It's been a while since I posted here; I've been doing lots of quilting, though, especially since I am participating in Art Every Day Month, which is sort of the artist's equivalent to National Novel Writing Month; Leah Piken Kolidas hosts it (and came up with the idea in the first place) on her blog, Creative Every Day. I've been putting most of those updates on my 'art' blog, though I ought really to post them here as well, since this is the one dedicated to quilting and crafting, eh?
I'm the kind of person who has a bunch of projects (in this case, quilts) going at once that I do a little on here and there. I'm not really the start-middle-finish sort. But I've got rather a lot of them in progress right now, so let's post some pictures!
Here's the red pinwheel quilt, with Maude the cat (she moved her head and so is kind of blurry). This is all sewn by hand.
I decided to put some red sashing in between the blocks, as it ties together the various reds and sort of smooths them out. The little squares in the corners are a lovely soft aqua, though they look kind of grey in the photo. I'm madly in love with red and aqua right now for some reason. This quilt is meant to go in my studio room as the cover for the futon and that room is painted a lovely soft robin's egg blue, and so far it looks really nice there. It's probably going to end up on the large side, and I've only sewn thirty-six of the squares; however, I deliberately chose to sew up the ones I had, even though I don't have all of them done. I know most people (and this is what I was taught in art school) do them all then rearrange and shuffle to see what's best; but I rather like the idea of not really knowing. Like if I run out of that red for the sashing, and have to find some more, I'm pretty sure it won't match exactly. That is okay; that is good, even, for it will make it more alive, I think. I like making things up as I go along. I find planning it all out in advance to be deadening to a piece of art.
I did a second block on that green mandala quilt, too (yes, it could stand to be ironed); here it is again with the cat, who was yawning. She's not a quilter, apparently. Though she certainly like to sit on them, hmmm. This one is also hand-sewn.
This is my bitty Trip Around The World quilt, also hand-sewn, since I don't know how I'd even get pieces so tiny through the machine without the feed dogs chomping them up. The blocks are two inches square, and even though the seam allowances are as teeny as I could manage, given the overall proportions of the thing they make it really thick and dense. I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to quilt it later. Perhaps I'll just tie it in the corners? It was started out with the intent of being a doll quilt, probably five squares by seven; I like it so much I'm toying with the (absolutely insane) idea of making it a human-sized quilt. Yeah, right.
And then there's the one I've been working on the most lately. It's a nine-patch or something like that in sort of Hallowe'en/November colors. The spaces in between the nine-patches will be an ash grey solid; I thought at first I would do them in grey prints, but, one, grey calico/quilting cloth proved nearly impossible to find, and two, grey is a surprisingly finicky color, so that all the slightly different shades didn't read as grey but as blue or green or whatever (especially given the yellows and oranges, which pushed it over into complementary colors). So imagine the plain squares as a neutral lightish grey.
It's going to be twelve by fifteen squares when done (set on the diagonal), with a narrow band of orange, a wide one of black (print, I think, not a solid), and then bound in either orange or yellow; I want to be able to use it on my own bed, which is king-sized. So with eight rows I am more than half done with the nine patches. This one I'm sewing by machine and boy does that go faster, though I don't like the look so much as hand-sewn. Though it is crisper, I'll give it that.
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