My big event for the weekend was teaching my ruler class at The Longarm Network. I had a full class and it was a lot of fun. I think everyone was more comfortable using rulers after the class. But teaching is a lot of people interaction for me so after class I need some concentrated quite time and I decided to spent the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday with my rainbow scraps. Judy Laquidara's Snowball quilt calls for 4 sizes of blocks and I'm just piecing all of the bits together randomly. I got the bigger blocks done and at this point I needed 40 4.5-inch square blocks and this wasn't enough fabric to get that done. I went to my shop inventory and cut a half yard each of the 2 Color Wheel Gradients (since that's the palette I used for these fabrics) but I needed a little more. I'm almost embarrassed to tell you that I found another box of rainbow colored leftover tiny bits from this quilt that I finished THREE YEARS AGO! Normally that would be a sign of some sort of serious mental illness. In this case it happens to be a genius foreshadowing of a future need. By the time I went to bed last night I had all of the blocks made. I hope to get the background cut and substantial progress on putting this together this week because I'm kind of tired of working on it. I also killed an iron in the process. I think this $25 Target iron has lasted for 4 or 5 years and I'm happy with that performance so I'll just go buy the same one again.
I am so grateful to my customers who are willing to share their projects. I make the fabric but I'm not he one with the vision of what to actually do with it! Christine Cetrulo has used the Coleus Gradient as the background for Forever Cancelled, a piece about extinction. From Christine: "As co-chair of the Quilt Arts of Kentucky, I stepped outside the box in issuing our annual challenge. I asked our members of make a quilt that is a postage stamp, 32" x 32". In my own creative process I free-associated two words inherent to a United States postage stamp. "Forever" and "cancelled." As postage stamps commemorate something, I choose the dinosaur, which truly is forever cancelled. I also wanted the dinosaur to "relate" to me, so I pictured an Iguanodon, the first vegetarian dinosaur. I am a vegetarian. My task was to translate the contemporary stamp into something ancient. For example, the cost is one bag of stones; the location simply is "Earth: the year is XXOO. My vegetarian dinosaur spits out a a stamp of Humphrey Bogart (the Man of all men) and selects a tasty herbal leaf and flower to munch instead. The dinosaur is constructed of 120 folded squares for textured scales. An assortment of antique postage stamps runs in a banner across the top. I used beads, hand-dyed cotton by Vicki Welsh ("Coleus"), ribbon, wood, real minerals and metal." Christine doesn't have a blog but she does commission work and will have a quilt in the Sacred Threads exhibit next month. If you are in the Northern Virginia area you need to go check out this exhibit. You might remember this quilt that Christine made a couple of years ago. The detail stitching in it is amazing. She made this one using Thrive gradient. Inspired? What are you creating this weekend? If you've made something with my fabric we would love to see it! Share it in the Customer Gallery and receive a 3-month 20% discount for the shop. I had a lot of birthdays in May and our Airbnb traffic has picked up. Since both audiences get fabric postcards I wen't through my last stockpile pretty quickly. I only had 2 left and lots of Airbnb guests coming up. I had to get buys and make some new cards. I've been thinking about a fireworks theme for a long time but couldn't figure out how I wanted to execute it. Working on my little mandala quilt last month gave me the idea to get these done. I've written up a tutorial if you want to make some for yourself. You can find it under the Tutorials tab above or just click here. I worked through a few prototypes testing threads and technique. I decided that even the rejects looked good enough to keep.
We have been Airbnb hosts since September 2011 and we have one family that has visited us every year in June. They were pregnant with their 5th child in the first year and now have 6. These kids are the best behaved kids I've ever been around. They are also outside kids. They don't play video games. They run around barefoot on the gravel driveway, play Frisbee, chase frogs and catch fireflies. I look forward to seeing them every year. It's a joy to watch kids really play. This year I offered to tie dye with them. When they visit they are here for 3 nights and are gone all day until about 7 pm. To accommodate their schedule we tied Thursday night and dyed Friday night. They told me the colors they wanted Thursday so that I had everything ready to go when they got back Friday. I washed the shirts out Saturday morning so that I could soak them all day. A final wash about 6pm and I had the shirts ready when they came home Saturday evening. Dad declined a shirt but Mom participated. She and her only daughter went pink/purple with their shirts. After they got home they donned their shirts to send me a family photo. They are a very happy family! I'm already looking forward to their visit next year.
Now that I have a plan and can visualize and end to this project I've give it a name: Rainbow's End. I've been working on it in bits of time and am making good progress on getting the blocks together. I even found a good fabric in my stash to use as the background. I intended to use white but I think that this mottled pale blue will make it a little more acceptable if I decided to give it to an adult. I have about half of the blocks made and have plenty of scraps left for the rest of them. There are probably even a few placemats in there too. Once I get the blocks made this should go together pretty quickly......until I get sidetracked by something else.
The Fabric of the Week this week is Eminence. This is Shades Pack of 5 shades of a beautiful purple. Eminance is related to Regalia and Eggplant. Regalia is one shade grayer than Eminence and Eggplant is one shade grayer than Regalia.
Through Thursday, this fabric is 20% off or $18. That's a $4.50 saving! Shades Packs are dyed when ordered so there's no limit to what you can buy. If you order multiple quantities it comes as one cut. For example, order 2 quantities for 1/2 yard cuts. Ordered received by Wednesday morning (EST) will be shipped June 19. Ordered placed after Wednesday morning will be shipped June 26. If you prefer email notification of the Fabric of the Week, you can sign up for it here. There are also 2 popular gradients back in stock this week. I'm back with an update on my oldest UFO. I'm working on this project once a month when I have sew-in days with Country School Quilters. Here's where I left off last month. You can see that all I completed was the black border. That may not seem like much but I had to put the first 2 on twice. I'm finishing this quilt on a different machine from where I started and the 1/4" is different on each machine. The last row of 9-patch postage stamps is a little bigger than the rest of the quilt. I can deal with that in the quilting but I needed this border to be right to contain it all. I knew that going in and thought I had measured correctly but after I sewed on the first 2 borders they were too wavy so I remeasured and un-sewed and re-sewed and now I'm happy. The next border is 2 rows of postage stamps. I got one done this weekend and half of another. Maybe I can complete these next month. I'd love to get the last solid border on too but I think it will take 2 months. Regardless, it's one step closer to done!
I've got your weekend inspiration right here!
Rene Iannarelli sent this stunning piece in this week. She used Red Dawn and Summer Sunset with other gradients and batiks. If you study the panels you will see that they are based on the Fibonacci formula derived from nature. She made the panels-3-5-8-13-21. Rene has several other quilts in this technique in the Customer Gallery. Check her Featured Artist section to see her other work. Last month I showed you this mandala that I was marking to get it ready for quilting. As I was marking it I decided that I wanted to use some threads that I hadn't used on the longarm before and I felt like I needed to test them. I had a little fat quarter mandala that's been hanging around my sewing room for a while and decided that it could be my practice piece. It was in the same colors so I could test the threads. Boy am I goad I did this! You can take all the classes in the world, like my awesome ruler class next weekend, but nothing beats loading a quilt and practicing. Over the past year I've pulled this out several times and started marking all over it in Crayola Washable Marker. I think I had 5 or 6 different ideas marked on it. It was kind of a mess but I left it and just started quilting and tried to ignore the marker. I marked the petal shapes in one design, quilted in another and hated both. Then I ripped out the stitches. Then I got smart and traced the shape on paper to work out a design that I liked. To quilt the ring of red around the center I marked guidelines for every other stitched line. But that wasn't enough so I went back and added even more lines. They aren't perfect but from viewing distance they look just fine. This is after quilting and before washing. There's so much marker on it that when I soaked it the water turned dark purple....and it wasn't from the fabric bleeding! This photo shows off the quilting best and helps show some of the things I learned: - the acrylic thread runs beautifully on the Innova so I can use it on the next quilt confidently - but my color choices need some reconsideration. Those Spirograph shapes are really cool and you can't see them! I should have quilted those areas in dark grey or black. - I love the effect of the white stitched ring behind the petals. The back stitching shows but not as bad as I expected. But, you know what I really, really love? The back!! I hand stitched the binding just so I could display it from the front or back. There's one more lesson back here too.
When I did this I used the same thread top and bottom throughout to see how it behaves. I think that I should not use the acrylic thread in the bobbin. I'll use one of my "normal" threads. I also learned that I wan't the quilt to show well on the back so I'll use a solid for the back of the next quilt and I can't wait to get it loaded and started. Seriously, I am borderline insane. My ability to make things complicated knows no bounds. Remember the Rainbow quilt scraps? There are so many of them that I knew I could make another quilt from them. I don't NEED another quilt but they are perfectly good fabrics and I like playing with them. So I started sewing the small bits together into crumb blocks. That's no problem. But once I got them sewn together I started playing with ideas for the quilt and everything got completely out of control. I had some big triangle pieces and played with them on the design wall a bit. I kind of like the wonky pinwheels but got stifled when I tried to figure out where to go next with the layout. So I pulled out EQ. I saw some quilts on Pinterest that have this kind of look. Assume that the hideous stripe blocks are crumb pieced chunks. But this is way too buys and too fiddly and I don't like the gradient border (which I really want to use). I did 4 or 5 versions of this before I moved on to the next rabbit hole. The next rabbit hole had nothing to do with my project. I was at the beach and Anne was working on a quilt design and I got involved in 10 version of this. We're still working on this one but I sure do like it! I'm not sure even what I was thinking with this disaster. The stars would have been the scrappy fabric but it wouldn't even come close to using even half of the scraps. Oh, and it's ugly. Then I thought about working with big blocks and I like this one a lot. The red would be the scrappy part. I tried several large blocks and liked this one the best but I realized it would be a pain to piece. Getting back to simple I thought that maybe I'd just make some scrappy rectangles and sash them. Lame. Then I started going through my quilt books, especially the scrap ones. I saw an antique quilt in a Roberta Horton book and saw the "O" blocks from Anne's quilt above. I like this a lot but it doesn't use enough fabric. I went through 6 more versions of the "O" block. Then I found this in Weekend Quilts by Judy Laquidara. I actually made a kit for this quilt for a customer in another colorway. This is exactly the effect I wanted for my scrappy blocks and I can use the gradient for the border.
Hallelujah! Now I can sew again. |
FeedsTo subscribe click the RSS Feed button and copy the URL of that page into your blog reader.
In Bloglovin you need to search "Colorways By Vicki Welsh" to find the blog. About Vicki
I'm Vicki Welsh and I've been making things as long as I can remember. I used to be a garment maker but transitioned to quilts about 20 years ago. Currently I'm into fabric dyeing, quilting, Zentangle, fabric postcards, fused glass and mosaic. I document my adventures here. Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
|