The Four Amish Daughters

All Four of my Amish versions in one quilt.

I was talking to my pal Julie the other night about these Amish quilts and I said that I should fold all the flimsies next to each other so I could see how they looked like next to each other. Then I said that I could always just MAKE a quarter of each quilt and put them all together in one.

I thought it was a good idea, so what the heck.  I stayed up late (REALLY late) and got half of it done. The only reason I couldn't finish the second half was I needed to buy more of the green for two of the quarters.

You may wonder why the darker greens are on the left. It's because two of the quilts share the same inner Red, and I couldn't put those two sections next to each other.

The wrong side of the flimsy. Yes, all my quilts are this neat on the back, although I don't usually press the seams open.

If anything, these four serve as notice as to why it's a BAD IDEA to use all blenders, or all batiks or all prints of the same scale in one quilt. You need variations of scale to make any quilt a success.

The Amish Flimsies Complete

I have finished all the flimsy variations of the Amish quilt. Here they are, starting with the original that I love so much, and my interpretation of it.

The original. Maker unknown, Lancaster County Pennsylvania, circa 1900.

My version in solids. (Yeah, I know my center red square is too small.)

My version number Two, in blenders.

My version number Three, in Batiks. (Mostly, the center red square is not a Batik)

My version number Four, in prints.

My version number Five, which has prints and a Batik.

I sure do hope some poor lady in Pennsylvania isn't spinning in her grave.

The original, with its vibrant colors, simple geometry, and utter abstractness of design absolutely defines what it is I love about quiltmaking. It doesn't need one extra thing. So I am sure some of you are wondering WHY I felt the need to push the idea around and make four additional variations. Let me attempt to explain.

First of all it was a, "why not?" With a simple pattern that works, and using the same four colors, I was curious to see how different types of fabrics would affect the design. Actually I had a pretty good idea, but sometimes things happen in real life that you can't imagine in your head.

From my experience as a painter, I can tell you that you cannot make any color more intense than it comes out of the tube. Think of the color (and the fruit) Orange. In oil paint, you buy the color Cadmium Orange. Any time you add any other paint to that Cad Orange, you reduce its intensity. Translation: it becomes duller. It may also be lighter or darker, but it will NEVER be as intensely bright as it came out of the tube. So if you want it absolutely BRILLIANT, you try to leave it alone.

The original Amish quilt, and my variation, play on this concept. The colors are pure and intense, and the red alongside the cool teal is a complementary as well as a strong hot/cold contrast. The red center is also a complement of the green outer border. An important color lesson you should know is if you want to make a color APPEAR more intense, place it next to its complement. So if you want RED to look even more RED, then put it next to GREEN (the complement of Red is Green.)

The blender version is pretty close to the original, but because blenders are subtle patterns, they can't capture the brilliant intensity of the version with the solids. Like I said, they're close.

Every other version, the batiks, and both versions with prints, continue to degrade the intensity of the original colors, so the design doesn't have that same impact the original has, but the patterns in the batiks and the prints add different elements to make the quilts interesting.

And that's what it's all about. Taking something tried and true, so common you don't even notice it any more, and shake it up and make it look NEW. That's an experiment that's always worth doing.

So Lynne, you say.  Is there any way you can show me all four of those variations next to each other so I can really see how they are the same and how they are different?

Mais bien sur! (But of course!)

Check back tomorrow.




For those of you who want to see these fabrics in more detail, you can visit this blog post. You can also click each photo then double click for more detail.

Amish Variations

When I decided to recreate my favorite Amish quilt, I didn't think I do more with it, but once I got the fabrics home I couldn't help but compare the solids I had selected to the existing fabrics in my stash.

I thought, "Gee, wouldn't it be fun to push that idea around. How far could I go?"  Making a version with blenders would be one idea. Here is part of it. Actually, I think it's a snoozefest (translation: boring.) I don't have enough of the green fabric on the bottom to go all the way around. If I decide to finish it, I'd have to go fabric shopping.

Here's a batik version. I haven't sewn this up together yet. I decided to make these all the same size because, what the heck, I had the fabric and it was easier than recreating a new set of dimensions. I don't really consider this version particularly successful - the batiks are all too busy. In the real world I would use fabrics of different scales of pattern. Still though, it's a fun variation on the original.

I almost didn't make this one, but I'm really glad I did because I like it a lot. I'm not thrilled with the green here, but I was trying to find something that was a value match to the original. It's a tough green to find, and I wanted something with a largish scale. Still though, I count this as a success.

There's one other version in the works. It came about when I saw fabrics in my stash I thought might work. I'm really pleased I tried it, because I think it works. I'll have to go shopping for the green, but oh gee darn, how tough is that? This one just goes to show that sometimes the stuff out of left field is a lot more interesting than anything obvious. (Which is sort of obvious, really, because the obvious is usually dull as dishwater.)


*All these photos will enlarge when clicked, and then supersize when clicked again.

Amish Flimsy in Solids

 The easiest thing about this flimsy was putting it together.

 

The trickiest thing was figuring out how wide to make the teal strips. I worked it out on paper, but in the end I had to do it by eye. I thought I had it right, and then decided it needed to be thinner, so I made it thinner.

Then it was just "cut it up and sew it."

It was all a guesstimate, and I thought it looked OK.

I am not a solids fan, but these Konas are fabric that is a real pleasure to work with.

Compared to the original, I think I nailed the colors although I can see the teals should have been still thinner. I'm not going to do it over. Nobody's going to see the original anyway.

The flimsy is 45-1/2" square (115.5cm).


UPDATE:

FORGET IT! There's NO WAY I can look at this and not feel there's a problem, so yup, I took it apart...

 It was really a bummer to have to do this, but I did it, trimmed the teal strips down 1/4" and then I sewed it up again.

This time, I'm DONE. The quilt is 44-1/2" (113 cm) square. (Could the teal have been narrowed down a bit more? Probably, but I didn't want it to be too thin. The original is 78" square, so I had to guess to work out the dimensions, and in the end, I just did it by eye.)

By the way... If any of you saw the Quilts and Color show at the MFA in Boston last year, you cannot fail to remember how intensely the red and green quilts in the first gallery made you eyes go buggy. It's called simultaneous contrast, and it cannot be photographed. My quilt has that, and yeah, it's a lot better in real life.

Triangle Dance is a Flimsy!

The Triangle Dance has reached flimsy status. It is 54" x 69".

Some of the blocks got reshuffled a bit when I sewed them together, but I am happy with this. I like the all-over-ness of this, so I won't be adding any borders. I will make a scrappy backing for it.

And Now For The Blacks

I'm actually more proud of my Black fabrics than the White ones, so here are the black fabrics I've used in the Triangle Dance Quilt.

 These fabrics were all fat quarters that I bought on sale.

 These fabrics were given to me. I don't necessarily keep everything folks give me, but I am not averse to keeping the good stuff.

 I was on an Oriental kick for a while.

 Three of these fabrics are backings for quilts, the fabric on the upper right was a binding.

These are fabrics I bought for the Black Crayons quilt. I used most of them, but letters don't take much fabric, so I had a lot left over.

Whites

My pal Kathy commented on the quality of my White stash. A lot of it I've had a long time.

The top fabric I've had since 2007 when I was making and selling custom kitty quilts (called "Gizzy Quilts"). The middle one I bought for my friend Julie, who incorporated it in her See Rock City quilt of barns. The bottom one with the brassieres I bought to use as a lining in a backpack I made in 2008 when I went to Maryland for Violette's christening. I love the bras.

 I bought these fabrics for The Black Box quilt, but I don't think they made the final cut.

I bought the flying pigs for the When Pigs Fly quilt, but that idea didn't fly. The circles were for the low-volume Crayons quilt (the one I have since named "Mashed Potato Crayons.")

 I like Black and White, so these were BW's from my stash. The one on the far right was bought for the Chicken quilt ("Too Much Chicken") but didn't make it.

 I bought these for the first Rail Fence quilt. They all made it into the quilt and these are the left over bits.

The two on the left in this photo go way back. I bought them for my first Alphabet sampler quilt, "Letters from Home," which appeared in Tonya Ricucci's book "Word Play Quilts." The fabric on the right was used in curtains for the hallway in my last apartment.

 These were bought as fat quarters at a big sale, and have languished in my stash.

Three of these fabrics were backings of quilts. The bugs were the binding of the first Rail Fence quilt.

Three of these fabrics were bought as cut yardage for the stash, but for no particular quilt. The fabric on the bottom right, however, was bought for a house quilt I made for my godson Devon back in 2009. I particularly wanted the lady with the dark hair sitting at a sewing machine. I have used her in a couple of houses to represent me.

This quilt was intended to be a stash-busting quilt, so I've been trying to use the stuff I have that's been sitting around for a while.

Working on Autopilot

I've made four flimsies in the last three weeks or so, which for me is nothing short of phenomenal.

Usually I wrestle with fabric selection, struggle with size and placement, and agonize over the amount of negative space. Every single item in my word or art quilts is thought about in tremendous, sometimes agonizing, detail.

So I found it amusing last week when this quilt,

which I made with absolutely no thought or care whatsoever, drew many more comments than this one,

where I agonized over the fabric selections in each of the twelve toned blocks, and struggled with the layout.

My son and I were chatting on line, and I sent him photos of each quilt. About the Petals quilt, he said, "That's Art" and "I want it."

I laughed, and said, "that's funny, because I barely paid any attention while I was making it." That sank in, and then I said, "Maybe there's something to that."

Actually, there is.

When I was drawing and painting, one of the things that was to be avoided at all costs was having the piece look "overworked." What does overworked mean?  In a portrait, for example, you wanted the finished piece to look the person was about to move, to step out of the frame and come alive.

 An overworked portrait can make the sitter look more like a concrete sculpture than a living, breathing person. (You can practically feel this kid's shirt, touch his skin and expect him to talk back to you.)

I remember seeing an oil painting of white roses in a vase which were so exquisitely painted they looked like porcelain. They were beautiful, but they didn't look REAL. The petals didn't look thin or light. The petals didn't look like they'd move if you touched them, there was something about them that was heavy and permanent, instead of light and fragile, like real rose petals.

It's a fine line.

I've seen tons of quilts that I think are overdone, overworked and overquilted. They don't float my boat, but that's just me. It's one of the reasons why scrap quilts are so appealing. They aren't predictable, and their inherent whimsical structure makes them almost universally successful.

Something that's overworked has no magic, no verve, no lightness, and for me, no life. It's a big reason why I believe in leaving "the evidence of my hand" in all my quilts. Things that are made by machine don't have that sense of life. They are "too perfect," and static.

So how did the Petals quilt go so right? It had a number of things in its favor - the limited color palette and the finite number of blocks I had to work with, to start. Because I had made a rule for myself that I would NOT make more blocks I could by definition not make the quilt "perfect" by adding more to emphasize the pink ring or to remove the "irregular" blocks that didn't have quite the right shape. The hand cut curves helped too. Cutting those curves by hand meant I couldn't get them all to look exactly the same way, and that helped keep the pattern slightly out of kilter. Any art teacher will tell you a diagonal line creates tension and the more visual tension that's created in a piece, the more interest it will tend to have. The hot/cold color contrast also contributed.  But the biggest thing?

from searchquotes.com

The biggest thing was I left it alone. It was looking good, so I left it there. I didn't overwork it. I didn't TRY to make it PERFECT.




So how to you learn this? I can't teach you. You have to learn on your own, and you learn by paying attention every step in the process. And knowing when to walk away.



*You can click on the photos, and then double click to enlarge for more detail.

Triangle Dancing

 I finished cutting all the whites for the Triangle Dance.

Then I paired up a dark with a light, and to make it easy on myself, I layered the dark on top of the light, made sure to line them up and then sliced through both at the same time. I decided that I would sew each pair to itself and make two identical blocks.

Then I stacked them all up and set them aside to sew.

I fed them through the machine without pinning, because, um, I wanted to get them sewn up in a hurry.

Then I pressed them and started throwing them up on the wall.

I'm pretty sure I can tinker with this a fair amount, but after doing the math, I realized I have enough fabric for almost THREE quilts, so I don't have to worry about making a decision right now, so I just kept making this basic layout bigger.

My idea is for a quilt 9 blocks wide by 16 blocks tall, which would make a quilt about 58" x 72", so this would be just over half.  I took a photo with my cell phone, and when I moved the phone I had an idea...

Rotating the image 90 degrees really makes it. So I'll make this arrangement, 11 blocks tall by 13 blocks wide. I'll make the rest of the blocks, and then start rearranging and fine tuning where the fabrics should go. Then I'll sew it up and move on to version number two!