Friday, May 31, 2013

Pretty in Peach and Brown

 
A light, solid backing produces a wholecloth -- true back art. 

This beautiful carpenter's star is one of those quilts that is intended to be a gift, but we'll see if it actually is given. Sometimes clients change their minds after they see the quilting. I love the way this turned out, my client Janice just loved it, and so did everyone who saw it at guild. One of the perks of my job is the ensuing hug from a happy client upon seeing her quilt.

Part of what makes this quilt is the absolutely gorgeous design in the background. It's the Feathered Fan in Irena Bluhm's book, Blooming Background Designs. The Feathered Fan works equally well as a tiny background fill and as a large overall design. I tried it a few months ago on a large quilt with really simple piecing, and it was done in no time. So for this quilt, I thought I'd do a fast, freehand, no-big-deal quilting scheme. On a smaller scale, here as a medium meander, it was more time-consuming. And I had more stops and starts fitting it into triangles, squares and the border, as opposed to a large and open field. Love it.

In the diamonds, I freehanded flowers and leaves, changing the thread color to a darker peach on the brown fabric.


Janice and her husband, David, make a lot of carpenter's stars. The piecing method they like uses half-square triangles, which makes for quick assembly. At the Arlington show this month, I found a similar pattern minus the center LeMoyne star. Hmmmmm, wouldn't that be a wonderful place for some really showy quilting?

So I came home and flipped through a coffee table book of 19th-century quilts and found wonderful inspiration for a new quilt. It features broderie perse applique in the center, surrounded by 25 little carpenter's stars and about as many alternate blocks: ample room for lots and lots of showy quilting, like a wholecloth with some piecing. I didn't need another idea for another quilt, please, but I'm not complaining. I'm already pulling fabrics (it'll be really scrappy) and pondering trapunto designs, and I'm cutting true diamonds. By the time it's done, I will have mastered Y-seams.

 

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Fair isle fun

 I don't see this kind of quilt every day. It looks like a fair isle sweater! And I'm a big fan of red and white. It came during the winter, which was also a creative dry spell for me. I had no ideas. I put straight, radiating lines and continuous curves in the white fabric and came to a screeching halt. My client, Betty, wanted the quilting to look like intricate knitting and she suggested various interwoven straight-line designs, which I rejected. (I have a few achilles' heels.) Finally, she ran across the idea of creating "ribbing" at the top and bottom by stitching lines 3/8" apart and doing tiny, dimensional quilting in between every other row. See the detail shot, below.


 


In between some of the large snowflake blocks, I quilted little snowflakes with white heavy decorative thread.

I sprinkled snowflakes around either side of the quilt in various sizes. Some are partials. I used some stencils, which I marked with chalk. For the rest, I used cookie cutters, and I freehanded some based on crochet patterns. I've been collecting snowflakes for some time now.



For the rest of the quilt, I still had no ideas. But when a quilt doesn't talk to me, that means it wants straight lines. I know, it's weird, but there you are. I follow my intuition. I learned early on to go with the first idea that pops into my head -- or else. When I didn't, I always had a lot of ripping to do. And when no idea sprang forth, straight lines were the way to go. Now, I'll do almost anything to keep from crosshatching, but that seemed to fit here. It took forever, there were a zillion stops and starts, but it looks wonderful, front and back. And if custom quilting was ever worth it, it was in this quilt.