A cascade of quilts

I only intended to make one quilt, happy to be taking a class with Bill Kerr and to be using African fabrics that I'd been given a while ago, as I've previously written up.

But the construction of this quilt left me with a lot of half-square triangles, so I started playing with the print triangles.  In my earlier post about this, I forgot to mention that I was strongly influenced by a quilt made by Wanda Hanson, using all African fabrics cut in half-hexagon shapes. She first posted about this some weeks ago; here's a post with a photo of the finished quilt. I liked that Wanda put the fabrics right next to each other, no sashing or borders. I also thought that the combination of angled and straight edges added liveliness to the design--more so than simple squares or rectangles--and wondered how it might look using triangles. Well, now I had a chance to try out that idea!  I am still working on a final layout, but I've decided to go with the idea that Kathy Loomis suggested in a comment on my previous post:  "You could put them both [blocks with a central diamond all one fabric and blocks with each triangle a different fabric] into the same quilt!! Would be less predictable if the regular block pattern were broken up."  Thanks Kathy! This way I get the best of both worlds--some stability from the one-fabric diamonds, but with the liveliness of every other block being 8 different fabrics. (I highly recommend a visit to Kathy's website--inspiring work.)

This one will be a lap-size quilt. In the photo below (about half the eventual size), blocks are tentatively placed on the design wall. I won't sew them together until I have more blocks done and have played around with placement.

Finally, I wanted to do something with the green and blue triangles leftover from the first quilt. I pieced them together, thinking I could use them as part of the backing for the first quilt. But I think they look quite nice themselves, so I put on wide borders from some pale green hand-dyed fabric I had on hand, and voila, another top for a baby quilt. It is satisfying to get a very quiet quilt from the same source as the rambunctious one above.

And something I meant to mention in the post about the class I took: Bill brought with him a lot of fabric, books, and kits from Modern Quilt Studio, and I couldn't resist the kit for "Tube Socks." This is the first kit I've ever bought, as for me one of the chief pleasures of quilting is the selection of fabrics. In this case, I really liked their new fabric line, Warp & Weft, but didn't have anything in mind I would use it for. So when I saw the kit for this fun quilt, I indulged myself. 

2 options

The layout-on the right is the one I've posted before, the one on the left is new. In the one on the left, I put four pieces of the same fabric next to each other to form a diamond. I like both layouts, and may make both. I'm thinking of starting with the one on the left (with still many more blocks to add and placements to adjust). If you have a preference for one or the other, I'd be happy to know!

Using large-scale print fabrics

I have the good fortune of having received a large supply of African and some South Asian fabrics from two different sets of friends, both of whom had collected fabric over years of travels; photos of the collections are here and here. Beyond making return gifts for these friends, I hadn't used the fabrics. But last week I took a great class on using large-scale fabric from Bill Kerr, of Modern Quilt Studio, and I brought along these fabrics as well as some large-scale domestic prints.  Most people in the class worked on a version of Modern Quilt Studios "Follow the Leader" pattern, but we were encouraged to work on whatever we liked, so I chose a pattern by Blair Stocker that I've had my eye on:

"Leaving the Nest" by Blair Stocker, Wise Craft Quilts

I reduced the size the the triangles from 12" (long bottom edge) to 9" and used a variety of solid colors for the background instead of all white. When choosing the solids for each block, I aimed for some contrast between them, in order to minimize the dominance of the parallelogram shape between the print triangles. I used hand-dyed green fabrics that I had on hand, but also added in a couple of commercial solids in blue--fabric that I bought when I took my first class with Bill and Weeks in 2005!  I made a crib-size quilt, 36x55." I'll probably quilt it with horizontal lines, and will use one or more of the African fabrics for the binding. 

I made the flying geese blocks with a method that starts with one large rectangle (the print) and two squares (the solids). When trimmed, this results in 4 half-square triangles left over for each block, 2 solids and 2 prints.  The photo at the top of this post is a photo of the leftover print triangles. I've now started playing around with another quilt top made of just these print triangles. I tried adding in some scattered solid triangles, but I find myself liking the "hot mess" of all the print triangles.

Each of the 2-triangle squares is 4x4"; these are not sewn together yet. There will be a lot more moving around as I make more squares to have enough for a quilt. (The squares above would sew up into a piece only 21x28, so I have a ways to go.)

It is a great pleasure to spend time lining one fabric up with another, with so many choices possible. Not every pairing works, but many do--or they will when put together into a larger mosaic.  To show you some of the possible pairings, I chose four of my favorite African fabrics, and paired each of those with four other fabrics. In the photo on the left, the favorites are positioned so that they make a large on-point square in the middle of the four small blocks. On the right, they're positioned to all be in the bottom right corner. To better see the pairings, click on each photo to enlarge. In some there is a strong contrast between the two fabrics, creating a clear edge between them on the seam. In others the fabrics are closer in color and/or pattern and the contrast is less vivid. But if, when I tried out a pair, they were so close that they looked like they could be part of one pattern, I didn't use that pair. 

Four fabrics, each paired with four other fabrics (4 same triangles positioned in a central on-point square)

Here the 4 same fabrics are position in the bottom right of each pair.

I will be interested to see how this one turns out. . .

Working with large-scale prints

This is a quilt I finished recently. I was interested in using some large-scale prints, not something I'd not done much of before. I used a very simple pattern of rectangles to show off the prints--"Carousel," by Kim Shaefer, Cozy Modern Quilts (C& T, 2009). I'm pleased with how this turned out.

This detail shows the two different fabrics I used for the binding; I had assumed I would use green, but the light teal looked much better. The very nice quilting was done by Mary Walck, a long-arm quilter in Galesburg.

And here's the back--most of it a large piece of sage-colored Kona cotton that I over-dyed with greens and brown, and then an extra piece of hand-dyed yellow-green to complete the back.