LizQ3 – Fun with Colour

I’m loving making this because I really have little idea what it will be like when it’s finished other than very bright and it’s great to use all of these fun fabrics I’ve been adding to my stash over the last few years and waiting for the right time to use them. This quilt has now become a bit of a challenge to use more and more bright fabrics but in a way that works well. I particularly like the border strip with the sewing notions on it – it pulls all the current elements of the design together really well, and starts to balance out those naughty shoe-fly blocks.

I had a ball last weekend playing with my collection of bright coloured fabrics from my stash. The LizQ has now developed from making a quilt for a sewing room, to being a challenge to use as many bright fabrics in one quilt as I can. How did this happen??

Displacement was discovered by accident, so were post-it notes, and I’m now adding the LizQuilt to the list of happy accidents. I started the quilt with my shoe-fly blocks (see the entry The Liz Quilt – A Random Project (LizQ1)), and when I added them to the panel blocks I created, I thought they overpowered the picture panels which wasn’t the effect I wanted, as the picture below shows.

So I kept adding borders to both balance the shoe-fly blocks and to increase the size of the quilt (it’s still not big enough to be comfy yet – but there’ll be more on what I’ll do about that in the next post or so). And this is where I’ve pieced it to so far.

While the sewing notions strip looks good (I think) it was fiddly to piece because I had to try to match the pattern. I think I’ll write some notes for the website in the next few weeks (http://sites.google.com/site/bertcollections/) to save some of the traumas with this – I spent a long time getting the first join in the pattern done, and then still wasn’t happy with the result. I pinned it to my design wall with the centre panel and thought to myself “why didn’t I just do it this way”. That had a couple of effects – the second join to me about fifteen minutes instead of an hour, and the join was so much neater that I unpicked the first one I’d done differently and re-did the whole thing. In hindsight I probably should have consulted my books and magazines first but I was on a roll and having fun so it didn’t really matter.

The LizQ is now about the standard width of a fabric so the pieces I have not big enough for the next border, so later this week I’m off to my favourite store in Canberra to get some extra bright fabric to help me complete another couple of borders for the quilt top.

So, the LizQ is proving to be lots of fun, and I hope your projects are keeping you amused too.
Bert.

PS: I’m still working on the Time for Tea Quilt (T4T) in the background as well – I’ll post an update on that once I’ve got the ideas clearer and can share them with you.

LizQ2 – Fun with Piecing

I'm having a fun weekend, switching between building outdoor tables from recycled wood in the garage, to piecing the Liz Quilt inside. The LizQ is proving good fun, as for once I don't have strong concept of what I want the finished product to look like, so I'm just adding a section at a time and making it up as I go along. Yesterday that included managing to put two strips on upside down, unpicking the seams, and resewing them, but I was in a good mood, and Mr Mark was sharing the sewing room with me so that made it alright.

Today I've added a thin blue border to the top and bottom of the centre panel, and then I'm adding a thicker patterned border to that. The patterned border needed some tricky joining of the patterns, which I fiddled with on the first section for an hour or more to get it not quite right… then went I to do the second section I thought, oh, why didn't I just do it this way – and had it done in a quarter of the time. Needless to say the iron, stick and sew method I used the second time proved much easier and gave a far superior result, so I'll put the instructions for how to do this on the techniques section of my website so that you and I can both do this the fun and easy way next time around.

Back to do some more quilting and sawing.

Bert

The Liz Quilt (LizQ) – A Random Project

I had a crappy week at work last week, on the weekend I had the flu , and I was feelin’ blue. So instead of writing a country and western song, I decided to brighten up my Saturday with some seriously bright fabrics and put together the initial blocks for a project I’ve been thinking about for a while. So here’s the story…

Mr Mark forced me to buy a ‘Quilter’s Quips’ panel at a quilt shop when we were on holidays last year. The panel has pictures of a quilter with funny quotes about quilters and quilting on it, and its very colourful. So, it’s the perfect starter for a quilt for a quilter, whose sewing room gets quite cold on winter afternoons. I thought about the fabrics I had and the sewing I’d done before, and I remembered that the first piece of patchwork I ever did was making a cushion for my chair at school when I was all of eight or nine years old. Amazingly, I remembered that the design was called ‘shoe-fly’ (yes, it’s probably supposed to be ‘shoo-fly’ but I remember it as shoe so that’s the way I’ve written it) and was essentially a nine patch block with half-square triangles in each corner. I called my Mum to confer about the design, and she confirmed that this matched her memory of the cushion and that it was red and blue. Mum also mentioned some UFOs she had that she and my grandmothers had started when I was small, so I suspect these may now get handed down for me to finish one of these years as well ;-).

Anyway, so I drew up my shoe-fly design, found some bright pink and turquoise fabric that matched the panel and was still close enough to red and blue. I then remembered that my cushion had a print in the corner triangles, I’m not sure what it was though. So, I dug out a white fabric with small brightly coloured buttons on it and put that on the corners, and put strips of it on each panel section so the blocks are all 9” square when they’re finished.

My next challenge is the borders and balancing the strength of colour in the shoe-fly blocks, but that’ll be the next installment.
Have a great week.
Bert