More Quick Satisfaction

Well over a year ago, I wrote here and here about ideas for using up some of the stash of selvage edges I've been collecting. 

Way back in February 2013 I got them all color sorted

I decided to make a long narrow wall hanging to replace this painting, which I kinda hate. It's boring and mundane and I was pressured into buying it at one of those art by the yard house parties. 

Voila!

Now that it's hanging in that little piece of wall space between two doors I kind of wish I had added more neutral border at the top and bottom, and then added a dark narrow border to frame the whole piece. Ah well, next time. This went together so quickly - probably a total of five or six hours over two days - so I may well make another one soon. I am loving these quick projects.

To make one of your own, select the selvage strips you want to use overlapping the finished edge on top of the raw edge of the piece below. Sew the strips together, sewing a scant 1/4 inch from the finished edge. Cut a couple of pieces of background fabric that are the height of your selvage collection and the desired width to go on both sides of the wall hanging. Now lay these strips on each side of the selvage collection overlapping by about two inches. Use your rotary cutter to cut a wavy line through both, and discard the scraps. Now pin, pin, pin those curved edges and sew the sides on. Clip the curves and press the seams towards the center. That's it. 

Quilt and bind to suit, including either a hanging sleeve, or corner pockets for a hanging rod. I've been using this method with corner pockets and a simple piece of dowel from the hardware store lately. Easy Peasy. I hope you decide to make one and if you do, please leave a comment here with a link to where we can all see it.

Love Quick Finishes - Here is "Prairie Bloom"

This is so unlike me. I started this project last weekend and here it is finished. I'm not that inclined to dawdle when I do apparel sewing or make bags. Those are often start to finish in a day or two, but quilts? Never,

It does help that this one is a small wall hanging or table topper - it finished at about 25 x 23 inches - but consider: 

I didn't know what I was making when I started building the equilateral triangles (look here for the technique); The background material was still sitting at Fat Quarter Shop and had to be mailed; used a different quilting design than I had ever tried before; and, the binding was done by hand.

You can really see the quilting in the picture of the back. 

I may have to do more small projects just to get that burst of happiness that comes from accomplishing something more often!

Everyday Inspiration

The West Atlanta Modern Quilt Guild has hosted some of the best swaps and challenges in the past year and a half that we have been in existence, but I think the recent "Everyday Inspiration" is my favorite so far. Our President, Robyn Webb, challenged us to take pictures of things we see in our everyday life, and then to select one and create a quilt that is inspired by the photo.

As with most assignments, I chose not to completely follow directions. On a recent trip to San Francisco, I toured Heath Ceramics in Sausalito with family and friends. Even the historic factory design by Marquis and Stoller in 1959 is inspiring. Read more about that here.

But I was most taken with glaze samples that I saw hanging on the walls. The image immediately put me in mind of all the Kaffe Fassett shot cottons I had sitting in my stash - some dark, some light, and some just that shade of gold. I knew before we left the place that this image would somehow figure in my entry for the challenge.

Later that same day we were in Berkeley and stopped in a restaurant called Eureka, (which I am determined to call Bang because of their signage). When I saw that sign facing me as I sat down, I loved it! For those that aren't in the know, this is an exclamation mark, or exclamation point, but for printers and programmers, it is commonly referred to as the "bang". 
Not to stray too far afield, but the symbol was thought to derive from medieval copyists who used to write the Latin word io at the end of a sentence to indicate joy! what a perfect summation for what had been a perfect day in the bay area.

So I didn't choose just one photo for inspiration, but two. However, I didn't noodle on those images for long after we returned to Atlanta because we left a few days later for a week at the beach. I needed a hand project for the car ride and this was it! I printed out two inch squares on freezer paper, grabbed fabric and scissors and off we went. I never would have thought to make this sort of straight-forward grid using English paper piecing, but it worked out great. In the past when I've tried to work with the Kaffe Fassett shot cottons, I've found them to be a stretchy pain, but there was none of that with this method. 

I did have a bit of a fit with the big gold bang, as it wanted to move around quite a bit, and I wanted to do some thread painting prior to quilting. I compromised by spray basting it to the background and then stitching all around the raw edge to start. given the barn wood decor of the restaurant and the sign, I wanted to let the edges ravel and be a bit more rustic. For quilting I decided to use straight-forward stitch-in-the-ditch to make the "tiles" pop. 

This was a truly fun challenge that had our members stretching to try things they had not done before - like designing their own piece and working without a pattern. Check out some more of our finishes here, and consider a similar challenge for your guild in the future.

Improvisational Quilting: Floating Frames

For most of the quilts I design and make I start out with a pretty complete design on paper before I begin cutting into fabric. The quilt I made for my niece Coleen, dubbed Floating Frames, was not like that at all. When I saw this fabric collection from P&B Textiles in the Hawthorne Threads newsletter, I really loved it and ordered a half yard of most of the prints in the line, plus a couple of recommended coordinating fabrics. I always love it when online shops take the guesswork out of finding coordinates, don't you?

photo courtesy Hawthorne Threads

A couple of months later, after looking at it for a bit, I decided the colors would work for a quilt I wanted to make for my niece. However, I knew I was going to try something improvisational, so guessing the amount of fabric I would need was a bit of a challenge. Just to be safe, I ordered a few more prints and solids. Well and then I didn't think I had enough fabric for the backing... Before I knew it, I had 14 1/2 yards of fabric.

Fabric

Hah! Talk about crazy town. The good news is that after making a quilt that measures approximately 50 by 60 inches, I still have almost six yards left in pieces ranging from more than a fat quarter to more than a yard. That's enough for another whole quilt top! 

Finished

But enough about stashing building and busting. The real question is this. How do you write up a pattern for a truly improvisational quilt? My conclusion is that I can't. Others have, I know, but I could never tell you at this point how to precisely measure and cut to make a quilt that looks exactly like the one I made.

I needed that big red dahlia for the center!

However, I can share a bit of process. The first thing I did was to cut out some large blocks (six by six inch) of the prints I wanted to be focal points. Next I cut strips of all of the other fabrics in widths of 3 inches, 2 1/2 inches, 1 1/2 inches, and one inch. I used these strips to build frames around the center blocks, building them up and trying to maintain a contrast of light and dark with small pops of red.

Frames floating on a black wall

After looking at the resulting big framed blocks, and laying them out against a black background this way and that, I decided that I wanted to set them on point and add lots of smaller blocks scattered in and around the larger ones - much like a modern grouping of photographs on a wall, but all askew.

This little block almost fell off the edge

This is where things got interesting. It was easy enough to cut various pieces of the colorweave black (my background fabric) and to join and square the blocks up into rows. What I hadn't counted on was the corners. In order to finish the corner pieces I cut a bunch of triangles. What I neglected to pay attention to was where the bias edge was going to fall on these triangles. As you can imagine, I had some fits (and colorful language) when these bias edges tried to warp the whole thing out of shape. Next time I would cut more carefully to place the bias edge (if there must be one) in the least difficult location. In my opinion, that is along an outside edge where the whole thing can be squared up if need be.

Quilt back

Despite my whining, this whole project really was fun, and I will definitely continue to do more improvisational piecing - even on point projects like this one. I even did a wonky piece job on the back of the quilt. Just a glutton for punishment I guess. Though I learned a great trick for making sure that a pieced back is lined up with a pieced front in this Wendy Butler Burns class on Craftsy.com.

Labels tell the story

So I can't give you a pattern to follow, but I can give you a suggestion. Buy a stack of coordinating fabrics and start to play. When you are finished, you can add a label like this one that tells the world, "I made this".