Dancing Jewels Tinkering

 

Sometimes you (well, I) make a quilt and I put blocks up on the wall and I can already tell that no matter how I arrange the blocks the quilt is going to look good. I do tinker because if I put the blocks up in an orderly fashion, then sometimes I have blocks made with the same fabrics together in one area of the quilt and I really want them distributed throughout.

So after not a lot of tinkering I had this, above, and while I liked the arrangement of the colors and fabrics, I really wanted to make the shapes "dance," so I went back and rotated many blocks.

Here is the result, and I have decided I will sew this together. 

I did not want it to be "perfect." I did not want to make the secondary shapes blend into each fabric gradually. Sometimes there is a break. This is because  I had fabrics of different values and I wanted to spread them all around. I didn't want the quilt to look forced or overworked. Part of the charm of this whole curved seam thing is that the blocks are unique and unexpected, and if you're headed down that road, you have to keep going. I wasn't going to make unique and unusual blocks and then arrange them in a traditional manner.

I make a lot of quilts with geometric shapes. It's one of the things I like best about quilts. I love the surface design, the narrow "picture space." What I mean by that is if you look at a landscape painting, you might see a foreground, a middle ground and a background. Lots of space between near and far. A narrow picture space means the design is basically two-dimensional and is "flat." This quilt is like that. 

The blue Macnas quilt also is made from essentially two colors and one alternating shape, but it doesn't feel like the purple and orange quilt. The quilts are about the same size, but you don't have a sense of a flattened picture space in the blue one. It feels like you have more space to breathe. 

I think the difference is the value. There is a big difference between white and dark blue, but a much smaller range of values between the oranges and the purples. So the purple and orange quilt seems very much "in your face."

Pretty interesting, huh?

Anyway, I love the sass and the verve of the Dancing Jewels quilt. It isn't at all what I thought it was going to be when I started, and I wasn't at all sure it was going to work, but everybody who sees pictures of it responds instantly with at "WOW" or "I love it."

Works for me.

Coincidentally, today is the Nephew's birthday!

Dancing Jewels

 I finished sewing the blocks for the purple and orange quilt, now known as DANCING JEWELS. I am very excited about this and like it very much. Now the real work begins of tinkering with this to make it better.

I love the way the shapes transform into oddly shaped diamonds. I love the way they get fatter, and then skinnier and shift from one side to the other.

Here are some details so you can see how the various fabrics play together.

I have yet to make any decisions about how I arrange the blocks.

Oddly enough, I'm not sure it will make much difference whether I tinker with this or not. We'll see, but what I love about this is the way it doesn't do anything like you think it ought to.

Karma

 

Life is full of coincidences. These are my water bottles. The purple one is the one I use when I go to the gym, and the orange one is the one I use for my carbonated water that I keep in my fridge. They are rarely on the counter at the same time so the connection to the Porange quilt didn't really occur to me until I saw them together.

Porange Grows

In order to get the seams to match in the hourglass bocks for the Purple and Orange quilt, I had to do some pinning. So while I watched tv, I pinned the blocks I had ready.

Then the next morning I sewed the blocks, trimmed them and threw them up on the design wall. 

I have added space for the extra row I mentioned yesterday.

I can tell you the more blocks I add, the better I like this. I think it glows like a jewel.

Moving Along

 

The Yellow Macnas quilt is now a flimsy. I have turned my attention to the new purple and orange quilt for my nephew. These are the fabrics I cut into squares for his quilt.

The design will be very similar to the Orange quilt I made last year, Carnelian. It is modified hourglass blocks made with curves, from Sujata Shah's book Cultural Fusion Quilts.

The quilt will have three different blocks - a large square block eight inches square; a rectangular block six inches by eight inches, and then six inch square blocks which will make up the body of the quilt. The four large blocks will be in the corners, and the rectangular blocks will make sort of a border.

Rather like this. Bear in mind I've got to make a lot of blocks before you can see what the design will really look like and I can tell if it will really work or not.

I've made the four blocks for the corners, and here are the pieces that will form the "border."

I do them in small groups because I get hunched up over the sewing machine and my shoulders get sore.

The original quilt (above) was made with mostly blender-ish prints, but as you can tell from the first photo above I have included fabrics with larger prints and prints that have additional colors, so we'll see how it all turns out.

Incidentally, I think this is one of the best "beauty shots" of any I have ever taken. The fence the quilt is thrown over has since been painted bright white and reflectors have been added to it, so it is no longer quite the setting it used to be.

***Mary Ellen, I have never taught a bird class outside of New York and New England. Contact me directly through my email address (at right) for answers to your question.

Coming Up

I was cleaning up in my studio and came across a stack of squares I cut but did not use in the orange Carnelian quilt. So I cut them into Macnas-sized rectangles.  Once I had those, I had to figure out what to match them with. 

As it happened, I was watching Project Runway, and one of the guest judges (I missed her name), was wearing an orange and pink sweater.  Can you say … INSPIRATION?

So now I will cut some pink Macnas pieces.

Then, when I had a lot of time to fill, I worked up this design on my iPad. It isn’t perfect, but it gives me a place to start. I’ll use oranges, pinks and creams. 

Carnelian Quilt, Finished

 

The Carnelian quilt is all finished. I had never made an orange quilt, so I made this, and I am really happy with it.

Carnelian is a Flimsy!

 

This is IT, and what I will sew together.

And as you can see, I start where I can reach without getting out the stepladder.

Here I am pinning the two halves of the quilt together.

Ta-Da! Here it is all sewn up. 

I do not think I will add a border to it. Never say never and all that, but I just don't think it needs it.  

I have 36 leftover blocks I did not use, and about 50 more 8" squares of fabric I didn't use either. I thought about using them on the back, but I don't want there to be any competition on this quilt of which is more interesting, so while I might use the leftovers somewhere, chances are pretty good they won't be on the back.

Unless I have miscounted, this quilt has 46 unique fabrics in it. The pictures are pretty good, but this quilt really shines in daylight.

Carnelian Blocks First Pass

 

Here the design wall is full of the blocks for the orange quilt, called Carnelian. I haven't rearranged these at all, and I haven't replaced blocks or fabrics I think aren't working. I can tell you that I won't be tinkering overmuch with these. I have about two dozen blocks in progress to replace blocks I don't think are working. 

Yeah, I know, but "overmuch" would mean removing ALL the blocks from the design wall and starting over.

I had a LOT of orange fabric, but the problem was they were all so similar in value that it reduced the number of successful blocks I could get. It also meant I had to use some light coral fabrics which lean a bit toward pink in order to get some contrast between the two fabrics in each block.

These were some of my test blocks. I did NOT like the fact that the points didn't meet, so I had to figure out how to get the points to match. (You know I did that, right?)

I tell anybody who'll listen that if you know how to sew clothes, then making a quilt will be a snap. I matched the seams on both pieces, then worked backwards to pin the edges I would start sewing. (As in attaching a sleeve or adding a collar to a neckline.)  I didn't need to pin the whole thing. (The full instructions are in the book, and I want to respect Sujata's work, so if you want to know how to do these, you'll have to refer her book, Cultural Fusion Quilts.)

This isn't quite "IT" but it's getting close. I've replaced a lot of blocks. This is like the 6th iteration from the photo above. (Notice the blocks in the top and bottom rows are larger than the others.)

Thanks ever so much for your comments. It's nice to know I don't have rocks in my head and that this quilts sings for so many of you.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On the health front, I saw my nutritionist last week. She was overjoyed by my progress. I have lost close to 10 pounds, and my A1C numbers are dropping steadily. Woo Hoo!

Wonky Orange Hourglass Blocks

I'm making slightly wonky hourglass blocks the way Sujata Shah makes them with gentle curves as seen in her book Cultural Fusion Quilts.

Because they use curves, the original blocks look very much like potato chips, which is to say, warped.

Trimmed, they are better, although this particular block has to go. That big teardrop shape on the left tends to blend into the adjacent block, and we can't have that.

This is about half the blocks I need, and the blocks are not arranged in any particular way.

NOW LOOK, I know this is not everybody's cup of tea. Orange is generally the least favorite color, and these blocks have a very narrow range of intensity (Brightness. Not Value.)  This is actually by design. I wanted something like a Turkish carpet or a mosaic. 

This is also a result of the color choice. Orange is a fairly middle value color, and when you make it ligher it gets washed out. You can make it yellower and again it's not particularly intense. If you make it darker, you get brown. That makes for a narrow range, and because this is an ORANGE quilt, and not ORANGE AND something else, the quilt has a compressed range of tones.

Remember, this is by choice. You are entitled to your opinion, which is, of course, subjective.

This is different from anything I have ever done, but to me it has a kind of appeal. and I really like it.

This is most of the blocks I need. Notice the large rectangular blocks at the upper left and right corners. I like those, and the top and bottom row of this quilt will be rectangular blocks instead of square ones.

There are some fabrics that I don't like, and I will have to remake some blocks. That will take time. The blocks aren't difficult to make, but the way they are sewn together makes me hunch over the sewing machine intensely, and that just makes me sore, so they are taking a bit longer than usual.

 

Oh Oh Orange!

 

Woo hoo! The orange fabric has arrived, and been through the washer and dryer, and has been pressed.

I have cut much of the orange fabrics I already have.

Now I have cut the new fabrics.

It's time to start playing. Originally I expected the fabrics in the quilt would be close in value. I wanted the quilt to read as "Orange."

But these preliminary blocks tell me the blocks should have more contrast to make a more interesting design. So I have more work to do.

I will name this quilt Carnelian, which is a semi-precious stone.

Orange

 

I'm wrestling with the idea of Christmas colored scrap slab triangle quilt. Mostly I'm stuck with how to make it colorful and yet balance the colors, so I've set the idea aside for now.

 I went through one of my big scrap bins and pulled out all the orange fabric.

I ironed my fabrics and paired them up.

Then I cut them up into Scrap Slab Triangles. It's amazing how quickly I made forty of these.

I've made a dozen Scrap Slab Triangle Quilts, and I know there are more to come. If you want to make one, you can get my tutorial here.

Oh Oh Orange!

This is another "missing U" block from Sunday Morning Quilts.  In the last block, I built around the white piece. When I made this one, I just pulled pieces out of my little orange scrap bin.

See? I wasn't kidding. Little orange scrap bin.

I pulled scraps out of the bin and sewed pieces together. Essentially I was making "made" fabric. Then I sewed them around the white block.