Walkabout

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Walkabout has been a work in progress for well over a year, and I finally decided that I just needed to get it finished and entered into some shows.  The first entry is into the American Quilter’s Society Spring Paducah Quilt Week.

The idea for this quilt came when I was walking through German Village, a historic neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio.  This pattern of embossed brick kept appearing in the sidewalks, and it just cried out to become a quilt design!

I wanted to maintain the feeling of an embossed design, so I knew that I wanted to work with two fabrics and focus on value and density of quilting to create the texture.  I designed the quilt on AutoCad, which helped me to create accurate templates for all of this very specific piecing.  The lighter fabric is a Moda Grunge print, and the darker areas are a Kona solid.

The design is entirely machine pieced, and each circular ring is cut as a single piece which is set into the adjoining circles.  Here is a back view of part of the quilt top:

For the quilting, I decided to keep it simple for the light blue-grey fabric, but do a more dense design in the dark blue areas.  I was very undecided on what to do for the denser quilting, but I ultimately landed on doing mixed motif organic quilting.  I liked the idea of exploring the juxtaposition of the geometric embossing of the brick with the leaves, moss, and pebbles that land on and surround the brick.

Quilt Stats

Title:  Walkabout

Size: 53″ x 68″

Techniques:  Machine Piecing

Quilting:  Free motion quilting and ruler work on an A-1 Longarm

Fabric:  Moda Grunge and Kona cotton

Batting:  Hobbs Tuscany Wool

Thread: Quilted with Aurifil 50wt in two colors matching each fabric

Binding:  Faced with the Moda grunge backing

AQS Spring Paducah Quilt Show Entries

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It really is the season for quilt show entries!  This is the time of year that I try to get as many quilts as possible finished to enter in the next year’s shows.  Spring Paducah is the largest American Quilter’s Society show of the year, and the entry deadline is usually within about one week of the QuiltCon entry deadline- what a combo!  This year I am entering four quilts into the Spring Paducah Show.

Complementary Convergence is entered into Large Wall Quilts: Modern

Walkabout is entered in Small Wall Quilts: Movable Machine Quilted

Ebb and Flow is entered in Small Wall Quilts: Stationary Machine Quilted

Synthesized Slivers is entered in Miniature Quilts

Challenge Swap

Posted on by thenotsodramaticlifeadmin / Posted in Bags and Pouches, Quilting Community / Leave a comment

For the third year, a small quilting group I belong to has done a fun challenge and swap combination project.  Around September or October we each bring a piece of fabric (fat quarter or larger) to a meeting and place it in a brown paper bag.  One by one we each pull out a piece of fabric and try to guess who put that fabric into the bag.  We are surprisingly accurate!  We then take the fabric that we pulled out and make a gift for the person who originally put the fabric in the swap.  It can be anything sewn, and there is usually a wide range of projects that come out of this challenge and swap.

This year the fabric I pulled out of the bag was a cute rectangular dot print on a light green background.  Since the green is so light, it almost read as a neutral.  It looked good with so many different colors!  In the end, I loved the line and dot effect of the black and white batik with the dot print.

I decided to make a project bag with pockets around the outside to hold supplies and notions.  The lower half of the bag has a structure of Annie’s Soft and Stable so that it will stand easily on its own.  The bag is fully lined so there won’t be a chance of having a work in progress catching on any seams or picking up unwanted threads.  I thought the orange was a fun, unexpected pop of color, and it is also a favorite of the swap recipient!

 

Ebb and Flow

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Each year The Modern Quilt Guild includes a style/technique challenge category in QuiltCon, and this year the challenge is a two color quilt.  I was excited to approach this project because I had been casually considering what it would take to make a dynamic quilt top that used the same amount of two fabrics.

For most quilts, I tend to create a set of parameters for the design.  I find that working with some constraints helps me to achieve a more cohesive result.  For this project the parameters are:

  • Two Colors
  • Use equal amounts of each of the colors
  • Use the colors in a way that does not equally distribute the colors in each section of the quilt
  • Make the graphic quality of the design the star (let the quilting take a back seat on this design)

I went through lots of designs before I finally landed on this one.  I liked how the visual weight of each color shifts from one end of the quilt to the other.  The strips are cut in incremental widths with the narrowest strip finishing at just 1/8″ wide.

Many of my show quilts evolve organically, and take a fairly long time to construct, so it was a lot of fun to be able to cut and sew a quilt top in a day!

Ebb and Flow was quilted on my domestic sewing machine, but I did the basting on the longarm using a water soluble thread.  I also tried using a large scale stippling technique for the basting.

The quilting is simple lines, spaced about 1/4″ apart.  I was able to get this quilted while I was a quilting retreat with a group of friends, which was a great way to break up the monotony that comes with stitching hundreds of straight lines.

Once the quilting was finished, I soaked the quilt to remove the basting stitches and blocked the quilt on a frame.  

By the time it dried, it was perfectly flat and ready to be trimmed and finished.  I decided that a facing would work better with this design than a binding because I wanted to to allow the lines of the piecing to extend all the way across the quilt without the frame that a binding creates.

Quilt Stats

Title:  Ebb and Flow

Size: 51″ x 64″

Techniques:  Machine Piecing

Quilting:  Linear machine quilting using a walking foot on a Bernina 1008 domestic

Fabric:  Kona Cotton in black and white with a Moda wide back print

Batting:  Hobbs Tuscany Wool

Thread: Quilted with Aurifil 50wt in white and black

Binding:  Faced with black Kona Cotton

Quilts Accepted into AQS Daytona Beach!

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I have definitely caught the quilt show bug!  When I first started entering, I would enter a show here and there, mostly if I thought I might be able to attend.  But once my quilts started getting accepted, I couldn’t help entering more too!  And after I received my first ribbon at a national show, there was no going back.

Quilt shows have their own cycles and rhythms, and your quilts have to be available for each show for a lot longer than the week the show takes place.  You also have to enter well before the show takes place.  The entry deadline is often 2-4 months before the show week.  Submitting entries, receiving jury notifications, shipping the quilts, and (if you’re lucky) attending some shows can quickly become a year-round event.  It can make for some fun days if, like last Friday, you are submitting to one show while receiving notifications for another!

The Daytona Beach American Quilter’s Society show is the first notification of the 2019 shows, and I am ecstatic to have four quilts that were juried into the contest.

Lateral Ascension is in Large Quilts: Stationary Machine Quilted

Taking Flight is in Large Quilts: Movable Machine Quilted

Zenith is in Wall Quilts: Stationary Machine Quilted

Raise the Roof is in Wall Quilts: Movable Machine Quilted

I have never been to the Daytona Beach show, but I hope my quilts have a wonderful time there!