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!