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How do we ever choose what to work on at any given time? I came up with this question after returning from a relaxing week away from home (You were fabulous, Ashland OR and the OSF!). I specifically took along a hand sewing project that I wanted to finish, and also packed a pile of fabrics for a project that I was considering for a new work, just in case I finished the first task.
You guessed it: I completed about half of the original task, and then went nuts on the pile of fabrics, and made these, which currently have no planned home:
Just can’t stop making them for now. I think I’m putting in my training time on the hand applique techniques, which I’m finding very satisfying, after doing so much patchwork for the last 40 years.
Since I could not stop sewing these things, I think this is the feeling that I am looking for when I do what I do—being “in the zone”, losing track of time, I’ll make just one more, this quilt “made itself”, I was just playing, etc. I’ve been in all these states, and I think this is where I do the best work.
Another WIP
I’m making another quilt from 2″ squares, just like Fun Fours, as described in the previous Four Patches blog post. The quilt top was done, but this quilt sat for quite a while because I wanted to find a new quilting pattern. When I make a quilt I have made before I want to do something new, something individual. This time I wanted a different quilting.
I designed a free motion quilting pattern simple enough for me to be able to execute. I think it will work out well. Of course I chose to to these new machine quilting techniques on a quilt that is HUGE, so it will be a while in the making.
No longer a WIP
I finally figured out how to quilt this recent squares exercise about which I wrote in August, and had tons of fun doing it. Really like how bright and cheery it came out.
All the circles seemed to coordinate well with all the dots. I used a commercial template to start the centers of the large motifs, and then just eyeballed the rest of the spiral. Also got a chance to use up some wonderful Sulky rayon 30-wt. threads from a previous project—orange, yellow and fuchsia.
Free form circles in the border–fast becoming one of my favorite border patterns, since it is soooooo fun to do.
Tessellations-Solving the puzzles
28 09 2012I love puzzles, and especially the puzzles associated with putting fabric together. There is a challenge to finding just the right fabrics, to using just the fabrics I have at hand, or to succeeding at some other Susan-imposed limitation that I think is necessary. Whatever the puzzle, I am in!!
So it seems appropriate that the puzzle aspect of tessellations would appeal to me as a quilter. I had seen many quilts by some of my favorite EBHQ quilters, especially quilts by Rebecca Rohrkaste and Mabry Benson, so I thought I , too, should try this fun game. In addition to a small handful of baby quilts, here are a few of my favorites.
Tessellations
The first was this one, using some wonderfully complex fabrics and lovely colors, with just enough value contrast between the fabrics to allow each one to shine.
Tessellations, circa 2002
Tessellated Dots
After finding myself with piles and piles of dotted fabrics leftover from making Maggie’s graduation quilt, I put tons of them together in this huge quilt. The colors are so cheery and bright that I love to have this hanging on one of the walls in our home.
Tessellated Dots, 2007
63.5″ x 76″
Photography by Sibila Savage
Tessellated Dots, detail
Tessellated Pinwheels
Still with a few more piles of dotty fabric remaining (helped along by subsequent purchases; I never met a dot I didn’t like) and pairing these dots with other bright geometrics, I started on this hand-sewing project that could provide me with hours and hours and hours of stitching during the TV times and the vacations and the road trips. It’s an English paper piecing project using a design I found in Barbara Brackman’s Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns, which is full of gems if you are willing to take the time to pore over this tome.
I have given this quilt the subtitle “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time”, because it did seem like lots of fun to keep making these really cute little pinwheels by putting six diamond around a hexagon, made relatively easy by using the EPP method. Even while making many, many pinwheels, I did not realize the hole I was digging for myself until I decided it was time to start sewing the pinwheels together. Had the idea of sewing them together occurred to me earlier in this process, this quilt would have been much, much smaller. Twisting and turning the paper-lined patches to nestle next to each other in this pesky pattern was a difficult maneuver that had to be done way, way, way too many times.
Tessellated Pinwheels, 2009
60″ x 74″—Photography by Sibila Savage
The borders for this quilt were chosen for only one reason: purple was the only color that was used so little in the quilt that other colors would show up when the pinwheels were next to it. Also this dark purple was strong enough to hold all these wiggly, jiggly pinwheels in place. Click on the photo and then click again to get a close up of the quilting, which turned into another unexpected nightmare. I quilted each pinwheel individually using threads that matched the fabrics in the pinwheels, since there was no thread that could coordinate well with all these brights.
Turns out it was a good idea to make this quilt because I love it, but it was much more work than I thought I was signing up for.
Click here to see more EPP projects by others.
WIP update:
Remember those flowers from last week, the ones waiting to find a home onto which they could be appliqued—they have been multiplying! Sometime I’ll stop–perhaps now that I realize that I am going to have to sew them all together. Oooops-Wasn’t that the lesson I was supposed to learn from the pinwheels. Oh, well . . .
Photo Credit
Check out the new photo at the top of the home page. It’s one of my favorite shots of ME, taken by my husband, Paul Hennessey. Love those old-fashioned irons, too!!
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Tags: English paper piecing, tessellations
Categories : Observations and insights, Quilts and commentary