Fourth of July Quilt Finished!

 

It's finished! The Fourth of July quilt is all bound and ready for its beauty shots. It's been raining all day and the weather tomorrow isn't promising, but Sunday looks good for me to take it out for it's beauty shots.

The back of this quilt is equally stunning. 

I think it looks great with this dark red binding.

Binding and Bingeing

 

I'm sewing the binding on the Fourth of July quilt...

while binge-watching The Great British Baking Show.

Fourth of July Quilted!

 

This is the back of the Fourth of July quilt. You can see the quilting.

Here's the front. I will bind this with red.

This quilt already has a home. I will tell you more about that when the quilt has been gifted.

The Lighthouse

 

It was pretty clear this lighthouse panel would be the backing of the Fourth of July quilt. But it needed to have fabric added to it to make it big enough.

I had four yards of a fabric I could use, but after doing a lot of math on graph paper, it was clear my four yards wasn't quite big enough. Fortunately I had a piece of fabric that had a water feel to it, so I added strips to the top and bottom of the lighthouse panel.

The fabric I've chosen for the backing is directional, so I had to be careful to cut it properly. I cut two panels and added them to the top and bottom of the lighthouse panel.

Printed panels made great backings, but because they are printed, they don't always line up parallel to the straight of the grain. So I had to trim the edge to be straight. One side of the panel looked fine, but the other was really curved. Fortunately perfection is not required. Yes, these big rulers are used for trimming wallboard, but they are handy for getting long edges straight.

Because reality does not often match what you think, I always line up the fabric where I want it to go, to make sure I have enough. I did, so I started sewing the two long panels to either side.

This looks pretty good. The gingko leaves remind me of clamshells.

Laying the quilt on top of the backing is something I always to do make sure the backing is big enough. It also tells me how the two fit together. It does, and really like it.

This is the reason why I pay attention to the backings of my quilts. It's the back of the quilt that lives on my bed, and my pal Julie made it. Every time I make the bed I get to see the back and how it was put together. Julie has influenced my work in so many ways.

Sew Me Up!

 

I tinkered, and now I will sew this together. I already sewed one pair of triangles together in the second row.

Somebody asked me once, when I bought fabric, why did I do it and how much did I buy. I wrote a whole blog post about it a long time ago. I'd find the link, but it's Wednesday morning and I have to go to work in less than an hour so this is going to be quick. 

Anyway, I saw this panel about New England, and since I live in New England, I bought it. Truthfully I thought it was a quarter of the size, and when it arrived I was a little bit annoyed. WHAT THE HECK was I going to do with it, but as I worked on the RWB quilt (which I think I am going to call "Fourth of July"), I thought it would be perfect for the backing.

In real life I have been planning to replace my over 30 year old central air conditioning unit. It works, but it's loud and I'm pretty sure it's very expensive to run. Every time I turn it on I cross my fingers. I won't let anybody touch it, because with old equipment like this, if you start to mess with it it may never run again. 

So I have been getting quotes. The first guy told me to be sitting down when I opened it. Good thing I was, because gosh darn it, everything is so damned expensive. 

Why I Love You!

 OH! I love answering questions!

FOUR YEARS AGO... I was working on the first of the Zebra quilts. The block on the right is 18" square (with seam allowances, 18-1/2"). At the time, someone asked me if I could make them smaller, so the block on the left is made with 2-1/2" strips and sews up to be 16" square. Doesn't look like a tremendous difference, but...

When you put it next to the others, there is a BIG difference. What I really liked then, and still like now, is the BIG graphic quality of this. Meaning it is very "design-y" (as one of my college classmates one said of something big and bold.)

When Karen asked yesterday if I could make the blocks of the RWB quilt smaller to be more efficient, the answer is both yes and no. Yes, because, yes you probably COULD get two (smaller) blocks where I can only get one of the larger ones. But it would only be EFFICIENT if you USED the leftover blocks to make something.

Ultimately I did not choose to go with smaller blocks, and part of that was how big the finished quilt would be. The other part was I loved the BIG IMPACT the scale of the diamonds provided.

My Zebra quilts are made basically three big 18" blocks across by four down. Before adding a border, they are in the neighborhood of 54" x 72". If you made the blocks smaller, even 2", then this layout becomes 48" x 64". Not, in my book, big enough to be a real quilt. A quilt that size will NOT cover me up, and a too small quilt is kinda dumb. (Ever wonder why I don't make "lap quilts?" Because where I live in New England it gets COLD, and if I want a quilt to keep me warm, warming up half my body ain't gonna do it.)

To make that quilt BIGGER, you would have to add an additional 16 inches. So now you have 64" across, but to balance the design, you also have to add 16 to the height, and that makes 80 inches. Now you're getting into a quilt size that begins to be unwieldy. I mean, if somebody you're making a quilt for is over six feet tall, and is "big" then a quilt like this might be OK, but to me that's just too big.

If you only made five vertical diamonds across (the one above is six) then you can get a quilt 56" wide, but the design above would have three and a half diamonds across, and that's just dumb. 

It could work for a Ribbons quilt, like this one, because one more (or less) vertical row won't affect the design right to left, but to add another 16" vertically would make a quilt 56" x 80" and to me that's just stupider. The top of a queen sized bed is 60" x 80". Why make something that won't cover that? And for the Ribbons quilt, I'm not sure the lovely wiggle you see above would work with another row below it. And you'd have half green triangles instead of whole ones, and that might look weird.

Bottom line: Scale matters.

I DID, however, figure out how to make the quilt more efficient. Make TWO! I can't be the only quilter who has ever been asked to make TWO quilts that are the same. Or damn close. With not a lot more fabric, and a bit more time (and very clear directions) "you" (or somebody) could make two quilts at the same time. 

Really!

You can read my original logic here.

Options, Options, Options!

 

I thought I would finish this quilt on Saturday. I had like three triangles to make.

WELL THAT WAS WRONG... 

I tried to distribute the prints, and make it look balanced. I did NOT finish on Saturday. This was where I was on Saturday night. I got across the room and squinted and thought, hmmm, it looks kinda grayish, from where the red and blue blend in your eye.

NOT exactly what I had in mind. 

And then I thought, well, what if I made the diamonds in one color? So I swapped each pair of triangles.

I liked it better already, but - AGAIN - I had to tinker with the fabrics to make each diamond cohesive. After I remade a half dozen triangles, I had this.

But when I went across the room and looked, I thought, "Damn, that's a lot of RED." What's funny is there is EXACTLY the same number of red triangles and blue triangles.

SO NATURALLY I had to flip the triangles again...

And I like it better.

I have to tinker yet again, and I'll do that later because my brain is already fried.

These are the leftover pieces from cutting my triangles and the triangles I decided to replace to make the quilt better looking.

This is a spectacularly inefficient block to make. Because of the way this pattern is, the leftovers from the two striped triangles you make for this quilt CANNOT be transformed into each other. So there is a lot of waste. When I started to make this quilt I thought I would update the Zebra tutorial with it, but it is so fussy and creates so much waste that I have decided against it. 

But I think it's going to be a pretty terrific quilt.

Ding Ding Ding!

 Red and Blue fabric has arrived, been washed, ironed and cut into strips. I have been making one triangle at a time and tossing it up on the design wall to see how it goes. So far so good.

Yes, I also used some dinosaur fabric in this quilt. What the hell.

I was not really worried about arranging this yet. Just getting blocks made and tossing them up on the design wall. There is a very particular way they are arranged, so by this time, after I get a pair of fabrics sewn together into a four strip set (like the photo above) I considered where best to place it in the quilt and cut the triangle accordingly.

This isn't it by any means, but it gives you an idea of where I am headed. I am pretty pleased. It will be a great summer quilt. For somebody.

About the Spelling Bee: I've played since the start and for months I was thrilled simply to get to Genius on my own. That was pretty normal. One day, quite by surprise I hit Queen Bee ABM, as they say in the Community. A few months later I realized there are HINTS, and then later I realized some hardy folks like Steve G and Kline and Jenn and many other leave nifty hints on the community bulletin board. Once I figured that out, I was able to reach QB regularly. Daily in fact. Now I strive to get the pangram on the first word. I did that today (5/18/23) and then I discovered there were FOUR pangrams today. I got the second one pretty quick, struggled with the third and got the fourth as my very last word which gave me QB status.

I asked my boss where he liked fishing the best, the ocean or a local lake or pond. His reply was terrific, and I thought you'd all enjoy hearing it:

"I like fishing so much I'd fish in a puddle."

GREAT line!

A Patriotic Zebra

 

Way back in 2019, this was what I was trying to do when I made a quilt of large striped triangles. After I finally figured out how to do it, I made a series of quilts that were different. The problem was that THIS quilt  doesn't use fabric efficiently, and that's a very long story, which you can read here.

Anyway, in the photo above I have made some blue diamonds and some red ones.

In this layout they are mixed up, sort of, but I like this better. If you have been following me for a while you have surely figured out that I LOVE checkerboards. So I am going to tinker with this. 

This is where this quilt is headed. And you know me. I like to do things that are unconventional, so several of my light fabrics will actually be quite busy. As for the reds and blues, I want clear reds and true blues. No "warm" reds (which lean closer to red-orange) or too "cool" blues, (which are closer to "teal" or blue-green) or warm blues, (which lean closer to purple).

Since red and blue are very close in value, they should be kept apart from each other. Otherwise they would "blend" together in your eye and those red-blue areas would read as a blob, which is never good. It's one of the reasons that many red-white-and-blue quilts (in my opinion) are not successful.

Red White & Blue

 

This is what I am working on at the moment - yet another "Zebra" quilt, but not really. This version is not represented in the Zebra tutorial. I thought it would be fun to make a Red, White & Blue quilt, as I have never made one of those before.