Bordering

I puttered a bit as I came up with this graded pink border.  Problem is, I think I puttered too much, and completely over-thought how to do the corners.  Tomorrow, I will remove the red, and replace the 3 pieces with a single triangle.  It will (1) be simpler, (2) have less seams, and (3) stand a change of having the corner point match well.  Aside from that, I think it is coming along.

I have a ton of client work right now, and much of it is custom.  As a result, I have been hitting my limit of how long I can stand to quilt at about noon or 1pm each day.  That is 5 hours of quilting for the day, which is plenty.  Then I get a walk (a little forced fresh air before we have snow is a good thing!@), and then I am free to play with some piecing.  This solid quilt is at 25", and will end up at about 40", eventually.  Time to go cut some foundations while my youngest whines some more over doing any homework...sigh

Solid Play

Yesterday, since the big green monster is of the longarm, and I was awaiting the arrival of 3 new quilts to quilt, I took the day to play with something new.  I know, what on earth am I thinking, another project???!  Yea, I hear ya, but who cares.  I have been thinking about solids for a while and wanted to play.  The color of the picture is horrible - the background is somewhere between celery and light taupe.  There are several other tones of this background color that will be in the quilt, making it look better.  These fabrics are from Moda's discontinued crossweaves collection.

My blocks are just under 9" finished, and were a bit finicky to make.  That's mostly my doing, being the anal retentive quilter when it comes to points.   Now, I have been a quilter and a piecer for a very long time.  I have made more than a hundred quilts, and I know quite a bit about how to piece accurately.  Or so I thought I did.  This project as taught this old dog a new trick though.

 My blocks above look pretty good.  The points are there, all shapes look like they are in good alignment.  But in the quilt I had designed, they would be placed on point, as below.  It is there that I have discovered I should have done something differently.  I should have devised the piecing so that diagonal rows were sewn, not the crossways ones (ie, making the block as a square).  Any slight meanderings of the diagonal seam are evident.  Live-n-learn.

I have played with what to do with these a lot.  I wondered if I could redesign the 40" quilt to have then not on point, but it just loses so much interest to do that.  That small of a quilt leaves no space to dither around; everything counts.  My final thought is that I hope that when the blocks are quilted (on point) that they look good, and don't show the things I see here.

Now, onto figuring out the rest of the quilt.  This is, afterall, supposed to be a "simple" quilt.  We all know, though, that I don't really know how to do simple :-)

water lilies

Despite having kids at school for 7 glorious hours each day (which I have been mostly longarm quilting during that time), life just seems so incredibly crazy all of a sudden.  We have soccer practices twice during the week, band is about to start up after school, and Saturdays, well they are so crazy that it makes your head spin...two soccer games, one of which may be away somewhere else, swim lessons for one, and tap for her too.  What all the craziness and waiting around while they have sporty fun affords me though, is time to hand applique.  I am again working on this quilt.  It may be 6-8 months or more before it's ready to quilt because I am too slow and too distracted with other and new projects.

 Last weekend, while we were apple picking, I saw this pond that had a bunch of these.  Water lilies are one of the most perfect looking flowers.  I always knew I wanted a row of setting squares on this quilt to have appliqued water lilies, but now I actually know how to quilt them too...they need the yellow stamen doe in thread.  I now have 5 of the 16 needed appliqued blocks.  The blocks are all pieced, and have the deep pink bias piping already.  They are just awaiting me to hand stitch the petals onto the block.

This, of course, is not my only applique project in the works.  Go figure!  And it's not the one I have been telling myself I want to finish first either.  Maybe once I get these flowers out of my system I can move on and finish the last corner of this quilt.  Then it can be assembled. And then there is another applique quilt too, but I'll spare you my scattermindedness with every project.

Playing in the Swamp

Proverbially, that is.

Last week before we left on vacation, I started paper piecing (ick!) the 16 outer setting squares.  These have 15 pieces each.  I had cut them out before we left from a dozen or so of the greens I have, plus a few blades of deep teal just for variety.  I was really shocked that they took me about 7 hours to sew.  I made a few mistakes, but mostly they were sew iron, repeat.  They need the quarter-circles still, but that's where I had to stop and regroup with the entire design in order to determine which fabric looked the best there.  I layed out the entire broken star...

In my original design, I had the quarter-circles in a deep rose/pink.  It brought a lot of contrast to the design, which it needs since it has so much blue and green.  Unfortunately, it just seemed out of place.  I will have water lilies in pale pink appliqued on top of this quarter-circle (see right part of upper pic), and pale pink flowers on deep pink background was getting circus-like, and not pond-like.  I tried out a couple shades of greens and aqua, but nothing seems as right as a deep marbled blue.  I'll just hope that the water lilies and the bright pink bias piping around the quarter-circle will provide the contrast needed. 

I'm also playing with what color to narrowly outline the inner star.  All the blues and greens seem to disappear.  I'm leaning towards the deep brick red.  It will be a subtle and thin outline, but just enough to set the center star off from where the green leaves of the first round of setting squares begin.

I also played (top pic) with the orientation of the outer 24 diamonds.  Did you catch that??...On one side, the purples point outwards, and on the right side the purple points inward.  The left side gives much better definition.

This top will probably not be too much fun to put together, given the very many number of Y-seams - and a total of 56 pieces to all make lay square and flat.  Sounds daunting!