First Finish For August 2014

 I have finished my Improv quilt and am calling it A Walk In The Woods. The colors and the movement bring to mind hiking in the tall trees with the trunks. There are spots of blue where you see the sky and spots for green. I really love the flow and colors in this piece. It is not meant to be straight and the sides and bottom are gently curved. It measures about 36 X 41". I posted a tutorial for this quilt back in January and you  can see it HERE

I enjoyed the process of working on this quilt. It was very freeing not to worry so much about block construction and to be able to work with form and movement. The little blue and green pieces were gleaned from the scrap bin as I am always trying to make a dent in it. Of course the quilt generated more scraps than I used but those will be for another day and another project.

 When it came to choosing the binding a problem presented itself. I do not have a stash with yardage so the fabrics used in the quilt were no longer available to do a binding. I needed bias because the edges were not straight and a binding with the grain would pucker. I found a quarter yard the width of the fabric in a perfect color that tied all the colors in the quilt together perfectly. It was the exact color of the thread I had used for the quilting. Well making a bias binding for that would use very short strips so I kept looking. In the end I came back to the first fabric and had an aha moment. Cross grain has some stretch, if you cut it at a greater angle there is even more stretch. I finally decided to go with an angle to get the longest strips but not a perfect bias. The stretch in the strips was still good. Please do not tell the quilt police on me! The strips finished at 20" which meant there were two seams on each side of the quilt in the binding.

 For the quilting I first went with wavy lines which added vertical movement with the piecing. I then filled in the colored inserts with a modified "spiral" design. I also did pebbles in the pieces between the inserts. Then I went back and filled in a line of pearl between some of the wavy lines. Looks simple but I spent 12 hours quilting on the longarm.

  

I really like the definition in the darker colored thread in the light areas of the quilt. I used Superior thread in So Fine (medium brown) for top and bottom.

 This past weekend we took the bike out for breakfast and a day of riding up east of Santa Fe, New Mexico. We visited the Pecos National Historical Park just south of the town of Pecos. It was a huge ruin. In its heyday the pueblo was 5 stories high and had 2000 residents. The sign shows what the site looked like during its better days. Now it is just a mound with a few areas where they have excavated. The panoramic view that these people had was awesome.

Then we headed north along the Pecos River all the way to the end of the road at Jack's Camp. On the way back down we stopped Cowles. This is just a crossroads that gains access to National Forest campgrounds and trail heads in the Pecos. It was a wonderful day filled with beautiful scenery. Because of all the rain everything was very lush and green.