2013 Challenge Quilt — Solids!

Bright color camouflage! Can you find the hidden child?

Once again, part of why my blog went dark in the latter part of last year was that I couldn’t show you what I was primarily working on. This year’s challenge was announced in May and was solid fabrics, at least six different shades/hues. My initial reaction was very negative:  basically, “eww, I’m not doing that!” After all, the fabrics I love are prints and batiks, and I have a houseful of them. Doing a solid fabric challenge would entail buying new fabric at a time when I’m desperately trying to use up my stash, as my stash decidedly lacks solids.

Finley helped me assess my feather coverage partway through the quilting.

However, when I told my mom about the challenge and how much I was NOT inspired by it, two things happened. First, she reminded me that the first quilts I fell in love with, the quilts that inspired me to start quilting, and indeed my first several quilts, were all made of solid fabrics. And second, she gave me a bag of twelve solid half-yards for my birthday. I subsequently added some neutrals, and the game was afoot. Besides, in retrospect, if my reaction to a challenge is “eww!” then that suggests that it really will be a challenge, not just an excuse to make a quilt I would’ve made anyway.

Early on in the process, I decided that the biggest advantage working with solids would give me is how well quilting shows up on solid fabric. Therefore, I wanted to keep the piecing simple. Since I love pinwheels, and have been planning for years to make a quilt that incorporates different sizes of pinwheels, I settled on the idea of making a quilt similar to this one of Kaffe Fassett‘s:

From _Country Garden Quilts_

I started the cutting at my mini-retreat in late July with Rhonda and Diane, and didn’t really work up a strict plan. I decided to just run all the solid fabric through my Accuquilt GO! cutter (after all, I really wasn’t looking to start a solid stash) and make the quilt however big it turned out. I had a lot of fun cranking out all those triangles. I then paired them off into blocks using my standard concept of quilt entropy, trying to get the colors as mixed up as possible. I don’t know whether I will ever be capable of leaving things up to chance sufficiently to make a “brown bag” quilt, but I did have fun free-associating about the various bright color combinations:  green and purple is the Hulk, orange and fuchsia is the beach, red and brown is a robin, yellow and purple is Easter. The colors all coordinate with one another because there are so many of them; as Alex Anderson says, if the colors in your quilt aren’t going together, add more colors and they will.

You know you’re really chain piecing when you can barely see the baby

I sewed all the large 12″ blocks together and had paired up the triangles for the 6″ blocks when I realized I’d goofed. In the original quilt, the smaller blocks are 1/3 the size of the larger blocks, not 1/2. Oops. Time for a new plan. I liked the idea of keeping the center of the quilt set on point, so I just sewed the large blocks together and planned on making the smaller blocks into a border. And that’s when I got seriously sidetracked with other projects (they’re in the next post.) That’s also when I fully internalized just how large a quilt (84″ x 84″!) I was ending up with, which hadn’t really been in the plan.

Just the center

The primary problem with having the challenge meeting in January is that I didn’t get back to the challenge quilt until after Christmas:  even though we actually had more time between the announcement of the challenge and the meeting, I would have had to have the quilt virtually finished before Thanksgiving to have truly been on-time with it, and my brain doesn’t work that way. I very nearly packed it in and turned it into another UFO, but Dan was my cheerleader and encouraged me to finish it. Fortunately, the rest of the quilt top went together smoothly and the children more or less cooperated to get me some sewing time.

Some days, this is what cooperation looks like

I wound up working in Danville, PA for a military dental event the weekend before the guild meeting, so I made certain I had the quilt basted and the quilting started before I left so I could get some dedicated quilting time in my motel room. I made the most of it and had the entire outer border and 1/4 of the center quilted by the time I got home. Once again, working under deadline really helped me make decisions as to what quilting designs went where. Feathers are favorites of mine to stitch without a great deal of marking and they always look fancy, so I put Patsy Thompson-style soft heart feathers in the outer border and Kimmy Brunner “twirly whirly” feathers in the center. I was able to get away with only marking the spines in all cases; the seam lines for the borders and the X through the center gave me all the other guidelines I needed. This was definitely not a project for subtlety, so I used neon green Brytes by Superior Threads for all of it. I managed to get the remainder of the center quilted and the outside edge zigzagged and trimmed in time for the meeting, so even though it wasn’t finished, it was finished-ish.

Before and after hyperquilting

The inner border was reserved for my fanciest quilting, since it would show the best there. I think it also helped me finish this quilt, as I was really looking forward to quilting that border; otherwise, I probably would have lost momentum once the meeting was past and I no longer had a deadline. I rewatched Patsy Thompson’s Free-Motion Fun with Feathers Vol. 4 DVD again for inspiration and quilted a hyperquilted, symmetrical border flowing from corner motifs that started as Quilter’s Rule Dragon Scales template and evolved from there.

Detail, corner quilting design

I used orange Brytes for the original feather and hyperquilted it with Superior Threads Metallic in variegated gold. I also shook up my standard machine binding protocol to add a little more embellishment by trading the stitching in the ditch for a decorative stitch in a variegated King Tut:

Detail, binding stitching

What would I do differently? Well, much as I love wool batting, it definitely increased the difficulty level on this quilt. I think as long as I’m quilting on my home machine, I need to reserve wool for the smaller projects. It doesn’t spray baste as nicely as the cotton blends, and I got more pleats and tucks on the back than usual. I didn’t have any problems with skipped stitches or shredded threads (even with the Metallic! That stuff worked like a charm and I will most certainly be using it more often from here on out) but I had more “nests” on the back than I normally do. I’m not sure why. I didn’t let it stop me (another benefit of being on a strict deadline) but I will be keeping my eye out for future problems along these lines and possible causes/solutions.

For a happy dance, I’m mining the classic movie musicals again. The bright colors in this quilt made me think of the old movies that would advertise being shot “in Glorious TECHNICOLOR!” including “On The Town.” Enjoy!

Orphan Block Guild Challenge

It’s always summer when you’ve got shades!

Obviously, it’s been a really long time since I posted. I had intended on taking the summer off from blogging, but I didn’t mean to let it drag so far into fall. However, Hurricane Sandy closed my office on Monday, and since the power at home stayed on, I got some good momentum going on this post before normal life resumed.

Part of what has kept me quiet was the fact that until very recently I literally couldn’t talk about the main project that has occupied me since July: the guild challenge. This year’s theme was orphan blocks. We randomly drew bags that contained anything from a single orphan block to a collection of blocks or precut pieces, and then had to make something new out of the bag’s contents. My bag had just one single block in it, and it had issues:

The original orphan block

In the plus column, it’s a 54-40-or-Fight block, which I’ve always liked the looks of but had never made; the basic color palette had promise, since purple and green are two of my favorite colors; and the fact that it was primarily made of solids meant that finding coordinating prints would be relatively simple. HOWEVER, I completely understand why this block ended up an orphan. It’s hand pieced, and the seam allowances were positively enormous, in the 1/2″ to 5/8″ range. There were rust stains, probably from being stored with needles or pins in it, and this block did not have a single 90-degree angle to its name. If I had made a block like this, I would have stopped at one, too. I salute the brave quilter who not only held onto this block for some years, but offered it up for public consumption. And I have to say, it inspired me to make something I’m very proud of, that I never would have conceived of otherwise.

My first thought was to just rip out the seams and use the individual pieces for applique. Heck, with those seam allowances, I certainly would have ended up with plenty of fabric! But ultimately, I decided I really wanted to maintain the sharp points of the original block and riff off of those for my final design.

The finished product, “Aurora Borealis,” 36″ x 36″

A brief aside regarding my conflicted relationship with foundation paper piecing. I absolutely love “sharp pointies” designs such as New York Beauty and Mariner’s Compass, and paper piecing definitely seems to be the way to go to achieve satisfactory results with these blocks. However, I really don’t enjoy the process that much. I’ve tried several different books’ and teachers’ methods for paper piecing, I’ve tried several different types of paper foundations, and I still just find it to be tedious. I don’t like sewing on paper because the presser foot slips around, I despise having to trim after each seam, and I HATE having to tear the paper off afterwards. But in order to achieve the results I want with those super-sharp points, it’s what I have to do, and I’ve made peace with that. It will just never be my favorite technique.

I’ve had a book in my collection for many years, “Quilt Mavens: Perfect Paper Piecing” by Deb Karasik and Janet Mednick, whose pictures I have (metaphorically) drooled over for as long as I’ve had it. Up until now, though, I’ve never had occasion to make any of the patterns from it. But strangely enough, their pattern “Spike Redux,” which is essentially a giant Lemoyne Star by way of the Chrysler Building, seemed to echo the sharp points of the 54-40 or Fight block while introducing new design elements. I just changed the color and value distribution to suit myself, and swapped out the corner New York Beauty-style blocks for the orphan block.

I had bought the beautiful, hand-dyed-look, gradated purple and green fabric, “Glacier Lake” by Caryl Bryer Fallert, at least eight years ago. (I found it on the enclosed porch of the old location of Endless Mountains Quiltworks, so it’s been a while.) It was love at first sight, but it’s been one of those “too good to cut” fabrics for me all these years. With this color palette pre-established, I had finally found its showcase in the big setting triangles and curving center pieces. I only had a yard and a half, so I had to cut carefully, and I only have a few scraps left after just barely having enough to make the binding, but it was the perfect fabric for the job. In fact, most of the fabrics for this project came from my stash; the only ones I had to shop for were the pale lavender and pale chartreuse, because I needed lights for value contrast, and these are not shades that naturally occur in my collection. Fortunately, my mini-retreat with Rhonda and Kathy occurred just when I was about to embark on this project, so a shopping trip to Sauder’s did the trick.

Detail, “Aurora Borealis”

The only part of the quilt that I hadn’t completely pre-planned before starting to cut fabric was the corner blocks. Initially I had considered leaving the block intact and just making three more like it (obviously machine pieced and with new fabrics), but I was concerned that wasn’t changing it enough for the spirit of the challenge. Also, having three identical blocks and one “vintage” block would probably tend to draw focus to the odd one out, like that old song from Sesame Street:

So I tried cutting the blocks in half diagonally, although I flipped the orientation after playing around on the design wall. I experienced a great deal of stress when finally rotary cutting that block, because it was the only one I had — normally the worst thing that could happen is that I’d have to recut or repiece, but the stakes were high on this! Plus, those hand-pieced seams really wanted to spring apart until I sewed across them. I had fun making my own new 54-40 or Fight block for the other two corners. I finally used the Tri-Recs ruler I’d bought years ago, and was very happy with the result.

Quilting detail, “Aurora Borealis”

For quilting designs, I mostly fell back on my old standbys:  freehand feathers in the Glacier Lake pieces and  parallel lines in the paper pieced areas. The stroke of genius was Dan’s, as he came up with the idea to quilt the corner setting triangles as if the piecing continued for complete blocks. Doing the dense pebbling filler pattern not only created contrast in the solid areas, but also gave me some additional peace of mind regarding the hand-pieced blocks, that they wouldn’t be going anywhere.

And all my work and soul-searching was very well rewarded at our guild meeting, when my quilt got the highest number of votes at the big challenge reveal! I got a lovely prize bag and the grateful satisfaction of knowing my work is appreciated by a group of quilters I love and respect so much. Priceless.

For the happy dance, I had to go with Gilles Marini’s Bollywood dance from DWTS All-Stars. It just makes me smile: