"Union Station" quilt complete

I'm very happy with this quilt!  The fabric is all hand-dyed by me (dyeing discussed here).  The pattern is "Union Station" by Janine Burke, published in Colorful Quilts, by Amy Walsh and Janine Burke.  The back is one large piece of hand-dyed fabric.

Here's a close-up of the quilting.  I chose a dark charcoal thread; I like how the design disappears in the black stripes.

I came up with the quilting pattern, a meander with mostly sharp corners but some curves thrown in.  My sample is on the left below (beige fabric).  I gave this sample to Mary Walck, my go-to long-arm quilter.  She did a great job with the quilting, but it's also interesting to me that even while she was following my design, it has her own "signature"--quilting is like hand-writing that way.

For the binding, I did a machine-stitched binding, sewn first onto the back and then flipped to the front.  I used a "faux-piped binding" method that involves piecing two binding strips together, resulting in a small flange on the front of the binding.  

The method is designed for having the flange in a contrasting color, but if you do both strips the same color, it still has the advantage of giving you a very clear line to follow when doing the top-stitching on the front, and the stitching gets buried in the seam.  This was my first try at using all one color--I like it!  Thanks to fellow Galesburg quilt guild member, Ron Bishop, for telling us about this method, and for suggesting doing it with all one color.  The next photo shows how the binding looks on the front of the quilt (lower horizontal) and how it looks on the back (upper).  One does end up with a line of straight stitching around the edge of the back.  I forgot to put thread in the bobbin to match the green of the background fabric, which would have made it less noticeable.  But being the same color as the rest of the quilting, it still looks OK.

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!