GLAAQN Workshop

The Great Lakes African American Quilt Network celebrated it’s 10th anniversary this past weekend. I was privileged to be a workshop teacher, showing some wonderful ladies how to make quilts without patterns. I had a great time with a really nice group of women.

I remembered to take some pictures–hooray! The best part of a workshop for me is when the pieces and parts go up on the design walls. Everyone works from the same set of instructions and makes the same basic pieces. Do any of these pictures look like the same quilt? I truly love seeing how different everyone’s work is.

I don’t try to match names with the pictures. I admit right up front that I make errors when I try to do that and I’d rather just share the work with you than offend someone with the wrong name on the wrong piece!

This picture is of the samples I brought to show that no two quilts will look the same, even with the same instructions.

These pictures are what the ladies came up with…exciting!

Enjoy!

My Eight Day Week

That title has nothing to do with my actual week. It’s just the title of the piece that’s been hanging around my design wall for a couple of months. I finally had time today to get back to the studio to finish it. Well, the top at least. It’s not very big. About 36 x 48.

I finally decided to use the orange fabric for the extra blocks, but I took the suggestion in the comments of  Judy Spahn, who thought a secondary design behind the black and white would be good. Here’s how I implemented that…

My first thought was to make curvy lines with bias strips, but then I couldn’t decide on black, white or a print. Finally remembered how much I love cording, and how easy it is, so that’s what I went with.

First white.

Then black.

Here it is assembled before I went into the border decision trauma phase! I auditioned quite a few fabrics, combinations of piping and borders and went back to the original premise–keep it simple!

I’m quite happy with how it turned out and now just need to answer the how-in-the-#*##-do-I-quilt-it dilemna! But that’s actually just fun to figure out, no matter how much I complain about deciding on that.

Here’s a detail of the cording, just because…

I’m linking this to Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday. Check out everyone’s work for this week.

Even bad photos help…

I’m trying to make decisions about my next project. I’ve found it very informative to use my camera to help with those decisions, especially since I am notoriously bad at decisions anyway! This part of the design wall has the least light in my studio, but I took dark pictures rather than move everything. It works…I can tell what’s what and where.

Black and white—the blocks are the results of an exercise I did with my wacky quilt group and I really like them.I’ve actually even got a title for the piece and it’s not even sewn! I’m calling it My Eight Days This Week. At first, I wanted to screen paint designs on top of the black and white. I held off on that because I really don’t have a design that looked ‘right’ on top of the black and white. I may do some thread work along those lines.

My eight days are spaced on a twelve block grid, so I have four spaces to fill.

First selection option: black and white graphic prints, separated with a bright orange sashing?

Next: saturated orange/red blocks of color, with or without an orange border?

I’m leaning towards the bright orange blocks, but I DO  love black and white graphics…

The one thing that even bad photos can’t do is make the actual decision for me. They only help me to see what I like better. Deciding is never easy for me. I do welcome your comments and opinions, even if you hate orange!

One Project at a Time!

Only one project at a time? That’s not like me, but I seem to be in a finishing mode right now.

This project has been kicking around since sometime in the winter and now it’s finally finished!

I finished the beading and then was going to add a lot of hand stitching with embroidery floss. My hands are not happy when I do a lot of hand work, and sewing through batiks is even less appealing. I decided that a minimal amount of hand stitching would be just fine.

There are a lot of details to see in this piece so I’m sure a few stitches won’t be missed at all.

  

And now it’s on to another project that’s been hanging around for a while. Well, only a month or so. That’s not bad at all, is it? It’s those 17 quilt tops sitting on the shelf that make me feel guilty…I’m never going to quilt them myself because they were class samples that I have no emotional attachment to at all. I’ve started sending those out to be quilted and plan on using them in the house. One project at a time, even if I’m not the one doing the actual quilting!

I’m linking this to Off the Wall Friday.

Scrapbox City Update

Not trying to bore you with partially finished projects, but I have something I’m going to try with this one. I’ve been following Melody Johnson’s blog Fibermania and she’s been working a lot with a quilt as you go finishing technique. It looks good; not like an afterthought. Integrated into the design. She credits Marianne at The Quilting Edge and her great tutorials. All I know is that I want to finish this project with this method.

Advantages: quilting smaller sections at a time. Easier with a domestic machine. You can also add sections to change the size of the piece or the look of the piece at any time, even after you think it might be done!

So–my sections are assembled and ready to be quilted. I made a rookie mistake in the beginning and started squaring things up as I put rows together. Duh! I need extra fabric all around for the quilting and then trim and square up AFTER the quilting is done.

I want to show you the origin of this project. You might think you need to have everything all figured out and planned and drawn to scale and a real pattern before you start. NOT SO! Here’s my plan—

And I don’t usually start with this much! I just had a bunch of scraps, some white fabric (and I never use white), and the idea to make wonky nine patch blocks in different sizes. The rest is all just arrange as desired and fill in the gaps! Fun, challenging, nothing is precise and you can’t make a mistake. My kind of quilting!

Not sure when I’ll actually get back to it. My next several days are tied up with the quilt guild workshop weekend. Maybe Monday. I’ll let you know how the quilt as you go assembly process works…probably with pictures and hopefully NOT with cursing and gnashing of teeth!!!

Oh, this crazy life!

Sometimes life is boring. Same day after same stuff after same thing. And then we go into a phase where life is just crazy. Occasionally it’s a bad crazy and often it’s a good, busy fun crazy. I had both of those in the past week and today I am embracing the boring!

A little beading, a little piecing, a little gardening, maybe a little napping…just nice, peaceful boredom.

Watching the grass grow and the trees leaf out…

Of course, that means nothing to tell you about, so how about a little giveaway?

I always have fabric that needs to find a new home and today I am giving away a vintage set of the same fabric in different colorways. I’m not sure if I have ALL the colors in this set, but I have most of them.

Various sized pieces that I have not used up because I never found the “perfect” idea for them. I think there’s a yard of the green and 1/2 yard of the blue (which has stains along the fold), but only a little square of the brown. I think they would work well in a more traditional pattern and since I don’t use those anymore, this fabric should go to a new home.

Would you like it to be yours? I sure would! Leave a comment and I’ll pick a winner this week…when I’m done with nice, peaceful boredom!

Always color…

My color decisions today involve beads. I’ve been slowly working on this piece, little bits at a time when I have a bit of time! It’s only about 16 x 20, but I’ve not been working on it very steadily.

I have my big rectangular dark beads on. I have my dark curvy lines. And then I have the pinky/orange/floral parts that I originally fell in love with. They’ve been totally ignored and now it’s decision time.

The flowers are subtle, but there, if you know what I mean.

These are the most clearly seen, quite pink, with just a touch of the orange on the right side.

These are almost completely pink with no orange nearby.

More very pink, no orange.

And a big swath of orange with no flowers.

I want to emphasize the flowers, pull in the orange flavor, but not overwhelm the subtlety of the flowers.

I started with the very lightest flower and used a gray/white bead.

Haven’t gotten too far, but I pulled these beads. I think I can achieve what I want with these…just don’t know how heavily I will cover the flowers with beads. I think a light touch is called for.

May not get this done for a while since it’s the “work-on-when-I-have-tiny-bits-of-time-piece” but I’ll post a picture of the completed beading. Then I have plans to add some hand stitching before the whole thing is done. Yep, little bits of time, but eventually it will get done!

I’m going to link this to Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday. I love to check out what everyone else is doing–you might, too!

I love wonky blocks!

My scrap project is now officially going to take forever and a day. And I don’t care! To make it match the picture in my head, I just cannot bring myself to square everything up and have it all neat and even. What that means in terms of construction is that there is no stacking and cutting of layers, no chain piecing, no shortcuts. But it’s all so much more unique when you customize every part of your work that it is just plain worth it!

Have you added wonkiness into your quilt life? I made a lot of crazy nine patch blocks and now I’m going to add some inserts into some of them. Just in case you haven’t tried inserts, here’s how I do it.

I’m using fairly wide strips for my inserts, because I don’t want to drive myself totally bonkers!

This block already had one insert and I’m going to add the striped one, also. The strip is one inch wide, so the finished insert is 1/2″ wide.

Simply slice your block where you want your insert to be.

I try to avoid seam intersections, but if you hit one, it’s not a very big deal. Sewing the left side first is what I usually do, lining up the edges, just as if it were a regular block. When you add the second side, you have choices.

Line up the edges again, as shown by the fat arrow, and sew. Don’t fret about lining up the other insert that’s already there or the block pieces. This is wonky and doesn’t need to match. Your second choice, shown by the skinny arrow, is to put the left edge of your presser foot closer to that first sewn seam. That makes your insert skinnier and by following the first seam line, your insert is straight, too. Or you can start with a skinnier insert piece…I don’t do that very often, but if you want to see great, skinny insert work, check out Kathy Loomis’ work at artwithaneedle.com She is awesome!

So, back to my fat inserts…I press the seams towards the insert.

That fills up the insert with fabric and you don’t end up with a big sinkhole in your block. See–nice and full and fluffy and the orange strip even accidentally matched!

Notice that I have not squared up the edges of the block. I save that part until I am actually joining my blocks. That way I can put off the final size decision a bit longer. Procrastination works well for me when I’m doing wonky stuff!

So this is what I’ll be doing for the forseeable future. I’ll try not to bore you with updates about doing the same thing over and over–I’ll save the next post about this piece until it’s done. I just want to encourage you to find something you can cut into without a heart attack and do something wonky, too. Quilting is supposed to be fun and this is lots of fun for me!

I’m happy to have something to share on Nina-Marie’s blog this week. Check out all the cool blog link-ups.

Design Time Again

My scrap project from my recent quilt retreat went up on the design wall today. I took a good, long look at it and decided that I wanted to proceed with it. I like it.

Now come the design questions that I think about right from the beginning, though many of them don’t need an answer until much further into the project.

What size do I want this piece to be? Do I want a real bed quilt or am I thinking more in terms of a wall quilt or a couch throw? On the design board right now it’s about 63″ square. I’m pretty sure that I don’t want it to end up square, but with this design, it will look fine to add more length at the top and easy to do with my planned white background.

Okay-next question…before I make any cuts or sew any seams, I have to decide if I want to square up my blocks, to a common size for each level.

Do I want to add more inserts to the largest blocks? Do I want to join blocks with uniform strips or more wonkiness?

Straight and square seems too easy and somehow like cheating! But wonky stuff is going to be much harder to do. How much work do I want to put into this easy scrap project? Hmmm…..sounds like these are my first decisions.

Time to step away from the design wall and THINK before I do something I’ll regret.

Today’s beading lesson is…

Outlining–creating a nice, smooth curve–not as easy as I thought it would be. There is, of course, more than one way of doing this, but I have chosen to use a backstitch. It feels like I’ve done about 20 miles of outlining on this piece and I still make errors.

Part of the problem is that I’m beading on an already quilted piece, scrunched up as I work, so the surface is not nice and smooth. The ideal technique is to thread on your beads, snug them up to the previously set beads and insert your needle straight down.

When you are holding that scrunched up, quilted piece, often at a weird angle to reach the center of the quilt, you sometimes lift the beads a little and your needle gets off target.

For me, it’s usually too close to the previous beads and that results in beads sticking up and not laying nicely in a smooth row. A smidge too much thread is better!

Sometimes it looks worse while you are working on it. When you smooth out your piece, the lines smooth out, too! If they don’t, there are a couple of solutions. You can get out your pliers and crush a bead or two to give the others more room to lay flat. You can take out your beading and re-do it more carefully. Or you can leave it alone and live with it. That’s my choice on this piece, because in the overall picture, it’s not really that noticeable!

But when you get those nice smooth lines…

sweet!