And a little handquilting

This is a small quilt, 20x28--a nice size to hang on a door. You can click on the image to enlarge it for a better view of the quilting. Here's a detail of the colored rectangles; the thread is YLI silk 1000 denier.

This is one of a pair of small quilts, in which I was playing with magenta and its friends. Here's the other.

Construction of the orange-red tier of shelter is coming along quite well. Another couple of days of piecing and I should have enough strata for this section.

Genealogy of a Quilt-2

Back in this post I wrote about a quilt top pieced with rectangles that combined fabric from two ideas--thinking about a pine grove and about stones. Over the last few days I've pieced a back for that quilt. I incorporated the stone-blocks in the back, and decided to slice through the largest ones (that looked more like dinosaur eggs than stones). The photos above show details. Here's the full back:
I like it.

Turquoise scraps

This is a 4" coaster, made with scraps from the turquoise tier of "Shelter," along with some of the orange-red that will go in another tier. Tomorrow I'm going to start strip-piecing the orange-red fabrics.

Alternating easy and difficult

Writing my last post about ten days ago was very helpful to me. The realization that I didn't have to think about April as a deadline for finishing Shelter gave me permission to enjoy simpler piecing projects without feeling they were a distraction from the larger work. I started up a routine that has been very productive as well as satisfying. I would "warm up" by laying out and piecing together a few blocks of the "Spectrum" quilt, and then I would move over to Shelter. To help me focus on the more difficult work, but not get overwhelmed or discouraged, I decided to limit a stint on Shelter to the length of a CD--about 40 minutes. (I generally listen to instrumental only for work that takes mental concentration--quiet jazz or solo guitar.) Alternating back and forth (though generally not doing more than one or two stretches on Shelter in any one day) has had significant results. The finished Spectrum quilt above, quilted and washed. This is 36x36. I really enjoyed making this quilt, and I think I'll do this pattern again. Below you can see the quilting a little better, along with the back. (As always, you can click on the photo to see a larger image.) I would have liked to handquilt this one--the shot cotton is so soft that the machine quilting seems crude--but I wanted to get this one out to its young recipient.

With the Spectrum quilt done, I wanted to find something else really simple, to keep up the alternation. I've had the "Turning Twenty" pattern in my drawer for a long time, and decided to adapt it for a crib quilt. I down-sized it by 50%, and ended up with this little quilt, 36x44, made from small pieces in my stash. I like Spectrum better, but it was satisfying to use up fabric that I have on hand, and this pattern is adaptable for a wide range of fabrics.

OK, enough on the easy stuff. Here's what happened with Shelter. The next photo gives you a bit of an idea of how I lay out strata, and then have to cut away what's underneath before basting the pieces onto the stabilizer.


Once I get a section set, I baste it all together. I'm putting off the final applique until I'm sure of the composition. With it only basted, it is easy to add something in later.

Today I finished basting up the turquoise tier. I've pinned it up above the blue tier on the design wall, roughly turning under the edges to get a sense of how they'll look when they're pieced together. The piece is now about 60" wide. It will be taller once the black and then orange-red tiers are added.

(For a post that shows all four colors, and that explains the origin of this quilt, click here.)

Deadlines

In my work life, I often am working towards a deadline. On a day to day basis, it's the deadline of preparing for class, or getting graded work back to students. When I was doing scholarship, I would figure out deadlines that would help me get the work done. In the early stages of a project it would be finishing a paper to be delivered at a conference; further on it would be the book deadlines supplied by the publisher. I know how helpful it is to have a deadline to get work done. But when I stopped doing scholarship, and quilting took up that space in my life, I self-consciously eliminated the deadlines. For the bigger art pieces, the ones that are deeply personal, I wanted to just go at whatever pace developed, settling into the piece and the experience of putting it together. That's been a good thing. But now I have a self-imposed deadline approaching on "Shelter." I scheduled myself to give a talk in late April on my turn from scholarship to quilting, and I would like to have Shelter done in time for that talk. When I first committed myself to this date six months ago, it seemed so far away and so reasonable that it hardly counted as a deadline. But now it's getting closer, and I will need to pick up the pace to get it done. Partly this is good: this piece is very challenging, and I can use a little nudge. But I also don't want to feel rushed. I also don't want to feel guilty if I spend time working on smaller things--just piecing for the fun of putting colors and shapes together, or to work up some gifts. OK, I've just decided: If Shelter can be finished by April, that will be good, but if not, I can show it as a work in progress, and that will be OK too. I need the pressure off.

So I can enjoy little things like this, some sample blocks for the pattern "Spectrum" by Judy Taylor:


taken from her book, Successful Scrap Quilts (this quilt is on the cover). I don't have any baby quilts on hand for gifts, and suddenly there's a baby just arrived and another on the way. I think this pattern will work up nicely with the array of shot cottons that I have on hand.

I also just finished up some octagonal placemats for my sister--a good shape for a round table. The large black one with the pieced stripe is a centerpiece; the placemats themselves are each just one fabric. The placemats were useful for practicing my ever-rusty machine quilting.

And suddenly it's almost December and I haven't contributed a quilt all year to my guild's charity project (quilts for local social service agencies to distribute to foster children), so I worked this up quickly from a panel with numbers.
I used this quilt for some more free-motion quilting practice. I had fun with the "Dresden Daisy" design from the "365 Days of Free Motion Quilting blog," alternating it with squared off spirals in the number squares.

The "365 Days" blog by Leah Day has helpful video tutorials for all the designs.

So, I'll let my "Shelter" deadline help move me along, but will also enjoy keeping up with "Spectrum" and other small projects, letting myself be satisfied with however far I get on the larger work. . .

back to Shelter

Finally, a good stretch of time last weekend and the mental state needed to get back to work on Shelter. The photo above is one section of the turquoise tier, just basted for now, but I'm liking it.

The problem comes as I move across into bigger areas. There is going to be some "stubbiness." I think the piece about in the middle above that ends in a stub is OK, but that the piece that starts with a stub, below the top edge of the tier (like the light green piece) is not. This section further is pinned only, not basted, so no problem making changes. I might try changing the angle of the stub, but it will probably be better to have everything either start from the top edge, or be tucked under another piece. If you are able to follow this somewhat convoluted description and have any suggestions, I'd be glad to know them!

Another challenge is that this tier is so much larger than the dark blue tier that I can't use the same construction process. For the smaller one, I pinned the whole thing up on the design wall, and then moved it back and forth from table to wall to work and look, work and look. This is too big for that, so I am having to work on it just on the table, relying on a stepladder for getting some distance on it. I also am attaching the turquoise strips directly to stabilizer, which I didn't do for the blue piece (though I had the stabilizer cut, and basted the fully pieced blue tier to the stabilizer once it was done). So, more bricolage, figuring things out as I go along.

And in case you're curious about the big project at work that kept me so busy all summer and into the fall, you can see the end product here.

Slow progress on Shelter

I've been very busy with a large project at work for the last two months, which has made it difficult to get back to "Shelter." I am at the stage of building up the large turquoise section that will arc around the blue section. I started working with some strata that I had pieced back in February, but found that working with 42" strips on this larger section wasn't going to work--the pieces looked "straight" even with curved piecing. I finally figured out that I needed to work with shorter pieces and interlace them, as I'd done in a very early sample piece. So, I cut most of the existing strata and most of my fabric in half (scary! I left some uncut, just in case). I laid the strips out on a drying rack (photo above), and now in the shorter bits of time I have for quilting (given the big work project), I'm concentrating on creating more strata, rather than working on laying them out on the design wall--which takes more active mental work than I can muster right now. Here are some of the strata:


And here's a photo of some of the turquoise section, very roughly pinned up--enough done to show me that using the shorter strata is the way to go, but with a lot of pinning and re-pinning yet to be done to get this section working: