Purple WIP Star Quilt

Holy cow, really? Fourteen quilts begun? Am I mad?

I'm one of those people who is sure good at beginning things, but when it comes to finishing them, not so much.

Well, you know, it's not that I'm lazy (not necessarily, anyway). It's that there are a couple disadvantages I'm working against.

The first is that none of my immediate family gives a flying capital F about quilts, and I don't have any friends who particularly do either, so I am making these quilts pretty much for myself only. The other part of it is that my bed, upon which I would put said quilts, since, as I have remarked in an earlier post, I am an old-fashioned gal and like my quilts to be, well, used and stuff, is king-sized. Of course.

So it's none of these wimpy 60 x 45 inch quilts for me, oh no. My quilts, if they're to look any good at all on my bed have to measure in the triple digits inch-wise.

So I don't know whether all of that is reason, justification, or excuse, but hey. One must obey the Muse. Still, I'd like to get something done to put on my bed, you know? So I thought I'd do some updates now and then as to what I've got going.

This is one I started last month, because I wanted something to go on my bed for the summertime. It was meant to be all in light airy colors, but somewhere in there it went for the dark and rich, which, honestly, is kind of my thing. I'm not a fan of white. Or beige, for that matter.

So here are the fifteen blocks I've got so far of a Northern Star quilt in purples, blacks and the occasional brown. The blocks are about eight inches across and I figure I'll need 132 of them, twelve by eleven. Oh, and as an old-fashioned gal I'm not really a fan of wide borders, either, so I like my quilts with the blocks all the way to the edge. I mean, when it comes to the pure theory of things. We'll see if I change my mind when it comes to practice.



So, inspired by that progress bar with the yo-yos (and I'm up to 41 now), I thought I'd keep track of this quilt with one also. I like watching it go up, you know? So, fifteen blocks out of one hundred and thirty two is 11.4%. Not as much as I would have liked, but still a good chunk.

UFO Roundup

I feel like I should have a little graphic of a flying saucer caught in a lasso to go with that title.

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.

Mandala Quilt

Here's an idea I had a little while ago. One of the things I've been making for a while now are photo mandalas. Basically you take a photograph of something, open it up in Photoshop, then take a pie-shaped slice of it, which you then flip, merge down, copy, paste, turn, &c., until you have a mandala, the number of segments depending on the angle of the original pie slice. To wit:

(From an original photo of autumn sumac leaves and berries.)

Mandalas, kaleidoscope patterns, quilt blocks... hmmm, all very similar, aren't they?

So I thought I'd design some blocks with this mandala method.

This wasn't real high-tech, mind you; pretty much I just scribbled for a while on the 45° pie template in Photoshop until I got something, or rather, several somethings, I liked. So these are the 'quilt blocks' I eventually assembled together:

Now interpreting that out to quilt blocks is a little trickier than I thought, but I managed to get one done. From this sketch

I made

I've changed the colors around, since I'm making it in shades of green, with autumnal sort of accents in red, orange and yellow. Sort of the old M&M color scheme, but with an emphasis on the green (Eddie van Halen would be proud). The block is fifteen inches square, and sewn by hand.

Red Pinwheel Quilt

Well here's the first of my works in progress, and, these things being what they are, it's the one I've started most recently.

It's the makings of a pinwheel quilt, done in red and white prints, meaning red and white only, one red printed on a white, not off-white, background. Of course, being as they are all different brands of cloth, the reds are all a little different, which I can't decide if I like or don't like. Here they all are so far, laid out edge to edge.



Why who's this? That looks like a cat, one Mad Maudlin the familiar. Surprised, aren't you? I know I sure wasn't.



I don't know how they know.