It's A Hoot!

This quilt is for the new brother of twins Eloise and Wesley.

The request was for an owl, in sage and olive green. I found this pattern at Bound Shop. We really liked how the owl popped on the muted background.

The pattern, as written, provided the actual fabric colors from the Bella Solid line by Moda. But for the owl itself, these were in two shades of blue (plus Maize, Bronze, and Coffee). So it was easy enough to go find excellent substitutes of celadon and celery from the same line. 

We replaced the solid gray and cream fabrics in the background with ones of tiny white dots on white and green dots on cream.  

I did free-motion quilting in the darker green areas to simulate feathers. Also did free-motion on the face in gray. Then some angled straight line quilting in the orange areas. Different feather pattern? Whoooo knows. Finally, I ditch quilted with white on all the horizontal lines in the background.

And whoooooo's it for? Baby Thomas!  

 

QFL

One of the students in my ESL class is an amazing artist. Her favorite motif is repeating shapes, often with a geometric arrangement. Several times over the last two years, she made bookmarks for every other student in the class, each featuring a unique design!

This spring, she presented me with this piece:

 Beautiful, right!!!! And it is only 5" x 6"!

She knows that I am a quilter (we have shared our work with each other), so she said she hoped I could make a quilt based on this design. Challenge accepted!

The first thing to take note of is this: Clearly there are 12 wedges (thus, each must be 30 degrees). At first sight, it appears that it is the same segment repeated 12 times. But look again closely. If we start at the top middle and go clockwise, you can see that the odd sections (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11) are slightly different from the even ones! If you still can't see it, look at the shape of the black "triangles". 

The best way to create such wedges, with their crazy angles and small pieces, is with the paper piecing technique. That meant I would need to create a pattern for the 6 odd-numbered wedges and a slightly different pattern for the 6 even-numbered wedges.    

Her design of each wedge initially appears to be very simple. Some stripes and rectangles and lines. 

How to translate this into fabric? 

I used this design as a starting point. No way would I try to find fabrics with the exact patterns on her drawing. Trying to do so and getting them in complementary colors would be a fool's errand.  So, I would have to use fabrics that gave the same feel or appearance as the original.  

How big to make it? Obviously, having a finished quilt at 5" x 6" is somewhat foolish (unless you're decorating a doll house), and to do a paper pieces one of that size would be next to impossible. I did some rough calculations and came up with a workable length of about 11" for the longer edges (the left side of the odd pieces!); the edges of the odd pieces are a little shorter. The outer background could then be whatever extra size would make sense overall. This would give a total size of about 22" x 24". 

Once I made that decision, the next question was how much of her design should I try to replicate? Since each wedge was fairly small and made up of a number of pieces, I had to eliminate some of the smaller details. So I took a copy of her original, and, using paper scraps to "edit" and drawing in some revised lines, I came up with a design that could be done in cloth. Since each wedge is made up of several different fabrics, the total amount of any particular one is very small (less than an eighth of a yard). 

At that point, it just made sense to use fabrics I had in my stash. The original is blue, and blue is my favorite color, so naturally I have the most fabrics in that color. But try as I might, I could not find the right ones to work here. 😒 The greens seemed like the next best candidate, and yes!  I found just the right mix of colors and patterns.

Everything was falling into place!

Next I went to the local copy shop to make a full-sized enlargement. 400x ought to do it:

I then used special paper-piecing paper to trace each odd and even segment. Then I had to cut each of those into the sub-sections. For example: there might be A1 and A2 as one subset in an Odd wedge; B1, B2, B3 as another. Then draw the seam allowance around each and mark each sub-piece with an identifier for the correct fabric. Then make a final copy (actually 6 of each) for the odds and evens.  

Next: putting it together. It was just a matter of sewing each sub-section together, then sewing Set A to Set B, etc., then sew the wedges together.  One difficult part was the white outer background. These parts were not included as part of the wedge since:

a) it would have been too big to fit on one sheet of paper, and 

b) each white area is a little different based on which wedge (1 - 12) it is attached to. 

So after making each wedge, I just added a large piece of white in roughly the shape needed. Then I trimmed them to fit.  Looking back now, it would just have been better to add large white triangles (and the strips on the sides) after each 3-wedge group had been sewn together (fewer background seams that way). 

I also decided to put a thin green border which echoed the thin fabric strips in the wedges.

Quilting was minimal: ditch quilting on the 12 wedge seams using clear monofilament thread. Then a ditch of white thread in the background - border seam.

Finally, I wrapped it canvas-style around wooden stretcher bars. It's now ready for hanging.

Hopefully, this does justice to the original.

I will be gifting this piece to my artist-student-friend. But you may have noticed that this quilt does not yet have a name. I asked her what she called her original piece and she said there was no title for it. We tried to think of a name, but couldn't come up with one. So I am asking my loyal followers to submit their suggestion (either as a blog comment or directly to my email). We will pick the best one and then I will give her the quilt (and update this post). 

Thanks to all who submitted name suggestions. As you can see, the winner was "QFL". What does that mean? Quilting as a First Language!  Because art is the language that all people speak and understand. 

Zig Zag I and Zig Zag II

Every quilter has a stack of projects that they will get to "some day". One of mine has been this design, which was sent to me by my daughter in 2012!

 

I found it interesting because of the shape of the triangles, as well as the opportunity to use different fabric patterns. I also liked how the quilting reinforced the shapes.

However, we did not like the orange on black; too Halloweenish.

And notice that some of the fabrics are repeated on the left and right sides. Unless you were going to make it symmetrical, why do that when there are so many patterns available?

Having nothing to go on but this photo, I first had to decide how big to make my triangles. You can see that each pair is made up of an orange and a black. They are right triangles, so each pair makes a rectangle. So simple! Along with determining the triangle size, I had to decide how many to make in each half.  I didn't want the finished piece to be too big. I could have a lot of small triangles or fewer larger ones. I played around and finally settled on a finished size of 2" x 8" for the side and base (you can figure out the hypotenuse if you wish).  This size then worked well with 10 sets. I made a cardboard template, adding the 1/4" seam allowance all around. The same template was used for the colored fabric and the black background fabric.

Next....what color? Not orange.  White would be a good contrast, but the patterns on the fabrics would be too subtle. Yellow? Maybe. Purple? Not enough contrast. OK.....blue or green?  Wait!?!?! Why not make one of each? 👍👍   

So....let's find 20 different green fabrics in the stash. Want some contrast, some interest, not all dots or batiks; stripes might be problematic. How about this one? No, that one. Move it here...no there. Eventually we had over 30 pieces cut and up on the design wall before deciding on the final set and arrangement. Sew the green triangles to the black ones, sew the 10 sets in a column, sew the 2 columns together, add extra black fabric on the four sides and presto! And I knew up front that I would mount these on stretcher bars, so I added enough black fabric to wrap around.

As mentioned above, I like the echo quilting, but I didn't want to do it in green, as I feel that lessens the green on black effect of the fabrics. You may have a different opinion; fair enough. So I used black thread (you may have to zoom in to see it). There is no quilting on the green fabrics at all!

For Zig Zag II, then, the blue fabrics. But to throw in a little twist, I decided to reverse the triangle pattern. What does this mean? See how the long edge of the green fab is on the top of each triangle on the left side, but on the bottom of each on the right? So, I wanted to do the opposite for this one. Note: the short side still needed to be in the center. And you can't just "spin" the template / triangle set; if you do, it will still come out the same way! It has to be flipped so that the side facing the fabric when the greens were cut is now face-up when cutting the blues. This results in the long edge of each blue triangle being on top on the right side but on the bottom on the left. Other than that, everything else was done the same.

 12 years later, I can finally cross this one off my list!

Calliope

Wanted to do something colorful, and also visually interesting. I came up with six possible designs all based on the same theme of pairs of fabs / colors in a series of rows. At Thanksgiving, I printed them out and had the family vote on which one they liked best. There was a clear majority on one of them; alas, not the one that I had wanted.

These designs were all based on 11 rows and 41 across (an odd number so that the left and right columns would have the same color-strip. So, in this case, 42 was NOT the answer to everything). The 11 and 41 worked well with the planned size of 2.5 x .75 for each of the "full" pieces. The idea to add interest was to then have some rows with "half-size" pieces (these thinner pieces are 2.5 x 0.375)....thus 82 in those rows.

The family liked the idea of double symmetry:  top to middle to bottom (though there is only one middle row) and left to right. So that is the one I went with.

As I normally do, I designed this using Excel, and just put in colors that contrasted enough to be obvious; not necessarily the actual colors I would finally use (although I did like the black-white combo).

This was a quilt I made just because I had the time on my hands, and I wanted to use some fabs from my stash. However, if you do the math you can see that for each color:  

20 pieces (each color) per row * 2 rows * 3" x 1.25" (cut size) per piece = 150 square inches. So that is not even a 6" cut across the width of the fabric. 😂😂😂😂 This made hardly a dent in my stash!

I started out picking what seemed like appropriate colors. Put some samples up on the quilt wall. Nope...swapped this one for that one...nope...these clash too much. Decided early on to go with mostly solids and small scale / subtle batiks....did not want the fabric patterns to distract from the overall strip pattern. 

Somewhere along the line I decided that I needed a little more interest (tension? focus?). I briefly considered throwing in a non-matching piece here and there, or making one or more columns the same strip part of the way up, but that approach didn't please me. 

So I decided to do a horizontal reverse in the four split-rows (numbers 3, 5, 7 and 9). For example, in the black and white rows it would be (split) white/black white/black white/black......then a full white (which reverses the pattern), so then black/white black/white-black, etc. til the middle when it would reverse again, and then reverse again on the other side. So these rows break up the symmetry of the other ones.

Easier to see (below) than to explain.

For the assembly, there are clearly a LOT of seams. In most quilts, you assemble the rows first and then join them together.   But doing so here would have meant matching 41 seams!!!! So it just made more sense here to assemble the COLUMNS first, and then join them going across; only 11 seams to match up.

I had originally planned to not have a border. The batting happened to be a scrap of black batting that had long sat in my batt pile. When I laid the quilt top on the oversized batting before I trimmed it.....boom! It needed a black border! That made the colors pop. So a little extra cutting, pinning, and sewing and then I was ready for quilting. 

And like many of my quilts, the point here is the colors and the pattern itself. So it was an easy choice to use the transparent monofilament thread, in the ditch, across each row.

Ta da:

And the name?  Once the piece was finished it organically (get it?) popped into my head. Wikipedia defines a calliope as "....typically very loud. Even some small calliopes are audible for miles. There is no way to vary tone or loudness." That pretty much sums up the impact of this quilt.

Now I just need to find a place to put it!