Cars, Trucks, etc.

Another quilt in the "Mari's Family" series!  This one is for Mateo, brother of previous quilt recipients Lucy and Max.

Mari asked for "cars and trucks"....I've done several with that theme before. So: design the pattern first, or pick the fabs first?  Hmmmm.......

This time I went with "fabs first". Found a great line called "Ready, Set, Go 2". So many cute patterns....which to get? Based on the choices (colors and patterns), I put together a 9-patch design using 3 of the fabrics, and purchased a fourth one for the back.

Ta Da:

Because the 9-patches from the first two fabrics were a little on the dark side, I used yellow fabric (from my stash) for the sashing.  From the third, I had to fussy cut the horizontal strips and the borders. So the maximum height (about 2 1/4") of those was dictated by the pattern. That is why I made the yellow sashes so thin; I didn't want them to over power the main fabric.

The back uses many of the same cars and trucks, plus bicycles; that's how the quilt got its name!   

Definitely a two-sided dragger!

Purple Prisms

A while back I saw this image on Pinterest:

You know how excited I get about op-art and 3D images, and turning them into quilts.  So this one was very intriguing.  After much digging, I determined that it was the work of Victor Vasarely, a major force in 20th century op-art.  You can read more about him and see other of his pieces by clicking here or here.  However, I could not find anything specifically about this piece! It is not on any of the Vasarely sites...I do not even know its title.  I tried contacting the Museo Vasarely en Hungría, but they never replied to my email.                                                                                                                                            
Looking at this piece, you can see that it is a variation on the standard tumbling blocks pattern. The main differences are a) some of the blocks are rectangles rather than squares (actually, the tumbling block "squares" are really hexagons!), and b) there are black filler pieces in between each "block". These fillers separate the blocks and add extra depth.

So...how to turn this into a quilt? Actually, the design was rather easy! I printed it, drew horizontal and vertical lines through all the vertices, and got a very well-defined grid. It was easy to transpose this grid, including the diagonals, into Excel and then use its tools to shade appropriately. To get the dimensions, I started with 1/2" x 1/2" as the size of the center square. That meant the intersecting middle row and column were also 1/2" wide.  From there I worked the dimensions until I got to the last row and column which are both 3" in size. This resulted in 37 columns and 31 rows, and a finished size of 43" x 58"!  Certainly a large work (no idea how big the original is), but I felt this size was necessary to create the depth required for the best effect.

Here is my finished piece:

I chose to use 4 shades of purple (plus black) rather than the blue of the original (although some of the shades look similar).

So the pattern, plus the judicious use of light, medium, and dark colors seems to pull the viewer into the center of a distant pit. You feel like you are falling inward.

On the other hand, if you look at the outer edges, they almost appear as a street view of apartment balconies and buildings.  Or are they prisms fracturing the light into various shades? (Hence the name: Purple Prisms.) But perhaps you see something else altogether.

Construction proved to be much more of a challenge than the design phase. This involved cutting and piecing many half-square triangle and half-rectangle triangle pieces. Half-squares are easy; it was the half-rectangles that gave me fits! For certain of the smaller finished dimensions you can not  follow the standard tutorial instructions. Why? Because the seam allowance is such a large part of the actual piece that you have to account for it when putting the two halves of the rectangle together. I am not exactly sure at what point this happens. If anyone is interested in solving this mystery I have a full write-up available and would love to hear from you!  Unfortunately, I did not realize this issue existed until I had finished several columns!  Hey!  The points aren't meeting up correctly! Rip...rip....rip...rip!!

One good aspect of the construction is this: when you make the half-square and half-rectangle pieces, you get 2-for-1!  That is, cutting, 2 black pieces and 2 purple pieces, then slicing, dicing, and sewing back together, results in 4 finished pieces! So, as I cut and pieced one column, the corresponding column on the other side of the center was simultaneously being built!  Made it seem like a faster process.

The other nice feature of this pattern is that every other column is made up of simple square or rectangular pieces. That is, the "halfsies" are in the even numbered columns and took a lot of time to do, while the even numbered columns are simple fabric pieces that went up quickly.

To quilt it, I used clear monofilament thread, and ditched it on both sides of the even numbered rows. You can see that the seams on these rows go uninterrupted from edge to edge, while the seams in the odd rows are broken up by some of the vertical solid blocks. The "wow" is in the pattern....why distract with any kind of noticeable quilting?

When the body was done, it was time for the border. Like many of my op-art pieces I wanted that extra POP!, so I figured a black border would be best. As I played with the fabric to see what size to make it, I was not satisfied. Since there are black pieces on all four edges, it looked like they were bleeding into the border. Hmmmm.....   I consulted with a quilting friend and she suggested no border at all! She felt that anything would present too much of a frame that would detract from the illusion. Perhaps Vasarely felt the same way as his op-art pieces all appear to be unframed!

As with some of my more recent pieces, I knew I wanted to mount this on stretcher bars. Having it just hang loosely from a sleeve would lessen the impact; it needs to be taut. So I still had to add fabric to allow the piece to be mounted. I sewed on 2" of black fabric to facilitate the wrapping around the frame. However, it is only seen from the sides, not on the front, so it is completely functional and not part of the finished work.

Note: The piece is mounted on the rectangular frame; the apparent curve in the photo above is just camera distortion.

And there you go.

To see more of this wonderful artist's work, go to Artsy.

One more treat:  to demonstrate how the piece actually came together, I created a slide show of photos after each two columns were added.  It's a pretty cool thing! If you have two more minutes, click on the link to see how it went: Construction Slideshow

Sesame Street

Made for the new great-grandchild of my mother-in-law's friend, this colorful and adorable quilt is sure to be a long-time treasured companion.

 

...and the back:

 

 

It is from a free pattern!  The large figures are fussy cut from a panel. The rest of the setting pieces, sashes and borders, and binding are all from the associated coordinated fabrics.

 



The quilting is free-form stiple. I used matching threads in most of the areas, and transparent monofilament in the rest.

Hard to believe I've made over 130 quilts and this is the first time the Sesame Street characters have made an appearance. So I would like to dedicate this quilt to Sonia Manzano, who played Maria, and just retired after 44 years of being a positive role model for our nation's children.

Motion

I like playing with black and white patterns, especially when they can be considered Op Art.  Two of my better examples of this are Labyrinth and Stand Back!!  This quilt does not quite have the same "pop" factor, but it still makes the eye travel back and forth across the canvas.

To reinforce the flow of this original piece, I scoured the internet for just the right fabrics. If you look very closely, you will see that the pattern on the black fabric is actually made up of very tiny black and white lines (click here to see a close-up swatch) that are angled at 45°.  The white fabric has very subtle white-on-white lines (click to see), which I arranged so that the stripes are all vertical.  Thus, the fabrics themselves reinforce the movement from bottom left to top right (or is it top right to bottom left?).

All of the vertical sections are solid (i.e., one-piece) strips. 

I pressed all the seams open because I did not want to create ditches, so I had to be extra precise when matching up the seams. This resulted in some seams being resewed two or three times to get them to line up perfectly. Even so, the seam gnomes came during the night and offset some of them just a wee bit. So it is better to view the quilt from several feet away.

For sale: 42" x 37"  Wall hanging (mounted on stretcher bars)  $150 

Butterflies III

This is the lucky 13th baby quilt I have made for my friend Mari, and the third time I have used butterflies as the theme. See Butterflies and Butterflies For Hannah for the others.

 

For this quilt, I started with a panel which had 2 butterflies that were surrounded by the flower pattern seen on the border. The panel itself (24" x 44") didn't work for the design I had in mind, so I bought two of them and fussy-cut the butterflies to 12" x 12". Then I flipped the butterflies on the right side so that they were symmetrical.  

 

The green and white mini-butterfly border fabrics are the same ones I used in a previous quilt for Mari, Dominique's Garden.

 

What to do for the quilting?  The butterflies are already so colorful that I didn't want to detract from them. I thought about using variegated thread, but just couldn't find a way to make it work. Then I noticed the thin white border surrounding each butterfly and their distinctive wing patterns.  Yes!!! So I used white thread to free-motion outline each of these. Invisible and gives dimensionality to the butterflies.  I then did use rainbow variegated thread to ditch around the 4 central squares and then in each border ditch.

 

The final touch was the label for baby Sofia, new sister to Jaxson .   



Labyrinth

About a year ago I posted my Bulging Checkerboard quilt (Stand Back!), and got a lovely email about it from a quilter in Portland, Oregon named Margaret Ellis.   She also wanted to make that pattern, but in the same size as I did (51 x 51) vs the original 102 x 102 size of the pattern.

Since that time we have corresponded regularly and shared photos and ideas about a number of projects. And, yes....she did make the Checkerboard quilt too.

I have had a pattern in my queue for a long time, "Labyrinth Walk", (click for link to pattern). This pattern also makes a huge quilt: 84 x 84! Maybe it's just me, but this is waaaayyyy to big to put on a wall (unless you had a specific large, prominent space in mind), and I think the whole effect / impact would be lost if it was used as a bedspread. Why do these creators make these quilts so big?

I had been able to scale down the Checkerboard to one-fourth size, but for some reason was having trouble doing this one. Margaret reminded me of a fun math fact: halve the dimension and you get 1/4 the size! So she was kind enough to put together a complete set of cutting instructions at the new size of 45 x 45 and sent them to me in December (along with a picture of her version of Labyrinth). The reason it is not exactly a one-quarter scale is that the white strips in the original are cut to 1.25" wide. There is no way to scale those in half and still have room left for a 1/4" seam allowance on both sides. So she just made those 1", which still worked out fine.

I put these new instructions in my "stack of things to be done" because a) we were going away for a week at the end of the month, and b) I was working on another quilt. Then, just after the first of the year, I saw a Facebook posting for an Art Auction at Homer Plessy School in New Orleans. Loyal readers know that my daughter lives in Nola, and one of her good friends is on the board of this school. YES!  I will make Labyrinth as it is a perfect candidate for an auction. But the art piece submission deadline was March 15th! Suddenly, I had to get very busy working on this. Luckily, we have had a string of single-digit and below-zero temp days, and my wife had an out-of-town weekend conference, so I had plenty of time to work on making this quilt.

Here is my finished piece:

As in some other 3D quilts, the farther back you stand, the better the dimensionality.

And, like a lot of quilts, this looks so much harder to make than it actually is! The fabrics are white, light gray, dark gray, and black batiks. There are really just two different blocks and they are arranged in 3 x 3 rows: the "2 concentric squares" block (5 of those), and the "maze" block (4 of those). Each block is about 12" square. It's all in the design, cutting and piecing. The former block is made up of 30 pieces for each, while the latter needs 64!

The two gray borders on the right side and bottom, plus the diagonal black corners, reinforce the apparent depth of the body.

As usual, I did minimal quilting: white thread in the ditch of all the white strips, plus grays and black ditching along the border edges as necessary.

Let me know if you can find your way out of the maze!

Ark 3

One of my mother-in-law's dear friends has just become a great-grandmother for the first time! She has been a long-time admirer of my quilts (at my MIL's apartment), so when she learned of the coming event she jumped at the chance to have one made for the new baby.  She looked at my blog posts for some inspiration and decided that she wanted a Noah's Ark quilt.  I have already made two of these (Sebastian's Ark and the original Noah's Ark), both of which used / were based on patterns found in "A Quilter's Ark", by Margaret Rolfe.  I don't like to do the same pattern more than once, so each of these is a little different: different arrangement of the blocks, the size of the blocks, and the animals, etc.

Once I agreed to do this pattern, she informed me that her grand-daughter (the mom-to-be) has always liked armadillos (!) and could I include one in the quilt!!!   Hmmmm.....   If you take the Noah story literally (and who doesn't?), then here had to be armadillos on the boat.  Guess they just don't have as good p.r. as the elephants, zebras, giraffes, and doves.  Well, even so, my pattern book does not include a paper-pieced pattern for an armadillo. But a search of the interwebs turned one up!  In previous Ark quilts the blocks were 5x5 or 6x6.  This pattern was 5x8.  I figured that reducing it would be problematic (lots of little pieces), so instead, I picked the other animals and reconfigured the blocks to varying sizes so that the 5x8 would work. Of course, this meant that I had to actually enlarge the other 11 animal blocks! The animals are not to scale, but what the heck.  I also had to slightly adjust the size of the Ark block.

Since I was adding this "odd" animal, I also decided to include a panda because it was so much fun and so cute in the Best Friends quilt (yes!, there were pandas on the Ark as well!).  And, I put in a sheep; hadn't done one before and it just seemed to fit in well.  The other 10 animals have made previous appearances (and, yes, I am running out of the zebra and tiger fabs!).

The back fabric and binding is a really cute Noah's Ark pattern.  Click here to see the back (and more pix of all my Baby quilts).

And here it is: Ark 3!

Bon Voyage, Little One.

Best Friends

Time for another baby quilt.  Since this one was a complete surprise to the recipient, I had no guidelines (or restrictions) as to color, theme, etc.  So I searched the web for something cute and girlie (knew it was going to be a girl).  I found a picture of one on Pinterest that really fit the bill. It was of a little girl and her best friend, a (toy?, stuffed? real?) panda, lying side by side in their bed.  Unfortunately, there was no pattern for it.  So I decided to just wing it and design it myself.

Here is the result:

 

 

The construction: Each of the 6 columns in the "blanket" portion contains 20 rectangles of varying sizes, all made from scraps in my stash (with some repetition). In fact, except for the ruffle, this entire quilt came from the stash!

 

Then I needed a fabric that looked like a typical little girl's bed sheet.  Checked in the "multi-colored" stash box and amazingly found 2 yards of the perfect fabric (wonder when I had bought it? Wonder why I didn't use it before??).  So this was enough for the bed sheet and the back fabric!  Wow! Perfect.

 

For the pillows, I first put together the yellow fabric, 2 layers of batting, and then a piece of (hidden) muslin on the back. I sewed these together with a decorative zig-zag stitch. Then I quilted each pillow assembly; did this so that they would look "fluffy" and not be quilted through to the back. Then I attached each one on 3 sides to the sheet fabric using an invisible line of stitching close to the edge.

 

Then, after many design iterations, I drew, cut, layered and fused the fabrics for the girl and the panda.   

 

Next, I attached the blanket section to the sheet / pillow section, catching the 4th sides of the pillows and sandwiching the ruffle in between as I sewed.

 

I wanted to keep the blanket looking fluffy too, so I did minimal quilting: a shadow line 1/4" on each side of the vertical seams, and a similar horizontal shadow at 4 or 5 random places in each column.

 

Finally, to continue the illusion of a bed (blanket and sheet), I created a split binding. The lower half uses one of the striped fabs contained in the blanket section; the top is the same fabric I used for the sheet.

 

So it looks like the two friends are tucked in for a night of peaceful dreams........... 

........................................................................

Update: Dalia, quilt and Doobie, May 2021