Yellow Again

 

I've been making blocks for the Yellow Macnas quilt and getting them up on the design wall. Getting the top two rows up meant I had to get up on the ladder, which isn't much fun. I can see some blocks I want to rearrange up there on that top row.

Here the entire design wall is covered. This will shrink down to 60" x 76" when it is all sewn together. Normally I like my quilts 60" x 72" so  I may not need either the very top or the very bottom row. I'll have to review this when I have more energy to decide, but overall I'm pretty happy with it.

Yellow & Chlorine Update

 

I've been adding Yellow blocks to the wall. I haven't done any tinkering yet. I can see a block that needs to be shifted in this photo, but I'll get to it later. I want this to feel more random. My friend Susan saw this picture and said she liked the little blips of red and the lighter ones. She thought they looked like rays of sunshine.

Here are what she is looking at - the yellows with other colors and larger prints,

I do have about forty unique yellows for this quilt. I'm having fun with this. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece. 

I've been watching a lot of the Olympics. I find I prefer the sports that are on ice. Which is to say, speed skating (long and short track) figure skating, curling, luge, bobsled and skeleton. Some of those events are suitable for sewing, and some are .... not!

I just love the Arthritis Swim classes. It's faded my bathing suit but the thing that has really bugged me was still smelling chlorine on my body while I lay in bed AFTER showering when I got back home after class. So I did a bit of research. Turns out the best way to get rid of the chlorine smell is to rinse it off as soon as you get out of the pool. This prevents the chlorine from seeping into your skin.

There are also body washes and shampoos that can help remove the smell and moisturize at the same time. I ordered some shampoo and a body wash and they arrived over the weekend. When I got out of the pool yesterday I went into the showers and rinsed off... BRIEFLY! The water was COLD! When the water temperature in the pool is 93F, water that is chillier really feels cold. At home the new body wash and shampoo worked too. Win, win!

Yellow Progress

 

I've been sewing the yellow Macnas blocks together while I've been watching the Olympics. This is about nine of nineteen rows. The blocks are just tossed upon the wall, but I like it being a bit haphazard.

I've also been in talks with the gals at the Night Owl Quilting Studio about possible classes there. I might teach classes on the Scrap Slab Triangle quilts and the curve based Rail Fence quilts based on Sujata Seah's book Cultural Fusion Quilts. We have scheduled a birds class there in April.

Yellow

 

Back in December these were the leftover yellow Macnas rectangles from the Little Brother yellow and gray Macnas quilt. Somebody asked me what I would do with them. I counted the pieces and I had enough for just over half a quilt. I figured I could cut up some little bits of yellow to make enough to make a yellow Macnas quilt.

Since I'm waiting for more purple and orange fabrics before I can work on a new quilt for my nephew, I decided to cut up some of the bits from my yellow scrap bins.

Here are the yellows from the yellow scrap bin. I pressed them, and then started cutting pieces.

Here are the pieces I cut from fabrics in the scrap bin. I haven't counted them, but with the leftovers from last December, I'm pretty sure I have enough to make a quilt.

Yellow Scrap Slab Triangles

 

I spent some time Sunday afternoon at the Mall, visiting various wireless carriers, and then had a chat with  a person at the Apple Store. It was very interesting and informative.

After that I went home and went into the studio to cut some yellow (golden yellow) scrap slab triangles. Rather than overwhelm myself with every single scrap of yellow fabric I own, I took a very small selection out of the tiniest bin and made ten scrap slab triangles. I group them in stacks of ten, so it was a good number. I have fifty so far. I know I want to make another quilt with these, and I want to do something special with the blocks, so I have been thinking.  No reveal just yet, I'm still working it out.

After 26 years of one ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software, my company is going Live with a new one Monday morning. 

Wasn't quite sure I'd ever see it.

It is going to be a very interesting next few days. Weeks, even.

Yellow Too

 

I've always known that I wanted some yellow to play with the blue. Blue and yellow is a very French color combination, and it's really pretty. Last night before I went to bed, I went into the studio and grabbed some yellows and paired them up with some of my blues.

 

Tonight, when I started cutting them into strips I realized I didn't quite have enough, so I placed a small (for me) online order for three more blues and five yellows.

These are the pairs I have so far. Some of the yellows I really liked I didn't have enough of, and some looked too dark.

With these yellows, some of the lighter blues wouldn't work. For what I have planned I need the blues to be the darker fabric in the pair, and I need some good contrast between the two. Some of the pairs in the photo directly above seem a bit forced, like the one on the lower right - birds and cats. The colors are OK, but the scale of the prints seems to me to be too much the same, and the  orangey-yellow to the left of it is almost to bland a design, and perhaps a bit too orange.

At any rate, none of this is carved in stone, but I like what I have so far, and yes, I do have a design in mind. This blue and yellow quilt will be primarily for my dining room table, but I also want it to be useful as a couch quilt.

It's A Start

 Anybody who tells you that sitting down to sew 112 strips together into 8 strip panels is easy has rocks in their head.

It's a lot of hard work. But when all my strip sets were sewn together I could cut them into big triangle and place them on the design wall. That's the fun part.

I was pretty happy with the fabrics too. This is a Zebra quilt variation. If you are interested in making your own Zebra Quilt, you can get the tutorial here, in my Etsy shop.

 

As usual I went around in circles for a bit. (Dammit I hate the new blogger. I want my pictures centered and the text left justified. I think text that is centered looks amateurish and cutesy. I hate loathe and despise "cute.")

 

 

 

After a whole day's work I had this and I was not thrilled. Oh well, such is life. Fortunately stuff like this, while it may piss me off, doesn't stress me out.

 

 

Mo Yo!

My mother wants a yellow zebras quilt. I'm not going to make her one exactly like mine, so I had to work out just what I did want to do, and wait for fabric I ordered online. That fabric has now arrived, and I'm in the process of washing and ironing it. Regular readers know that no piece of fabric comes into my studio without going through what I affectionately call "the washing machine shuffle."

I arranged my leftover triangles into something I might make for my mom. This is just a preliminary idea, a sketch, a doodle. All that will change when I start sewing strips together and cutting them into triangles. Speaking of which...

When I was picking up some quilts at Janet-Lee's I showed her a printed copy of the Zebras tutorial. She told me she knew of a person who could create plexiglass templates if I wanted real ones made. At first I rejected the idea, but then I thought, why not, and gave the person a call. These lovelies arrived about a week later.

I thought THAT was such a good idea, I decided to have a 2-3/4" ruler cut as well.

NOW BEFORE YOU ALL GET ANY IDEAS...
I am NOT going to have these to sell. I do not have the place to store an inventory of them, and I do not have the kind of packing materials needed to ship them, and I do not have a relationship with a carrier to deliver them. The world changes every day (don't we all know THAT right now) so this may not be a permanent decision, but for now the answer is no. Don't even ask me for the name of the company that made mine. They won't inventory them for me. 

Yellow

 

My Mother's favorite color is YELLOW. When I showed her the finished Golden Zebras quilt, she said, "I love this. Can I have it?" I said No. I made it for my couch and I'm keeping it. She wasn't thrilled, but I said I would consider making her a yellow orange quilt kind of like it. "Not too much orange." Well, we'll see. I don't know what will happen when I make my quilts, so we will see.

Anyway, look at the book my mother is reading. It is YELLOW: The History of a Color, by Michel Pastourneau. I gave it to her for Christmas. This photo was taken in my house Christmas morning after we opened presents.

This is a picture that took itself, as soon as I walked into the room. Yup. This is an example of keeping your eyes open and NOTICING. Yellow book, yellow quilt... yeah.




Update # 2: Mom has asked for practically every quilt I have made for the last two or three years. It's getting old. I love her, but no. I designed the quilt for myself, and I don't make copies. She already has five of my quilts, and yet she only has one bed (and no wall space). I agreed to make her a variation. You're entitled to your opinion, but in the end the quilts I make are mine and I have the final say in where they go.

Yellow Golden Zebras

I finished sewing the Golden Zebras quilt together. I really like it.

This isn't really a good picture of the color of the quilt. The quilt is YELLOW.

Unfortunately, that isn't really a good description. The quilt is golden yellow. What the heck does that mean?

(An aside: I find color names such as "maize" or  "mustard" or "jonquil" or "lemon chiffon"  and yes, even "golden yellow," to be completely and utterly useless. My description of a color includes it's hue (basic color) it's intensity (how bright or dull it is) and it's value (how light or dark it is.) My quilt is a light to medium value slightly warm yellow. A bright yellow is as bright as a yellow can be without being anything else, neither too cool (like a lemon) or too warm (getting closer to orange.) Because yellow is a very light color to begin with, as soon as it gets darker, it stops being yellow pretty quick, so it doesn't have much of a light/dark range as compared to other colors, or say, black.)

According to color theory, there are three primary hues (or colors), red, yellow and blue. From these all the other colors are made. (I am not talking about dyes or colors made from light.) Unfortunately that's not the way color pigments happen in the real world.

Pigments are either organic or synthetic. Organic means they come from the earth, either dirt or stone or from something that grows. Synthetic means they are developed from chemicals in laboratories. In artist paints, one of the basic yellows is Cadmium Yellow. Cadmium is a  warm yellow. Another is a Zinc Yellow, which is a colder yellow. A lemon is closer to a cool yellow than a warm one. And since chemicals are in demand for other purposes (Cadmium is used in jet aircraft and batteries), colors available for purchase depend on the market for them. The fashion industry determines what colors are produced in clothing in any given year, that also limits your selection of colors at any given time. So it isn't always easy to get a "perfect" version of any color fabric.

What has that got to do with the price of tea in China? (In other words, hey Lynne, get to the point.) This quilt has twenty-eight different yellow fabrics. Yes, I have a good stash, and yes my yellow was a bit depleted, but YOU go buy 28 yellows and see how YOU do.) I did not want to make a yellow quilt so homogeneous that it looked like one version of yellow. I wanted to introduce something of interest and some other colors, because that is what makes a quilt magical. (I wrote a tutorial about how to use your fabrics to do the "heavy lifting" in your quilts, and you can find it here.)

Some of them are blenderish yellows. Some have busy prints (the Kaffee fans, the zebras, the butterflies, the big begonia leaves, the newsprint cut-up, the "marbled paper" one, as well as the chintz knock-off and the one with colored dots.)

I already had 20-30 yellows I wanted to use in the quilt. I bought another 9 more. My friend Gail sent me a huge box of fabric and I used several from the yellows she sent. When I put them all together, I felt some were too orange, so I left them out. There was a pair I sewed together that just didn't fit in the final quilt. (You can see that in one of the pictures in yesterday's post; it's underneath the zebras.) Some of my fabrics were "cool" yellows and most were decidedly "warm." There are pinks, greens, blues, silver and grays, and the odd purple. Those bits of colors are distributed across different fabrics. Like everything, it's a balancing act. Generally, the success (or failure) of a quilt depends on fabric selection.

So although I've been showing you this quilt as it has progressed over the last several days, you really can't tell just how yellow the quilt is, because things look different in the camera and the lighting in my studio, although vastly improved, has nothing over sunlight.

To wit:

One very yellow quilt, sitting out in full sunlight. Once this quilt has been quilted, and a layer of white batting is behind the quilt top, this will look yellower still.

 Both of these outside pictures, by the way, show the quilt in the same orientation as you have seen it on my design wall as well as the picture at the top of this post.

I thought it was pretty in the studio, but as far as I am concerned, this is gorgeous, and I love it!

It's Easy When You Know How.

I really had to restrain myself from adding at the bottom of yeserday's post "That was easy." I am aware that a lot of things are easy for me that are not easy for others, so I try not to show off.

But Rebecca asked how come this one went together so quickly when I agonized and wrestled with the Parade of Zebras last March.

The answer, Rebecca, was that all the struggles of last March taught me how to make this design work. I knew what I wanted to do, and how to do it. I had a plan.

I did not cut triangles at random and try to figure out how to use them afterwards. I cut my strips, matched the pairs and sewed the strip sets together. I cut only the triangles I needed to make design work. In other words, I designed the quilt one block at a time.

So having done all the "heavy lifting" before, this came together quickly.

Hope that answers your question, Rebecca.

Golden Zebras or...?

 
Back in March I decided to make a golden yellow quilt in the manner of the Parade of Zebras. Now that the Not Paper Pieced Quilt is off the design wall, I wanted to do something that was easy. (Well, you know, "easy" in my world.) So I have been pairing my yellows and cutting strips.

It's supposed to be hot (90F) today, and my studio faces south, so I'm trying to cut and sew my strip sets together and pressed before the room gets too warm.

I've got the A/C running and the tennis on the TV, so it's going to be a good day.

 Right now I like these big chevrons. We'll see where this goes.

Yellow

Here is the Yellow block for the Missing U Quilt. My son asked for a yellow quilt a few years ago, and I bought a lot of yellow gold fabrics for it. Many of them are in this block.

VeeV asked yesterday if I liked lemons or the FLAVOR of Lemon. Both, actually.  I think Lemon is my most favorite flavor...

Lemon juice in ice water!!
Lemon curd between layers of a white cake!!
Lemon curd, actually, any way, shape or how.
Lemon juice on fresh green beans.
or Asparagus, Zucchini, Carrots...
Caesar Salad

Lemon juice on cooked fish
Lemon juice on cooked chicken
Chicken Piccata (with Lemon!)
Lemon drops (the hard candies)
Lemon sorbet
...

You can enjoy the flavor of lemon in every meal, and I usually do. It is a crisis in my house if there are no fresh lemons.

Sunshine Slashed Squares

Try saying that three times fast...

I have decided to make the Sunshine Quilt using the Slashed Squares block. Since I have been buying the yellow fabrics in 1/2 yard pieces, I needed to work out how much fabric I would need for the blocks, and if I would have enough. I do. Each half yard will yield two blocks. I have 19 fabrics, enough for 38 blocks. My blocks will be 14" square, and I will make six rows of six for an 84" square quilt.

Which will live (believe it or not) in my son's car.

In theory.

(you can click the picture to enlarge.)

Sunshine

The yellow quilt will be a scrappy quilt, "beach size", for a guy and his lady friend to lounge upon at the beach or at a picnic, or to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Which guy, you might ask, wants a quilt of sunshine?

This one.



My son. He's a Second Degree Black Belt.