Friday Quilts (on Sunday)

Okay so the blocks are all pieced together and it's time to put them up on the design wall. Oh, but I don't have a design wall. My so-called quilt studio is the dining room! I taped a flannel blanket to the china cabinet, and that will be my design wall. The blocks will just kind of stick in place on the flannel and I can move them around if I want to change their position. 

Here is the stack of over a hundred of the hexagons. They are kinda sorta separated into reds, yellows, purples, and black backgrounds.

I have started putting them up on the design wall. They will kind of flow into the next color if I can place them well enough. There are so many blocks that there is alot of moving and switching around going on. The color isn't showing up too well here - I think I forgot to adjust the photos in IPhoto, sorry. Or maybe I forgot to use the flash.

I'm getting there. This is pretty time-consuming because after you put some up, you find another one in the same colors and you have to make a place for it. Then you have to find some blenders to help it flow on to the next area.

Shortly after I took this picture, I put the last block in its place down near the bottom. I walked around the table to pick up the camera, and Horror of Horrors! The dang blanket came loose and all the blocks fell on the floor! DOH! 

I'm so crushed. All that time spent arranging them just so. I had to walk away. Just turn my back and walk away. Sigh. I need a real studio with a real design wall. I need a million bucks.

Friday Quilts

I didn't forget! I just didn't have the camera handy. I will put the One-Block Wonder project that's in progress up tomorrow. I'm in the design process now - the blocks are pieced and pressed and separated into various color dominance groups. This comes together as kind of a color wash, impressionistic kind of thing. This isn't a traditional quilt by any means. For those who think of quilts and grannies in the same breath, it's a whole other world out there now. The things that are being created these days are amazing. So, pictures tomorrow.

Friday Quilts

I didn't forget!! I've been working off and on this week on those One-Block Wonder hexagons. As it turned out, each of the 6 strips yielded 18 triangle sets for a total of 108 hexagons. Ugh. I really do NOT like doing projects with big numbers like that - it just makes it seem like a daunting process. Who wants to think of piecing together 300 triangle sets or 540 4 patch units?! Really, it's enough to make me, at least, not even want to start!! Here's my little secret - I break it down into how many I can piece together in 10 minutes or 20 minutes. Then I don't feel like I have to sit and sew for 5 hours straight, after all, this is my hobby, not a job! I have pieced together the hexagons of 3 of the 6 strips. I'm halfway through! Well, of this part at least. There are the two large stacks waiting, and parts of the third set spread out next to my sewing machine.

Now that I have so many already pieced, I am able to divide them up into groups. There is a predominantly yellow group, a red one, a bluish-purple one, and the rest are mostly black which makes them the background "filler". You have to have the background hexagons to ground the others, it gives the eyes a place to rest. Each one of these hexagons is almost like a mini work of art.

I ended up with about 2-3 inches of fabric at the end of the strips after cutting out as many triangles as was possible. If there was any color to that section at all, I cut small triangles out. I pieced these together and they will be part of a quilted wall-hanging for my parents (I tend to work on more than one thing at a time). 'Tis a special request with a specific place already waiting for it in their new home - right above the fireplace. It will be an appliqued bouquet of flowers of some sort, fanciful and colorful. These few mini-hexagons will be some of the flowers, I think.

Here is a close up of one of the "flowers". Isn't it neat?!

One-Block Wonder - Getting started

I'm using this book as a guideline to making my own one-block wonder quilt. The book has pretty clear instructions, and the photo illustrations are really good. The technique isn't new by any means (anybody remember Stack and Whack by Bethany Reynolds?!) and it uses a ton of fabric, but at least it's just ONE fabric. And there's the beauty of it - one fabric that produces a hundred different blocks. You'll see. Follow along with me.....

The fabric I'm using isn't what I would have picked out for myself since I'm not much of a fan of black backgrounds. But I chose this particular fabric with an eye toward my parents' new condo - I think the black with touches of reds, yellows, greens and a hint of blue will go in their new great room really well. I can almost ALWAYS count on finding what I'm looking for at my local quilt shop (Kindred Quilts). Take a good look at the fabric - when it's all said and done, you'll never know that was the base of it all.

The following is going to be really abbreviated, for the whole, entire, complete she-bang, you really will have to get the book! The first step is to find the repeats in the pattern of the fabric and, to make hexagons, you'll need to cut 6 (some icky math : hexagon = 6 sides) sections of the fabric. This is why you need some major yardage - I used a little over 4 yards. Carefully stack the 6 sections on top of each other. Use pins to line up the edges by pinning through the exact same place in all six sections. This is the real pain in the butt part - time-consuming, and nitpicky. Haste makes waste. 

Now that the sections are pinned on all four sides, I carefully lay this out on the cutting board and make the first cut to trim up one edge. I only cut about 1/2". Then I make the first, gulp, real cut. It's a 3 and 3/4" strip from selvage edge to selvage edge. Put a couple pins in the large section and cut another strip.

Laying one strip out on the cutting board, I used my equilateral triangle (icky math alert: all 3 sides are equal) ruler and cut the triangle sections out. I have to take the time to pin each section together - after all, I'll have... hmm, I didn't count, but surely more than 70 of these sections, and I sure would hate to drop them and they get all mixed up!

I felt like peeking at a couple of the sections. I fanned four of them out to see what the final image will look like.

Now that's inspirational!! I can hardly wait - each one of the triangle sections cut from 6 strips will be a slightly different version.

Friday Quilts

I think I'll make every Friday a quilt day. I'll put up a picture of either a finished quilt (by me), a current quilt project, or a vintage quilt from my collection. Today's quilt is the one in the April 2008 issue of McCalls Quilting Magazine. It was made from the Katmandu line of fabric from Mark Lipinski*. Actually I made this quilt for Mark for the 2007 Spring Quilt Market to help debut the new line. His booth was just amazing - filled to the rim with projects such as clothing, bags, quilts, embellished works of arts - it was really beautiful. If you haven't already seen this fabric line, get thee hence to your quilt shop and get some! It's perfect for embellishing, but just as great for regular piecework. I'm not much of an artsy-fartsy quilter, much prefer the traditional patterns with a twist. This is about as artsy as I get!

*I'll write about Mark one of these days. He's one of my most favorite people in my little quilting world.