Nonchalant is Finished

Woo hoo! I finished the Nonchalant quilt. I finished it last night so I haven’t had time to take it outside for beauty shots yet! But soon!

 

Binding Nonchalant

 

As I get older I have had to change the way I do things. While I have no problem hand sewing, when I hold something in my lap, I can't quite see what I am doing, so now I use a card table. One benefit is the quilt isn't on my lap and the pins don't get caught on things like my couch or clothes.

The biggest benefit is the quilt is closer so I can see it, and the table keeps it flat. I can put a light directly on the quilt so it's easy to see while I stitch.

And yes, I do all my finish binding sewing on the front of my quilts. I learned how to blindstitch many many years ago. More than once a quilt appraiser has missed this element of my quilts. I find it endlessly amusing. You can read about WHY I do it here. It's kind of a fun story.

While the stitching is invisible, there are other considerations with the way I bind my quilts. I have written a tutorial about it, and it is available at my Etsy shop.

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.

Quilt PickUp

 

I drove out to Janet-Lee's and picked up Blitzen, the Christmas Macnas quilt, and Nonchalant, the white one, which had been quilted. They are quite glorious.

What I like about the Blitzen quilt is that it's a Christmas quilt, but it doesn't hit you over the head with the idea of it being Christmas. And for me, Christmas colors are red, green, gold and white, which is why those are the only colors I used in the quilt.

The Nonchalant quilt is one of my favorite quilts. It's ridiculously simple and yet stupidly gorgeous.

I love the quilting design. True and funny story: When I first started getting my quilts quilted, I did not like closely quilted designs. My pal Julie told me I might be wrong about that. Over the years I have changed my mind and once again, dear Julie, you have proven correct. When I tell you all that Julie and I influence each other, I am not joking. I have met the most wonderful friends through blogging.

I am probably going to make another one of these. This quilt will fit anywhere, and everyone who sees it falls in love with it.

The Macnas series, which was Julie's inspiration, proves that a simple shape, with its basic repetition, can be more than a "scrap" quilt - it can be elegant and sophisticated  - as both the quilts above show.

Nonchalant is a Flimsy

 

The Nonchalant Macnas Quilt is a flimsy. It is 56" x 72". I guess there were more creamy WOWs than I expected. The sun was hiding behind the clouds when I took this picture.

But the sun came out briefly so I could take this photo of the quilt in the sun!

Nonchalant

 

After some very minor tinkering (removing some blocks I thought read as too dark and moving some darks and lights around so I'd have a better balance) I decided this is what I will sew together.

The quilt also has a name: Nonchalant, because this quilt is not full of itself, and not overly fussy.

So I started where I could reach, and sewed the blocks together in largish chunks.

Here are the sixteen blocks I sewed together first. These fit in the empty space in the photo above this one.

When I stopped to have dinner, I had two-thirds of the top half done.

After dinner I sewed up the last third of the top section. I have to sew the three parts together, but oh gee darn, that won't be hard at all.

I hope to get the flimsy sewn together over the weekend, but I'll be teaching on Saturday and am having some work done in my house that may start next week and will need some things moved before that can happen, so we'll see. At any rate the flimsy should be completed in short order.

Here is a closeup of a section of the quilt. The WOWs are self-explanatory - you know I love them and use them at random. The "Lights" are bright colored prints on a white background. That's all this quilt is.

The quilt is based on Julie's "Macnas" series, and you can read about them here and here.

3, 2, 1... Blast Off!

 

Once I decided to actually DO the Macnas dance, I had to work out how big it would be and set a vertical and horizontal line so I could properly line up the blocks on my design wall. A plumb line helps me work out the vertical line, a laser level helps me set up a horizontal one. Then I set out some blocks to help me work out how many across (14) and how many up and down (18.)

Then it was time to start making blocks. To do that I had to cut more WOW Macnas rectangles, and I did that from yardage. Once I made a bunch of blocks and pressed them, I literally put them in a stack and started working from left to right, one row at a time, and I put the blocks on the wall in the order they were in the stack, so there was no rearranging or designing. I just wanted to fill the space. It took about an hour to match, sew, press the blocks and put them on the design wall.

Well that was so easy, I just decided to keep going...

Woo hoo! This was fun!

Another hour or so later and I had covered three quarters of the design wall. But I needed to cut more WOW rectangles, so I did that.

And because you know me, in for a penny in for a pound, I just had to keep going until I filled out the entire design wall.

THAT WAS FUN!  Next up: fine tuning. But don't expect anything fancy. The whole point of this is to do something that looks fresh and free and isn't formal or stiff.

Plans for a Macnas

 Last Monday (June 16th), I texted Julie and asked her if the Macnas rectangles were 2-1/2" x 4-1/2". I had been looking at her blog posts about her Macnas quilts. (duh)

"I am thinking of going through the big bins and cutting up those scraps into that sized pieces and making them into a bunch of semi-scrappy quilts."

As you know, I have been doing that.

A few days later I texted Julie again, "You know what would be pretty? A White Macnas. Half White with colors and...  half Cream with colors.  Or half of the first with WOWs."

Julie said she'd go with WOW and White with prints.

I couldn't go with either because I was still sewing up the Green Deco quilt. Before I made blocks for anything else, I had to get the green quilt off the design wall. Which I finally did.

Before I sewed up any of the rectangular pieces I needed white rectangles. So I dug out my WOW scrappy bin and cut a whole stack of rectangles from that box. I also got rid of a lot of stuff I couldn't use (like long strips less than one inch wide...)

Anyway I finally grabbed some fabrics, paired them up and stuck them up on the design wall to see what it  might look like.

Yeah, that's a GO!

Squirrel??

It shouldn't surprise anybody (certainly not my regular readers) that Julie and I influence each other. She is now making a pinkish version of the Deco quilt and I have been cutting up my scraps into rectangles like her Macnas quilts. 

I have a big bin in my studio that has scraps of light fabrics. Some leftover backing bits, some pieces that

are too small to go back on the shelf and some that got thrown in because I couldn't figure out where else to put them.

I saw the lovely collection that Julie is making and when I looked at this bin, I knew there had to be a quilt or two or three in there.

So knowing the wicked hot heat was coming, and that simply having the iron on heats up the studio, I dug some pieces out of the box and ironed them before bed the other night. I planned to cut them up in the morning.

The result was the picture at the top of this post. I had a stack almost six inches tall. Woo hoo!

Thus motivated, I prepared another stack of fabric for the next day. Not as big as the first, but still pretty good.

On the THIRD day, I cut a stack of fabric almost SIX and a half inches tall.

And this is just the LIGHTS bin. I have other bins. And sadly, or not, depending on your viewpoint, the Lights bin is not anywhere close to being empty.

So here are all my pieces more or less organized by color. I have resolved not to begin to plan to sew any of them together until I have gone through the entire LIGHTS bin. Already I have some ideas.