My weekend plans changed! I was going to do lots of mosaic, load my next quilt, make some postcards and start a new quilt. I made a little progress on a couple of those things but mostly I spent a few days with my foot elevated because I sprained my ankle WALKING UPSTAIRS! What a klutz! I was lucky though because I had been in the basement to cut glass for a frame. When I fell I dropped the glass and it shattered in dozens of pieces and I didn't get one cut. That's a miracle that makes the sprain no big deal except that it interfered with the great exercise routine that I had going. The sprain wasn't bad and by yesterday I was up doing some things. I pulled out my shibori scraps that were left over from Loony Moony and I'm starting to play around with some postcard ideas. But mostly I played around on the computer. I researched and planned a couple of vacations and I got the tutorial written for this quilt. I'm calling it Bars and Stripes and the instructions are basically cutting instructions because the piecing is so easy to figure out. Click on the quilt image to go to the instructions. I even included instructions for a Quilt of Valor version. This week's featured quilt is Chrysocolla Meditation by Patricia Caldwell. She featured a large piece of copper and gemstone beads of Chrysocolla highlighted with dyed yarns. It's all created on the Riverside Gradient. Here's a great close up of the copper and gemstone centerpiece for this quilt. You can follow Patricia on her Facebook page.
For sharing, Patricia received a 20% coupon for the shop that's good for 3 months! If you have made anything with my hand dyed fabric I hope you will consider sharing it in the Customer Gallery. The only rule is that projects have to be complete. It doesn't have to be made totally from hand dyed fabric, just include a recognizable amount. What a great way to finish off the week. All 3 of the new veterans quilts are totally done! They are bound and ready for delivery. I had a blue variegated thread that was perfect. It showed up just the same on not quilts, not too dark and not too light. I used the star and ribbon pantograph on these. I had a light blue backing already dyed that worked well for these. Just so I'm prepared I dyed 4 new veterans quilt backs this week.
I'm so happy that I started out this month getting one more UFO out of the way. I had big plans for the weekend. I want to work on the fish mosaic, load my next big quilt for quilting and start a new quilt. But I've sprained my ankle so I'm not sure what will be happening. I'll see how it goes. At least I have hand sewing if I can't stand much. Getting those veterans quilt tops done really motivated me and I couldn't wait to get them quilted. This quilt was made by Becky. The batik fabrics are left over from a quilt that she made for her Grandson and his new wife. She added in the green for a nice bit of color. I had the perfect green backing for her quilt but since I quilt 2 quilts on one back I've been waiting for another quilt to pair with it. This leaf pantograph was perfect for the nature feeling of her quilt. My UFO transformation quilt with the green border was the perfect quilt to pair with Becky's quilt. Can you see that it's also bound! That leaf pantograph really helped out this quilt giving some focus to all that scrappy randomness of the tumblers.
If you are in the US I hope you have a great 4th. We are going to gill with Mom this afternoon but that will leave plenty of time for more quilting! I mentioned Monday that before starting a new project that I wanted to see if I could get something else off the UFO list. This quilt is what I picked. The original plan was to use this on a bed in the guest house after appliqueing some giant sunflowers on it. You can sort of see that I have a few rows of predominately green tumblers at the bottom. I drew out lots of ideas that I liked but I eventually realized that the quilt wasn't quite big enough for the twin beds in there and I wan't motivated to cut and sew more tumblers. This being 4th of July week I though maybe I could turn it into a couple of veterans quilts. Of course the easy solution would be to cut it in half, quilt then and call them done. But the quilt wasn't quite wide enough for that easy solution. But it would work with a border. I remembered that I had a veterans quilt upstairs paired with a green backing so this predominately green end of the quilt and a green border would mean I'd have 2 more quilts ready for quilting. It wasn't quite as easy as cutting it in half and adding a border. I added a step to remove 2 of the green rows and sewed them to the other side for a little more balance. Truthfully, in really life you don't see the distinction between the green and blue so much. Most importantly, I've 1/2 a UFO down! For the remaining half I wanted to see if I could do something different (more interesting). So off to EQ I went to work up some designs. I checked my stash and I had at least 2 yards of 4 different blue fabrics that I could work with. I love a good stash! I unsewed the rest of the quilt into 2-row sections. The finished width of these is 6" so that was easy to work with in designing a very simple pattern. Voila! Two veterans quilt tops! These took longer than they should because I made some ridiculous cutting mistakes. Fortunately, most of the cuts were too large. I was thinking that this would be a great way to use some of my waste fabrics or even a bold print. I'd only need about a yard of the feature fabric. You could even do crumb blocks like this. I might write this up as a pattern just so I have the instructions for future use. Anyone else interested? The nest part is that this is all that's left of the original quilt top!
Now on to some quilting. I'm so glad that my quilt club makes veterans quilt because they are such a great way to use scraps and bring new life to old UFO projects. |
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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
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April 2024
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