Bars and Stripes...Finished!

This quilt is finished and now at work keeping me warm at night on my bed!

Many times I have made a throw quilt by quilting a pieced top onto polar fleece. It is so easy and I love the fuzzy-on-one-side, cool-and-smooth-on-the-other-side nature of these quilts. I had never tried it with a full sized bed quilt before, though, so I used a microfleece blanket (thinner than polar fleece) from my local BiMart in Washougal. This worked out well indeed.

Basting was easy--I just used safety pins. Quilting was easy--just straight lines along the bar panels. Plus the quilt "sandwich's" minimal bulk allowed me to work this very large quilt through my Juki with no wrestling matches.

Maybe I should call this an Open Faced Quilt Sandwich!

Anyway, as to the finishing...wait til you see how quick that was.
All in all, as Borat would say, this was a "Great Success!"

First though, have a look at Bars and Stripes' predecessors....

This was actually my second ever crazy quilt, made in 1999. It is all cotton (I didn't have anything but in those days) with cotton batting and backing, and you can still see the influence of all the strip piecing I was doing then in these blocks. I free-motion spiral-quilted it for a neighbor's daughter, who was going off to college.
The bars are actually made of blocks.

This quilt also alternates bars of plain fabric with crazy pieced ones. This time some of the CQ bars are composed of blocks, and others are long pieced bars on a foundation.
This one, made of all silk, was quilted in the ditch between the blocks and along the bars, but not around the individual pieces. My sister-in-law has it.

For my quilt, I wanted to keep the quilting minimal, but have it show just a little bit. Plus I wanted to experiment with using #8 perle silk as my quilting thread.

As long as I went slowly, my Juki could handle the heavy thread just fine. I used a size 110 Jeans needle, a free machine foot, and the feed dogs UP.

One of those recessed sewing machine tables would have been nice, but we make do!
In this picture you can see I switched machines to apply that lace (using a zigzag, which my Juki doesn't have). I had put the quilt on the bed and decided that a little more lace needed to be on there.
Quilts don't live their lives on design walls, after all. Seeing it in situ showed me what adjustments I needed to make.

Even though I love my Bias Tape Maker from Simplicity, I still didn't feel like making a traditional binding for this large quilt, which is somewhere between a Queen and a King in size.
Then the very forgiving nature of the microfleece gave me an idea.....

It doesn't fray.
Plus, there was no exposed batting edge that needed covering--so no binding was required at all. I just had to cover the edge of the quilt top, really. So I sewed on rick rack! This attached the two layers to each other around the perimeter of the quilt as well.

First I zigzagged down the center of the rick rack with a narrow clear thread.
Then I made a second line of stitching, this time using just the straight stitch on my machine, to secure the tops of the V's in the rickrack to the quilt top.
It was the easiest "binding" I ever made, and I love the way it looks on the bed.

It is just so cozy, draped over a down comforter.
I still need to make some pillows, including the crumb-pieced one from earlier this fall.

But right now I want to get back to Meg's Home Portrait....

Bars and Stripes...Day 7

Thanks for all your input on the machine quilting/hand embellishment question for this quilt. Machine quilting was the runaway winner, but the idea of adding a little handwork afterward was also suggested and I like the sound of that very much...so that is what I will (eventually) do.

Here's a little series of photos that show another piecing strategy I used along the way.
If I have an area where I know I want to include certain fabrics in a particular scale of shapes (that makes sense, right?), I will lay them all out puzzle-like first, then figure out how to sew them all together.

This is the bottom of the right side dark bar. I wanted to use these farics to mimic the opposite corner in the quilt, the top of the left side bar. (It's a compositional thing.) So I freeform cut out all the pieces, making sure to oversize them to account for seam allowances, and laid them out over the muslin foundation.


It was a fairly logical progression, sewing them together....

...making bigger and bigger "chunks". You'll notice I did have to add that pink shape on the left, as I had not left enough room for seam allowances after all!

Sorry about the difference in lighting here.
I also added that tan cotton on the left, as the maroon shape above it was too large. (Yes, I just slapped it over the maroon--did not rip out or cut anything....!)

And here is everthing pinned up on the wall together, as of this morning.

I am really quite pleased with it!
I may tweak a few things after this sets awhile, though. Some of that pink is pretty bright.

Now I have to spend some hours restoring sanity to my sewing room...and then I am going to wait to sew this together until some ribbon arrives from my friend Kerri, who kindly offered to send some that she thought would be good to help edge the bars.
So this project will sit for a week or so...and I have a little traveling to do in the meantime.

But I do hope to play with all the little shards of fabric that piled up in the process of piecing this quilt before I leave, crumb piecing them together for a matching pillow top. Hope to post that in a few days...

Bars and Stripes...Days 3 and 4

After finishing the two inner "light colored" bars, I pieced the outer one that goes on the left. This, after I folded up most of the lighter fabrics and got them out of the way, and selected out the darker ones.

Here they are all piled up on my sewing tale. You can see I have two ironing surfaces, one to the left and one to the right of my sewing machine (the one to the left is that small square below the cutting mat.) I sew standing up too....this arrangement is the most efficient for me. The muslin foundation for the bar is just to the left of the sewing machine.

As I piece along, sometimes I know what fabric I want, but I don't know the shape.

So I'll sew on a chunk.....

....flip it and press it....

...and then trim it to size.

Every once in awhile I pin the bar up on the design wall to see how things are looking...

..and decided that the center of this flower was too light and stood out too much, so I knocked it back with a fabric marker. Then back up it goes so I can check again...

It was better!

I'm standing on a very sturdy step ladder, by the way.

My son Max made it in 9th grade shop class. I use it every day and it makes me think of him!
My other son is often just on the other side of the design wall...

Chad is here watching and listening to a YouTube cover of the song "Waterfall" which is really, really good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzTmoqkCueY
(Better on headphones, though.) I love it when Chad plays "DJ" while I am working...

So now I have three bars pieced and will work on the fourth one today.

I like the darker value on the outside! *whew!*

I'm playing around a bit with the "Stripes" sections and know that those have quite a bit of evolution ahead of them.

My big question is whether to embellish this at all or just quilt it. Hand stitching would look so nice and I would love doing it, and yet I might get over my phobia of machine quilting if I just went for that on this project...decisions, decisions...

Bars and Stripes...Day 2

Made some good progress getting this project rolling! One and a third bars are done being pieced.

I'm going to have to rearrange things in here to free up the full extent of the design wall. I haven't needed it this big since my last bed quilt, which I made in about 2003... ;-)

This shows the width of it...

..and this shows the length. The pieced bars are 11" wide; their length is about 88".

Here's a closer look. You can see I've pinned up some lace to act as a border on the plain fabric. I honestly don't know what will actually be there in the end, but probably some combination of lace and velvet ribbon. The color choices of these have the potential to really spark things up.

As do the second set of bars. Their colors will be deeper in value and a bit richer in hue than the inner bars. I wonder if that will be good...got to keep going to find out!

New Project: "Bars and Stripes"

You know how it is...deep down you have a quilt forming that finally has to come out and see the light of day.
I've been thinking a lot about cottons, ever since I made that class sample last spring. I love cottons!

So I decided to make an actual bed quilt out of cotton (mostly; a few silks just have to sneak in there) in a combination of crazy and sane quilting techniques. There will be bars of crazy piecing alternated with bars of striped cotton fabric which will no doubt end with applique on them.

I got started today.....

As always, I begin with the "blanks" of foundation fabric on the design wall. Here they are placed between the striped fabric bars.
I'm not sure if I'll keep those striped fabrics or not...but I've been saving that Kaye England border print in the center for years and really do want to use it.

It is more or less determining the color scheme of the quilt (though gosh it looks washed up in this picture. The background is actually much more yellow.)

I pulled my fabrics and the scene below is the harbinger of the tornado that will soon be my sewing room.

Ahhh....I do love this part.

Then I just jumped in and started piecing. I'm thinking there will be lighter valued pieced bars in the center, darker toward either side. So I started with the softer, lighter colors.

I really do want to emphasize more of a flat surface in this quilt, in a departure from the 3-D work I've been doing for quite some time now. I don't know why! So I am keeping the texture in the fabrics to a minimum.
This will have very basic seam embroidery....

...and maybe even some machine quilting in the striped bar areas.
I have to psyche up for that though. You know how I feel about machine quilting. Yuck!
(I'll think about it tomorrow, at Tara.....)

But meanwhile I have some happy days of piecing ahead of me... ;-)