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! 

Succulent Variation

Friends of ours were travelling in northern Michigan last fall when they happened to stop in at a local quilt shop (though they are not quilters).  Inside they were drawn to a large quilt hanging on the wall. It was made with Kaffe Fassett fabrics, and they loved it! His fabrics are generally bold and bright, and feature a lot of floral motifs. So they snapped a pic, and when they returned home, asked me if I could do one like this I previously made a bedspread-sized quilt for them back in 2011 (Wondrous Waves). 

They told me the name of this pattern was "Succulent", hence the name of this quilt.  However, the published pattern includes all of the required fabrics using a blue colorway (23 different fabrics in all!).  The one in the store was made with more reds and yellows. My friends wanted something more like that. 

Since we had to find new fabs anyway, and because she wanted the quilt to be slightly bigger (at 92 x 84) than the one in the pattern, we decided to make some design modifications. It is still made up of smaller (4") squares and larger (8") squares. But, in order to get the size she wanted, the borders needed to be 6". So the new design featured 16 smaller squares (per row) and two larger squares (per row spanning two rows each). In total, there are 18 rows. Because of the large size, I knew that I would make this in four sections using my Quilt in Sections technique. 

Then we had to find the right fabrics. She looked on-line and we went back and forth, and eventually agreed on 11 fabrics for the small squares and 5 for the large squares (one of which was also used in the borders, the binding, and the back of the quilt).  Most are red, some are dark blue or dark green, and one is bright green. She wanted this last one for some "pop" in the design. We ordered some from that same quilt store, but had to get the rest from several other sources.

Next came the challenge of actually laying out what went where.

Can't have a large "border" fabric sqaure right next to the border!

Can't have the same smaller square fabric adjacent (or even touching diagonally) to itself in two rows.

Can't have too many green pops!

The large squares had to be randomly placed.

There must be two large squares for each full row pair

Keeping in mind that I would do it in quarters, each "quarter" row pair actually called for 16 small fabrics and one large one. Sharp eyed readers will immediately notice that 11 (different fabs) is not a multiple of 16! So each quarter row pair had to have all 11 fabs plus 5 repeats! Not adjacent, not diagonal. In the next row pair down, I then tried to use a different "plus 5" than in the row above (or to the right) while still being frugal with the green pops.

Here are each of the 4 sections after piecing (including borders!) and quilting:

Upper Left

Lower Left

Lower Right

Upper Right

For the quilting, I used a variegated thread with reds and oranges. Even by the blue and green squares, the quilting line is pretty hidden. I quilted in the ditch both horizontally and vertically for every row and column. However, I did not quilt into the 8" squares.    

When all the quilting was done, I joined the two upper quarters together, then the two lower quarters, and finally the two halves together. A regular flip binding and it was all finished!

  

rainboW Weave

In our den we have a U-shaped sofa. The sides are chaise length, and induce instant torpor when anyone stretches out on them.

Last year, during the height of the COVID quarantine, we decided to make a lap quilt to make daytime napping even comfier. The result was Circular Spectrum #72. 

Of course, once we had one made, it was only a matter of time until there had to be a second one (for the other, cold, lonely chaise). 

We wanted a pattern that would allow us to use the many, if not all, of the colored fabrics, and the same two background colors. It had to be a complimentary quilt (same size and feel), but unique as well.

Somehow, we did a web search and found the answer within 30 seconds! That never happens!!  We chose a weave (or lattice) pattern.

Knowing that Circular had a rainbow of colors that went from upper left light to lower right dark (through the spectrum), we decided to arrange these colors the same way.

Pawing through the stash we managed to find all of the fabrics / colors that we had used before! But in this pattern, the strips were smaller (less impactful) than the circles were, so we started to swap some out and swap in some others. We also decided to keep the same color family from top to bottom in each column, as opposed to the diagonal nature of Circular. And with 9 columns, we had to determine how best to divide ROY G. BIV.

Laying out all the possibilities (and a few more we bought from Quilter's Heaven) resulted in an arrangement of Pinkish-Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Green-Blue-Blue-Purple (Indigo...Violet).

For the background colors, we also had some scraps, but knew we would need more. Luckily, QH had just enough on hand!

Cutting and piecing were very easy (nothing like the process in Circular). Lots of pieces to sew, but chain stitching helped that go faster. I knew that I would do the same ditch quilting as on the other one (though this time just the vertical seams), so the size (42 x 54) was manageable enough to do all in one.

The result:

And, just like with Circular, I once again went with the "facing binding" technique. So no binding is visible on the front (and it blends in on the back).

We have already tested this new addition to our family and can confirm that it is just as cuddly as its sibling!

PS: no....those are not typos in the name. It's that way for a reason. We're sure you can figure it out! 

Circular Spectrum #72

Way back in February.....back before Everything Changed, I started to make a lap quilt for our den. We wanted something that had a neutral background (to match our couch), but also one which had pops of color to provide some interest.  

Looking through the interweb, we found this posting.  As described, that quilt had circles of color fused to background squares and then the quilting went over them to secure them in place. This was appealing as I don't do applique.

However, there were two things that didn't work for us. We liked the idea of the pattern but also wanted something with more actual dimension. So just fusing on the circle fabs was an issue. Also, this was a   mini-quilt (18" x 18"!), where the squares were only 2" finished! Which means the circles were even tinier. To make a lap quilt with these block dimensions would require 672 squares!!!  Plus such eensy dimensional circles would be problematic.

So, we decided to make the background squares 6" finished, and the circles 4".

How to add some dimension?

I started by cutting a 4.5" circle of the colored fabric, AND a 4.5" circle of lightweight non-fusible interfacing. I sewed the interfacing to the right side of the fabric with a 1/4" seam. Part of the interfacing was then carefully cut away:

I then turned the assembly inside out, which resulted in a 4" circle with a nice finished edge. The raw edges were turned under and held in place by the interfacing; since it is so thin, pressing the circle made it disappear!

Next, I cut a template out of card stock; 6" x 6" with a 4" circle in the center. This was laid on a square of the background fabric:

Fabric square

Fabric square with template

I then cut out a 3.5" diameter circle of batting. This was placed inside the circle of the template:

Then, the inverted fabric circle sandwich was placed over the batting:

The three layers (fab, batt, fab) were pinned in place and the template was removed (different fab shown in the picture below): 

I then stitched very close to the edge with a thread color that matched the color of the circle fabric. So in the finished square it is pretty much invisible from more than a foot away (a faux applique?):

The combination of the layer of batting and the stitch-around-the-edge provided both the visual and actual dimensionality that we were looking for

So now that I had the process, we had to lay out the colors. We went from top left to bottom right in the full range of the spectrum. Some of the circle colors are used twice; some just once. There are two colors in the background squares, so those were just alternated

Cut, sew, invert, trim, template, batt, circle, sew. Sew the blocks into rows, sew the rows together.

The quilting is in the ditch of the background squares, both vertically and horizontally, using a thread color to match the darker squares. Again.....mostly invisible.

Just like with my quilt "All Different, Yet All The Same", I felt that a border, or even a binding, would detract from the effect. So I once again went with the "facing binding" technique. See "All Different" for an explanation.

OK....enough suspense. The final product:

Time to cuddle up and relax!!!!!

Pandemic - Part 2

I have now sewn over 100 masks!

Here is a sampling of some of the fashion-forward folks you may see wearing them all over the country.

And click here for one of the many articles on how to avoid fogging your glasses while in mask mode.

Stay safe....practice social distancing....be smart...wear a mask...save a life.

                                              

Quilting During A Pandemic

There are already thousands of stories, memes, posts, Tweets, "Top 200 Movies To See" lists, musical parodies, etc., about how people are finding their way through this never-ending Spring of 2020. Even in this very dark time, it is amazing how much incredible creativity is coming forth.

So what is a quilter to do?

I was about 1/3 the way through a quilt for our den, and had one more baby quilt (for a friend's granddaughter) in the queue when things began to get worrisome. We were very early adopters of the stay-at-home policy (easy for introverts like me!). And it looked like the hunker time would last quite a while. So I mentally began to suss out how much time to spend each day working on them to make them last as long as possible, or at least until we were paroled.

Sure, I can order patterns and fabs on-line and have them delivered, but one needs to have a project in waiting to do so.

Then, the word began to spread that there was a serious mask shortage for the medical community. Suddenly, the interwebs were filled with all kinds of DIY masks: with elastic, one-piece, with ties, sewn, glued, even from old bras!

Perfect!!! I have lots of time and a huge stash of fabrics!

I contacted our local hospital and offered to make some for them. They requested that I make a prototype and send it to them and they would let me know; so I did. That was two weeks ago and I have not heard back.

Time went (slowly) on, and then the conversation changed to everyone wearing masks when they go outside. Boom! Just like that I had a dozen orders from family and friends. But, just as with my morsbags, I make and distribute these for free. Oddly, the masks take just about as long to make (40 minutes) as the bags!

Here are some of the ones I have made so far:

Let me know if you would like one. I will try to turn them around as quickly as possible (via mail or no contact delivery).

And...one day....I'll be able to get back to finishing those other quilts. 

 

NOLA Houses

Our daughter Emily lives in New Orleans (i.e., NOLA; you can see the quilt I previously made for Em's house here), and works for Habitat for Humanity (click for main web site or NOLA site). Last fall she was promoted to a new position which included her own office! So she asked me to make her a quilt of NOLA houses to put on the wall.

For those of you who have never been to New Orleans, you may not realize that it features an amazing variety of architectural styles. These range from one of the standard and ubiquitous styles, the "shotgun" house (a narrow house where the rooms are arranged one behind another), to the grandest of mansions in the Garden District. In between are many shapes and sizes, and often featuring the bright colors one usually associates with the Caribbean islands. Click here for a visual sampling!

So I had a ton of options to choose from . My original thought was to do a traditional block quilt with maybe 16 squares, and each square being some pieced version of one of these houses. 

But around this time my quilt friend Kathleen Warren and I got together for a working (well....really playing) session using her abstract quilt-as-you-go freeform technique.

She is a true artist with a definite eye for color and design. She helped me "cut loose" and just randomly build up a design on a pre-cut piece of backing fabric. The idea is to fill the space and then mount it on a 10"x10" pre-stretched canvas.

As I was doing this, the proverbial light bulb went on in my head. Why not do individual houses like this and mount them on these same 10x10 frames!?!?!  I love to mount my artwork on stretcher bars, but these have almost always been larger pieces; I had never considered doing an individual mounted block.

Then, these could be hung on her wall in lots of different arrangements and switched from time to time. Em liked the idea, and then we set out to decide which ones to do.

We definitely wanted to do her cute house (narrow, but not a true shotgun), and also wanted to do one of the popular versions that Habitat builds down there. I had decided that I would make 8 in total, so we began to look for others to use. We found a few, and I set to work.

As I do a lot, I "translated" these images into a grid pattern in Excel. I then made them using a combination of sew-and-flip, paper piecing, and fusing. So these are not "quilts" in the traditional sense; more fabric art. 

For the most part, I tried to match colors of the fabric house to those of the actual house  The hard part was portraying the dimensionality of each in the (basically) two-dimensions of the fabric. In some cases I think I succeeded; in others, the final versions have a flat look.

Each house has from 80 - 100 pieces! I then fused the completed houses onto the background (of grass and sky). Then, the completed piece was staple-mounted to the canvas frame.

After much work, we decided that 4 was plenty!

Here is each one; first the photo used as the model, then the actual fabric version.

First, the Habitat house (under construction):

 

Next: a double-wide (usually two shotguns joined with a common wall):

Then, a colorful and ornate beauty:

And finally: Emily's house!

Here they are just hanging around:

...and on site at the Habitat For Humanity office in NOLA with Em: