Quilting Along with Leah Day - Week 20

I'm still playing catch-up from our vacation in the Canadian Rockies. We ended the trip at the Fairmont Hotel on Lake Louise. This is an image taken by my husband from our room early in the morning before breezes and canoes disturbed the lake. Note the near perfect symmetry of the landscape.

Lake Louise

Week 20's assignment from Leah had her followers playing with potential layouts and eventually selecting one using the wonky blocks from the previous week. This proved to be much harder than I anticipated. My wonky blocks just didn't like to play well together. Some of it had to do with the broad spectrum of values in the fabrics going from fairly light to very dark. However, the fact that lines created by the piecing of the blocks were close but off had an unsettling, jarring effect. Nevertheless I preserved and discovered that symmetry helped. I also added an extra strip on two sides of the quilt (top and bottom of the horizontal quilt) in order to "finish" the border.

Wonky Top Hung Horizontally

Wonky Top Hung Vertically

I'd love your feedback. Which do you think works best, the horizontal or vertical orientation?

Quilt Along with Leah Day - Week 19

I've been on vacation hiking in the Canadian Rockies, while Leah Day cranks out the assignments. Now I am playing catch-up.

Instead of QUILTING Along with Leah Day, Week 19 has us PIECING along with Leah Day to create a "modern" quilt block. This was a challenge of a different sort for me. Precision piecing is something I LOVE to do. Leah recommends her wonky block method because no precision is needed. She requests that we gather 15 or so approximately 7" square fabric scraps and some solid coordinating yardage. Clearly, Leah buys and cuts her fabric differently than I do.

I usually buy half yard lengths and cut selvedge to selvedge strips to create the various squares, rectangles and triangles that make up the majority of my quilts. If I have scraps they are strips and small geometric shapes. So, my scraps were pretty much useless for this project and I didn't want to cut 7" squares out of multiple fabrics. Instead I devised a way to create square scraps from strips.

A Section of the 8.5" Ribbon 

I selected approximately 10 similar fabrics from my stash. Most of these fabrics were purchased back in my early days of fabric collecting. In other words they are 20 to 25 years old. I cut multiple 2.5" selvedge to selvedge (or the longest length possible) strips from each fabric. Next I sewed the 2.5" ends to each other, making yards and yards and yards of "ribbon." I divided the sewn strip in half and seamed those 2 pieces lengthwise. Divided it in half again and sewed those 2 portions together lengthwise. This resulted in an 8.5" wide by very long ribbon.

A Single Wonky Block After the Unifying Solid Fabric "L" Has Been Added

In Leah's example she created the wonkiness by skewing the squares under the strip they were to be attached to. Since my squares had seams and I didn't want to inadvertently force the seam in the opposite direction it had been press towards, I opted to cut "wonky" squares using my 9 degree ruler. Then I could line up the wonky edge of my pieced square on top, versus underneath my strip and keep my eye on the seams while still achieving skewed squares. It worked for me.

Finally, I Played With A Possible Layout

Quilting Along With Leah Day - Week 18

Going Loopy - Week 18

Upper Right - Lots of "l's"

We are going loopy with Leah Day this week. Gone are the straight lines, sharp points and angles of recent weeks. Instead the lines are curved and peppered with loops.

Once again, Leah broke down the assignment to its most basic and built up to the most complex over a series of small steps. Rather than approach this as I did in the past, by selecting a solid colored piece of fabric and marking chalk lines to both guide me and distinguish between the steps, I opted to quilt a practice block I had on hand. I stitched the four different levels of the assignment in the four corners and did the final free form in the remaining five pieces that form a plus sign.

The assignment reminded me of the exercises we would do in fourth grade when I was learning how to write in script. Rather than practice individual letters, we would create rows and rows of loops and  waves.

The machine quilting in the upper left is the most basic of the exercises. Leah described it as a row of "e's" but it was closer to how I write my "l's".

Upper Left - Upside Down "l's"

I thought the work in the upper right, which was an upside down version of the "l's," like the tails of many "y's" looked the best. I shortened the line between loops and focused on the just the loops.

Next, I tried my hands at alternating between "l's" and tails, much like an open, loosely flowing figure 8. It did flow smoothly, but wasn't particularly compelling to use as a quilting motif.

The final assigned pattern was to alternate between "w's" and "m's" with the middle of each letter being a loop. The advantage to this pattern was that you could cover a lot of ground quickly.


Once the formal patterns were complete I tried my hand at doodling loops.

My final thoughts on Going Loopy, is that worked up very easily. It is definitely the kind of stitching that I can float away on. My take away is that it is best suited for cranking out "lovey" quilts.

Lower Right - "g's"

Summer is here and so is my vacation. There will be no Musing from me for a couple of weeks. I look forward to catching up with you and sharing more of progress with Leah's assignments and my personal work when I return.

Lower Left - "M's" and "W's"

Quilting Along With Leah Day - Week 17

From Top to Bottom - U's, L's, Tessellated F's, H's
and Mixing and Matching

Leah Day is back from a much deserved time away from creating Quilt Along assignments to provide her groupies with the next challenge. When she left off Zippling was the topic. The distinguishing feature of Zippling is its sharp angles and straight lines. This week the focus was on the building blocks to create a Circuit Board quilting. Like Zippling, a Circuit Board  uses straight lines. However, the angle is no longer acute, instead all angles are right angles.

Leah had us start with the most basic shape of a circuit board - a squared U. Next we tried tessellated F's, an H and L combo, before ultimately attempting to design our own circuit board.

Detail Showing a Mix of Straight Lines, Solid Right Angles
and Some Beginner's Learning Gaffs

I find it easiest to mark my fabric with horizontal chalk lines in order to guide my scale when I am first learning a pattern like this one. It is like practicing script on lined paper versus blank paper. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I only got lost once while executing the various letter designs. (Naturally, that is the spot my husband focused in on when in photographed the close up of my practice.) For a first pass I managed to keep predominately straight lines and right angles. I found it helped to stop at the angle versus in the middle of a line. This made it easier to create the right angle. If I continued to run the machine as I executed a right a angle I would invariably soften the angle with a slight curve.

It is helpful to have many free motions patterns that I am comfortable with and can turn to, so that no matter what quilt I design, I have the perfect quilting pattern to accompany it. Would I use Circuit Board again? Probably not, at least until I am fluent enough with it to avoid channeling and the appearance of rows.

Hibiscus Haven is Done!

My Motivation

Persistence, faith and gumption is what it takes me to go from idea to completion of an artwork. When I start a new work it seems brilliant. That is the hook that motivates me to begin.  Somewhere in the middle a combination of panic and drudgery take over. The panic is due to whether I will be able to pull off a successful composition. The drudgery comes from the shear repetition of piecing and stitching that is a natural process of making the fiber art that speaks to me. Once I consider a work finished, as I do with Hibiscus Haven, my confidence, that dipped in the middle returns. There is the shear relief of completing the piece from beginning to end. There is also the sense, that yes, this will do. I have another work to add to my website and hang in galleries.

Hibiscus Haven is Done!

Detail Showing Floating Leaves and Binding Finish

Hibiscus Haven is my own design. However, Leah Day's genius in coming up with 365 different free motion quilting designs needs to be mentioned here. Her designs are my bible when selecting a motif to quilt into the background. I used her Floating Leaf pattern in Hibiscus Haven. Prior to Quilting Along with Leah, I probably would have done a small scale version of the design. However, now I am able to modify the scale of my free motion quilting, I chose to do this at a medium scale. I wanted the scale of the quilted leaves to match the appliquéd leaves. Another nod to Leah, is that I have always created bias binding and hand stitched it down on the backside of the quilt. Since, I had used the button hole stitch with the appliquéd leaves and hibiscus, I opted to use the button hole stitch to secure the binding to the front of the quilt, a method that Leah endorses.

My Current WIP - Part 2

Hibiscus - Week 2

Patience is a virtue that eludes me with more frequency than I would like to admit. None of my work comes together quickly. I do make time to be in my studio, but it never seems to be sufficient to create all that I want to create. I work on simplifying my technique. Then I am inspired to add layers of simplicity until once again I am faced with anything but a simple quilt. That simple little hibiscus quilt continues to blossom, but at the same speed that a watched blossom unfurls.

Thread Painted Hibiscus

Detail of Thread Painting

This week I finished the machine appliqué portion and started the thread painting.

I have experimented with multiple forms of appliqué over the years. I started with needle turn appliqué. (Talk about labor intensive!) I moved from there to fusible appliqué that had a satin stitched edge. This required a far more extensive thread collection than I was willing to invest in, since the thread needed to "match" the fabric it was surrounding. I experimented with just quilting over the appliqué pieces, but this often resulted in raggedy edges. That was great if the appliqué involved a cat with fur, but a disaster for a smooth edged feature like the wall the cat was walking on. Yesterday I discovered that my Bernina 1260 had a blanket stitch that was perfect. So, that is the option I went with for this quilt.

Hibiscus - The Flip Side

Backside of Thread Painted Hibiscus

I've taken Leah Day's advice and started to match my bobbin thread to my top thread. It takes more time, since every thread change is a double change, but I love the effect it has on the back of my quilt.

My Current WIP

Last week I focused on flowers and how they have a way of appearing in my work. So it should come as no surprise that my current WIP (Work In Progress) is based on my new hibiscus plant.

I could have recreated the picture or a detail from the picture, but I prefer to give a sense of the image - an artist's impression. I am naturally drawn to value changes, light and shadow as well as positive and negative space. My first step was to select green fabrics from my collection to use as a background and for the leaves. Next I hunted through my hand dyes to find a coral/pink fabric with sufficient contrast to show up against the greens. 

I used my photo to trace the shape of the hibiscus flower, but opted to draw my leaves free hand. Although I've been making art quilts for over a decade, I still love the process and appearance of pieced blocks. So, that is what I did for the background. What gives them the artistic flair and makes it hard to distinguish the blocks is how I randomly piece the fabric, busting through the concept of using dark fabrics consistently in one section of the block and light in others.

The next step is to add thread. I will quilt the background and enhance the hibiscus and leaves with thread painting. The final step will be to add french knots at the end of my thread painted stamens.