Catching Up: Daiwabo--four projects completed

About a year ago, I posted about the large collection of daiwabo fabric that I was given by my friend Kathy.  I made a tablerunner for Kathy, and then cut out pieces for three additional quilts, two napping-size quilts and one wall hanging. I put them aside, to work on when I wanted to do some simple piecing.  One of them I pieced together at the annual retreat of Quilters by Design, the small group Kathy and I both belong to. The retreat was March 9-12. Within a day or two of returning home, the shutdown began. Amidst the disruption and anxiety caused by the pandemic, I found myself wanting to do some simple patchwork sewing, rather than doing the final work on Jeremy's wedding quilt. It was nice to have the daiwabo quilts, all ready to be pieced. Working on these gave me the break I needed before coming back to the wedding quilt.  The four projects:

Kathy's tablerunner (from September 2019

I can't find a photo of the whole tablerunner, but this gives an idea.

Half-square triangle napping quilt, 56x72"

I did diagonal straight-line quilting in both of these half-square triangle quilts,
which I think worked well. Click on photo to see detail.

Half-square triangle wall hanging, 36 x 36"

Zen Chic pattern, "Play a Card," 49 x 72"

This one still needs to be sandwiched and quilted.

Too many projects

I really like working on just two projects at a time--one main project that involves significant brain power, and one that is easier.  Earlier this year, my focus for several months was Jeremy's wedding quilt, and the work felt very good. But as I got closer to finalizing that design, I felt I needed a break from it, and it happened that I needed to prepare for a workshop I was doing for several friends in late August. So I turned my attention to preparing samples of monoprinting and screen printing and writing up instructions for the several processes we'd be doing. Here's a photo of some of the monoprinting samples. Unfortunately, I didn't take photos of the work people created at the workshop, which was stunning.

Once the workshop was done, I took two different directions--finishing up assorted small quilting projects, and starting two new hand-stitching projects.  The hand-stitching projects took precedence over a return to the wedding quilt, because in mid-October I'll be getting together with several people in Utah to camp, hike, and stitch, and I wanted a couple of small but challenging projects to bring with.  I'll post about those projects before long.  First, a round-up on the projects I've been finishing up.

One of the daiwabo projects is close to completion. I'm now sewing on the binding on this table runner:

After testing out about 8 different ways to quilt this, I ended up with simple in-the-ditch quilting. This puts all the focus on the fabrics.  

I'm also finishing the binding on a bed-runner for a friend who recently re-modeled her bedroom, including laying a strip of parquet flooring in a pattern just like a "rail-fence" quilt block. Fabrics were chosen from the stash of my friend Carol, and the two of us pieced the blocks--a fun project for us to do for our mutual friend. 

I mentioned a while back the Palette Stacks panel from Marcia Derse that I'd purchased. I decided to make it into a whole-cloth baby quilt. Here it is basted up, ready for hand-quilting. No rush on this, just a nice project to have by the couch when I want to do some simple hand-quilting.

Just as I was thinking about what to do for a backing for it, I came across this sweet pattern for a "Tiny Tile Quilt" from Purl Soho.

Tiny Tile Quilt from Purl Soho website

I wondered what it would look like to do this pattern in a variety of all bright colors, including the white "snowball" shape that reads as a background when done in just one color.  I made up nine blocks, and then surrounded them with larger pieces of solids, all hand-dyed fabric I had on hand.

I liked this enough to decide it deserves to be a top of its own, so I dyed up some solid red fabric to be the back for the Stacked Palettes instead. The new snowball top is folded up in the closet; I will leave choice of backing and quilting until I need another baby quilt to give to new parents.

Finally, having finished the hand-quilting on the appliquéd quarter-circles, it was time to bind that, so I dyed up some medium blue and put the binding on.  The hanging sleeve is now pinned to the back, waiting for its final bit of hand-sewing.

I've got a few more days of hand-sewing to finish these up, and then I can focus on the stitching project for the Utah trip. I look forward to having fewer projects in the works.

Daiwabo!

My goal is to spend mornings in the studio, leaving other things for the afternoons (errands, desk/computer stuff). Working on the intricate piecing in Jeremy's wedding quilt is very demanding, so I've limited it to the making of one block a day, which can take me anywhere from 1-2 hours. That leaves me time for other sewing, something simpler.  For the last month or so, that time has been spent working with daiwabo fabrics, a Japanese style of fabric I've used in some other projects, for example the placemats in this post, and the dresser cover here. I love the subtle range of taupes/tans/browns, even though I am not drawn to brown as a color either in other commercial fabrics or in hand-dyeing my own.

My friend Kathy decided that she was never going to use the large collection of daiwabo fabric that she had collected. I told her that if she would like to have someone else work with it, I would be happy to take on her collection. So, a sizable bin of these beautiful fabrics came home with me after our last quilting retreat in April. Thank you Kathy!! (Click on the image below for a better look at the range of texture/designs.) 

My first thoughts about using the fabric are centered on making something for Kathy. She decided on a tablerunner, using the pattern "Get in Line" from our friend Amy Walsh, which I used for the table runner (link above). Cutting one 1.5" strip from each of the fabrics would give me plenty for a tablerunner for Kathy's dining room table. After cutting a few of those strips, I decided to line up a couple of other projects using these fabrics, and to do all the cutting at the same time, since I was taking out each fabric anyway.  Here are the three sets of strips, cut to 1.5" for the table runner, 2.5" for a second project, and 5" for a third.

Here's the start of the runner, about 1/3 of the top done. To work on this, I'm using a small, secondary design wall that is in a corner of my studio.

The second project is a pattern called "Play a Card," by Zen Chic.

I'm using a creamy white linen for the background and narrow strip between the daiwabo rectangles.

I have cut and sewn together enough blocks for a lap-size quilt, done while visiting a friend in Wisconsin. Sewing the blocks together into the top will be a good project for when I'm travelling again.  It could be our annual Quilters By Design retreat in the spring, or perhaps when I visit my sister in Arizona in the winter. (I've left a small portable machine at her house so that I can sew while visiting.) Sometime before that, I'll lay out the blocks on my design wall and mark them so I know the order to sew them together, but I can't do that until Jeremy's wedding quilt is off the design wall--likely some time this fall.

The third project is another lap-sized quilt, made up of half-square triangles (HST).  Here are photos of a couple of baby quilts I've done with HST blocks in the past. The blocks were placed somewhat randomly and then edited into a pleasing design, a method I picked up from Katie Pedersen.


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I'm thinking the daiwabo fabrics will give a quite different look, but beautiful.  Here's one block along with all the squares I've matched up for blocks. (Two 5" squares cut on the diagonal will yield two 4.5" HST blocks.)

And here's four blocks randomly placed on the design wall. Playing around with these blocks will definitely be fun.

And a couple of weeks ago, I used a few mornings' time to print up another batch of napkins. I'll get two napkins from each of these printed lengths.

Finally, something that only took a few clicks on the computer: I couldn't resist purchasing a yard of a "Palette Stacks," a new fabric from Marcia Derse.  Bowls! And I love the color work. The fabric is now sold out, but a new supply is expected in September.

I'll probably use this for a whole-cloth baby quilt (using just the one, whole piece of fabric), and try out some quilting in response to the design.  Or maybe I'll just staple the fabric as is to a wood frame and hang it in my studio. . . 

Setting a table

I've had time to work on some small projects while I wait for two successive overdyeing stints on Accident-2.  I saw the photo below of fan-shaped placemats on the GE Design blog--a great shape for the round table we have in our kitchen.  

There weren't instructions in the post, but I figured out a pattern and method, starting from some wedges of Marcia Derse fabric that I had leftover from a tablerunner:

I had some mottled hand-dyed fabric on hand that worked really well for the binding.

I liked these two placemats quite a bit, but didn't have enough Marcia Derse fabric for more, and I need four placemats for the table.  I had some Daiwabo fabric leftover from another project, and decided to use that for four more placemats.  I also re-sized the wedges so that there are ten in each placemat rather than seven.  I didn't have enough dark fabric for all the bindings, which is why two are done with light fabric.  Might have been better with all four done in the light fabric, but also fine as is.  I will enjoy using these when we have guests for dinner. 

(Close-up in top photo of this post.)

I've also been working on making napkins from hand-dyed cloth.  We use fabric napkins all the time at home--I've been making them for many years.   I also sometimes give them as house gifts.  I was converted to cloth napkins in 1975, when I was a boarder at a student dormitory run by nuns in Angers, France, where I was doing dissertation research.  One of the requirements was that I bring two cloth napkins.  They were stored in a drawer in the dining area, and you picked yours up before every meal.  When one was dirty, it went into the wash and we used the other.  It had never occurred to me to use the same napkin more than once.  Growing up, we used paper napkins for everyday.  For special meals we used linen napkins, once only and then laundered and ironed.  Part of the discovery was that cotton napkins don't need to be ironed if you smooth them out when they come out of the dryer.  The ones I make have always been from commercial printed fabric, but I thought it might be nice to personalize them more by using fabric I had dyed myself.  My first thought was to dye them as I did bandanas this summer, like these:

But I also thought a napkin would be a good place to use some of the embroidery stitches I practiced when I thought I would be putting a variety of stitches on one of my shot cotton quilts.  So, I've been testing out stitches that might work well for border designs (you can double-click on any photo to enlarge):

And dyeing up samples to see if I can find a range of six colors that I'd like to use.  Here's one set of samples.  Not happy with these, so I will be trying out some others as well.

I'm also testing out a number of different base fabrics.  I found an inexpensive muslin that has a "beefy" hand, nice for a napkin, but it's pretty wrinkled when it comes out of the dryer.  Right now I have several different linen blends (with rayon or cotton) in the dye process, to see whether any of them might be a good option.

And a while back I also finished the crayon quilt I posted about in October.

When I cut the scraps for this quilt, I cut enough for a second quilt as well, so I can give this one away knowing I can easily make another.

Daiwabo runner

About a month ago, I wrote about the runner I planned to make from daiwabo fabric, for the buffet in my dining room; you can see the array of fabrics I started with on that post.  Above, you can see the completed runner, along with a painting of the Hotel de Sens in Paris by our friend Rick Ortner.  

The runner was made using Amy Walsh's pattern, "Get in Line" (from American Patchwork & Quilting, June 2012).  Below is a closeup that shows the binding and the quilting: 

I used bias strips for the binding, because of needing to go around a couple of curves.  And since the fabric I choose for the binding was a heavy weave, I made it with single-fold rather than double-fold binding.  I haven't used single-fold binding before, but I think I'll choose it again for some projects. The reduced bulk is nice, and it uses up less fabric.

Those nice wavy quilting lines are done with a set decorative stitch (rather than free-motion quilting), a stitch that came built into my new sewing machine.  I recently upgraded from my Pfaff Performance 2056 to a Pfaff Performance 5.0.  The main impetus to the upgrade was to get enhanced quilting ability, in two ways.  1) The machine has the ability to do very wide decorative stitches, including this wavy one (which can be made wider or narrower, elongated or not).  This is a really useful stitch for a fast and easy way to quilt a project.  2) The throat space on the machine (the open space between the needle and the right portion of the body of the machine) is 10"--several inches longer and also higher than on my old machine.  This makes it much easier to quilt a larger quilt, as half of the quilt has to be able to scrunch up in that opening when being quilted.  These are the features that got me to look at the machine, but in addition, Pfaff did a great job of adding in a lot of very useful features for everyday sewing, without taking away anything I already loved about the Pfaff.  I'm very happy with the purchase.  For any sewers out there who are interested in the machine, I would recommend this 45-minute video:

The table insert that surrounds the machine is clear acrylic--so the thing that looks like a map behind the machine is actually a reflection in the acrylic of the redbud tree outside my window.

Before I put away the extra daiwabo fabric and strips, I sewed up a little log cabin block, just to see how I would like it.  Maybe someday, I'll pull out the fabrics again, and do a table runner from four larger blocks like this. . .

Quilt accepted in a publication

I got the happy news recently that a quilt of mine has been accepted into a forthcoming book by Sherri Lynn Wood, The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters.  Sherri solicited quilts from volunteers, who were assigned one or another improvisational quilt "score" set by Sherri.  Even though I've done quite a bit of improvisational work before, I learned a lot in the process of making this quilt, and I look forward to sharing more about it, including photos, once the book is published in winter/spring 2015.  (Until then, contributors are legally bound not to share any photos online.)

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To give you a photo of something, though, here's the fabric I've just cut for a small project--a runner to put on the top of the buffet in my dining room.

This is a selection of Japanese daiwabo fabric, quite different from what I usually work with, but it is such lovely material.  Here's another view of the fabrics, uncut:

Several years ago, I bought a dozen pieces of daiwabo at a quilt show, and made a few placemats from them.  I really like the subtle variations in texture and color.   Here's one of the placemats:

Sample of machine quilting

I've finished all the remaining applique on the four tiers of "Shelter." Even though I tried to pace myself, doing all this applique was stressful on my wrist, and I've developed a ganglion cyst. So, I need to find a way to machine quilt this piece rather than hand-quilting, which would be even more stressful on my wrist than applique. On the small sample piece above, I've quilted every other strip with "in the ditch" quilting (which runs right up against the seam-line). I think this is good--maybe even better in final appearance than hand-quilting. You can't see it unless you look extremely closely, and it will give a more flat texture than hand-quilting would. I did a row of top-stitching also, just to see how it would look. If you click on the photo above to enlarge, you can see it on the middle strip in the turquoise tier. Top-stitching is easier to do than ditch-stitching, but it would add another visible line, which I don't want here.

I recently ordered some Japanese Daiwabo fabric. I think it is a possibility for background fabric for appliquéed stones. On some pieces, I've used linen, which gives a nice contrast of texture, but the local fabric store just has one color.
I also ordered some plain white linen to dye; if that works, I'd have a wide range of choice possible.

One summer project is to get back to fabric dyeing. I've cleared a table and taken out my notes. This week I hope to figure out the basic routine again and get started.