Lucille sent this photo of her newly completed Whimsical Garden quilt. Yay, Lucille!
Whimsical Show & Tell…
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Category Archives: Color
I’ve been sewing…
I’ve been working this week on a quilt (in 2 sizes) for the revised edition of the Piecing book. I do wish I could show you what’s on my wall, but all I can show is a little bitty teaser…
Actually this quilt is not little. It’s going to be 90″ x 90″ and I am both looking forward to/and not looking forward to quilting it. I have high hopes that, once finished, it will look good on my guest bed. After I set it together tomorrow I’ll know for sure.
I don’t know about you, but I have a really hard time making a quilt that looks good in a particular space. I start with that intention, but then as I make the quilt, the quilt takes over. Colors and values can change. The finished quilts always look good but they may, or may not, look good where I expected to use them. Such is life.
In the construction of this quilt, I used an HST (half square triangle) method that is very accurate. This is the one where if you want a finished size 6″ square, you cut squares 6 1/2″, and trace across them on the diagonal, then sew on that line.
When you use this method, there is some waste… unless you sew together the triangles that you cut away. Which I did!
I’m not entirely sure what will happen with these HSTs (that need their dog-ears trimmed and then need to be pressed open). I might use them on the back of the quilt. Or not. Tonight, I’m too tired to think about it :-).
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An Everyday Best Challenge!
Valerie Prideaux sent me these photos from a friendly quilt challenge that she and some friends took part in. The quilts were recently displayed at Quilts at the Creek 2014, a yearly outdoor quilt show in Toronto, Canada. Aren’t they great! All the quilts were quilted by Sandy Lindal of Scrappy Gal Quilt Co, who was so busy doing the quilting that she never got hers done.
FYI: I’ve loaded the 6 pictures into a slideshow, which is a new feature I’ve found on WordPress. Hover over the picture and you’ll see a pop-up control bar where you can click to go from slide to slide.
Shirley entitled hers “One Thousand Three Hundred and Sixty pieces of my mind” which cracks me up. I have never taken the time to count the pieces in any quilt I’ve made because, if I knew, I might despair of ever finishing :-).
I do love Valerie’s minimalist interpretation of the design—so very contemporary. Thank you all, for sharing your work!
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Barns and farms in Indiana…
I had no idea that there were so many Amish and Mennonite farms in Indiana! Last week I landed in Ft. Wayne and then was driven to Elkhart. It’s about a 1 1/2-2 hour drive through lovely country. If we had stopped the car every time I wanted to take a picture, I’d still be there :-). As it was, I took photos with my iPhone from a moving car. (Side note: my iPhone takes a really good picture!)
In many pictures, you can see a reflection on the windshield that I took the picture through. It adds something to the photos that almost make them more interesting…
Farm buildings don’t have many windows or doors. Each building is comprised of big, simple shapes. The colors, and the way the colors change in shadow, are mesmerizing.
There is something, too, about the weathered nature of these buildings that make the so much more interesting. The owner probably wishes that this barn was scraped and painted, but I like looking at it the way it is.
We stopped to take this photo, and the next one. This is a small building off to the side of a much-large farm building complex. I found out that the Amish will often paint the trim around the doors like this one below, or in a similar fashion. I see hearts when two doors meet!
This is the larger structure…
You know, I love the look, but I have less-than-zero desire to be a farmer or to live in the country. That said, I am really, really happy that there are those among us who are called to grow the food that we all eat. If that’s you, thank you!
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Summer time is flying by…
Although my husband tells me that time passes by exactly the same way, minute by minute, day by day, I swear that time moves faster as I get older. It makes him sigh, deeply. At any rate, I can hardly believe it has been a week since I last wrote. (FYI: the new bras are amazing! I hope you found time to shop as well.)
I’ve been working on a new quilt for the revised edition of our Piecing book. I can only show you a snippet of it, otherwise it would spoil the surprise for when the book comes out…
This is the pile of scraps that were left from cutting strips. It’s a very happy quilt!
I enjoy piecing and am finding it fun to crank out some quilts… as long as I still have applique to do at night :-).
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Seven Starry Sisters…
If you receive my newsletter, you have already seen this quilt and read at least part of the story behind it. (FYI: I posted the Seven Starry Sisters ePattern today.)
I started this quilt in the early days of Piece O’ Cake… back in the 1990s. In fact, it was so long ago that I drew the pattern by hand!
My Mom wanted to make a quilt and she offered to applique blocks. I gathered fabric, made the overlay and templates and she got started. And, as sometimes happens, years passed by :-). Every now and then she’d sew on the blocks and then move on to something else that interested her more.
When Mom moved to Texas a few years ago, she gave me the blocks. Most of them were finished, but some were not. Interestingly, she hadn’t appliqued the pieced stars.
My tastes in color and fabric have changed over the years which is not at all surprising. I chose the clearest red and white blocks for the quilt I made and set these aside…
And these two blocks have also been set aside. Honestly, I’m not sure what I was thinking when I chose these fabrics!
The Seven Sisters is a traditional quilt pattern based on legends that relate to a distinctive star cluster, the Pleiades. The traditional quilt block can be pieced, although it’s a complicated block. There are probably English paper pieces that you can use to hand piece it. I have always thought that it is an easier block to applique.
I cut my blocks in a non-traditional way, with star points hitting the edges of the hexagon on all sides. I added sashing because these blocks were not all exactly the same size, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The sashing adds a terrific spark of color and sets this quilt apart.
I’m sure that I chose blue for my sashing because I found the blocks on the 4th of July. But If I had run across them at Christmas, I might have used green sashing and this quilt would be different but still great fun. Click here if you’d like more info on the Downloadable ePattern.
And, in case you were wondering, Mom was very happy to see this quilt! In fact, the top is now in her living room, waiting for me to find a little time to get it quilted!
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