Colorweaves Top is done

I am finished with this little 38" quilt top.  Though I like the look of the pure solid colors, I am SO ready to get back to working with batiks, or other fabrics that are thin and non-ravelly.  I appliqued the curved mustard-colored section down by hand so that I could piece the outer 2 borders in a way that the stripes remained perfectly straight, but the crazy fabric nearly raveled off in my hands.  I am 50-50 with whether I really love this.  Since it shouldn't take a huge amount of time to actually quilt it, I will finish the project and hope for the best.  I had been designing the quilting all along, and now just need to tweak a few things, finish a few client quilts, then I will quilt it.

Tomorrow I finish a client's 3rd quilt and I hope to have some great eye-candy to show.

Indecision Brought to a Forum

For the most part, my little Crossweaves solid quilt has been on hold for a week.  I have been quilting away on several client quilts, and I hit a brick wall on the quilt's construction.  I had gotten the quilt to this point a week or two ago, and like the look of the rose and red border.  You all know me well enough to know that I have too much trouble taking the easy way out.  Why I didn't do a single color border initially is not known.  I had a 1/2 yard of many different colors, and really wanted to bring the variety of these colors into the quilt. 

Problem is this, though.  This quilt will only finish at about 38-39", and these are thicker fabrics.  So the more I piece them, the more I get bulk.  I had the top all layed out with the next triangular sections, but after hand sewing (yea, long story short...I couldn't get proper alignment of the narrow 1/2" borders, so I glued it and hand stitched the diamond to the triangles.), I discovered that it just wouldn't lay down at the seams.  I was ticked.  I had dealt with the bulk acceptably on all of the pieced blocks, so why not now?  

So the clearest solution seemed to be to take it all apart and eliminate the pieced pink border, which I really liked, and make it a continuous/solid border.  Boring, my mind thought, but easier.  The next step was to select the border color, cut and sew.  Seemed simple and fast.  Ha!  It was anything but fast. I had an idea what fabric I'd choose, but instead, I posted some possibilities to my facebook buddies to get some other opinions.  The first six posted had solid borders.  Not to my surprise, most either selected the red or the aqua.  A few chose the brown, despite my knowing that I didn't have enough brown fabric.  What was my inclination, you wonder?... (or not wonder)...#1, the beige.

 But before making up my mind, I decided to add some corner stones, just so I could add a pop of a different color.  Some folks disliked these right off.  The overwhelming favorite, though, was the bottom right one  - aqua with red.  Ick.  I do not care for aqua and red together whatsoever.  It's too trendy-retro 50's for me.  Each color is great by itself, but not together.  As I said initially, I got lots of opinions, and that is what I wanted, hoping one of them might spark a design choice I had not thought of.

 My last effort involved streamlining the corner stones to a more refined shape.  Since lots of people liked the aqua, I showed this one.  And because I preferred the beige, I added it.  To twist it a little, I made the corner diamonds in a deep rose, not the red.  By this point, I think people were falling asleep on my indecision, but I'd made up my mind I'd go beige.  I'd have more blank space for quilting.  And, I really didn't care for the aqua because the triangles seem to blend in with it too much.

Today, after 4 hours of quilting, it was time to mess with this border.  I got out my fabrics, and to my horror discovered that I did not have enough of the beige.  DRAT.   What I settled on was a fabric I had not even considered before though.    These are crossweaves -- so the warp is one color and the weft is another.  The fabric I chose appears red in some situations, and peachy in others.  It has a red warp and a tan weft.  When  it is beside red, it looks like a paler red.  I did use the red diamond points, instead of the pink and they look good.

All put back together, and happily I can report that triangles came in perfect alignment the first time (using the machine too!).  One more border to figure out how to get on with decent lines, and it is DONE (or I should say, ready to be quilted)! 

 It is always pleasing to get a finished product that I like better than my initial designs were!

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!

Photoshopping a Quilt

I am getting accustomed to what my next 9 weeks will be like, slowly but surely, and whether I want or like it or not.  The sad reality is that I will have little to no daytime quilting.  My 3 kids are like fleas, always in different locations, and just when you think you might do something productive, they run in demanding something else.  If they do come in, I find that they leave behind a path of destruction - toys left here, a shoe there, and the bathroom, Oh Lordy, don't even get me started there.  Next week my boys go to a day camp, and I am thinking that I'm going to sign my daughter up too just so I can have a week of peace.  I will have a couple of client quilts to then, unless I miraculously get them finished and then I can work on this quilt (or another I have started!).

This picture shows the 24" center on point, as it is in the quilt, with the 4 corner units (making it about 34-35" square) just sitting there.  I'm working to finish the ivory and orange appliques before I assemble the unit.  Appliquing with a smaller piece is easier than always having a 35" block on one's lap.  This is especially true since we have upper 80's coming in 2 days.  Yea, the beach is in my future!

The 3-1/2" terra cotta border is getting appliques in orange, just to bring the orange color out a little bit.  It's a bold and rich pumpkin-like orange, and I love it in the center.  I just thought it needed a little accentuating.  From a distance, I suspect it will appear mostly monochromatic, but up closer, the detail will be evident.  I saw a similar type design on a floor in Italy.  I'm currently stitching the orange applique on the 2nd corner.  They take a few hours to sew.  Just to see what it'd look like, I Photoshopped the corner onto the other locations.  I haven't pressed this at all - It will look better when it's done.

Here's a peek at the corner, again, not pressed.  I am toying with either trapuntoing the filigree, or running a thick yarn through the applique to help poof it just a little.  I'm a bit gun-shy of real trapunto because I snipped my quilt top the one time I did it.  That would make me livid.  Each of these corners have about 8-10 hours of hand applique beyond the hours spent piecing the star and florette.

I work on this when I can, but mostly at night.  I have a monster 117" quilt on the machine right now, nearing that done point.  My husband took the kids a bit this weekend so I could quilt, but during the week, I get only about 1 hour in the early morning, and things don't get finished quickly at that pace.

Time to look into that daycamp!...my piece of aqua silk arrived so I can get the silk quilt all together.

New Adventures

I have been scattered lately.  I have been trying to finish off a show quilt that had been doing it's best to put me in a grave, and my focus on all other things has suffered.  Usually I only have a couple of projects going at a time, but I've completely let myself go recently.  I have a pieced split carpenter's star all in it's diamonds, ready to make the last 16 setting blocks, then it can be assembled.  It is getting a good bit of applique, which I have been sketching out the last 2 months, but the basic background of the quilt is pretty far along.  I have another mostly all applique quilt that I started a couple months ago in the works too.  I just about have 3 of 4 primary blocks finished.  You haven't seen any of this.  It will probably get worked on this summer when I can't go downstairs to my studio on account of having 3 kids in the house.  Then at MQX I bought some silk and started designing a 40" (or slightly smaller) quilt.  I started that one this week.  If you neglect the fact that I miss-cut one of the fabrics, it probably would be done before next week.  Today I put the center, a Mariner's star together.  It's in 2 large pieces.  Well, the entire star block is only 10" square, so large is clearly relative!

But 2 weeks ago, it would seem I went through a mild mid-lifer and decided I wanted to make another mosaic floor quilt.  I thought I might get more of it pieced before kids are home, but, I always think that.  I am happy with the quality of the piecing and that is what counts.  The mosaic on point is 24" square.  With the additional 4 corner triangles added (and 4" more of the coral fabric) the block will be up to about 35".  The entire quilt is really fun and repeats some of these motifs. It will be around 68".  

I love to design piece-work, but sometimes it is just much better accomplished with hand applique, as is the case with these triangles.  The scallops are all hand appliqued.  They are about 7/16" wide, finished.  Each of those florettes in the triangles will be outlined with the wide bias in ivory as well.  This is a great task for me because I can sew this in the evening.  The only thing done on machine on the triangles are the paper pieced black-white-brown florettes (seriously, they are not broccoli, but what is a better name??!).

Though I like the intricate details of lots of piecing, I have to think hard about leaving some open space for machine quilting.  My preferred style of quilts is hard to be competitive in machine quilting shows because I don't leave enough "show off" space.  It is a happy medium.  I don't want to make a large quilt out of minimal piecing because to me that is boring to make, even if it has plenty of room to be made beautiful with quilting.  But I want all of my efforts to be rewarded at the shows I enter too.  Happy middle ground...always in search of it.