Colorwash at Home & Answers

 

 

I've finished sewing the binding and the hanging sleeve on my colorwash quilt and I hung it up in my living room.

 

 Each square is 2" and it is 20 squares across and 20 down so it is about 40" square with 400 pieces. There are about 382 unique fabrics.

If you ever have the opportunity to take Wanda Hansen's colorwash class I urge you to do it. It's a terrific class that teaches you how to use color in your quilts.

I have a lot of artwork hanging in my house. From my spot on the couch I can see into the dining room and my mom's painting on the far wall. I did the watercolors that hang above the archway, and I made the quilts on the wall and on the table.

You can see Millie in the lower right. Last week marked the 16th anniversary of her "Gotcha Day." 

Oh, I have had a couple of questions...

 

1. Yes I -always- work on the angled drafting table. Always. Everything. This blog started in July 2008, and I know there are tons of pictures of my drafting table in use.

 

2. Yes, the bulldog clips are used as weights. They are tied to string which is pinned to the top of my design wall. I have several and use them as plumb lines to keep my blocks straight when designing a quilt. I also use a laser level for keeping things perfectly horizontal.

 

3. I will update the Zebra tutorial with pictures and a design layout for the Yellow Ribbons quilt and i have also created an outline page for it in case anybody wants to color it as they work out a design (thank you Cathy.) Anybody who has bought a zebra tutorial can contact me for an updated version when it is ready. I am sewing the binding on the Firebird quilt, and want to include finished pictures of that in the update, so it won't be ready for a week or two.

 

4. Many glass companies sell and cut plexiglass, and there are custom quilting template makers on the internet. You can get your own templates made. Just think carefully about what you want. If you want a hole to hang your template, you'll have to ask for it.

5. I don't use any kind of sticky ANYTHING on the underside of my templates, ever. Any adhesive gets stickier over time and is harder to remove. The chemicals needed to remove sticky residue are very bad if they get on your skin, and into your body. Plus the edges of tape lift and get caught on fabric and drag the fabric where I don't want it to go. Really, I've thought about all this stuff.

6. I can contour draw left handed, but I don't trust my non-dominant hand with a sharp rotary cutter in it. I keep a box of band-aids in my studio for a reason.

7. I find that teaching in-person is good because you can clarify something if a student gets confused. You can go off on tangents. You can see if your students really "get it." I don't think the type of tools you use matters one way or the other. I have written eight tutorials, and these are harder. You have to be very careful about your language, you have to be very clear about your process, it has to make sense and you have to be consistent. Writing directions is very hard and few people do it well. I work very very very hard (and I have a crack team of proofreaders and testers who help me) to get it right. I've sold hundreds of tutorials, and nobody gives me grief because they can't understand what I am saying. But I don't think a tool is better for "live" or "written" or "video" learning. A tool is a tool.

8. I've said it before, and it bears saying again. Do What Works For You.

Look Ma, No Pins!!

This is my 400 piece colorwash all sewn up.

and pressed, on the design wall.

I counted fourteen fabrics which are used more than once. One fabric has four blocks on the quilt. There are three or four prints that are represented in different colorways. Originally I had a fair number of "blenders" in there, but as Wanda pointed out, when they sat next to a "busy" print, they looked like flat holes. So I went through my stash and replaced them. This may be a "color" quilt, but it is the prints that carry the color from one area to the next, and they move your eye around.

If you want to learn about how color works in quilts, you should take Wanda's class. I haven't encountered ANY better way of teaching or learning color in fabric. I am really good with color. Very good. And I struggled mightily, pissing and moaning for two weeks over this. Once I got over the fact that I didn't want to be a "mini Wanda" I was able to relax and go for it.

It took about three hours to get the fabrics up on the wall for a starting point. I spent close to 40 hours "tweaking," often working four hour stretches until midnight. Then I'd get up at 6:30 the next morning, look at it before I took a shower to get ready for work, and invariably I'd move two or three pieces around.

And yes, I sewed those 400 squares together without using one damned pin. You know me, the Pin Queen. Never would have thought THAT was possible, but I'm telling you this, I'll never go back to the old way of sewing blocks together.

Years ago I showed a photograph of blue painter's tape on the linoleum floor in my dining room outlining the size of a quilt I wanted to make. (Hey, I got sick of measuring every five minutes.) One reader commented thusly ("I'm banging my head on my worktable. So. Freaking. Brilliant.")  That's how I feel about assembling the quilt this way. Never going back THERE again.

Wanda, thou art brilliant!

Scary!

Rebecca asked if I had learned anything in the colorwash quilts that I could use in my other work, and the answer is absolutely. But there was one thing that I really wanted to know, and that was how Wanda manages to put all the pieces together.

Taking the rows off the wall and grouping them like this...

is kind of a leap of faith.

Here are all the pieces of my quilt. Wanda has the most ingenious way of sewing them together I have ever seen.

And guess what, they don't sew together the way you think.

 I was glad I was doing this on a Sunday, because I sat at the sewing machine for about four hours. I would not have wanted to interrupt the process.

Here is the day's work. My shoulders were sore, so I will finish this later.

 Wanda had suggested students try a smaller 25 square version, before embarking on the real thing. This is mine, so I know how the next step works.

Lies, Lies, Lies!

You really didn't think I could keep my fingers off this thing, did you?

Well, I didn't. I have been tinkering. I tried to make the outside rows look less like dark borders and allow the color on the edges to bump out a bit. I tried to make the corners less like blobs. I have some flat spots, and not as many lively fabrics as I perhaps ought to, but I am good with this. (Yeah, I know, I've only been saying that for the last two weeks.)

This is the view from my cutting table. I have started cleaning up a bit. This also gives you an idea of the scale of the colorwash. It is 20 rows of 2-1/2" squares, so right now it is 50" across, but when it is sewn together it will be 40" square.

The sewing machine table is clear as is my ironing table. As you can see I've got fabric all over the place. I have something like three quilts to bind, but I have to have room to cut strips and pin the binding to the quilt, so I have to clean up. Plus I hate it messy.

By the way, Gail of the boxes of fabric, your green and yellow box of fabrics saved my butt on the colorwash quilt. Have I told you lately how much I love you?

After & Before...

This is the absolute latest and greatest. (Although I've said that several times during this process, I am pretty sure this really is IT.

And because it is so hard to envision the whole process...

This was the first pass. I look at it now and I can't get over how choppy it was.

Once again, I have to tell you all how incredibly difficult this is. It's not just the color, it's the value. It's the placement next to its neighbors. It's how each block fits together to get as seamless a transition from light to dark and from one color to the next. And I should tell you that in the 400 squares in the picture at the top, there are probably 396 unique fabrics.

Wanda makes it look easy, but then, Wanda has a stash like no other and she's been making colorwash quilts for a long time.

Everything is difficult before it is easy.

ON THE HOME FRONT... I got out the stepladder and went onto my roof and washed the skylights. Then I started clearing the leaves from the gutters. It was messy work. So I got ingenious and went to get the leaf blower, and back up on the roof, I used the leaf blower to clear the gutters. It was messy and stuff flew all over the place, including in my face. It was great fun!

After I coiled the long extension cord and put everything away, I emptied the planter pots and moved the empty pots behind the house, stowed the garden tools and hose and sprinklers in the shed, moved the wind chimes into the house, washed and placed the storm glass panels on the porch doors. I've already cut down the perennials and trimmed most of the plants that grew in my front yard so I didn't have to do any of that. Then I went grocery shopping, came home and made the best pizza I have ever cooked.

I sent an email to my son telling him about my day and his reply was, "Geez Mom, we just had breakfast and you've already done a whole day's work!"



By the way, I was wrong about Wanda's studio.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Before I went to bed Thursday night, I had this, and I thought it was damned close to perfect.

Wanda had a suggestion. She wasn't sure it would work, but she thought I should try moving the two big spotty light prints up higher (the one with the green shamrocks and the one with the big light blue dots.) I thought, I can do that...

I didn't like it. For one thing, now those two pieces were close to other big prints and I didn't think it worked well at all.

So I rearranged them. Now they are at an angle and I like it better, and there aren't too many big prints in the same area. But I noticed the top had a place that was too light and needed to be fixed.

Four hours, dinner, a little bit of reading and I had this. Problem was, now there are two blocks in the top row that look like an entry point, and many of the others in that row just look too dark.

Another hour, and edging close to midnight, I had this. I think it's OK. I also tinkered with the darks in the upper right corner. I still have two blocks that are kind of light in the middle of the top row, but the whole top row doesn't look quite so heavy. They look worse in the camera than in real light. There are also two light blocks that make a clear horizontal divide between them and what's above, but I had that before. I've been tinkering with that area for days, and it's past my bedtime so I'll look at it tomorrow in natural light and see what hits me.

Right now I'm looking forward to my head hitting my pillow.

Colowash Wringer

This is the upper left side of my colorwash. Each square is 2-1/2". I worked on the upper left, where Wanda said my greens were a big solid block (my term would have been "blob.") I tried to break it up. I also worked on the top edge. You can't see it in this photo, but I also worked on the light blue to blue green area. I had a peninsula of blocks that just did not "blend."

This is a LOT harder than it looks. I'm pretty good with color and fabrics and the other day I was ready to blow this thing to bits. I also have a really good stash, and it's STILL a huge task. So why am I putting myself through this form of hell (which I am really enjoying, btw, no matter how much I may moan and groan)?

Well, I consider Wanda the Queen of Color in Quilts. I wanted to learn how Wanda does her magic with color so I could improve the magic I do with color in my quilts. So I decided to take Wanda's Colorwash 360 class. Trust me, I am learning. I have set myself up for the grand Mac Daddy of challenges - I'm making a Very Large colorwash (20 x 20 blocks. Usually they have 17 x 17 or some variant thereof. That's 111 fewer little squares of color that I am trying to beat into submission) and I am using regular cotton prints, batiks, and fabrics from the Kaffe Collective and other big prints in my stash. But hey, you know me. If it was easy, it wouldn't teach me anything.

So this is the very most recent version of what I have. I still have work to do along the left side and the bottom. In fact the entire outer row needs work so it doesn't look like a border. I am pretty happy with it.

(I uploaded these photos really big, so you can click them and then click them again to see all the different fabrics, etc. But this is fair warning: on my computer monitor at work, this whole thing is totally washed out. (ha ha.. washed out.. get it? Colorwash, washed out, wringer? Very punny!)

However...

WANDA!!! Stop reading right now! Go find something else to do. Go back into your studio and do whatever magic you do down there. The following pictures ARE NOT for your viewing pleasure. If you keep going, you are going to have a heart attack, and WE CAN'T HAVE THAT! So close your computer and go find something else to do. Go bake some cookies or something...

Now shoo!

OK...

Is she gone?

This is what my studio looks like. Wanda keeps her fabrics neatly sorted in those trays you see on my (new) table. Me, not so much.

And I am 99.999997% *** sure Wanda's studio NEVER looks like this.



*** that's Five Sigma, you can look it up.

I'm going to bed now.


 

Purple

Here's a detail of the purple area on my colorwash quilt.

After a lot of work, this was my "I think this is it" version, but I know it will what Wanda calls "tweaking."

Colorwash Quilt

I'm taking Wanda's Colorwash 360 class. I have been cutting 2-1/2" squares of fabrics. I've used ordinary prints, batiks and some of the Kaffe Collective fabrics.

Then it was time to start arranging them.

It's harder than it looks.

I had to figure out where my colors were going, and how big this was going to be.

So this is my "first pass." It's 20 blocks across by 20 blocks down. That's 400 different fabrics.

It still needs work.

Hand Sewing to Country Music

I've had the scrappy diamond Magic Carpet quilt ready for binding now for many weeks, but since I spent much of my vacation time in California, I didn't get it done then. Usually I work on the binding while I "watch" TV.

This week, Country Music, the documentary by Ken Burns, started showing, so I've been sewing the binding on the quilt while I watch it.

See that quilt that is hanging on the wall behind my TV? That's a quilt by my quilting idol, Wanda Hanson, who blogs at Exuberant Color.

I'll tell anybody who'll listen that in my not so humble opinion, NOBODY, but NOBODY in the quilting world knows color like Wanda does. There's a reason why her quilt dominates my living room. It is that good. Wanda is that good.

Sparkling Stars @ Home!

Wanda's quilt, Sparkling Stars, is now hanging in my living room. It is quite stunning.  The colors are wonderful.  The quilt just glows.

 Here's something very interesting. Hanging in the same room is this painting by my Mother, Jeanne Lachance.

The colors are the same in both pieces, and they relate beautifully.

I am beyond thrilled.  I am positively overjoyed.