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.

Over The Limit I

I have been slowly working on the finishing touches of this improv project. This one was actually the first in the series of Over The Limit. I liked the colorway of the second one so much that I finished it first. This one is bigger and measures at 40 X 40. I also like the quilting on this one much better. I knew when I put this one on the longarm that it required more than echos of the piecing like I had done with the orange and blue version. I began with what I knew in the upper right corner and that was to echo the fabric design. Then I moved to the middle right block (the light green one) and did my spiky swirls. I liked how things were going but I had run out of things to quilt and headed to the internet for multiple searches for ideas. I found lots of great art quilts and started doing a bit of doodling. I then changed the designs up a bit and made them my own. In the end I came up with a few things that I made up entirely.

Close up of some of the quilting designs that came up with.

 I think the swirls with the lines of wonkey parallel quilting in the two purple areas are my favorite designs, followed by the bubbles and the flowing parallel lines in the darker turquoise area.

 This quilt really spoke to me during the design process and I did do some sessions with Jack The Ripper but not too much.

A Great Start

The way that a seam is pressed makes a huge difference when you are quilting inside of the lines (not doing an allover design). I looked at this yesterday in the above photo and realized that the direction that the seams were going was just helter skelter. I have envisioned a quilting plan and the seams were going to be an issue. For my last quilt in this series it was not and issue because of the design choice I made. Well it was time to have a session with Jack The Ripper and pick out just the places where the seams needed to be flipped and resew them. It actually did not take as long as I feared. You can see the before in the top and the after in the bottom photo. When I originally pieced this I had no real quilting plan so I did not even give it any thought.

 So fast forward to the quilt on the frame. I have done something new which is to baste the entire top before quilting. That way it will not shift as I go back and forth with different thread colors. This is just a sneak peek at this quilt. It is the same piecing method as the orange and blue Over The Limit II but I am doing something very different with the quilting on this one. So far I am liking what is happening on the surface and think I have a great start!

Two Improv Quilts Finished

Over The Limit II

 I managed Three finishes for June. The first one was the Scrappy Trip Around the World I posted already. The Over The Limit series is something I have tried in two colorways so far. I actually decided to quilt the second one in the series first because I liked the bright vibrant colorway of the orange and blue. The quilting looks very simple and straightforward but it took forever. There were many stops and starts and Five thread color changes. Since I bury all my thread tails that made for lots of knotting and pulling those thread tails under the layers.

Over The Limit II (closeup)

 The next quilt is called Energy. It was the first thing that I stared in the past four years. I made it for a challenge for the About.com Arizona Quilt Retreat in Phoenix. The rules were very simple. The shapes had to be 2" by 2" or 4" or 6" or 8".  I had been looking at lots of improv quilts on Pinterest and found a few inspiration pieces. I loved the bright orange and deep blue colorway. I began by cutting the blue pieces. I pulled out fabrics and just cut the sizes above. Then I cut a series of orange and began laying things out till I liked the way it looked.

Energy

                     

Energy (closeup)

The quilting on Energy was really fun. I quilted lines across the blue. They are not spaced evenly........consistantly inconsistant. Some are only 1/8" apart. Then I did a swirling spike like little suns in the orange. I really love how this one came out.