I like her use of stripes and plaids, and also her playful freeform quilting. It’s a joyous little book. 🙂
Carnival Beauty is the quilt on the cover, although that only shows part of it. Here’s a picture from inside the book that I took:
I like that there’s a kind of a gradient in her quilt top, with the bottom being darker than the top, although I didn’t manage to accomplish that myself.
I was very excited to realize how much I’ve finished on my quilt top. Here’s my progress so far:
You can see that I need three more little suns to finish the top in this layout. Looking at this photo, I have a feeling that I was going to move that top yellow sun up half a row so it didn’t line up with the pink one so well (they’re not sewn together yet) then add more little suns around it. (That would also explain why there are two more blue background squares cut.)
Clearly, I prefer my suns being whole. 🙂 I added rick-rack around a few of them (to make them more radiant) and that’s fun, too. In the project stash, there is also some trim with mini pom-poms, so that might end up in the finished top. (Maybe around the border. Hmm.) I really like it so far and am pleased with the fussy-cutting and piecing.
This one also requires me to dig back into the stash and search for fabrics to finish up this top. Sounds like a trip to the attic is on the agenda for this weekend! This top is an exciting find as it’s almost done, and the size means I’ll be able to quilt it myself. I’m also excited that many Kaffe Fassett yarn-dyed stripes are available again, so I’ll be able to add some of them into those little suns that need making.
Tomorrow, we’ll have a look at a finished quilt. 🙂
Yesterday, we talked about quilting inspiration and two unfinished projects in my stash. Here’s the first one.
This book is Karen K. Stone Quilts and the quilt on the cover is called Cinco de Mayo. There are 36 quarter circle blocks, all with different paper piecing combinations.
I couldn’t find a good picture of the complete quilt, so I took a picture of that page in my copy of the book.
Have a look.
One thing I like about the book is that she shows you each group of four blocks in detail, both with a picture of each and a line drawing of the component pieces. There are (of course) pattern templates included in the book, too.
And here are my blocks so far.
LOL. I remembered that I worked on it for AGES, but I only have four completed blocks!
After I took this picture, I realized I had sewn them together incorrectly. I picked them apart again. I didn’t start at the top left corner – these are blocks 3E, 3F, 4E and 4F. They should be rotated and positioned like this:
I did this mock-up digitally, which is why the carpet shows through in some places. A couple of these blocks can be swapped with others in the design, so I didn’t sew them together again yet. I see that I’ve used a turquoise print as the outside/background on all four of these blocks, so they shouldn’t be clustered together like this.
I will need to do is reassemble my stash for the project. One thing Karen teaches in her workshop is choosing a palette, then gathering fabrics that fit in each specific colourway – like that shade of turquoise, or the black with a floral print. They have to be pretty close in tone within the group, regardless of the pattern, to make the quilt cohere. (Although I will almost certainly stray too far, since chaos is how I roll.)
For this quilt design, she chose 11 colour groups. I’m using 8. I remember having trouble finding more of the particular bright yellow I used. Once your palette is gathered, you use at least one fabric from each chosen color in each block. I even kept track of what I used where in a chart – this was her suggestion to ensure that you use the colours throughout the blocks (instead of always using the turquoise for the background. I left the background off the chart, but that’s fixed now.)
You can see the palette pulling together a bit better in the quilt I made in her workshop because it used fewer colours and because you’re seeing 30 blocks together in this image. Each block has a bit of yellow and a bit of that red purple, a bit of indigo, etc. Even though the blocks are different, the whole comes together. I chose the gradient fabric for the inner border because it had both the yellow and the red-purple.
I need to get that one back on the quilting frame and finished up. I started the hand quilting and have done maybe 20% of it.
I still have the index card with swatches for the colours I chose for my Cinco de Mayo quilt. I’ll go through my stash and look for matches, maybe need to shop (for more yellow) then concentrate on finishing this quilt before dispersing the stash again.
In the meantime, I found another quilt top in the UFO stash that is much closer to completion. We’ll look at that one tomorrow.
Last weekend, I picked up two of my quilts from the long arm quilting place. I’m binding their outer edges now and will show them to you when they’re done.
In the meantime, I’m already thinking about what to quilt next. 🙂
Here’s the book that’s teasing me right now: New York Beauties and Flying Geese by Carl Hentsch.
I particularly love this design included in the book, which is called Pandemonium.
Isn’t that gorgeous? I’m currently on the hunt for a fat quarter pack of Kaffe Fassett shot cottons, including 36 colourways. That’s what he used in the rainbow sections, but it looks like they’ll be tough to find. (I could build my own spectrum of fat quarters, but I do love KF’s shot cottons. I’ll look for them first.)
In the meantime, in the spirit of finish-itis, I revisited my unfinished projects. Actually, putting this book on my shelf reminded me of several other books I have. I found two different paper piecing projects which are incomplete.
First up, this one. A number of years ago, I attended a workshop with Karen K. Stone. The quilt I pieced there is still being handquilted (it was New York Beauty, from her pattern sold at the workshop), but I subsequently bought this book of hers – Karen K. Stone Quilts.
The quilt on the cover is called Cinco de Mayo and it is stupendously gorgeous. There are 36 quarter circle blocks, all with different paper piecing combinations.
This book is tougher to find since it’s from 2004. The AMZ link is for used copies at crazy prices, so you might have better luck at a used bookstore.
What’s fun about this book is that she uses stripes and plaids (lots of Kaffe Fassett yarn dyed stripes and plaids here!), and that she sometimes changes the central circle to an oval.
Her free motion quilting patterns are also fun. Lots of swirls and leaves, all the better to inspire me to get better at free motion quilting.
The pattern I found particularly inspiring is called Carnival Beauty. It’s the one on the cover, although that only shows part of it. I can’t find a picture of the complete quilt online, so will take a pic from my book when I show you my progress.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at my progress on Cinco de Mayo…
Last time, I told you about watching Kate’s videos at her YouTube channel, The Last Homely House. I went back to her channel to watch more and chose a video about using up scraps – because it was first in the queue of her most popular videos. (It’s right here.) She shares her enthusiasm for Terry Rowland’s scrappy quilt. I was sufficiently inspired to see what I have in my bag of bits and ends.
A lot of my bits are from specific quilts. For example, I had a bunch of half square triangles leftover from this Lady of the Lake quilt. The palette is pretty specific on this quilt, all olive greens, pinks and burgundies. The first fabrics chosen were a selection of fat quarters featuring Alphonse Mucha drawings, all Art Nouveau ladies. I just love those prints.
I started to piece the leftover bits into blocks:
I have a few strips of fabrics from the quilt and will add as many borders as possible. This will be a mini quilt to practice my machine quilting – although it’s a good size to be a matching pillowcase. Hmm. I’ll show it to you when it’s done.
I also found the Franken Fish, long forgotten by yours truly.
I called these the Franken Fish because I made a mistake and patched it up. These fish were cut from charm squares – each square was just enough for one set of pieces, so there’s a fish of any given fabric and a background of any given fabric. I made a cutting mistake though and because there was no extra fabric, I patched the pieces.
Their scars are all in the same place. They are Franken Fish.
I must have seen the block somewhere and liked it. I have a vague memory of scribbling it on some random piece of paper in my purse. Now the Franken Fish need an ocean to swim in…
I found a lot of bias already cut. There’s a tremendous amount of the pink, which probably means I had plans for it. I wonder what they were.
And I found these two pieced stars, fussy cut from Kaffe Fassett’s Kimono print.
Interestingly, the camera reset itself on the second one and dimmed down the colours, as if it was saying ‘whoa. That’s a lot of fuschia and orange together.’ LOL It is!
I must have made these while piecing my Pineapple Star, which used a lot of that Kimono print.
Somewhere (ahem) I have many bits and pieces of Kimono in triangular shapes. I need to find them and make more of these smaller stars because I really like them.
There are more bits and ends, too, but let’s start with these. 🙂
This exercise proved to be more like poking about a hard drive of saved works-in-process than opening a dictionary. Instead of raw materials (bits and ends), I found all sorts of forgotten beginnings. I’ll be finishing these incompletes up first – then I’ll have a look at the remainder for a true scrap-busting project.
First one to be finished will be the Lady of the Lake scraps. Stay tuned!
It’s been quiet here lately because I’ve been buried in writing and publishing tasks. Last week, though, I took a little fiber break and got this quilt top finished. I quilted it on my Singer 185.
This one was inspired by a quilt I saw on our road trip to Maine: the cabin where we stayed had a quilt in this pattern on the bed. Theirs was red and white, but I really liked the simple pattern and how effective a design it made. I doodled it down, then came home to sort through my stash. I really like this colour combination. The top has been waiting to be quilted for a while.
Since the colours reminded me of the ocean, I quilted it in waves – they go diagonally across the middle square, then I started to quilt around and around. After finishing the third (outer) square border around the middle, I had to respray the outside border with temporary adhesive – all that wrestling of the fabric had made the layers come apart again. The backing is a printed cotton sateen from my stash, and the border is the same Kaffe Fassett Roman Glass in purple that’s in the quilt.
Here’s a picture of the pieced top in the sunshine:
This one was a challenge to quilt on the machine – I think it’s either the maximum size that I can manage or close to it. It’s 72″ by 72″ finished. I have one more that’s about this size (the mermaids) and I’ll probably try to do my Storm at Sea on the machine – it’s a teensy bit bigger. (Ha. No pix of that one. It’s been waiting a looooooooong time to be quilted!) The bigger ones will have to go to the long arm quilter to be finished up.
I also have a lap top pieced in these fabrics which I’ve been handquilting with embroidery floss. It has flannel on the back and is a very cozy piece of work. I’ll try to get that done soon and post a pic.
I’ve recently finished a new quilt top, one that hadn’t been in my plans but just fit into my schedule perfectly. Here it is:
(I have to figure out a better way to photograph quilt tops. Hmm. I end up holding the camera overhead (even when I stand on a chair or ladder) and hoping for the best, about 10 times in a row. (Thank goodness for digital cameras!) I wish I had a wall high enough and big enough to hang each quilt. Hmm. I’ll keep thinking about it.)
The fabrics are mostly from a collection called Mermaid in Blue Jeans by Chelsea Design Works from StudioE. I’d ordered the panels, thinking they might make good tote bags, but changed my mind once they arrived. I decided to make a quilt instead and ordered another set of blocks to make it bigger. There are two free quilt patterns available for download on the StudioE website, but I didn’t see those before I started. (It’s okay. I don’t mind having designed my own.) You can also see on that page of the StudioE website that only the panels and the pink contrast fabric are currently available from the manufacturer. I bought my fabric on Etsy where all of the fabrics are still available.
Here are the fabrics that I used and the quantities. First, the mermaid panels. There are eight 10.5″ squares sold in the panel. You can see that there are really four designs then the mirror image of each one (with two having a colour change.) I bought two of these sets.
Then the allover mermaid print:
I had some of this left from my tote bags but ordered another meter for the outside border and used pretty much all of it for that. I cut 5″ strips lengthwise for the border and had only two inches left over. (I prefer to cut borders on the lengthwise grain, since it’s less inclined to stretch than the crosswise grain. This means, though, that you either need more fabric or have to do more piecing.) Even though this is a one-way design, there’s a lot going on, so I didn’t bother to match the seams for that outside border. I just didn’t sew any mermaids in half.
The third fabric I used from the line was the Dark Blue Mermaid Wave. I had one meter of this fabric, but once I started the sashing, I had to buy another. I have some left and I made some cutting errors. You could probably make it work with 1.5m, especially if you were less matchy-matchy than me.
The bright pink was in my stash. It’s a basic blender that comes in lots of colours and is stocked at Fabricland. It’s called Mystic Vine by John Louden. (That’s a UK site that shows many of the colours. I’ll guess mine is the Fuchsia.) Besides the fact that I like pink and navy together, the brighter pink gives the quilt some punch. I tried a paler one that matched the pink in the blocks more closely, but it was dull. I had maybe half a meter which I used to border the blocks and bought another meter for the border and binding. That’s a .75″ strip used to border the blocks (which finishes out to .25″ – I used .25″ seam allowances throughout) and a 1″ strip around the border that was cut at 1.5″.
There’s a challenge with these printed blocks that I also experienced with the dragon quilt. The blocks are printed square, but when you pre-wash the fabric, the cotton shrinks more in one dimension than the other, leaving rectangles instead of squares. Mine were about half an inch longer than they were wide after washing, which confounded me for a while. OTOH, it’s better to have this shrinkage before the quilt is pieced. Ultimately, I realized it didn’t really matter since I wasn’t coordinating these blocks with other square blocks. I just cut longer borders for the height.
The second challenge was that wave fabric. It’s a one-way design, which meant some planned cutting of the sashing. Also, it looks so much better when the wave is continuous across the quilt. (This is probably why it’s only used as an accent fabric in the free patterns. That’s a lot simpler.) I discovered that the wave shape repeats every 4″, with the complete design repeating every 12″. That’s why I cut 4″ sashing – it was easy to make matches then. My blocks finished out to just under 12″ with the pink borders, which was a happy coincidence. If I did this again (not going to happen!) I would plan for them to be 12″ wide.
I was going to have the blue horizontal sashing go all the way across, but again, it looked a bit bland. Instead, I cut 9 blocks of the allover print and didn’t like that at all. Next, I fussy-cut 9 mermaids out of the allover print for the blocks at the junctions of the sashing. This was less bright than I’d hoped, but the backgrounds blend so well that it’s not immediately obvious where my seams don’t join with surgical precision. I like the small mermaids there, too.
I found some turquoise-green cotton in the sale bin that matches those green mermaid tails and bought it for the backing. I’ve cut bias binding from the rest of the bright pink for the edges. The quilt will finish out at 60″ by 64″ or so. I’m going to try quilting it on the machine once my walking foot arrives. (Not as a first project, but it’s in that queue.)
I like this one. It presented a few challenges but was a pretty easy make while I finished writing a book. What do you think?
Alive & Knitting 