Paintbox Quilt

This has been a nearly year-long project. I started piecing it in January or February. There were some problems, as the pattern (in Quilty magazine) had some errors in the cutting instructions. Fortunately, I had only cut and pieced the first two rows when I discovered that they didn't line up and I had enough extra fabric to re-cut the problem pieces. It was a bit of a pain ripping out one whole row, but I persevered. Then the top sat around until early fall, when I found some good backing fabric at a local store and figured out how to quilt it. Then the binding didn't get finished until the week before Thanksgiving.

I used Marcia Derse fabrics for the large squares, as I had a set of quarter yards of her Modern Textures line. I think that's what it was called; it's no longer available. The orange and turquoise connecting strips are from In the Beginning's Modern Solids and the white and gray are Kaufman Kona solids.

It's quilted with watery lines in the white background, and arches and wishbones in the colored sections. The arches have a lot of wobbles, but from a distance it still looks pretty good.

Go Hawks!

If you're anywhere in the Seattle area, you can't miss the flags and banners for the Seahawks, 12th Man etc. I started to play with designs to make my own Seahawks quilt during last season's playoff, and adapted an eagle design I had sketched from a magazine photo over 30 years ago. The original seemed hard to piece as well as clunky in areas, so I kept refining it to make it both simple to make and graphically effective. It now has 2 squares that take some fussing, 1 square made of quarter-square triangles, and everything else is half-square triangles, squares and rectangles.  The borders are simple too, to look both modern and sporty.

It's quilted heavily, using some designs in Angela Walters' latest book. After washing and drying, it crinkled up a lot and should probably be blocked, but I couldn't wait to hang it up!

Linking to Finish it Up Friday.

Baby Stuff

Although I already made one quilt for Emily and Seb's expected little one, it was a little on the large and loud side, especially when I learned that they preferred a color scheme of navy and gray. I played with a few ideas, but decided to keep it really simple and have solid navy on one side and solid gray on the other. Quilted with a variegated King Tut thread on the navy side and a coordinating So Fine on the gray, this allowed me to practice some free motion quilting without regard to seam lines. I used In the Beginning's Modern Solids line in Indigo and Lead. This cross-weave fabric is much softer than other solid fabrics I've used, and combined with a thin, 100% cotton batt, made a really nice crinkly baby quilt.

I also made 2 baby slings with fabric that I hand-dyed. The first is an organic cotton twill which is very soft and cozy, but was perhaps a little too thick for pleating and running through the rings.

The second is an Essex linen/cotton blend. I know this fabric is popular with a lot of modern quilters, but I've never used it before. I may have to dye more and use it for a quilt in the future.

Woven Baby Quilt

This is for Emily's baby, due in September/October. My sister's first grandbaby! It only looks a little woven, it is really just pieced squares and rectangles. I have to confess, I planned to make the whole quilt a checkerboard of bright scraps and solid yellows, but I miscalculated on the number of squares to cut and didn't realize it until I was more than half-way through the piecing. At that point, I didn't want to go back and find more scraps to cut, so I added alternating strips on both sides. I think it actually came out more interesting this way.

The back is pieced from a cheerful sunflower print and a stripe that just happened to coordinate. 

Linking to Finish It Up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts.

Norsk Quilt

In high school, middle sister Jill spent a summer in Norway as an AFS exchange student. A couple of years later, the older daughter from the family she lived with came and lived with our family for a year as an unofficial exchange student. Aud has always kept in touch and still calls my mom for Mother's Day and on other occasions. Aud became a grandmother last year and I finally got around to making a baby quilt. Red, white and blue are not only USA colors, but of course also the colors of the Norwegian flag.

The strips are alternately 3 inches and 1 1/2 inches wide, but I played with the color proportion and placement.

It's quilted in variegated red, white and blue thread, in rows of different designs that run perpendicular to the pieced strips. I just didn't want to be locked into following the seams.

I liked how the thread isn't noticeable from a distance, but the variegation gives a lot of interest close  up.

The back is pretty wild compared to the front, and the fish fabric may seem an odd choice. But the family name is Koi...

Linking up to Finish it up Friday, where there is lots to see and inspire. It's also such a good motivation to get things done, and blogged. 

Fishy Quilt

"One fish, two fish; red fish, blue fish" is what I think of when I look at this quilt. The cartoon-y fish, both large and small, make me smile. The hammock comes in handy once again for displaying smaller quilts, although it was so bright and sunny I couldn't see what was on the camera screen.

Some close-ups of the quilting.

And part of the back.

This is for my good friend Sudha's first grandchild. 

One from the UFO pile

This quilt has been hanging around for 10 or more years, waiting for a decision on how to finish it off. The feathered star in the middle was a challenge to piece; the little triangles are only an inch and that is really small for me! It has several 'genuine Java' batiks as well as fabrics from lines and even companies long gone (Rose & Hubble). It's been done out to the blue borders for most of those years, but I couldn't decide what to do after that. I played with simple stars or delectable mountains blocks, but nothing felt quite right. Digging it out again this year, I laid it against this Jason Yenter print and it seemed perfect. The colors, the complexity of the print seemed to tie it all together.

Not the oldest item on my UFO list, but it was up there. And now it's done!

Linking to Finish It Up Friday. 

Bound at last

I've been getting things quilted, but procrastinating on the binding. Now I finally have something finished to show. I had quite a stack of September Light fabrics, since falling for them when they first showed up in stores. But I'd only made this and it wasn't entirely from that line, so I wanted to do something more with them. And I also had been wanting a bed-size quilt with a wool batt since hearing that was more comfortable to sleep under. I thought a relatively simple strip quilt would let the fabrics shine.

Each color fabric was quilted in matching thread. Each size of strip was quilted in its own design, with feathers in the olive ombre where they would show the best. 

Here's one corner of the back. I had over 6 yards of this fabric in my stash for over 20 years. I rarely use red, but knew this would make a great back some day. 

Linking to Crazy Mom Quilts.

Modern Landscape

Late last fall, I purchased the book Modern Color, by Kim Eichler-Messmer. It is a guide to dyeing fabric, especially in planned gradations, and then using them in quilts. I had already completed dyeing for the season by the time the book came out, but I was interested to read about her techniques and particularly interested to see how she used the hand-dyed fabrics. A number of the projects were fairly traditional, but near the back of the book, she had an abstract landscape quilt that caught my eye. And there were several more in the gallery section. I thought this would be a great project to start using my fabrics. I had a few gradations where I had loosely tried for dark and medium values, and I lined up different colors to suggest a landscape: sky, horizon, green fields, turquoise lake, brown fields.

It's hard for my camera to capture some of the subtle color changes, but I'm happy with it. It's quilted simply with mostly wavy lines, breaking occasionally into swirls, or waves, or grassy shapes. I used 12 different threads on the top, trying to match or complement each color area.

A February Finish

A bit of a lull after the drive to finish things for 2013. I was working on this and another quilt during January, but didn't get it all the way done until last weekend. It was ready to quilt between Christmas and New Year's, but I couldn't decide how the quilting should go.

The piecing could hardly be simpler: a dark blue in the middle, a medium blue on both ends, and separated by black and white bands. They could be pieced, but are actually a black and white diamond print I had in my stash, bordered by solid black.

In the lighter blue, I quilted a long feather, echoed it a few times, and then did sets of straight (more or less) lines. In the darker blue, there are two long feathers with lots of echoing. It's bound in green, because I was starting the binding on Super Bowl weekend (go Hawks!).