I finally finished the quilting on my Great Egret and only have to do the binding now It is hard to see any of the quilting. I did big pebbles in the grey "stone" part and straight lines in the green I may do a bit more in the eye but have to get the original picture.
I finally got three of the four borders done. Still have to attach the final blue border. I have enough to do a back as it is a big wide piece of fabric. I am going to do the quilting down in North Carolina.
I am up to about 50 lbs of strips in red through green in 2 1/2 inch, 2 inch and some 1 1/2 inch and 1 inch strips. These are mostly solid substitutes at this point and if I need solid like fabrics these days, I tend to use my hand dyes as I probably have about every color. The yellow and green in this quilt are hand dyes. I have been accumulating lots of patterns.
It's finished except for the corners and the borders. I will have a 2 in green border, a 1 inch white border, 1/2 gold and then a blue border. Decided to take a break as I want to get it all pressed and good iron is in a different room! Soon. I will do the quilting when I return to NC.
I have been cleaning out as I have mentioned and discovered quite a trove of tshirts so I decided to get some done both for my daughters and to sell at my quilt club garage sale. These are just a few of them. I am going to overdye a couple of them as I am not crazy about the colors. Some I folded and some I just smushed like this one. I used only fuchsia, sun yellow and navy blue over ice. The navy blue was a 5% solution and the other two were a 10% solution.
Really liked this one!
I may throw this one into some yellow dye.
Another one I liked.
Random color!
I believe this was a light yellow tshirt that I just used the fuchsia and navy on.
These are the first five of the blocks which will be part of a mystery quilt I am working on with the guild. Also have parts of other blocks but have no idea what it will look like when finished or whether I will like it or not. I am sticking with a purple, green and white palette.
I have been spending some time each afternoon cutting various widths of strips from smaller pieces of fabrics which were mostly less than a yard ea. I am doing them by color family and have done yellow, orange and most of red so far and probably have close to 30 lbs in 2 1/2 gallon bags.
I have been searching the internet for easy blocks to do with jelly roll sized strips especially since this is what I have the most of (2 1/2 inches wide).
One technique an art club member mentioned was making half square triangles out of strips of fabric. I have always disliked half square triangles because of the trimming but using this technique makes them turn out perfectly the same even though they have bias edges. You sew two strips together on both sides (instead of just one), then use a 45 degree ruler and cut out triangles which unfolded turn into squares. Using two 2 1/2 inch strips, the finished squares are 2 1/2 inch (3 inch unfinished).
The next thing I played with is a block called Hidden Wells which coincidentally was probably the basis of one of the very first quilts I did 40 years ago! The technique for this one is related to the above one. I just randomly took four strips from my 2 1/2 inch x 22 inch bag. I sewed them together to make an 8 1/2 inch wide strip, pressed the seams to one side and then cut out two 8 1/2 inch squares. I then sewed those two squares together around all four sides, placing one with the stripes horizontally on top of one with the stripes going vertically. After sewing all the way around the outside, I made two cuts diagonally on the finished square which results in four squares which I sewed together as shown here!. It is certainly a lot easier technique than the one I used so many years ago and resulted in a really well matched block which was about 10 inches square. I will probably use the same color family on the top and bottom of strips for a real quilt. I think a quilt will come together really quickly and this technique really is easy. I will have those bags of strips used up in no time!!
I am making significant but very slow progress on this quilt. I have fiddled around with settings and testing out colors and doing everything on point is making it trickier.
I finally got all the blocks done and most of the four patches and everything up on the design wall so I could arrange the blocks.
I have about half of the quilt sewn together now and am putting the blue and yellow half blocks around the outside but am not so sure about this now so back to Electric Quilt to test some options. If I had enough of the blue, I would have used it around the whole outside but alas it is a very specific blue that I can't match (believe it or not!!).
Well, I am now seriously thinking I will undo a bit and but one of my hand dyed greens around the outside including those set in triangles. Will test this tomorrow.
In the meantime, my sister gifted me with an early birthday present.
As I have mentioned before, the only type of radial symmetry quilt I haven't done but had seen is one where you have a central panel and then do hexagons out of six additional panels which you use to surround the image. I am so glad she bought seven panels for herself as well. The fabric is by Northcott and is part of the Water Garden series. This may end up being my very favorite and end up on a wall. We shall see... the panel is about 27 inches by 44 inches. Can you believe birds!!!!
I hope you can see why this fabric inspired me to do another stack and whack. I really liked the colors and figured there would be good designs from this. Of course the challenge is always the set.
This is the second bunch. Altogether there are 81 blocks and I want to set them on point. I played a LOT with Electric Quilt 8 to figure out what to do with these blocks. I found two pieces of blue that worked well with these and then decided to use a yellow/orange so looked into my hand dyes and found some that was perfect.
I should add that besides culling fabric from my stash, I have been going through it all, gathering the smaller pieces and cutting it to 2 1/2 inch, 2 in and some misc strips by color. I have only gotten through the yellows and oranges so far but have filled 5 2 1/2 gallon zip loc bags with these strips!!
This was the beginning of what how I thought I was going to arrange these blocks. I liked the Christmas ornament look I had seen on some Pinterest quilts.
I have a problem with too much blue for some reason and find it very difficult to work with even though it is one of my favorite colors. Soooo....
This is the iteration I worked out with in EQ. I had decided the previous day to split the blocks into those that were predominantly yellow or had yellow on the outside and predominantly blue ones. It worked out that I had a pile of 30 of the yellower ones. The really weird thing is that the set that I had picked out used exactly 30 of the lighter colored blocks!! Totally unplanned. I told my husband that I thought my brain was processing things without me knowing. He laughed.
Anyway, I thought the yellow was going to be too overwhelming sooo...
So this was the next audtion. I removed the yellow corner blocks and was just going to leave it like that but then after staring at it, I came up with another version. Haven't made any sample blocks but auditioned it in EQ and think it will work! Instead of the solid yellow, I am going to put four patches in on point with the yellow on the top and bottom and white on the sides.
This is how my current idea of the set from Electric Quilt. Of course the blocks are all radially symmetric blocks instead of these!
This was one of my favorites and is by Bev Kondolf who was one of the chairman of this fantastic show! It contains a lot of her hand printed and dyed fabrics.
Another piece by Bev! I really mostly included abstract pieces in this blog post. I am never quite sure how to classify more literal interpretations.
These next two beauties were by my friend Marcia DeCamp.
These next two pieces were by Tina Somerset who was our speaker last month.
Another by Tina.
Gretchen Beaver.
This was a multi-quilter effort by Val Schultz, Julie Brandon and Kathi Everett.
Karen Sienk
This is another multi-quilter effort by the ladies from the Batavia art quilt group and entered by Kathi Everett.
The next three are by Pat Pauly. She incorporates many of her hand dye printed fabrics. She teaches both the dyeing and piecing techniques nationwide.
This was one of my favorites and I am pretty sure won a prize in the modern quilt category. Wonderful use of color and neutrals.
I won't comment on the rest except to try to get names on all the quilts! They were the ones I liked the best (and there were more as well but just didn't get the names with them).
Audrey Pantas
Betty Gordon
Janet Atkins
Jean Lemmon
Terri McDonald
Verna Baumgarten
Antonia Herring
Barbara Grimsley
Beth Kelly
Tina Somerset
John Kubinec
Kathleen McIntosh
Lana Wright
Linda Coats
Mary Ching
Sue Beevers
Terri Cherni
Nick Williams
Pat Delaney
There was a whole exhibit of all the different colorways of this piece of fabric. I picked one to show here. The quilting was different on each one. If you look at Nick's quilt above, you will notice that this panel is the background for his piece. This one was done by Kimberley Werth.
