystack quilt on the couch. I guess this means I am going to have to get some blue pillows....

oh my!

Updates

I've finished the Needle in a Haystack quilt. I haven't taken beauty shots of it yet. I've been preparing for my talk in Connecticut, gathering up the quilts I will show and putting finishing touches on my speech.

Here are the quilts I will bring, all labeled and sorted. It's amazing how heavy this many quilts are!

I've got the Green Deco quilt back from being quilted and I really love the quilting on it.

The Green Birds quilt is back too!  I love them both.

I will have to choose bindings for each of these, but I won't get to them until after I get back from visiting the Connecticut Piecemakers Guild.

Needle in a Haystack

 

I'm finally working on the binding of the Needle in a Haystack quilt. 

It's much easier when I can "watch" tennis at the same time. I am watching the tennis at the US Open in New York. Streaming it on ESPN means I can choose what match I want to watch instead of being stuck watching the one that is being broadcast on normal television. I am quite enjoying it.

I'm also working on the talk I will give to the Connecticut Piecemakers Guild in a couple of weeks. I'm talking about the kinds of things that inspire me, and how I like to work in series. I'll be showing word quilts, scrap slab triangle quilts, my Zebra quilts as well as examples of quilts I make based on the inspiration I get from simply looking around.

I've never given a talk quite like that before, and I am excited about it. I'm also teaching a bird making workshop the next day, so that's going to be fun too.

I'm feeling a lot better. The congestion from Covid is gone, but I am still building up my stamina. So I am trying to take it mostly easy and not doing too much in one day. 

Needle in a Haystack Flimsy

 

The Needle in a Haystack quilt is a flimsy. Here it is, above. You can click the photo and then click again for a closeup.

After a couple of false starts I decided not to have a border, and will instead use that lovely floral I showed the other day as the backing and binding.

I have gone shopping for fabric online and have done some stash replenishing, particularly yellows and oranges, were a bit thin on the shelf.

I still have lots of scraps and an idea based on the Kangamangus quilt, so I will be tinkering with that design to see where else I can take it.

You Really Didn't Think...

 You really didn't think I would make a quilt so uniformly ... Blue, did you?

SURELY, my regular readers would expect me to put in some sort of joke...

Or visual pun,

Or anomaly,

that MAKES YOU LOOK!

Surely you all know that I love nothing more than breaking the rules while following them at the same time. Above there is indeed one purple triangle. It's been in the photos all along, but you have missed it because....

VALUE SUPERCEDES COLOR!

(Nyah, ah, ah!)

So, for those of you who missed it, you can often substitute a different color in your quilt as long as it is the same VALUE. Most people will miss the difference, because it looks like it belongs. It DOES belong, because it is the same VALUE.

So the title of this quilt is: Needle in a Haystack.

As in, Needle? What needle? Where?

I love to put surprises in my quilts to reward viewers who are paying attention.

SO, why purple? Well, there are some pinks in this quilt, in the light blocks with the insects and beetles and the lotus leaves. 

Pinks are really light red-violets. You can see the relationship in the photo above. I tried this red violet block in the quilt but it didn't "hide" as well as the purple did when lined up with the other blue triangles.

As you can see.

Purple is a mixture of blue and red, so the purple block fit in with the overall plan. Of course I used a fairly nondescript print so it wouldn't draw too much attention to itself.

THIS IS IMPORTANT...

WHAT I WANTED was for the different block to DISAPPEAR with the others. I wanted it to be there, but I WANTED it to HIDE. I wanted viewers to notice it if they looked hard enough. Had I WANTED it to show off, I would have used the red-violet block. This was a conscious choice. The color, the print, the location for this block were all specific, conscious. and deliberate choices.

When YOU make YOUR quilts, you have choices too. WHAT do you want your quilt to say? How do you want your quilt to LOOK? How do you want it to FEEL (visual feel, not texture.) As Yogi Berra famously said, "If you don't know where you are going, you will end up somewhere else."

I knew what I wanted this quilt to be from the very beginning. The choices I made were choices that would make that idea come to life. It is very important to know that when you make a quilt, or any other piece of art.

Kill Your Darlings...

 

Sometimes no matter how much you like something, you have to recognize that it doesn't work and you have to get rid of it. In the block above, the color of the flowers in the blue triangle on the right match (and thus blend) perfectly with the blue in the fabric on the left.

This kinda breaks my heart as this fabric is the inspiration for the entire blue quilt. 

You can see that blue flowered triangles in the layout above. You can see that they attract the eye right away, and they also do not "read" as blue. There's a white flower up there, that is surrounded by blue and it reads as a "hole." That's a no-no.

Here I have covered up those flowered fabrics and the design really shines. What I want in this quilt is to emphasize the sharp blue triangles. Without those flowers, what you see is TRIANGLES. Which is what I want.

I also removed the light blues in the above blocks. These light blues "read" as too dark and were too close in value to some of the other blues that were used as "darks."

I ended up discarding 20 blocks, which is 12% of the total blocks on the design wall, so I had to make more blocks before I started to design the quilt for real.

And one more thing:

Am I the only quilter who has ever done this?

And I did it TWICE!

So How Did I...?

 

You're probably wondering how did I cut down the long triangles from the template (on the right) to the smaller size on the right. I mean, I'm sure you know how I did it, but let me tell you how I did it EFFICIENTLY. 

Because we all know I don't mind working hard, I just don't like working STUPID.

For this design I'd need over 250 left leaning right triangles. And they had to lean in the correct direction or I couldn't use them. I knew I sure as hell wasn't going to cut them one at a time.

I wanted to cut my traingles 8-1/2" tall, so putting a piece of painter's tape near that line would help me, but I'd need more than that.

I figured I could get two triangles out of a rectangle of fabric, but how big would the rectangle be? 8-1/2" was one dimension, but I needed the other, so I placed two properly cut triangles on my worktable and measured. It was somewhere between 5 inches and 5-1/4 inches. That was good enough for me. So I cut my WOF strips 5-1/4" wide.

Then I taped a 6" ruler to a 2-1/2" one and subcut my strips into two 5-1/4" x 8-1/2" pieces. This meant I had FOUR of each (because WOF = two layers of fabric.)

Next I flipped one piece over so both rectangles were wrong side up. I aligned the edges so one rectangle was perfectly sitting atop the other.

Next I lined up the top and left edges of the fabric with the top edge on the ruler and the 8-1/2" line, which I marked with the blue painter's tape so there would be no confusion. I cut along the long edge of the triangle, pulled the other pieces of fabric out of the way slightly and trimmed the corners.

Then I rotated the ruler, matched up the edges and cut the next piece.

Worked like a charm.

After that all I had to do was sew them up.

You know, "all."

***Now, I because I wanted my triangles leaning to the left, and because I wanted the template to face UP (I find templates slipperier if you turn them upside down), I had to cut my fabric from the wrong side. If I had wanted them facing the other direction, I would have arranged the fabrics right side up.

Monochromatic <> Boring

 

Just because something is monochromatic (one color), it does not have to mean monotonous, or boring.

This quilt is shaping up to be just what I had envisioned. It just took me 126 blocks on the design wall to know for sure.

Yesterday I still needed to make about 45 blocks, and for that I had to cut more fabric, so that is what I did. I cut the blocks and sewed them into pairs and put them up on the design wall. These are arranged willy-nilly, with no editing whatsoever. That will change later today when I get to designing in earnest.

Blue Grows

 

As I watched a movie over the weekend I pinned some blue triangles together to sew together later. I think there were almost 50 of them.

I added them to the ones already up on the design wall. These rectangles are about 4" x 8". I have to fill the design wall full of blocks, so I will need 135 in total. I need about 40 or so more blocks.

I am liking this very much.

Blue Triangles Start

 I started sewing pairs of triangles together and put them up on the design wall. One of the things I liked about the Triangle Dance quilt was its liveliness, but I have not yet decided if I want this quilt to share feeling. Originally I conceived it as an all blue quilt.

Here I have cut more blocks and threw them up on the design wall. 

Arranging blocks is often like creating a Sudoku puzzle. It can be tricky to evenly distribute the various prints. Here I tried to put the busier colored lights in diagonal rows. Didn't thrill me.

Here I played with the idea of two different triangles next to each other creating parallelograms. This is a better idea in the imagination than in real life.

When I get stuck I remove ALL the blocks from the design wall and go back to the start. In this case, my original idea (even if I have since wondered if it would be too boring.)

It is quite literally monochromatic (one color) but that's not always a bad thing. I'm going to keep along this route, making more blocks and seeing where it goes. I have kept the busier blue prints in the "light" category for now. I always like to have a little surprise.

New Blue Quilt

 

I ordered a bunch of lovely blues and I have been thinking of what to make with them. Here are the middle range blues. 

Finally I figured out what I wanted, and I would need some light blues too, so here are some light blues.

In 2015 I made this quilt from scraps, and I always liked it. The first question was how big did I want the triangles to be:

The triangles on the right are 9" tall and I thought they were too big. The ones on the left are 8" tall, and I like the fact that they lean to the right.

One of the things I liked about the inspiration quilt was the bright colors in the light fabrics, so I went through my stash and found a few I thought would work. I've started cutting some pieces, but I have a lot more to cut.

I'm looking forward to playing with this shape and the blues.