Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Jean's starburst

Jean's quilts are so fun to work on for many reasons: choice of colors and fabrics, she lets me have free rein (within reason), her foundation piecing is really good, and they're contemporary -- eliciting a whole different and challenging approach to the quilting than do traditional quilts.

I sat with this top for awhile and considered possibilities. Nothing slid into place in my brain for some time until I noticed the piecing lines connecting the outer spikes to the medallion. Those lines create a circle. That reminded me of something I'd saved in my great big inspiration notebook, a collection of magazine tearsheets, advertising, photos and designs from various sources.

I like mandalas and their inherent movement of pattern in several different directions. Now, Jean's top already moved, so the concept of a star bursting from the center outward on a spinning circle really made me happy.


With ample color in the fabrics, the use of warm thread colors would have been overkill. I wanted contrast to make the quilting show up, but only low contrast, so I opted for the light blue found in the tone-on-tone background fabric. I used a really thin thread, and if I had to do it all over again, I might opt for a heavy thread in some places.

I knew I wanted radiating lines somewhere. They're so powerful. These seemed to fit best outside the circle, as the spikes already point that way. I like the way they cross at the corners. Why didn't I just run those lines off the 2 borders? It didn't occur to me at the time, but that would have been a sensible option.


Now what to do inside the circle. This is the kind of thing I think about as I drift off to sleep. Having searched fruitlessly for a motif, I decided to design one. I really liked the orange swoop shape, so I played with that, freehanding something similar. This is where doubt likes to creep in: Is this anything? Is this anything good? Is this going to look stupid? Dare I take a chance? Fortune favors the brave, and besides, I didn't have any better ideas. And I'm willing to rip out stitches if need be. So, I decided to repeat the swoop as many times as would fit, have them point the other way for movement and be about the same size as the orange original. That left me with just the space above the orange swoop, which I filled with flowing, horizontal lines of echo. I stood back to admire and ... hated it.


The swoops didn't show up. Might dimensional quilting be the answer? Threadplay came to mind. Yes. The thin thread -- So Fine! #50/3 by Superior -- is appropriate for threadplay, so off I went laying in color, overlapping little circles like spun sugar in the background, because there are circles all over the background fabric. I filled a few other spaces with some designs by Linda Taylor, whose pattern books are an essential part of my bag of tricks. And when I was done, I liked it at last. And Jean liked it, so it was worth it in the end.



Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Book recommendation

   
I've had the privilege of learning from many gifted teachers, one of whom is Hari Walner. This is her latest book from C&T Publishing, $26.95. I've been waiting for it for years. She has given us new designs, reworked designs from her successful line of pattern packs and great color photos of each motif quilted in various threads with diverse background quilting so you can see just what it will look like and not have to imagine. Some people can visualize really easily and others can't, so this is a real help. 

The chapter Design Your Quilt for Quilting is my favorite. Like Harriet Hargrave suggests, Hari tells us to think about the quilting from the beginning, before starting to make a top, so that finding appropriate quilting designs won't be a chore.

Among her suggestions is eliminating seams when possible, and I could not agree more. So often, I've quilted a beautiful motif that is perfect for the theme and space only to find that a seam or an intersection of seams literally sticks out in the center of the motif. That's not good design. Super-easy speed piecing methods add seams so beginners don't have to fool with set-in squares and triangles or deal with bias edges, but they create problems for me when I'm quilting. Hari shows how to redraft the block and how much more successful the quilt is in the end. This makes a big difference in show quilts. 

Another suggestion is to vary the way borders are applied so those seams don't interfere with a border design. Quilting being a visual thing, you need to see that page to really understand the concept.

If you are trying your hand at machine quilting, this book is a must-have. If you're not interested in machine quilting, it's still worth acquiring because your quilts need to be quilted (or they're not quilts) and the book includes gorgeous designs anyone would want on their quilts.

Other titles from Hari:
Trapunto by Machine
Exploring Machine Trapunto
Paper pattern packs of continuous line machine quilting patterns published by Beautiful Publications

Friday, February 4, 2011

Quilt of the Week #1

Suzanne's Celtic Knot
This is a 30X33 wallhanging I quilted for my client Suzanne. I don't do Celtic anything -- as  a freehander, parallel lines are too big of a challenge. Parallel lines need to be, well, parallel, a level of perfection freehanding doesn't achieve. But I knew I'd be using matching thread, it's small, and most important, this quilt cried out for complimentary Celtic designs. The background is too big to quilt just any old design on it and call it a day. I started to add round motifs in the corners, but they looked off center. So instead I tried to use a triangular design whose point would intersect the knot, but that didn't work either because the white space is a rectangle and the center motif is circular. So I found a simple border pattern and thought it would be easy to make it into a circle. Make that an oval -- the space is larger on two sides. After 4 tries, I finally got a design I liked.
This is the back of the quilt, which shows off all the quilting:

The whole effort was a mix of algebra and geometry, and math has alway been my Achilles' heel. I got a trapunto effect (extra stuffing that makes with the motif 3-dimensional) by using Hobbs wool batting. I marked the design with blue Wash-B-Gone. I quilted the chain, stippling inside as I quilted it. Intuition said echo it several times -- always listen to your gut -- then added dimensional crescent quilting on either side of the chain, a tiny crescent meander in the corners, small echoes between the chain and the knot, stippling inside the knot, and a tiny swirl at the very center. I put in large crescents in the braided border to make the pieced points lie flat and that resulted in beautiful texture. Finally, I quilted swirls in the outer border, following the pattern of the printed fabric.


It was so much work, and it took hours and hours, but it was worth it. Custom work is always worth it.