the baby top becomes a quilt

After staring at it for several days debating about backing fabrics, I finally decided on a cheerful bumble bee flannel.

I decided to try out a new batting; this one is an 80%/20% cotton/polyester batting that I picked up a while ago at JoAnn's. Normally I'm a fiber snob, with both knitting and quilting, and prefer natural fibers to synthetics almost all the time, but the 80/20 blend seems so popular with some folks that I thought I'd give it a try. I had a crib-sized batting on hand, and it was just big enough. For once my backing fabric was actually larger than my top by at least an inch or two on all sides (just barely big enough), and I had a little problem when my basting pins only went to the edge of the quilt top. I should have pinned the batting and back together, because at one point the back folded over and I quilted it that way.
Fortunately I noticed not too far along. It still meant some quality time with the seam ripper, but not nearly as long as it would have taken if I hadn't noticed fairly quickly.
I also did something new by using a loop-de-loop and star quilting pattern, with a pink Gutterman thread on top and yellow thread in the bobbin. I like the effect! It was also a good choice, since the quilting took a lot more thread than I anticipated and I used at least 2.5 of the 3 spools of pink thread I bought for this quilt. I also thought the yellow would go better with the bees on the back. I just hope the baby likes it!

Now I just have to attach the binding and it'll be ready to send to a new baby!
~Phosphorelated

quilting the purple zig-zag quilt!

My poor zig-zag quilt has been languishing lately. I bought several yards of a deep purple print for the backing, and then one day while working on my hexagons found one made from this purple and green print, and I realized it would be an even better backing than the one I bought. I had to piece it together a bit, but I figure that's no problem. So, I got a quilt sandwich together! The batting is a crib-sized White & Warm, and it was just barely big enough.
After a lot of mental back-and-forth about the quilting pattern, I decided to go with a loop-de-loop pattern to contrast with the sharp angles of the piecing.
I used a violet-colored 100% cotton thread from Connecting Threads, and I really like the effect. Unfortunately, I went a little too fast with the free-motion quilting, and in places the stitch length is longer than I'd really like, but I think it'll do. On the up side, I got all the quilting done in one day!

Progress feels good. Cheers!
~Phosphorelated

still quilting!

Happy Labor Day, to those of you who celebrate it (and those of you who don't)! I was at work fora while this morning, but when I finished things up there, I came home and back in front of the sewing machine. Here's how the quilt is looking this evening.It's overcast and has been raining a bit today, so the light isn't great, but I wanted to see the quilt outside.
I'm really liking it, which is good, because I'm not nearly done yet!
Here are some close-ups of the quilting. I now have 2.5 of the 5 rows of blocks quilted, but so far I've been concentrating on the ends. The middle is a lot harder to get through the machine; I've come up with a system of rolling the edges tightly and fastening with binder clips to help squeeze things through the throat of the machine.
It's not exactly easy in places, and it's certainly not fast, but I like the results! I hope you do, too!

Cheers,
~Phosphorelated

today's menu: ratatouille and a quilt sandwich!

This morning, Brad was up before the sun smoking some brisket.Me, I am not that ambitious (though I certainly do enjoy eating the brisket someone else has spent 14 hours cooking!). I took some herbs from the garden,
some beautiful veggies from the farmer's market,and made ratatouille (yum)!That took most of my morning. We had a lovely lunch off the grill (thanks, Brad!), and then I got to work on the quilt. I pieced the back, then remembered I'd meant to add a contrasting stripe on either side of the blocks. Oops.
But I thought it looked OK, and when I measured, it was just big enough. So I flipped it over
and built a quilt sandwich!
I added lots of pins,
and lots of bobbins of cheerful yellow thread (it's Essential thread from Connecting Threads, in Butter)
and was ready to quilt! I spent a lot of hours (at least 4 or 5) doing organic line quilting. (You can find nice instructions and an example of this technique here, thanks to Jacquie of Tallgrass Prairie Studio, another quilt blog I greatly enjoy.)
I'm quilting every 1/4 - 3/4", widthwise. After quilting all afternoon (and OK, the whole evening, too...maybe more like 6+ hours in total) I have gotten some quilting in each of the blocks to help stabilize the sandwich, and have finished the quilting on the first row of blocks. One down, four to go! It's going to take a while, but I really like the resulting texture, so it's worth it.

Onwards!
~Phosphorelated

HST adventure, continued

I'm having lots of fun with my rainbow quilt! Here are the HST blocks I have assembled so far; they will be 8" square when they're all sewn together:
I have some more that are most of the way assembled; one seam left to go!
I think when they all go together in the quilt top, I'll have a pretty good mix of colors. Nice and rainbow-y, which is the mood I'm in right now! You can see that I've decided to try an "everything but purple" color scheme. Unusual for me, since purple is a color that really speaks to me, but I started with bright pinks, greens, yellow and orange, and decided to try one of these "leave one color out" color schemes I've read about but never tried. We'll see how it goes! My triangle sewing leaves something to be desired, but I think I'm getting better.

I really hope to get some more blocks assembled this weekend!
~Phosphorelated

Rainbow HST Quilt

I've been really enjoying Red Pepper Quilt's blog lately, and I recently felt inspired by the HST (half-square triangle) Overload quilt. I enjoy the shapes and the bright rainbow colors are really appealing to me right now. You can see from my pile of scraps the sort of bright, sunny colors I'm going for. I cut a bunch of 5" squares (pairs of each color, plus extras to use on other quilts):
I paired up light and dark colors, marked a diagonal on the light-colored square, and sewed a seam 1.4" to each side of the diagonal line. Here they are, ready to be ironed; you can tell I still haven't quite mastered the art of sewing an even seam on the bias (diagonal to the grain of the fabric), as they're a bit wrinkly:
Then I cut them apart on the marked line, like so:
Which gives two pairs of triangles sewn together!
When you unfold them, you get half-square triangles!
I originally tried just trimming off the triangular bits from the seams,
but in the end I had to trim them down to 4.5" squares. Trimming about 1/8" allowed me to square them up again, as my imperfect sewing & ironing meant they weren't all quite...quite. Also, 4.5" squares simplify the math from here on out!
I can't wait to assemble them and see what it'll be like!
~Phosphorelated

my two cents on modern quilting and design process

Today I stumbled upon an interesting conversation going around the blogosphere about what "modern quilting" is, and about sharing design process more in our blogs. Specifically, I've been thinking about R0ssie's post on mutant quilting, in part in response to Naptime Quilter's post "throwback - a digression," and R0ssie's process pledge.

What does it mean to be a quilter? A "modern" quilter? What route did you take into quilting?

Marit brought up cooking, and that really resonated with me. I think the fiber arts, like cooking, can be approached in a variety of ways. With cooking, you can learn in the French tradition, Julia Child style, in a strict classroom with a fussy guy yelling at you to cut your veggies precisely in various shapes whose acceptable dimensions are defined down to the millimeter, and you can learn precisely how to make each of the "mother sauces" from which all other sauces are made. Or you can travel the world (in person, or via books, restaurants, or the internet) and absorb the traditional cooking methods and flavors of Morocco, Greece, Russia, Spain and Peru. You can be an avid coupon cutter, priding yourself on getting $50 worth of groceries for $5.23, and eat whatever it is that is on sale. You can learn a set of techniques, and then pull stuff out of the cupboard and throw it together using those techniques. You can cook strictly from recipes, or be inspired by recipes, finding flavor combinations and cooking methods, or simply modifying dishes to suit.

I think knitting and quilting are very similar: you can follow a pattern, using a prescribed yarn or fabric collection, for a pre-determined outcome. You can substitute your own "ingredients" into a traditional or commercial pattern. You can draw inspiration from "recipes" that "sound good" (patterns that look intriguing, blog posts that get your creative juices flowing, books, museum exhibits, Flickr, etc). Or you can start with a familiar "flavor" made up of a favorite color combination, and try a new technique! The permutations are endless.

What does this have to do with what "modern quilting" is or sharing the quilting process? For me, it's all about approach, and how that influences the process and outcome. There was some discussion of taxonomy, and how to classify different sorts of quilts, for example a quilt with lots of white and bright colors. I think there's more to it than that, though; it's not just about what colors and lines are in the quilt, but also how the quilt came into being. Did the quilter see a quilt she/he loved on someone's blog, buy the pattern, and use the recommended fabrics? Or did the quilter putz around with a stack of fabrics, do some improvisational piecing, and play around on the design wall? Or maybe she saw a great photograph someplace, loved the color combination, and sat down with a sketchpad to capture the "feel" or palette of the photo in a quilt. Any of these processes could give rise to a quilt with lots of white and bright colors, but I think that even if you had three identical quilts made via these three routes, each would be a different kind of quilting. Does that make each of the quilts taxonomically distinct, or are is it only the quilters (and their creative processes) that are different?

I don't know.

What I do know is that a Chef, a home cook, my next-door neighbor and a foodie can each make me dinner. And, different as they will be, I will enjoy them all.
~Phosphorelated

I've got quilting on my mind

I've been thinking about quilting patterns a lot lately; not patchwork patterns, for the quilt top, but patterns for the actual lines of thread that hold the layers of the quilt together. I've decided that I really like the crinkly look that comes from lots of quilting, like in my disappearing nine-patch, but I want to do something beyond the stippling I used on that quilt.

As a child, I used to make drawings by starting with a couple of long, swooping lines, and then turning them into an animal, or landscape, or just a geometrical design. Why not start a quilting pattern the same way? Like this:So, I decided to move to the white board and play! (Please forgive the glare.)
After putting in a few big, broad lines, you could echo those lines to fill in the whole quilt.
Starting with a few simple lines would serve a double purpose, too; not only could you give the quilting pattern an outline, but it would be like basting the quilt, getting the layers connected broadly across the whole "quilt sandwich." Here's an example of starting with just two lines:
Or three:
The topmost line didn't work for me once I started filling in; I took it out, and ended up with this. You could give the quilt a lot of movement and directionality with the quilting pattern!
I decided to see what this sort of quilting pattern (shown in black) might look like when put on top of a simple, geometric quilt top, reminiscent of a simple strip-pieced rectangle-based patchwork pattern (shown in green).
You could make a very simple patchwork pattern incredibly dynamic! I like the contrast between the straight horizontal and vertical lines of the "quilt top" and the more fluid, organic lines of the "quilting."
I think I may have to try to put together some small, simple quilt tops this weekend so I have some canvasses to play with. Maybe I'll do some small baby or lap quilts using bold color combinations, about which I'm curious but haven't yet tried: yellow and blue, a watermelon pink-and-green, or simple black and white. So many ideas, so little time...
~Phosphorelated

a cozy nest of hexagons

Some days at work are long and frustrating (big surprise, eh?). But it makes me happy and relaxed to come home, sit in my armchair next to my sweetie, and be surrounded by a project I can work on with my hands. Here's what's surrounding me today. On my left is a partially-assembled green hexagon-of-hexagons; on the right I have stacks of 2.5" squares of fabric
and all the tools I need to make more little hexagons.
It's a nice system; even though I keep making progress on assembling big hexagons from the little hexagons (lovely warm toes of my slippers shown for scale),My tupperware of little hexagons never gets any emptier! The color selection is slightly different from last time; I've been working on expanding the range of hues. I realized I needed more colors at the less and more saturated ends of the scale, so I'm going for some pale and dark values, instead of just medium values. Well, that's the goal, anyway. It's fun. What are you doing to relax?
~Phosphorelated

"directionally correct"

I was a virtuous grad student and went to work this morning to start some new experiments. It means next week is going to be incredibly busy, but it'll help things move forward faster. OK, that wasn't really such a virtuous thing to do, it's what a grad student should do, but both my weekend and next week would have been easier if I hadn't, so when I got home I decided to reward myself for doing the right thing by doing the fun thing for a while:As a result, I've made progress on my projects at work and my fun projects at home! These are two sets of aqua and white nine-patch blocks I started working on one night ages ago. The picture above shows 16 squares that will have sashing in between the blocks; the 25 blocks below, with a different blue fabric but the same white, will be sewn directly to each other, without white space in between. As Brad would say, since he works in industry these days, everything is "directionally correct." Things feel like they're going veeeeeeeeeeery slooooooooooowly, but they are moving forward.
~Phosphorelated