"Plain Spoken" now on the bed

Today I finished this quilt, begun about a year and a half ago.  It's a version of a pattern by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr, "Plain Spoken," published in their book, Modern Quilt Workshop; the fabric is Kaffe Fassett shot cotton.  I've written several earlier posts about the quilt, so if you'd like to read about the quilt in process, you can find those posts here.  

I've been working on the hand-quilting since last July; it has been nice to start each day with a half-hour or so of this quilt on my lap.  

Backing and binding are hand-dyed fabric.

Changing the stitching on "Plain Spoken"

Back in May, I made the decision to quilt my shot cotton "Plain Spoken quilt with embroidery stitches.  In the months since, I scoured embroidery books for a variety of usable stitches and began the stitching.  I enjoyed learning the embroidery stitches; it is quite amazing how holding the thread one way or another, or placing the needle here or there, can create a wide variety of designs.  But after doing about 80 different stitches, I decided I didn't like the way it looked on the quilt.  Too much variety of color, value, and pattern--all of which distracted from the flow of color in the quilt.   (Ignore the loose white stitches--that's just basting that will be removed when the quilting is done.)

And a close-up, with basting stitches removed.  No better.  

So I decided to go back to something simpler, and did trials with various weight threads in either a simple running stitch, or the "conversation" stitch that I used on my Regret quilt.  

I decided on the conversation stitch (thanks to Mary Beth for the suggestion).  I'm using two threads, a dark, dusky blue 20 wt pearl cotton (hand-dyed) in the darker strips, and 2 strands of 50 wt Aurifil sewing thread in a pale yellow-green in the lighter strips; varying between the two holds down the value contrast between thread and fabric.  I think this is better.  

The quilt is also secured with in-the-ditch hand-quilting in all the vertical seams, done before I began the embroidery.

Embroidery!

I recently finished piecing the shot cotton "Plain Spoken" quilt.  The next step was to figure out what I wanted to do for the quilting.  On an earlier shot cotton quilt, made from just the larger-size rectangles, I machine quilted a grid, and then added hand-quilting with embroidery thread, a simple line inside each rectangle.  I thought of doing similar hand-work on this quilt, so I tried it out on the sample above, right column.  Too boring, and the narrower rectangles needed a different treatment.  I've been wanting to expand my embroidery repertoire, so I decided to play with some embroidery stitching instead (working it through the three layers of top, batting, and backing, so that it serves as quilting as well)--done in the middle and left columns above.  I love how this looks!  So, my plan is to do vertical stitch-in-the-ditch in the seams between each column to secure everything, and then to do embroidery in the narrow rectangles (0.5 x 3").  I won't do any stitching at all in the larger rectangles (1.5 x 3").  It will take me a year or two to complete, but it will be a pleasure to do.  There are 1,440 narrow rectangles in this quilt, and I'm thinking I'll try to do something different in each one.  I've been going through embroidery books, picking out stitches that will be usable for this project, and so far have about 150 different stitches (e.g., back stitch, lazy daisy, French knot, etc.).  Since many of these stitches can be used in multiple ways, I think it's possible to come up with 1,440 variations, especially since the straight stitch (example in lower left corner above) is basically a short drawn line, so there are as many variations as one could make with a drawn line. . .

With a quilting plan in place, the next step was to baste together the three layers of the quilt.  I usually secure the layers by spray-basting, with the layers pinned to a vertical design wall--a method I learned from a Patsy Thompson video.  But this quilt is 90 x 112 (for a queen-size bed), and the spray-basting works best for something smaller, and for something done by machine rather than hand-quilting.  I decided to baste this on a low-nap carpet, a method described by Suzanne Marshall in her book Take-Away Appliqué, pp. 78-79.  I have a large carpeted area in the finished attic of my house that I could use.  First, the back gets pinned to the carpet, all around the edges:



Then the batting is smoothed out onto the backing.  (For hand-quilting, I use Hobbs Poly-Down.)  Then the top is smoothed out over the batting and secured with pins around all the edges.



Then, you sit on the quilt and baste it!  I've never tried this before, as I couldn't believe the quilt wouldn't shift from my moving around on it, and I also thought it would be a strain on my back.

But it has been working well.  I do only a half-hour at a time, twice a day.  After a week, I'm about half-way through.  I'll have to up the number of stints to three times a day, as I've got a guest coming into the guest room on Friday!

I'm stitching in the middle of every column, and in the middle of each row of larger rectangles.  It's a pleasure to be looking at all the color combinations close up.

Two quilt backs and two shirts

The first things I worked on when I got back into the dye studio about ten days ago were large pieces for the backs of two quilts.  Above is a light blue and green piece prepared for a queen-sized quilt.  I'm happy with it now, but it took two rounds of dyeing.  No pfd (prepared for dyeing) fabric comes wide enough to make a large one-piece backing, so I used a regular bleached muslin.  I forgot to factor in how much paler the colors turn out on this non-pfd fabric; the first pass, below, was just too light.

After I told a couple of people, "If it was for the front, I'd do it again," I realized I should do it again.  This quilt will be on my own bed, and I know I'll be seeing the back as well as the top.  So I overdyed the whole thing with more blue, and I am happy with the results--still light but much more pleasing:

Yes, the back will be a nice companion to the top:

Now this quilt is ready to baste up, in preparation for the hand-quilting I have planned.

Next in line was the back for a quilt that was pieced by my group of quilting friends, a quilt that will be donated to help with a fundraiser for the Loretto Center, where we have our annual retreats.  For this back, I dyed a circular pattern, done by folding the fabric as one would for cutting snowflakes from a piece of paper.

Below is the back with part of the top pinned to it.  The rust color is fine, but the gold color is not fully on target.  I could improve this by overdyeing the whole thing with a small amount of red and blue.   The fundraiser is a long time off, so I'll put this aside for now.

 I do love the color movement that happens in this kind of dyeing:

I also tray-dyed two shirts--so easy to do compared to the big backs!  One is a three-quarter length sleeve from Chico's that my sister got on sale.  She picked colors and a pattern that I had used on a T-shirt for myself.  Here's her shirt (on the left) and mine (on the right).  I'm delighted that I was able to reproduce the color/design quite successfully!

I had some black and red dye left over, and it occurred to me in would be interesting to try out another shirt with the proportion of the colors reversed.  I tried this out on one of the many shirts I picked up at Salvation Army last summer.  I like this combination too:

Playing with shape and color-2

The second project I'm working on between stints on the art quilts is a version of a  pattern by Bill Kerr and Weeks Ringle, "Plain Spoken," published in their book Modern Quilt Workshop.

I've had my eye on this pattern for a long while.  A couple of months ago I was looking at the many extra 2" x 3.5" rectangles I had left over from this shot cotton quilt.  Much as I love that quilt, I decided not to make it again, but to try something new, so I looked around for other patterns for which that size rectangle would work, and Plain Spoken came to mind.  I cut some of the rectangles I had in half, to get the narrower strips.  Each of my two-piece units finish at 2 x 3", while the Plain Spoken pattern has units that finish at 4.25 x 7.5."  So, the proportion is a little different as well as the size, but I think it still works out fine.  I'm piecing nine of the two-piece units into a block.  I need 158 of these blocks for a queen-size quilt.

Here are all the colors I had to work with.  I eliminated the white (top left corner), but used all the rest.

In this project, the shape was pre-determined by the rectangles I had on hand and by the pattern.  But lots of color to play with!  Here's an example of how I worked up the units.  I took a pile of larger rectangles all in one color, and then paired them up with a variety of colors in the narrower piece.

Then I made piles of units according to the color of the larger rectangle and sorted also by value.  

I would browse the piles to come up with nine units that I thought would work together.  Here are some stacks of nine units, waiting to be made into blocks.

And this photo shows all 158 blocks.  The pile on the left has been trimmed up so all are the same size.  The larger pile is yet to be trimmed--not the most fun part of making a quilt. . .

Once the trimming is done comes another interesting part--putting all the blocks up on the design wall and deciding on final placement of each block.  I composed each nine-unit block to have a variety of hue and value.  Will I be able to avoid awkward adjacencies when I put them all together?  I made about 10 extra blocks beyond the 158, so that adds flexibility.

For those of you who aren't familiar with shot cotton, here's a close up.  The warp and weft are usually done with two different colors, creating a lovely complexity in this "solid" fabric.