Blogger's Quilt Festival

Today's post is for the fall Blogger's Quilt Festival.  This an awesome online display of quilts brought to us by Amy (since if we are here browsing these, we aren't in Houston with all of quilting's lucky elite!).  We get to stay home and await Hurricane Sandy in the coming days.

My quilt is entitled Zen Garden.  This was finished this past winter.  I'll confess right off the bat to being a longarm quilter, and one the loves to make quilts for shows.  This was my 4th such quilt.  It had the pleasure of hanging in 4 or 5 shows this past season, bringing home a few ribbons.  Similarly, it's even made it into Quilter's Newsletter magazine.  But, enough with the boring stuff, you came here to see pictures.  Am I right?...

 

This quilt finishes at 65" square.  It's a traditional pattern called a broken star or Carpenter's star.  The applique all around the border almost disguises this.  It's deceptively easy to construct because the diamonds constructed of 25 pieces are actually made from strip sets.  The trick is just getting all the fabrics of the strips in the right order!  

One of the things I limited myself to when I made this quilt was to ONLY use fabrics from my stash.  So, there goes the possibility of this looking too traditional.  I have quite a bit of bolder color, larger print fabrics, and despite the size of these pieces being fairly small, they all seemed to work nicely at creating a visual colorburst effect.  

 

The majority of the quilt is the fabric used on the outer border and inner setting squares.  I knew since this was a Kona fabric (solids, though nice, are kind of dull and boring and they don't bring a lot of life to the party), I would need to make it interesting somehow.  As you can see, the setting squares were jazzed up by appliqueing a purple and pink flower to the inner corner, and then more applique.  The tan is just dull by itself.  The border around the star received a lot of Asian-inspired floral applique.  I love working with the bias strips, and the curvy-ness of this distracts the eye from the bland tan.  I was able to use flowers that are basically constructed from the same shape as the star is, and then brought many of the same green prints back in for leaves -- all 85 of so of them.   And I can't forget the butterflies.  They are my personal favorite.  A small feature that helps to define this as a garden.  I fussy cut them from a piece of fabric I had, then colored them with sharpie pens to make them the colors I wanted.

The part that I really love in the process, though, is when the quilting starts and the quilt is brought to life.  Design details can be added to the boring tan areas to make them visually stimulating, like the checkerboards shown above.  Rays were quilted into the inner star to bring it outwards.  I enjoy all the fun fillers that make the finished quilt an I-Spy of sorts.  Approximately 75 hours was spent on the quilting (did I mention that I am insane too??!)

 Here's a closeup of the edge...a small (yes, micro) micropiping gives the quilt interest, but also provides a little added stiffness to help it to hang straightly.

 Here's just a few more photos...

Thanks to Bonnie Hunter.  I posted 4 of the ones that she sent me after MQX.  And what fun would it be without one of the back?...  The backing fabric is a Laura Ashley print.  It shows the texture, but not all the stitching lines.  And that's my artistic muse, Picasso, eyeing the binding clips as potential toys!.

I love all your comments, and I hope that you have a great week looking at the Bloggers Quilt Festival quilts.

Stats...
size 65"x65"
techniques: machine pieced, hand appliqued
quilted by me on a longarm
Categories: wall quilt, professionally quilted, applique quilt

Blogger's Quilt Festival 2012

Thanks for looking at my blog, and welcome to the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  The quilt I am showing is called Sea Glass.  It is 63"x78" and is my original design.  It is currently at MQS in Kansas through this weekend.  It's made from all batiks and hand-dyes.  The watercolor background is made from the kaleidoscope block.  I then hand appliqued waves, and machine appliqued the 120 or so small pieces of sea glass.

I had this quilt already in progress prior to last summer.  But last summer my kids and I discovered a couple of beaches that had lots of pieces of sea glass to find.  It became our little obsession for the summer, wondering if the beach we were going to would have as much as the last.  Anyway, I had many pieces of batik for a while, and just thought they just looked like sea glass.  I knew making the quilt was my destiny.

The quilting was liberating.  It was my first quilt that I have longarm quilted that was mostly free-form quilting.  My machine is not computerized, but I wanted the motifs in the quilting to appear free and organic, as they do in nature.

The sea glass pieces are arranged in a symbolic wave, emanating from the wave, and being deposited on the beach. The only "structured" quilting was on the outer border.  It is axisymmetrical - opposing corners are the same, and it has a scalloped edges.  The feathers, though wavelike, are intended to juxtipose the unstructured and randomness of the churning wave of water.

 Here are some of the interesting organic fillers I used.

The opposing borders (ones with scallops) have this design.  The feathers again are somewhat wavelike, and the curved-crosshatching is just to give the design a change of structure.

 More cool fillers...

I should also note that this quilt is currently in the Quilting Gallery's quilt of the week contest.  I'd love it if you'd hop on over here and vote for it!!

Bloggers Quilt Festival

I am sure you are aware that the Blogger's Quilt Festival is this week. It is brought to us by Amy, who has done this for a few years now. I hope you have the time to look at the many quilts that will be posted at the Festival's link this week!

My entry for this fall's festival is a small-ish wall quilt named "Intertwined". Despite it being only 40" square, it is paked with details, and is made of my all-time favorite fabrics - Hoffman 1895 hand-dye batiks. It is shown below with me and my usually eager to be in a picture daughter (not so much this time!) at the Maine Quilt Show this past summer. Happily, it was one of 4 quilts to receive a 1st place ribbon!

The 14" center block was started a year before in a Karen Kay Buckley hand applique class. I should note that I am comletely addicted to hand applique, so if you have never tried, you might really enjoy it. Karen's applique pieces were challenging at first, being that they have a ton of inner points, and because they are small (grapes are under 1/2" diameter), but it is a relaxing form of stitching, and I like that I was able to drag it along with me to dance and soccer, etc. One other thing to say is that the batik fabrics are a tigher weave than most cottons, and the behave so much better for this type applique in that they are not prone to reveling when the turned under seam allowance is slightly under 1/4".

So, thanks Karen, for a wonderful inspiration for my quilt. I did design the remainder of the quilt myself to compliment the center block. The 4 cathedral windows were paper-pieced, and were intended to bring a little variety to the applique. I hand appliqued the two-tone ribbon on the twice before I was satisfied with how it looked. And then I decided that it just needed a punch of something different. That's when I pulled out my lime green batik and the orange & gold fabrics and made the intertwining vines of nasturtium (and hence the name for the quilt). I designed them to be like morning glories in shape, but somehow because they were orange, then needed to be a different flower!

I must confess, I am a longarm quiter, and I am most definitely my all-time worst client iterms of pickyness. I spent over 20 hours on this rather small quilt. The quilting features some ghost flowers in the background, and sections of feathers and other fills. Though I love doing the applique, I am a quilter at heart, and need for the quilting to take a "top" to another level. The quilting designs are as important as the piecing & applique.

The quilt received some Swarovski crystals when it was finished - white ones for the centers of the flowers and several hundred others on the quilt (even though they are not visible in the pictures whatsoever). Under show lights, the quilt twinkles beautifully. I also bound the quilt with a piped binding, which is a great finishing touch.

I hope you have enjoyed these pictures, and others you will see at the Bloggers Festival. If you find yourself ever in the need of a longarm quiter, please feel free to contact me. My business website is here.
(one last picture of "Intertwined"'s back!)