Ebb and Flow

Posted on December 4, 2018December 4, 2018 by thenotsodramaticlifeadmin / Posted in Aurifil, Finished Quilts, Quilting / Leave a comment

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

Entries for QuiltCon 2019

Posted on December 2, 2018 by thenotsodramaticlifeadmin / Posted in 100 Day Project, Finished Quilts, Quilt Shows, Quilting Community / 2 Comments

I love to enter quilt shows! It is so much fun to have the opportunity to share what I make with other quilters from around the world, and I am hopeful that I may be able to share a quilt (or more!) with all of the wonderful and talented quilters attending QuiltCon in February. Here are the four quilts I have entered.

Complementary Convergence is my largest matchstick quilted piece, coming in at a bit under 6’x7′. This one is entered in the Use of Negative Space category.

Ebb and Flow was created for the two color challenge. I set out to create a design that uses equal amounts of the two colors, and this is what I came up with!

Synthesized Slivers is a small quilt that I used to experiment with the use of non-quilting-cotton substrates. It also has lots of 1/8″ wide pieces!

Resonance was my 100 day project this year, and I had a blast using all of that colorful thread to quilt it! I entered it in the Appliqué category.

My fingers are crossed that at least one of these will be included in the show- now I just have to wait for the jurying results to come in the next few weeks!

House Mini Challenge

Posted on August 31, 2018September 17, 2018 by thenotsodramaticlifeadmin / Posted in Finished Quilts, Quilting / 4 Comments

At the beginning of August, Curated Quilts Magazine issued a mini quilt challenge with a specific color palette and the theme of “House.” I’m am very drawn to architectural details, so I decided to create this mini that focuses in on the dormer of a house.

The biggest challenge for me was the provided color palette. The image below is the palette provided by Curated Quilts. I love that each color scheme they provide echos the overall theme of the challenge. If you have followed me for long, you probably know that brown is not a color I tend to willingly incorporate. However, to make this design work, I needed to use the entire color scheme. (The only reason I even had that brown dot print was because a friend dared me to buy it a few months ago!)

I decided to use three point perspective to draft the design for this quilt. Most perspective drawings use one or two point perspective, which results in a realistic looking drawing. I think three point perspective tends to give a more wonky, whimsical feel to the drawing, and I liked the way that aesthetic pairs with the given color palette. I use AutoCad LT to draft the overall design. You can see each of the points surrounding the finished drawing, and I left a few construction lines to help show how the design came together.

The quilt top was created using foundation paper piecing. Once the overall design is complete, I break down the sections of the block that will be used to piece the block. Since paper piecing requires the fabric to be pieced on the non-printed side of the template, all of the template pieces are mirrored so the finished block faces the correct direction.

The quilting on this mini was a first for me- I used Aurifil Monofilament to quilt the entire quilt. I had never quilted with monofilament, and I had only done very limited sewing with it. The Aurifil monofilament worked beautifully for this application. It was amazing to be able to move across the quilt without having to change thread color! It went through my domestic machine really well. I reduced the top tension slightly and used a smaller micro-tex needle than I usually quilt with.

I tend to use lots of colors of thread in each piece, and I don’t think that will change much, but I do like how the monofilament thread allows the focus of the quilting to be on the texture rather than the color. This is something that I will want to explore further. The back of the quilt really shows off that texture!

Facings finish the edges so that the design of the quilt top isn’t interrupted by a binding border.

Quilt Stats

Title: Upward Perspective

Size: 15-1/2″ x 15-1/2″

Techniques: Foundation Paper Piecing

Quilting: Machine echo quilting using a walking foot on a Bernina 1008 domestic

Fabric: Assorted cotton prints and solids and Essex Linen in the palette provided by Curated Quilts

Batting: Hobbs Tuscany Wool

Thread: Quilted with clear Aurifil Monofilament

Binding: Faced with fabric matching the quilt backing

Diamond Placemat

Posted on July 14, 2018 by thenotsodramaticlifeadmin / Posted in Aurifil, Finished Quilts, Quilting, Quilting Community / 3 Comments

The charity that the Central Ohio Modern Quilt Guild is working with this year is Meals on Wheels. We are making placemats that are distributed to recipients along with their meals to brighten things up. Our Charity Chair has been issuing challenges this year to encourage participation and encourage members to use these projects to stretch their quilting skills. This placemat is from one of these challenges.

We were each given a line drawing of a traditional quilt block that we reinterpreted into a placemat. I received a block called “Diamond Quilt Block.”

My reinterpretation is fairly straightforward. I stretched the traditionally square block into a rectangle, but then I had some fun with the quilting. I matched the quilting thread to the pink, green, and white sections of the block, and extended the stitching out to the edges of the block. Each stitching line pivots to create a triangular form.

The pink and green stitching is done in 28wt thread and the white is 12wt, but the bobbins thread is always 50wt thread in the color matching the top thread. This still allows the design to show up nicely, even on the tone on tone print that I used on the back of the placemat.

I have several bias bindings that I keep made up and ready to go for small projects, and I chose this one because it enhances the energy of the diagonal quilting lines.

The labels for our guild quilts are Spoonflower Prints with our guild name and Logo. We each sign the label so the recipients know who made their placemat.

I won’t be writing a full pattern for this project, but if you would like to make your own, you can download the templates below. This file is templates only, and the template on the final page needs to be assembled prior to cutting your fabric.

Diamond Placemat Templates

Placemat Stats

Title: Diamond Placemat

Size: 12″ x 18″

Techniques: Machine Piecing

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

Fabric: Kona Cotton Solids on the front, print backing and binding

Batting: Warm and White

Thread: Quilted with 50wt, 28wt, and 12wt cotton Aurifil in pink, green, and white

Binding: Striped bias binding, cut 2″ wide, machine stitched to the front and hand finished on the back

Give and Take

Posted on June 15, 2018 by thenotsodramaticlifeadmin / Posted in Finished Quilts, Quilting / 1 Comment

Curated Quilts magazine issues a mini quilt challenge for each issue, and I love to see all of the amazing submissions. Until now I have never contributed an entry, but I enjoyed making Synthesized Slivers so much, I was eager to participate in another challenge.

Curated quilts provided a theme of Connections/Improv and a color palette which included cream, yellow, mustard yellow, navy, moss green, and grey. We could use as many or as few of these colors as we liked, and I ended up using all of the colors except for cream. Navy, grey, and mustard yellow are represented in the fabrics, and the quilting done in navy, grey, moss green, and yellow.

With the theme of connections in mind, I wanted to use roughly equal amounts of grey and navy fabrics with gear-like wedges intersecting where they meet. When cogs come together, they set off a series of reactions that is greater than either component on its own.

The quilting is dense matchstick stitching that both echos the pieced designs and integrates additional curves. The majority of the navy and grey sections are quilted in coordinating 50wt thread. For areas that needed extra emphasis I used 12wt green and 40wt yellow thread.

Quilt Stats

Title: Give and Take

Size: 12″ x 12″

Techniques: Machine Piecing, Improvisational Piecing

Quilting: Matchstick echo quilting using a walking foot on a Bernina 1008 domestic

Fabric: Assorted solids and one print by Carolyn Friedlander

Batting: Hobbs Tuscany Wool

Thread: Quilted with 50wt, 40wt, and 12wt cotton Aurifil in four colors

Binding: Faced with navy solid matching the quilt backing