A little over a year ago, I started participating in a round robin group on LiveJournal. For those that might not know, a round robin quilt is made by a group of quilters who make a center block, and pass the block off to another quilter in the round, who then puts a border on it, and passes the quilt to the next person. So if you have a 5-person group, there are five quilts being made, and after the fifth round, the quilt returns to the person who did the center block.
Well, the quilt top came back to me sometime in late July or August, and I added a final border to make it a good "couch quilt" for me to snuggle under in the winter. There it sat for a while, while I figured out how I was going to quilt the thing. Now it's done, and I'm happy with it. Happy enough to enter it in a local guild show in November. I call it "Horsin' Around" from the Laurel Birch horse fabric used in the quilt.
I tried a few different quilting styles in each of the borders. The outside border is quilted with a neolithic horse outline that is a combination of art I've seen in photographs in the Lascaux caves in France, and the Laurel Birch horse fabrics that are used in the quilt.
I finished a couple of quilts, and have to take a break from piecing fabric in favor of starting an upholstery project - our living room couch needs new cushions (more on that in my LiveJournal blog). For now, here are some photos of what I've been working on since I got my new machine in December:
First the commissioned quilt, which will be going to Janice Jamieson for long-arm quilting (it's a gigantic king-sized quilt, 113" on a side. I am not going to attempt to quilt that with what I have). Here is the design from EQ6:
And here is the finished quilt top (the photo is a bit dark - there are a lot of metallic prints in the quilt that just don't show up in the photo, especially the outer borders).
And here is my first foray into fusible applique, with a kit. I am going to "frame" it with some fabric and then quilt it for a small wall hanging.
I don't know if the buzz has made it to this community yet, but there is a small company in South Carolina called Spoonflower that lets you create your own fabrics in small quantities (1/4 - 3 yards) at reasonable prices for custom, short run type work.
I think this is the most incredible thing. I've already created my account, and my first project is going to be quilt labels. The printable fabric for the ink jet printer isn't cutting it anymore for me. It's too stiff and I don't think the inks are as colorfast as I'd like.
I haven't seen any fabric from them yet, but they are using Moda fabric as their base. I will let you all know how the labels turn out.
Here it is, Christmas day, and my daughter's present isn't done yet :(
However, I had the top pieced by the time she got home from my mother-in-law's Xmas Eve thing, and I blew her away with it. She is 14, and is currently in love with the Beatles, and we've all loved the cartoon Yellow Submarine for ages (As an aside, we also loved the animator's other big film, The Thief and the Cobbler at least as much). Anyway, a few months ago, eQuilter sent me a newsletter announcing a whole line of Yellow Sumbarine fabrics, and wasting no time, I ordered a pile of them, at least 1 yard of almost all the selections. I did show her the fabrics when they came in, because I suck at keeping surpises, but she had no idea what I was going to do with them. Heh. Heh....
Anyway, the top is almost done. I have to fix one corner that I made an inch too short for a miter (dammit), and I think it desperately needs a black border to frame it, especially since I'm going to be using a rainbow striped fabric (that almost matches the printed stripe around the panels) as the binding.
I took the opportunity to do my first bargello with 6 of the fabrics - I wasn't sure how to work them in with all the panels and medallions from the fabric called "Fab Four Frames" that I used as borders around the panel prints. I managed to get all of the conflicting colors and designs to work in that section at least.
The quilt back is going to be the first fabric shown on the eQuilter page referenced above.
I just received my latest Amazon shipment in the mail today. I ordered 4 machine quilting books. I got 60 Machine Quilting Patterns by Pat Holly and Sue Nickels, Machine Quilting Made Easy by Maurine Noble, Continuous Line Quilting Designs by Pat Cody, and Add-a-Line Continuous Quilting Patterns by Janie Donaldson.
My favorite right now out of all of these is Machine Quilting Made Easy by Maurine Noble, and not just because I feel like I came up with "Made Easy" for books when I was writing "Upgrades Made Easy" at Avaya for their technicians (but all these other "made easy" books came out afterward... just saying). Ms. Noble provides a series of exercises that are similar to the teach-yourself-airbrushing books and videos that I went through when I was learning how to use my airbrush. This is just what the doctor ordered, as far as I'm concerned. I have something to practice different techniques, and some solid, well-written instruction.
I guess I needed someone to tell me to practice on some muslin-and-batting sandwiches, because it didn't occur to me to do that on my own. I'd just fool around with an intricately-pieced quilt top, and create something that I"m not really proud of.
The other books have some nice designs that I may use directly or as inspriation for other quilting patterns. The Add-a-Line Continuous Quilting Patterns is really for pantograph quilting (I'm guessing for long-arm machines) which I don't have, so I'm not sure how useful this book is going to be for me in the forseeable future. It's going to be a long time before I get myself a long-arm machine. But the designs in thre are pretty - the whole animal patterns for the squirrel and the zebra are cute.
While we're on the subject of animals, the Cody book, Continuous Line Quilting Designs, has some adorable cat and dog border quilting patterns. This book feels more "utilitarian" as all the pages are on graph paper, which makes it easy to resize the designs as needed. The designs in this book are edge patterns and I think many of them can be accomplished with a walking foot instead of free-motion quilting.
The Cody book and 60 Machine Quilting Patterns by Pat Holly and Sue Nickels are both from the Dover Needle Arts series of books. I'm a big Dover fan; their books are very reasonably priced. The Holly/Nickels book contains some very nice central block patterns and continuous line border patterns. They are presented on one side of the paper as a lot of Dover books are, so that you can remove the page and just get the design you want, and even use it as a template without losing another design.
All-in-all, these are decent books, and I don't feel like I wasted my gift card.
I want to get better at applique, so I bought a couple of the Rachel's Cat Garden Block kits from someone on eBay. Then I was thinking it would be fun to reproduce some of my favorite fruit crate labels in a nice big quilt. I picked out probably 20 or so to choose from. I started with the "template process" for my favorite fruit crate label of all time: Tom Cat (I had a print of this hanging in my dorm room in college).
Here's the fruit crate label:
I'm planning to add most of the details in thread or possibly fabric ink, specifically the whiskers, the eye slits, paw details, the sunkist logo and maybe some shading. I'm also going to satin-stitch around the lettering (to hold it down and also to put in the yellow-orange outline around the letters). The finished panel will be 24x15. I'm pretty excited about this project - it will probably take me forever, and I have to learn some new techniques before I really get into it, but this panel, at least, seems straighforward, and I think it's only 15 pieces of fabric for the image (not including the letters).
Now that I have a tuxedo cat in the house, I feel the need to immoratlize her in my art (and she looks pretty similar to this cat, too, except her front paws just have white on the toes).
Well, I finally decided to put some quilts up for sale. To that end, I opened an Etsy Store and erected a website. The website links to this blog, so I thought I'd return the favor.
It's been a while since I've done any coding, so the site was a bit more challenging than I expected - however, I have finally, after a dozen years, figured out how to do forms! I'm probably going to have to redo them because I suspect that I'll be opening myself up to spammer hell the way it's done now, but we'll see.
One thing that may be of interest to you will be the quilt design instructions I plan to write up and post on the website. I guess my big debate is after I've written it, do I want to try to sell it to a quilting magazine or just post it online? I don't think I can do both, really.
I finished the "After Esher" lap quilt this weekend, because it's getting cold, and it's going to be a lap quilt for our living room for us to keep warm under while we watch TV. So it got bumped in the queue. Here are the design and construction and finished photos, in a series:
I've been working with the Snail's Trails block, or a variant thereof, since I found it in the EQ6 block library. I thought it would make a nice pattern for a baby quilt for my husband's best friend and his wife, who are expecting next month. So, this is what I designed:
And this is how it turned out:
I'm OK with this, even though I did half of the blocks backwards from what they should have been. I guess I didn't pay close enough attention to how to piece a 4-color tessellated version. But I actually like the frog shapes and the swirls and the parti-color areas. I think for a baby quilt, it works.
But I had to prove to myself that I could actually construct the design I designed. At the same time, one of the throws we use in the living room to bundle up underneath when we watch TV is getting really worn. It's sad, really, because it's been a favorite blanket in the house for all of us. But it's really on its last legs. It used to look a lot like this when it was new. But now the sun's pretty much detached itself from the body of the blanket and it's looking like something the dog is sleeping on (if we had a dog).
So, I decided to do the same design again, but in a more "grownup" color pallette. I call this "After Escher" and I did it in a 6x6 grid:
Here is a photo of the pieced blocks.
Do I stitch in the ditch? Some sort of pattern? Matching or contrasting threads? Hand quilt or machine quilt? (I've not done much in the way of hand-quilting, and my machine is a "standard" sewing machine, so it's difficult to get the quilt in there to work - I don't have a quilt frame. I do have lots of embroidery frames, however.
And, of course, the second I laid the top on my bed to photograph it, my cat had to check it out...
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Recent Comments
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Quiltsbybarb said:
[this is good]I love the quilt you designed and made using EQ6. read more
on Commissioned quilt -
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Queen of Fractal Beauty said:
While Janie Donaldson is a long armer her patterns are certainly adaptable to your use. Even if you don't want... read more
on Some Quickie Book Reviews -
Queen of Fractal Beauty said:
I am doing it with a bare needle, which I don't think helps things, either. Dangerous, but workable. A darning... read more
on After Esher, completed
on Commissioned quilt