Jill's Quilt...The Pink Bandana Challenge

I don't know her, but I love her. She is Susan Elliott's friend Jill, whom you can read about here. Jill is undergoing treatment for breast cancer and she is my inspiration for the quilt I am making for the Cherish: Pink Bandana Quilt Challenge. (There is information for you to enter it too, here and here.)

I started this quilt for the demo at Fabric Depot last Friday, but thoughts of Jill, her courage, and her refusal to give up her happiness in the face of breast cancer totally inspired me all week-end as I roughed out the blocks and design for my quilt.

The quilt will measure 45" X 54". The blocks at the moment are all roughly 6 1/2" square.

And my sewing room looks like a tornado hit it!

We're all among friends here so I'm not too embarrassed....!

Here are a few close ups of the naked blocks...

I used the Go! cutter for the hearts, which made them very easy.

And I used one of Simplicity's little square rulers to lay out trim in those squares within the blocks.

Those flowers are from the Schmalberg's. (More about them in a couple of weeks.)

This is early days of course and there is a lot of tweaking to do in the composition, etc. The blocks will each get their due attention over the next few months...but the impulse was strong to do this NOW and I am glad it is ready for its next phase of development.
But for the present, there is some cleaning up to do.... ;-)

Linda's Bouquet

I had such an amazing trip to Dallas.

The board meeting of the Alliance for American Quilts was super productive and again, I am blown away by the caliber of the people who serve. We have PhD historians, archivists, captains of the quilt industry, writers, media personalities, corporate marketers, and yes, some quilters in our group and the mix is stimulating and so much fun.
We were hosted by Mark Dunn, president and CEO of Moda Fabrics, and were given a complete tour of his facility, where our meetings were held. This was Quilt Heaven, make no mistake about that! He treated us like royalty and is the nicest man you'd ever hope to meet. Barbara Brackman, quilt historian extraordinaire who does the reproduction fabrics for Moda, was on hand and gave us not only a brilliant lecture, but also a very entertaining and myth-busting interview for the Quilters Save Our Stories project, conducted by our board president, Meg Cox.

I took a zillion pictures and plan on posting more about my trip soon....

But it is funny, when I got home I was too wiped out to do that yet. All I wanted to do was make something! So that is what I have done, whipping up a little surprise for my lovely roommate Linda Pumphrey as a thank-you for being so good to me. So this post is about my experiment for her....

I started with my bag of scraps and my Go machine, with the two flower dies, the Rose of Sharon and the Round Flower.

I noticed when she was looking at my book that Linda liked the vintage handkerchiefs pictured on page 82. So I chose one of them for the background of my piece, here shown interfaced and next to my little Go shapes.

I used Glue Baste-It to collage my shapes into place on the handkerchief base. I was able to move them around after I had glued them too, with a slight tug to loosen them.

Once the shapes were laid out, I covered them with tulle (a technique Linda and I had talked about), and layered this top over batting and a thin silk backing. Then I quilted it, the tulle and stitching trapping and fixing my shapes in place.

I quilted around the rose shapes in the handkerchief too.

I added a few more shapes, beads, and some lace trim flowers on top of the tulle. All of this is an experiment, remember...I had no idea how it would all work!

Then I finished the edge in just the same way as for "Soil and Sky"....first zig zagging....

...then trimming, and then zig zagging twice more around the edge.

The back looks kind of cool...but do kindly remember, I have had almost no practice machine quilting in over 10 years!

And here it is finished, about 12" x 12".

It was very fast and spontaneous and a fun way to use those Go shapes. I think the concept has potential and would like to try it again....but I plan on using colored tulle next time instead of white (have to buy some) and piecing the background.
I'm going to have to break down and put more design thought into the quilting too... ;-)

It's good to be home, as there is lots to do between now and the Crazy Quilt Adventure next month!
But a big thank you again to Mark Dunn, the great people at Moda, Barbara Brackman, and my fine fellow board members for a fantastic meeting.

Go Crazy...The Buttons

Bobbi, Freda, and Esther all gave thoughtful comments on my last post about the buttons and whether they were going to work well with this quilt.
They got me thinking...as did my sister on the phone yesterday who said, "Hey, I like that new quilt on your blog that looks like a chain link fence!"

Isn't it funny how two hours lying awake in the earliest morning can go by so fast, thinking about design?

So I came into my sewing room this a.m. to take stock of things.
Here is how far I had come...

All I could see was the dang "fence"!
So I just had to try something else for the heck of it...

I used the blocks I've made as a border and I could have a crazy pieced center.
But no...didn't like that...
I had had a vision for this quilt, so maybe it would be good to see how it would actually look...so I laid out some blocks on the floor with some buttons.

Hmmm...yes, this was not at all bad. But it was missing something.
I got out my Go! cutter and made some circles.

These are insanely easy to make.

One flick of my wrist on the crank and here are two perfect velveteen circles. On my next try I cut three at once.
Some enterprising art quilter or stitcher could make great use of the "circle waste" too, like some people use sequin waste.
Anyway, I placed the circles into position and got this:

This I like.

I have said that I'm interested in that borderline between sane and crazy quilting, and working on this has given me a glimpse into this new territory.
I find that there is not the ongoing decision making as in crazy quilting, which all of us CQers love....once the decisions are made here, there is much repetition in the work ahead.
Plus, this will be an overall geometric (or abstract) pattern...there is no narrative content to this quilt at all, and I kind of miss that.

But this work is very calming and it will be gratifying to see the vision unfold, albeit VERY slowly. And this will be a very nice quilt to use when it is done.
But I think I am going to have to get another little project going on the side that is more freewheeling!

Go Crazy: A New Quilt for a New Year

Happy 2011!!!

I love making crazy quilts as you all know...but right now I am pretty intrigued by combining crazy quilting and "sane" quilting to make functional bed quilts. I am wanting to revisit my quilting roots...but a decade plus of CQ means I'll never be totally without embellishment and a wide array of fabric types.

This is a detail of a vintage quilt I saw in Houston that is fanning my current flame and has inspired my new project.

It just did me in. I had to make it. (I think it appealed to me for the same reason that the Vintage CQ did...)
So I went fabric shopping....

I had plaids on the brain.
All the blue thread and ribbon in the foreground will set off those warm colors nicely, is the hope.

I also knew this would be a great way to use my new Go! cutter from AccuQuilt.
I am loving this new tool!!! Have a look at the Go! in action....

The die is on the bottom, fabric to be cut in the middle, and the cutting mat is on the top. To operate you just crank the die through the rollers, it compresses the foam so that the die that is within the foam presses the fabric against the mat, and voila...

A perfect 6 1/2" square.
This pic was just for demo purposes. I've cut up to 6 layers at once.

Like this.
I have a die that cuts 3" strips that was perfect for the black diagonal shape on the block.

I cut a bunch of these out of different "black" fabrics.
Then I use a template to cut out the shapes from the strips.
Here is how that goes....

I made this template out of freezer paper ironed to cardboard stock. I draw around it with a white chalk pencil and then cut the shape out. I have to do them one at a time for accuracy, but I find I actually enjoy the work.

Then I use a second template, the actual size of the finished shape, this time out of just freezer paper. I use it as a guide for ironing under my edges. In this picture I am clipping those curves before ironing.

Ironing in progress...

Ironing complete and the freezer paper being pulled off...

And here is how it looks from the back.

When my freezer paper template gets too fuzzy to stick anymore, I just make a new one.

The black shape gets pinned onto the background square....

...and sewn on with a narrow zig zag in a clear monofilament thread.

In keeping with the original quilt, I am just using the herringbone stitch...
and instead of those fluffy white ties (which form a very important part of the design, I think), I'll be using buttons like this...

But this will be the very last step. I have a long way to go before then!

But it will be fun....
What a great way to start the new year. Hope yours is off to a happy beginning too! ;-)