Waltzing Matilda

I've decided to name the quilt "Waltzing Matilda."

Several things came together to get me to this name. I was reading a book and a character's name was Matilda. The quilt reminded me of movement, of a dance, and I got an email from my friend Megan in Australia.

Matilda + Dance + Australia = Waltzing Matilda.
 
Waltzing Matilda has been described as the unofficial national anthem of Australia. I'm sure my friend Megan will correct me if I am wrong. It's not about what you think. There's a YouTube video of Johnny Cash singing it, offering a translation as he goes.

I received a wonderful compliment yesterday from Wanda Hansen of Exuberant Color. She thought the fabrics I chose were terrific. There are about 50 - 60 different ones. Anyway, you can click the pictures and click again to get a very good look at all the different fabrics I used.

I started this quilt Tuesday night, after 9:30 PM. I worked on it after dinner till about midnight on Wednesday and Thursday, took Friday afternoon off and worked on it all that afternoon, and after dinner that night, again until midnight. Saturday morning I got up about 9 AM, went straight into the studio and finished making the blocks and designing the layout. I started webbing the top together at 3:00 PM, finished one half, pressed it, had dinner, and then finished sewing the top before I went to bed Saturday evening.

It may not be the fastest quilt I ever put together, but it's damn close. One of the reasons is that I have learned that quilts I don't put a whole lot of thought into turn out really great. They don't suffer from being overworked, overwrought and overthought. It's all about trusting your instincts.

And, I suppose, having a good stash and a pretty good idea of what you want when you start.

Presenting... "Waltzing Matilda"

Here it is. I really like it. The individual blocks are 6" so the flimsy is 60" x 72".

I'm pretty sure this quilt knows where it is going to live when it's done, and it's a surprise, so don't ask. I've ordered the backing fabric already.

All Together Now!

I sewed the blocks together for this quilt using the webbing technique. I took a class to learn how to do it, so I respect that and will not reveal how it is done here.

Pressing a web sewn quilt is rather challenging.

One advantage of this technique is that it doesn't use pins. However it is quilt wrangling at its finest.

The quilt is all sewn together now, but it needs a name. I'm not thrilled with Ring Around the Rosy. I'll show the finished flimsy tomorrow.

Oh Oh Oh!

This isn't quite done, but it looks good. It needs a bit of fine tuning. I decided to add a ring of "busy" greens outside of the plainer green ring.

 So where is the other half of the quilt?

Right here!

This is the whole quilt.

I'm not accustomed to see a quilt like this. Now I have to sew it up.

Ring Around the Rosy...

YES YES YES YES!

I love this.

I might just name this quilt Ring Around the Rosy, which is kind of apropos. Did you know that Ring Around the Rosy* was once thought to come from the Black Death? It described the wounds on people who had the Black Death during THAT pandemic hundreds of years ago. Historians don't think that any longer.

ANYWAY...

I am in my happy zone and this quilt should be a flimsy soon!


*Ring around the rosy,
pocket full of posy
ashes, ashes
we all fall down.

This is the version I remember singing when I was a kid.  


AND CHERIE... Before you think you can take credit for the title of this post... I wrote it several days ago, but good on you for getting it early!

Round and Round She Goes

I am going round and round with this quilt. I like it a lot, and it's prettier in real life. You can click the pictures and then click them again to see it better. This is by no means the final arrangement. I have to make so many more blocks!

Around about here I figured out how I wanted the pink ring to be, and then I decided to surround it with the greens that had pinks and blues in them, and the next ring would be the plainer green. But to see it... I had to make more blocks!!!

Yup, I like those two rings...


Gotta keep going. I am really happy with this!!

Begin, Begin, Begin

I made a few blocks and threw them up on the design wall.  I need to make more. I have lots cut, I just have to sew.

When I was in college, my painting teacher, Armand Szainer, used to say "Begin, begin, begin." I'm pretty sure what he meant was "don't get bogged down early on." It's like Wanda says, when you get all your blocks on the design wall, that is when you START to design. It's way too early to pat yourself on the back and think you are done. I need to make more blocks, but you get an idea of where this is going.

Going Forward by Going Back

 

Five years ago I made this quilt using Sujata Shah's Cultural Fusion Quilts as a guide.

What was funny at the time was that it started out like this, and I thought, well that was ugly as hell, so I tinkered.

I am so emotionally tired (and I am pretty sure I am not the only one) but I need to get myself into the studio because doing creative work makes me feel better. I got to thinking about this quilt the other day because I showed somebody a calendar I had made with the Petals quilt (top photo) and was reminded of how much I liked it.

It's no secret I need to do something, but I don't feel drawn to any of the quotes I shared the other day enough to make a quilt out of any of them right at this minute. I know myself well enough to know that if I don't "feel it" it won't go anywhere. So the other night, instead of going to bed, I browsed my books in search of ideas, and ended up with the quilt above.

I pulled out this fabric with the dots. I bought it a while ago, and it's a hard fabric to use, but I liked the way the colors bounced around. Something like this can be more of an inspiration than a fabric in a quilt, and that's exactly what it inspired. You can see some of the fabrics I pulled out of my stash above it.

I pulled some pinky fabrics - but they all had to have some blue or green in them.

And I need some beige, cream, or whatever.

And because, what the hell, in for a penny in for a pound, so even though it was 11 PM, I cut some squares and then sewed these two blocks.

I have my next project.

Happiness is a Quilt

Happiness is a well loved quilt.

Or two.

As you can see, the Petals quilt has arrived at its new home. (That's the Sunshine quilt underneath it.)

Beauty Shot Sunday

I've been hanging on to the Petals and Over the Top quilts so I could take beauty shots of them. First thing was to bring them out to the pond to drape them over the Moose.

Alas, the Moose vam-oosed. DRAT! Later I learned it was dismantled because it was falling apart. Still.

"Over the Top" is over the bridge,

and over the railing.

What's interesting about the Petals quilt in this photo is how different it is when you look at it sideways.

or even at a slight angle. 

Both quilts, however, seemed a lot more at home in a truly natural setting.

 I don't know why this surprised me.

 

but it did.

After the photo shoot both quilts had a trip through the washer and the dryer, where, if possible, they both came out more beautiful.*** 






***(Yes Julie, that is the sound of Lynne eating vast quantities of crow. Enjoy it, my friend.)

Petals Quilt is Finished

Since it's too dark for a beauty shot photo shoot outside, I posed it on the couch.

Yup, I like this a lot.

Just Around the Bend

I've been working my way around the Petals quilt, hand sewing the binding while I "watch" TV. I've got about 12" left on this side, then another 30" around the corner and the Petals quilt will be finished. 

Because of Daylight Savings Time it will be dark when I get home from work from now until the Spring, so I will probably have to wait until the weekend to get any beauty shots of it.

Then I'll pack it up and send it flying across the US to it's home in sunny California with my son and DIL. Could they possibly look any happier? This photo was taken last week at the Long Beach Museum of Art. That colored "wall" behind them was yarn, hanging from the ceiling.

Showing once again how important it is to get out to your local art museum and see what's up.

Binding the Petals

Regular readers know I hand sew my binding on the front of my quilts. My mother taught me how to blindstitch when I was in the fifth grade.

Because I have arthritis in my right thumb, I can only hand sew about 30" a day, so I am working my way around the quilt 30" at a time.

Binding the Petals Quilt

I made the binding for the Petals quilt, and sewed it to the back of the quilt. The binding is one of the grey prints that's in the quilt.

This is looking quite nice and my son and DIL are very excited to get it.

Petals Sneak Peek

OH YEAH!

My pal Julie drove 30 miles to Chris's house so she could see the Petals quilt in person and collaborate with Chris about a quilting pattern.  Later she wrote to me: "Good thing the quilt is going to your son and DIL, otherwise Chris and I would be jostling to the front of the line to gain custody of the Petals quilt..."

Two by Two, then One, Two, Three

I had Friday afternoon off, so I went right into the studio and started putting the Petal blocks together.

I could have sewn the blocks together in rows, but I was worried I'd get the blocks mixed up because their orientation was so important to the design, so I sewed the blocks together in pairs, one pair at a time.

Then I sewed them into short rows.

And big blocks.

Seven hours (lunch, two loads of laundry, dinner and a bit of rearranging) later...

It's a flimsy.

Or rather, it was until I realized that I had altered the arrangement of the teal and gray blocks on the bottom left of the quilt, and not done so on the upper left, where you can see three gray blocks too close to each other. I hate when that happens.

So that had to change. NOW it's done.


Off to the stash to find fabrics for a scrappy backing!

The Seven Minutes

They say the devil is in the details. I'm not sure about that, but I know that sometimes it's the little things that make a big difference.  Shown below are four photographs I took the night I designed the layout of the Petals quilt. I had all 108 blocks on the wall.

 When I took the first photo, I thought I had it. Then I looked again.

I made several changes. I knew the big flower print in the inner pink ring wasn't working, so I moved it. Three minutes elapsed between the first photo and the second one.

I swapped two blocks, and took another photo. One minute between the second and third photos.

 

 I didn't like the fragmented outer pink ring. I couldn't make a complete second ring, but I didn't need to. I didn't need to have a complete one to get the effect I wanted. I moved a few pink blocks and created a partial "ring" below the main one.  Three minutes between the third and fourth photo, and I knew I had it.

Seven minutes.

It doesn't seem like much, but those seven minutes made the quilt. Here's the thing. We all know when we've got it right. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting from "OK" to "Nailed it." You can get there through trial and error, or what geeks call "brute force." That takes a lot of persistence, patience, and a willingness to experiment and fail. It's also a recipe for frustration.

I find it much easier to verbalize what isn't working. If you can't figure out WHY you don't like it, you'll struggle with how to fix it. After all, how do you know what you have to do to fix it, if you don't know what's wrong with it?

Now, I had no freaking clue what I wanted it to look like when I first started laying out the blocks. I knew I'd get started and things would happen and I would change my mind as I went along, but that was OK. I did get a design I thought was interesting, but I couldn't make more blocks (ran out of gray fabric, challenge was NOT to buy more). So I had to use what I had.

Looking at the third variation, I knew the placement of the pink blocks in the "outer" ring looked clunky and didn't suggest a ring because they were too far apart to connect with each other. What to do? Put the ones I DID HAVE next to each other to suggest an outer ring. And the only place to do that that made sense was BELOW the pink center, because any other position would have made the design look unbalanced.

Seven extremely worthwhile minutes.