Category: 2015 Works in Progress

So I was doodling in Adobe Illustrator. I started with circles that had diameters of 1″, 2″, 3″, 5″, 8″, and 13″ After playing with placements, I came up with this concept, which created an illusion. I wanted to incorporate flying geese, so I added the 10.5″, 6.5″, 4″, 2.5″ and 1.5″ circles to guide them.

 

Radiating from the center circle, I divided the 360 degrees into an even number of wedges, and built the geese on those divisions and colored them in — Duke Blue, naturally. Because I didn’t want the wings of the geese to end in the same places, I alternated the direction and placement of the geese so that they’d “float” and assembly would be easier. This created a pretty spectacular illusion, even in the monochromatic color scheme.

 

Then I sat down with my Prismacolor pencils and played (it’s flipped from the monochromatic version because my original design had the geese flying down on the outside ring, but I ultimately changed my mind about that).

Yes. I think so. I sent the foundations to my local copy shop, and they enlarged them for me on a large format printer. The biggest circle is about 37.5″ in diameter. The empty circle in the middle is 2.5″ in diameter. This makes the geese in the smallest ring really, really tiny. Turns out this was the easiest of the 5 rings to assemble because I wasn’t wrestling with a large foundation under the machine over and over. I didn’t want to cut any of them apart because I was concerned about the accuracy of trying to reassemble the rings after they were finished.

Each ring has 25 geese in it (except the biggest ring has 26, since the smallest piece isn’t microscopic), so each one had over 75 pieces of fabric. The process took a while.

The big blue ring was the hardest to do, by far. I put the green center in as a placeholder just so it wouldn’t be white, until I could get the red rings done and make a final decision about what color that center should be.

When all of the rings were assembled and the biggest one was stay-stitched around the edge, I reverse-appliqued the rings together from the inside out and then starched the circle almost rigid.

My mom thinks it looks like a dragon’s eyeball.

I may paint the light blue sections or something to calm them down, but they bother me less as time goes on.

For the moment, I’m just living with it on my design wall, trying to decide how I’m going to finish it. Trapunto to accentuate the 3D feel? Appliqued to something else? I’m not sure, but hopefully I’ll figure it out soon.

This thing was a beast to put together, but I love how it turned out. So far, anyway.

One of the people I follow on Instagram, Elizabeth Dackson (@dontcallmebetsy), recently offered a medium USPS box stuffed with scraps of fabrics for $16 or something like that. I happened to see it right after she posted the offer, so I ended up getting this box of happiness about a week later. Some of these fabrics were solids, and combined with my own sad stash of solid fabrics I had enough to try something I’ve been wanting to play with for a while. When I made It’s Loud in Here, it was my first time really exploring improv piecing. I enjoyed it and was scared of it at the same time, but I knew that I wanted to play with the idea more. And I wanted to use solids, but I didn’t have very many colors since I haven’t done a lot of work with solids in the past. As I was working on the Log Cabin Star (which also features a lot of Elizabeth’s scraps), I’d sew bits of these solids together into chunks. Then I decided to abandon the ruler when I cut them apart and sewed them together again, and this slab of color was born. It was about 15″ square, probably.

Soon it had some friends, and I started to get an idea of what I wanted to do.

After I finished piecing Queen of Fibonacci Squared, I cut up all of the leftovers from that quilt into wide strips for improv piecing, and chain pieced large sections into more slabs. It was so much fun! Then I tried to figure out how to put them all together into something usable, so I assembled the slabs into three vertical pieces about 18″ wide each. The next day, I decided to try to slash-and-insert a free-form tree with roots between the left two slabs. My intention was to have the tree be off-center, and the final third would be added to the right side after the tree was assembled.

       I discovered that this process is a lot more complicated than I had anticipated, and it also devours fabric as gaps have to be filled in because of how cuts were made and how the inserts change the distribution of fabrics. I also had to adjust again and again to make sure that the fabrics would lie flat after pressing, which isn’t a simple task when you’re improv-piecing curves. I kept having to make more slabs from scraps to compensate for these issues, but ultimately I ran out of the solid scraps.

  

 

I finally caved in and started incorporating the right third of fabric into the spaces needed to surround the tree.

And then I had the whole tree together. There were a few branches that would require some applique to flesh them out, but the piecing part of the tree was done.

I loved the ragged borders and didn’t want to lose that, but I wanted to enclose the tree to settle some of the chaos, and I wanted to have a solid border to give the eye somewhere to rest. So I cut some strips of solid black and found an aqua border that I loved after determining that green and red would blend too much.

 

 

 

 

After an afternoon of challenging sewing (sewing, deciding it wasn’t right, ripping out, trying again), I had the quilt top assembled AND flat on the design wall. Hooray! While the edges were smoothed by the addition of the aqua, it’s still asymmetrical, which I wanted. And the black inner border is almost perfectly rectangular, which is something I had to fight for.

 

I layered and basted it last weekend. I’m using one layer of cotton batting and one layer of cotton/bamboo batting, and it will be very densely quilted so that there’s a lot of texture. Friday was close at hand for the basting process.

 

I started quilting organic lines in the background using a variegated gray/green Aurifil thread. I spaced them about 1/2″ apart, because I knew I would be adding more lines between in a different color.

 

Then I added another variegated Aurifil thread in a cream/orange/rust colorway, and it started to come alive!

 

I love the wobbly lines and what they add to the wobbly piecing.

 

Then Ella informed me that it was time to stop for the day, since the Duke game was about to come on. OK then.

When I made the first Fibonacci Squared quilt last year, I knew I wanted to make another one using 21″ blocks that would come out to an 89″ square, or about a Queen-sized quilt. I started gathering fabrics, and I was excited about this combination except that it was too much of a repeat of the one I did last year.

 

I took out some of the fabrics and added a seafoam green, light gray, and medium gray to shake things up a bit. The blocks only have 7 pieces, so the blocks all go together in a quick evening of sewing.

 

I attached setting triangles in Essex Linen in black, and laid it out on the floor to admire it. Friday and Ella, as always, were nearby.

 

Ella immediately dove into the quilt top and did this, and then sat to the side and tried to act innocent. If you listen carefully, you can probably hear cat giggles.

 

I straightened it back out and both cats decided to claim it.

 

Jerry and I pinned it one night, and I marked as much as I could before I ran out of chalk. It took quite a bit longer than I expected it to, and I was quite sore the next day from the hours crawling around on the floor.

 

I started quilting it with Aurifil 50-wt thread in #2600 Dove, my new favorite color. It plays white without glowing, which I really like a lot. Ella let me know when it was time to stop quilting for the night. She’s helpful like that.

 

She also wanted everyone to be sure to acknowledge that this is HER quilt because she looks very nice on it. I spread it out on the floor to see how the quilting was looking, and less than 10 seconds later she was on it.

 

This is my favorite section because the quilted parts bleed into each other so nicely.

 

When I was about 1/4 of the way through the quilting, I realized that this spool wasn’t going to be enough to finish the quilt. Since it’s the second large spool of this color that I have used up since Christmas, I ordered a whole gigantic cone of it. It arrived while I was in Chicago on a school trip, so I was able to continue quilting immediately after I finished this spool.

 

Progress continued!

 

When I finished the interior quilting, I put it on the floor again for photos. Once again, there was frolicking. Ella was rolling back and forth, shimmying across one edge. Friday sphinxed on the opposite corner, as he usually does.

 

I decided to use the same quilting concept and filler that I did last year, even out into the setting triangles. It worked so well on the original Fibonacci Squared that I didn’t see the need to try to improve on it. I do like it better in the more subtle thread color, though.

The setting triangles were tough to quilt, because the dark gray thread was all but invisible on the setting triangles even with two Ott lights shining down from different directions, as well as natural light from the window. I had to rely a lot on muscle memory to make sure I didn’t cross over previous stitching. I wasn’t 100% successful but it’s hard to find the mistakes, especially from the front.

 

I finished putting binding on it last night, and tonight I’ll wash it to get the markings out and get it to crinkle up a little. Then, fence photos and I can finish up the pattern for publication!