Beyond "rail fence"--Two projects

I'm working on two projects right now that are both based on the traditional "rail fence" pattern, but that go in different directions.   The first one, above, had its origin in an improvisational quilt class back in February, described at the end of this post.  This quilt retains the notion of each block having parallel pieces, with a common layout that staggers horizontal and vertical blocks.  But I did improvisational curvy lines instead of straight, and made the strips of uneven width.  I'm about 2/3 of the way done with quilting this one, straight lines going horizontally across the quilt (which you can see at the top and bottom of the photo; as always, double-click to see in more detail).  To choose colors for this quilt, I looked at African textiles, which often combine gold, red, blue, green, and black.  As mentioned in the earlier post, the darker colors are commercial Kona cotton, while the lighter values are mostly fabric I dyed to widen the value-range.

I can only comfortably quilt for about a half-hour a day (or sometimes two half-hour sessions), so I started piecing fabric for my next project, which is also based on rail fence, but modifies it by alternating long rectangles with the squares.

This great "Union Station" pattern is by Janine Burke of Blue Underground Studios, published in the book she wrote with co-owner Amy Walsh, Colorful Quilts.  (Union Station is the railroad station in Chicago, so a nod to the "rail fence" name.)  Working on this is totally different from the improv approach, as it depends on very precise piecing, a challenge for me.    I decided to use entirely hand-dyed fabric for this, and started out with what I have on hand.  Here are the first blocks, on the design wall--nothing sewn yet.

Besides running out of fabric on hand, I also decided I needed to widen the color and value range, so I dyed up several additional colors.



Below is a re-organization of the blocks that includes the new colors; this is about half the quilt.



Much rearrangement will happen as I put up additional blocks.  I may end up taking out the brighter gold color (now just one piece in bottom left corner; others replaced with the newly dyed darker gold).  I'll decide once I've got the whole thing up on the design wall.  Opinions welcome!

Changing RSS reader for keeping up with blogs

I've been very happy with Google Reader, so was disappointed to hear that it will no longer be functioning after July 1.  I've been keeping an eye out for blog-land discussions of other RSS feed readers, and last night tried out the three I'd seen mentioned a number of times:  bloglovin', feedly, and The Old Reader.  I much prefer The Old Reader to the other two.  As its name indicates, the idea of this one is to stay as close as possible to the "old" Google Reader, and since I was happy with that, it's not surprising I like this one.  It has an additional feature or two that I also like:  You can easily mark all entries in one blog as read (handy if one is getting behind), and can even mark all unread entries in all blogs as unread.  The last feature was useful when I first opened the reader with my feeds, as they each showed with 10 or more entries as unread.  I knew I had just read all current entries in Reader, so I could mark as read all that were coming into The Old Reader and clear the decks.

I did the transfer of subscribed feeds starting from The Old Reader, which is also linked up with Google.  There were a couple of steps, but I just followed the directions and it came out fine.

The Old Reader also works well on my iPad, accessed through Safari rather than needing a separate app.

So, transfer now done!

Using black

I timed a recent visit to New York so that I could see a large Matisse exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  When I think of Matisse's use of color, I think of his vibrant blues, greens, yellows, oranges, and reds.  The label next to two paintings of apples included this quote from Matisse on his use of black:  "Before, when I didn't know what color to put down, I put down black.  Black is a force:  I used black as a ballast to simplify the construction."  Ah, if Matisse sometimes had to rely on black, then I don't feel so bad about my own use of it.  I am especially drawn to using black when working with solid fabrics.  But I've felt a little guilty about it, because it does simplify decisions.  Scroll down through these images from the Matisse show, and you'll see the many places he uses black, including the two 1916 paintings of apples, where I saw the quotation.  The apples also here and here.

So, here are some thoughts on work where adding black in has, I think, improved it.  I took a workshop recently from Sherri Lynn Wood on doing improvisational quilting, starting from a traditional block.  I started out from a "rail fence" block.  Here's a photo of a pretty standard rail fence layout, which consists of a combination of four small blocks, each of them with parallel "rails":

And below is an array of the piecing I did in the workshop, improvising off of this basic model. (Double-click to enlarge the image.)  Starting at the top left is a pretty standard block, but with the rails cut free-hand, with no attempt to be precisely regular.  The changes proceed from there (moving left to right and then down).  In the second row, on the left, you can see the swath of strip-pieced fabric (tan and teal here), from which the smaller blocks would be cut (a typical way to construct the smaller blocks, so that each doesn't have to be pieced individually).  Then in the 3rd row, I simplified the color, putting in black and reducing the color to two shades of one color.  I liked this more, especially the third one (yellow-green), where I also curved the lines for the black pieces, rather than having them straight. 

In fact, I would have stopped there, quite satisfied with the results of the workshop, but there was another hour or so to go, so I figured I may as well continue on.  I made another swath of strip-pieced fabric (bottom left), but left it in a vertical arrangement (pieces put in a different order).  Then I got the idea to leave the larger swath whole, but to break up the piecing in the middle piece, which resulted in the final two pieces in the bottom row.  These I really love!

I will definitely come back to these.  I think a number of them could combine well into a quilt.  And/or I could do a somewhat larger version of one swath and make it into a table runner.

But first, I'm going back to the intermediary result of the black/2 shades rail fence, working this up into a lap-sized quilt.  I chose four colors of Kona cotton, and then dyed some fabric to make a lighter shade for each:

I worked up some blocks in each color, to see if I wanted to continue.  Answer is yes:

There will be endless possibilities for how the blocks will eventually be laid out.  Should be fun to play with.

So, hurray for black, with colors. . .

"Regret"--the top is pieced

It's been a long time since I posted about this quilt, but I have slowly been making progress.  There were lots of decisions to be made before I cut into the fabric.  You can see the story of this quilt on "Regret" here.  That post shows a small maquette of the quilt; the maquette was about 28x23", while the actual quilt top is 72x60".  The basic design remained the same, but I tipped the figure on the left a bit, which I think is an improvement.  The design process was arduous; the simpler the design, and the smaller the range of colors, the more impact each decision has.  I won't go into the many days it took me to dye exactly the red I wanted, and then to replicate it on the 3 pieces of fabric I needed to cut all the shapes.  The black too, took some trials, as there are two different blacks that I commonly use.  With the fabric finally done this weekend, I could go back to the full-size pattern I'd made and start cutting.  I'm glad I did a lot of garment sewing in my teens and twenties, as it made sense to construct this quilt using many of those techniques, which I thankfully remembered.  Things like using a pattern, cutting notches to help match up seams, using a 5/8" seam (versus the 1/4" generally used in quilting), pressing open the seams, stay-stitching around the outer edge, much of which is on the bias.  Here's a photo of the pattern, which I cut into its component parts and laid out on the fabric:

A detail shot shows a little better how I marked the cutting lines.  The pencilled scribble is a trial of the quilting.  More about that once I get to the quilting stage.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had originally planned to do this design through applique, starting with one large piece of rusty/red fabric and hand-sewing the black shapes on top.  I did the maquette to try out piecing instead, and I decided I preferred the very straight lines and sharper corners that I could get with piecing.  I'd prefer not to have the piecing lines visible in the background, but they're not dominant, and I think once the piece is quilted, they will mostly disappear.

This quilt has been a long time in the making.  I am glad to have reached the point where it has actually come into being.  There is a lot more to do, but it should be easier from here.

There was a bit of magic, too, in the making.  I struggled with dyeing the fabric, and I struggled some when cutting out the pieces, making a couple of mistakes that necessitated re-cutting, and having to break down a couple of larger pieces into smaller parts.  This is par for the course for me.  Even when I think I'm being careful, I make mistakes.  I just accept it as part of the process for me.  But when I was piecing, everything went together on the first pass.  My trusty seam-ripper, always at hand, was not picked up once.  Because of the irregular shapes of the pieces, many of the edges were on the bias of the fabric, rather than straight of grain, which I thought would be problematic in the sewing.  But for this, I seem to have been careful enough, and it's all OK!

The pattern pieces, having done their job.

Designing a quilt by drawing in Microsoft Word

During a longish intermission at a concert recently, I looked around the church for something to draw.   My eye was caught by the simple pattern of the wood panelling on one wall, so I made a rough sketch, with some guesses about spacing (1x, 2x, 3x):

I've been meaning to learn how to do simple drawings in Word for a while--I haven't been able to figure it out on my own just from messing around with the Drawing toolbar.  It occurred to me that this simple drawing would be a good way to start out.  So, I googled "Drawing in Word" and got all the help I needed.  This YouTube video got me started; various other sites give more detailed info.  Here's the drawing I made with Word, the plain sketch and then one quick stab at colors:

Now I can have fun trying out different colors.  It's also daunting--in simple designs with few shapes, each choice of color and value has a very loud voice.   I have a great set of Color-aid papers, 314 colors (thank you Rick!).  I have been hesitant to do much cutting up of the papers (each of my swatches is 4.5x6"), but I think they're just the thing to help me with this project.

Now, where to put this in my line-up.  Things currently in progress:

• Large piece on "Regret."  I'm just now finishing up the dyeing of the fabric for this piece, and hope to get much of the construction done this week.  This is my main priority right now.
• Finishing up hand-sewing the binding on my shot cotton "Spectrum" quilt.
• Getting started on a quilt in which I'll be doing an improvised version of a rail fence quilt.
• Following up from a recent workshop with Lotta Jansdottir to do some stencilling.  Today I took this drawing from last summer

 
and changed it into this, which I'm hoping to make into a stencil:
 
I'll start by cutting just one branch, to see how it works.  The image might be better for a thermofax screen than a stencil. 

More about the hand-stitching

I usually have at least one project in progress, set up by the comfortable couch in our living room.  Right now, I'm working on the hand-quilting that I'm adding to the machine stitching on the shot cotton quilt.  A sign of how pleasurable this work is:  I have found myself thinking that I don't want to finish the quilt quickly, so that I continue to have the stitching to do.  I love choosing each new color as I move from square to square.

 And I love seeing how the thread looks on the two different rectangles in the square.  Simple pleasures.

 

At this point, I'm about half-way done with the hand-quilting. 

Tray dyeing and some quilting decisions

To make a backing for my shot cotton "Spectrum" quilt (see here and here), I decided to experiment with tray dyeing, a method of getting multiple colors on one piece of fabric that I hadn't tried before.  I've very happy with the results.  I picked up three color samples at the paint department of Lowes, and then used my swatch book from Carol Soderlund's class to match up a dye formula.   As you can see below, I got very close indeed! 

I was especially pleased because the dyeing circumstances were not ideal.  My dye concentrates were a couple of months old, including two weeks not refrigerated.  I did the dyeing in the basement, with an ambient temperature of about 58 degrees.  Many dyers don't do dyeing if they can't get the temperature up to 70 or warmer, but this convinces me that colder temperatures work just fine.  I did leave the dye on the fabric for 24 hours before washing out; if it had been warmer, I could have done a wash-out after four hours.  The other not-ideal factor was that I was using a fabric that doesn't take up the dye as well as the standard fabric I use for dyeing, so I just eyeballed putting in more dye on the lighter two colors; the darker blue looked fine when wet, and it did turn out dark enough.  The photo below shows my dyeing set up.  I happened to have a couple of long flat cardboard boxes from the butcher.  I cut out one end of each and taped them together into a long tray, then lined it with heavy plastic.  I doubled over the fabric, so the dark blue ended up in the center and the green on both ends.  I didn't intend for any white areas to be left, so I'll be more careful with that the next time.  I stapled the plastic down in the cardboard to have a smooth surface.  Unfortunately, that mean that some dye leaked through.  The cardboard is too warped to use again, and I messed up the surface of the pingpong table.  Well, live and learn.  There are a couple of other options for trays that I can try the next time I want to use this technique.

 Once I had the back sandwiched to the front, the next decisions were about quilting.  I decided to do straight-line quilting in two directions. (Click on this and other photos to see larger.)

This seemed not enough to me, but I didn't want to put more lines of machine stitching on the quilt--too harsh for the softness of the shot cotton.  After a number of different trials, I decided to hand-quilt the inner squares with a long stitch, using 2 strands of a variety of embroidery threads.  I'm staying with the color of the two rectangles that make up the inner square, but choosing for some contrast in value.  (Click on the photo to see this larger.)

I'm enjoying spending the extra time with the quilt, having the chance to look closely at every square.