Sometimes when I'm having a colour moment I think to myself, okay what would be the most disgusting colour to add here? Sometimes that 'disgusting' can turn out to be 'surprising' and 'completely gorgeous'.(Angela A'Court)
I found a dark-pink Jan Mullen fabric with little black swirls that I had a half-yard of, untouched, in my stash, so that became my binding. (I think I meant to put it in the quilt, but I never got around to cutting into it at all.) Half a yard was just enough, there was about one strip left over. You can't see a lot of the binding in this picture, really, but I think I'm going to like it. It's dark enough to frame it a little without standing out too much. I sewed a sleeve to the top, too, so all I have to do is whip the binding and the sleeve down, and do a label, and I'm done. (Actually, I embroidered my name right onto the back of my last big quilt instead of doing a label - it went pretty fast, maybe I will do that again.)
If you've been paying attention as I put all these photographs up gradually all day today, you may have already figured out that Brenda Henning was the speaker at quilt guild last night. Her name wasn't familiar to me, but I knew the quilts - and the books (like this one, which I know has been in the quilt guild library since back in '99 when I was the librarian). She is a great speaker - if you ever get the chance to go hear her, do. Very funny and has some great quilts.
She said this is one of her newest quilts, and she hasn't published a pattern for it yet, darnit, because I really like it. (Or maybe that's for the best, actually, since I'm sworn not to make any more big quilts, and this was a VERY big one.) (It is in her workshop list, though!)
Made by Brenda Henning. Pattern here.
I love dragonflies. This is almost enough to get me to make a stained-glass quilt. (Stained glass is applique in disguise, and I don't do applique.)
Made by Brenda Henning of Bear Paw Productions, from the book Out of the Blue.
It's hard to get good pictures at quilt guild, because it's hard to get anybody to hold still long enough. On the whole I think I did pretty well - I was sitting up close, which helps. This picture is a little wonky but at least you can get the idea. (Also, if you look at the picture in the book I linked to above, apparently they were holding the quilt sideways. But I like it that way.)
Anyway, this is a quilt after my own heart - it appears at first glance to be a two-fabric quilt, but it's not. It's actually scrappy. This is probably easier to do with indigoes, isn't it, because it's possible to get a lot of them that are really close in color.
By Brenda Henning, from the book Out of the Blue.
Brenda said that she made this quilt out of reproduction fabrics even though she hated reproductions, and she used up all the extra on the back (see below) so that she wouldn't have any left over. Then she realized that even though she still hated the individual fabrics, she loved the quilt, and she ended up having to go out and buy more fabric.
By Brenda Henning, from the book Christmas Traditions in Stained Glass.
This picture is a little dark, especially the small version, so click through to the bigger one (or to the book link above) to see it better.
Made by Linda Potter. From the Faculty Showcare at IQF 2005.
I thought I would finish quilting the zipper quilt Saturday but I didn't quite make it. I ought to be able to finish it easily next week, though. I have to think what I want to bind it with, next. I should look and see what I have so that I don't have to buy anything else, but I'm thinking a dark pink would be good.
(I'll have to find where I saw this, but somebody is doing a "use what you have" thing on their weblog (here), where you pledge not to buy any supplies for the whole month of April. I think that's a really good idea, although I haven't officially joined so far.) (Of course, as I've already mentioned, I haven't been buying much fabric for the last several months, anyway, for some reason. I did buy a piece of batik for my swap that I'm supposed to be working on last week, but that - and one fat quarter pack from Connecting Threads - is the only fabric I've bought since before Christmas. Other than that, all I've bought is thread, anyway. Very odd for me.)
Eliza of Modern Gypsy is organizing a fundraiser for a friend who has brain cancer - it's the husband of Sara of Manto Fev, for those of you who know her. And since brain cancer has insinuated itself into my life (or more accurately, my mother's), I wanted to help. I didn't have any quilts on hand that I could send - and no time to whip one up right now - so I made up a little gift certificate for a wallhanging instead. If anybody else is interested in donating something, here is Eliza's initial post, and there are further details here.
And if you have always wanted one of my quilts, well, here's your chance! The raffle is supposed to get started towards the end of the month, and I will post the details when I know them.
Found during my periodic semi-random trolling around flickr. (You have to click over to the bigger version in order to really get the full effect of the cat yawning. It's kind of hilarious.)
I took this picture for Stash Sunday - they are doing green for St. Patrick's Day. This is all my leftover nickel squares from the green quilt. Obviously I have another quilt or two to make out of these!
Made by Janet Ghilino Bates of Kansas; entered in the category Art-Whimsical at IQF 2005.
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If you're new to shopping for fabric online and need some tips, A bird in the hand has some good ones up over on whipup.net. (Like the thing about minimum yardage. I have never quite forgiven Keepsake Quilting for not having this clearly stated in their catalog - theirs is a yard, unless they've changed it recently.)
| You Are Grass Green |
 Down to earth and a bit of a hippie, you are very into nature and the outdoors. You accept the world and people as they are. You don't try to change things. You are also very comfortable with yourself, flaws and all. Optimistic about the future, you feel like life is always getting better. |
Here is a quilted block - I'm really happy with how it's looking!
(I got about 40% done with the quilting, I guess, which is pretty darn good, don't you think?)
I used Sulky variegated thread in an orange and gold colorway - it might've been called Sunset, but I'm not quite sure about that. And I used a deep fuchsia on the back. (I may switch bobbin colors for the top half, though. I haven't decided for sure about that yet.)
I went to Hobby Lobby to buy batting today. Since my quilt is a just a tiny bit bigger than a standard lap/crib quilt size (i.e., 45x60" - when my quilt is about 46x63") I had to buy the 72x90" size, which is why it looks like there's a white tablecloth on my mother's dining table. I taped the back down to the table, which I hadn't ever tried before, but it worked pretty well. I think I even got everything pretty straight, which is something that always worries me. (If I would quit getting all fancy with the quilt backs, this wouldn't be as much of a problem!)
Oh, the batting I bought was Mountain Mist Cream Rose. I hadn't ever used it before, but so far I like it just fine. It's sort of similar to Warm & Natural, but maybe a little lighter, which isn't a bad thing.
I'm not really a huge fan of bubblegum pink, in general, but as a group I really like this collection. This is Quilt Pink from Moda and apparently it is part of a breast cancer event that will be going on later this year. (I am hunting for more info on that; I'll update if I find out more.)
(Mosaic made from Moda's online swatches with Mosaic Maker. Which I previously used to make this mosaic of quilts, which I may never have linked to here.)(Although maybe that was because I figured y'all have already seen the pictures of most of these quilts, anyway.)
Man, I love these fabrics. Paula Nadelstern has done her Luminosity series up in holiday colors. I'm going to have to think of something to do with this fabric - a border on something really elegant, maybe? (We are doing a block swap in cranberry and green, those would almost go with this!)
(From Benartex.)
108" wide batiks, what a great idea! See, it's a good thing I didn't have this or I wouldn't have had to piece my quilt back.
The backs of my quilts keep getting more and more eccentric. I like to make them out of leftovers from the quilt, when that's possible, rather than buying more fabric, so they end up being a hodgepodge of whatever I have around. (Often I end up using fabric that I'm tired of looking at and want to get rid of, but that's not really the case here.) So here's how this one came to be:
First I sewed together all the extra "teeth" from the zippers - and I had a lot of them. My original plan was to just put plain strips of fabric between the pieced strips, but then I realized that I would have to piece the big strips anyway, because the quilt is about 46" wide - just wider than any normal quilt fabric. So instead I started cutting big squares - I cut them 15" because that was the size of the biggest square ruler that happened to be around, but then I realized that that was a mistake, because 3 of those still wouldn't be wide enough.* So I started using 4-1/2" strips (which I only had a couple of already cut) between the squares, and then I started using the leftover 4-1/2x7-1/2" blocks and sewing several of them together to make them long enough to work. This added 8" to the back, making it about 52" wide, which still doesn't give me a lot of extra width to work with but I think should be enough. I made three rows like that, and then at the top and bottom I just went with plain strips, since I figured this thing was clearly already quite busy enough! (and part of the cheddar fabric at the top is going to end up covered by the sleeve anyway, so there was no use getting fancy there.)
A number of these were fabrics that never actually made it onto the front of the quilt. The entire middle row, for example. The pink-and-orange cat batik got eliminated because I decided the motif was too big, and the marble I threw out because it had too much white in it. (Nothing else on the front had any noticeable amount of white on it at all, so I decided it would stick out too much.) The batik in the narrow strips on the row below that also got eliminated on the big-motif basis. Every time I tried to put it in, I ended up pulling it out again.
*One of these days I will learn to plan ahead. Probably about the time that hell freezes over, at the rate I'm going!
First of all, a plug for the makers of all this fabric I've been showing. (No, they're not paying me, unfortunately.)
A lot of the ones below are from Free Spirit Fabrics, but the one above is Jason Yenter for In the Beginning. The Marsha McCloskey fabric further down is also an In the Beginning fabric, I believe.
I'm not the only one who's been in a fabric-admiring frenzy. Besides Material Obsession, which I already linked to below, there's also Quilter's Buzz... and Material Obsession also has an online store! (I think there are some more. If I find them again, I will add them.)
I've been reading a lot of quilting blogs lately, via my Nibelung ring (which I know I mentioned before, but which has grown considerably in the last week!) and I came across a couple of things I wanted to mention:
One is a Denyse Schmidt-inspired block exchange, in which you make 10 blocks and get 9 back, with the remaining block going to charity. I think that's a really nice idea, although there's no way I have time to do it right now!
Also, there's a very interesting discussion about the value of vintage textiles going on at Sharon B's website. It starts here, goes down into the comments, and continues here. The "artwork" that started the whole thing is here. (I put "artwork" in quotes because clearly in this case it's debatable. Personally, I am rather on the fence on this one.)
I tend to pick and choose from different fabric lines, partly because I don't like my quilts to match too much, and partly just because it's the way I am. I'm picky about pattern and color, and I was that way long before I was a quilter. (Although by "picky" I don't mean picky about quality, exactly. If I pick one of your fabrics and not another one, I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong with the ones I don't pick! It's just that certain things appeal to me in a way that others don't. I really don't know a better way to explain it than that.)
Anyway, this piece from the "Girlfriends" line by Free Spirit appealed to me a lot, even though a lot of the line is big multicolored florals, which is something I don't buy much of. In the case of florals, though, it's not so much that they don't appeal to me as that I just don't know what to do with them. On the other hand, scrollwork patterns do tend to appeal to me, so much that I don't always worry about whether I know what to do with them or not. (But still not all of them, and it's hard to predict which ones I'm going to like. See? Picky.)
(There's also more pictures & commentary on the Girlfriends line here.)
(Hmm, if you look here, it looks like it is actually called FUNdamentals!) - anyway, these are really great gradated pieces - they're right up my alley. From Fun@Hart.
I still haven't bought any fabric in months, which is so very unlike me - but I have started window-shopping again so it's probably only a matter of time until I break down and start buying, too. Here are a couple of fabrics from Denyse Schmidt's new "Flea Market Fancy" line - I didn't immediately look at every one of these fabrics and fall in love, but I think I will have to have this one to go in my collection of red, white and blacks.
I said I don't use 30s fabrics much - but the one colorway of 30s fabric lines I will reliably buy is the reds. I like this fabric a lot - and it would go really well with the Denyse Schmidt pieces I'm about to post!
Marsha McCloskey's new line "Fat 8ths & Friends" is mostly traditional 30s fabrics, which is not something I really use a lot of - however, I could definitely find some uses for these shirting fabrics!
Note that these prints are all on the same bolt of fabric, thus the "fat 8ths" name. (Because if you took a half-yard cut and cut the four fabrics apart, that's how much you would have of each fabric.)
