TropicalSoup

Immy's quilt

The new quilts for Cole and Immy's beds seem to be painfully slow in coming together, but I'm trying to focus on progress being progress...at least I'm heading the right direction, right?

I only have another 2 or 3 rows to add before this quilt top is complete (yay!) and thankfully it has received the nod of approval by my small pink-lover...she did however ask if that was *all* the pink I was planning on including (no such thing as too much pink in Immy's world!)

I'm quite tickled by the fabric - it is mostly Out to Sea by Sarah Jane, with plenty of stash included. Cole's quilt (his top is finally completed!) is from the same line. Mermaids, narwhals, pireates...it's hard to wring there, and Sarah gets it very right - happy and child-friendly, without being too juvenile. I think these will still work well in their room(s?) in a few years' time. Then again, who am I kidding - I'll either not have finished them before then, or be ready for another change, ha!

(I have to say, I am ready for a few smaller projects next!)

Cole's porthole quilt

Until just before we left for camping, this quilt top was taking up all the room on my design wall (and you can see the very top row was hanging on mostly by luck!) It's a new quilt for Coley, and I'm happy to say I have the top all together (and lined up!) now, and just need to put a back together to be able to baste and quilt it.the design space is now full of pink for Immy's new quilt (my daughter's mantra seems to be *no such thing as too much pink!*), and hopefully I'll remember to take a pic during decent light to show you in the next day or so...am I the only one who forgets to do things like that until midnight?

Could not be more proud

When she asked to use a charm pack of solids to set out a little quilt, I was envisaging a simple layout-of-square-blocks scenario. I should have known better. Now that {almost} all the details for Mouse's first masterpiece are in place on my design wall (I have never been so fearful of an errant gust of wind, ha!) we just need to figure out what fabric to transfer it to...and how...

Solid indecision

Hello blossoms!

Well, I have been trying to get into the studio and actually produce something in the wee moments that I find available at the moment. It seems though that I am suffering a little from inspiration overload, and I have *so* many ideas that I get thoroughly confused and indecisive and end up either making nothing at all - paralysed by choice - or something that is not what I had intended at all, (or that I don't particularly love) because I'm feeling so scatterbrained about the whole thing, rather than being mindful and focussed. And then I end up feeling like I've wasted those precious little pockets of quilting time that I *did* have, doing something I'm not in love with. Does this happen to anyone else?

The quilt top above is one I put together with the aid of 4 Kona charm packs (3 original and 1 pastel, I believe). I've been wanting to do more triangle work for a while now, (and remind myself that points aren't that intimidating, ha!) and am very pleased with how it came out. I tried to do random piecing and setting - truly random is hard for me - I think that's one reason I do so much scrap work - more fabric means less chance of 2 blocks the same butting together. (But oh, I do love those quilts with a more restrained palette!!!)

Anyway, where was I?....So, this top has been sitting on my design wall for a month or so, and has been a completed top for at least half that time, whilst I tried to decide what to do with the back of the quilt. And here's where I think I went wrong. I used a kona jelly roll and stitched it together in the order it came off the roll (and I'm trying to ignore the couple of strips that look out of order!) and then sliced it up and stitched it back together again, with that patterned fabric in between to make it wide enough. But I'm really not convinced.

Should I leave it as is - just push through and hope for that re-found love that sometimes happens once a quilt is complete, or slice and dice some more, or start again from scratch with the back? I love the front, but I'd like to love the whole thing too, if you know what I mean.

Pointy solids

I had the desire to make a quilt just with solids - I've seen so many beauties around, and solids are so versatile. I have also been thinking about how I'd like to do another half-square triangle quilt* and I happened to have several charm packs of kona solids just sitting around, so the ideas and the fabric got together, and this is the result, as of this evening. I'm trying to decide whether to sew them together like this - they were put up on the design board *almost* completely randomly -or to order them somehow in a way that calms a little of the crazy...given the squares were sewn together randomly, there will be a limit as to how ordered it could be, but maybe a gradation from light to dark, or more value contrasts...hmm. Does it look too mad and hectic as is?

What do you think?

oh, and for the record, I used 3 brights charm packs, and 1 pastel, all kona.

 

 

*I have another that I can't share just yet.

Topography

This is that quilt I started way back when. And have had finished most of this time, truth be told...just waiting to have its photo taken!

Inspired by a conversation with a very dear girlfriend (let's call her Pip - she makes the most divine hand bound art and travel journals) about opshopping for maps and atlases, and how it's not the map per se that appeals to her aesthetically, but the colours used in the map...and how she much prefers the vintage colourchart...

Later that day (whilst I was doing something glamorous...probably laundry. Or scrubbing the loo) I was thinking about colours and maps, and decided I'd really like to make a quilt using those parameters. And I'd been thinking for a while about how I really wanted to make a solids-only quilt, and the rest, as they say, is rotary cutters and thread.

I took my colour inspiration from a copy of an old map (none of the ones I had to hand were quite right), and matched as best I could with Kona colours (all hail the colour chart!) And whilst my quilt is definitely brighter and more saturated than the vintage look Pip was talking about, I'm rather pleased with how it all came together, right down to the colour key on the left!

 

The quilting is intended to mirror topographical marking on maps, though clearly this is some pretty rough terrain, ha! Next time I tackle this style of quilting, I'll try to remember to step away from the quilt a bit to make sure I'm not making the land too rocky and crazy.

 

The details - Topography:

36" x 19"

front: all kona cottons

batting: cotton

back: unknown tone on tone (shall we call it *vintage* since it's inhabited my stash for a decade?)

binding: Kona green tea, and a small slice of Rosemary Lavin's gorgeous Spa bamboo. Machine stitched - yay, I'm really starting to get the hang of this!

 

The Paintbox Pair

 

I thought I'd employ my 2 favourite short people to be quilt holders earlier this week, and snap some shots of the paintbox pair together, now that I have them both finished and living on the back of the sofa. You'd think I'd been feeding them crack cut with pure sugar all day the way things went down...it was pure lunacy! And since we haven't had another day at home with better lighting since then, you get the lunatic pics, ha!

Back to the quilts - they ended up at 46.5" x 40" each (they are the same size, in spite of how it appears in the photos!), and they each have a different back, different quilting and different binding. I quilted the second one in loopy FMQ, which I like the look of, but I confess the concentric circles is my favourite this time around.

I do wish now that I'd bound them both in the 1/4" grey and white stripe (just a generic from Spotlight, no pedigree sorry!) because it rather steals the limelight when compared to wee charcoal swirly line art on medium grey of the other. I hand stitched the binding on both.

 

The second paintbox quilt was backed in white with leftover strips of solids pieced in to break it up (you can read about the back of PaintBox A here) and whilst I was initially concerned about the amount of white on quilts which are going to get an awful lot of exposure to erm, *life*, so far so good. And really, at the end of the day, that's what washing machines and napisan are for, ha! (and why I always always always use cotton batting. Nowadays, at least)

 

The deets:

46.5" x 40"

Pattern: the blocks are made from the pattern given in Oh Fransson's Paintbox Quiltalong, though I deviated from the pattern (surprise!) and added offset white sashing between the blocks, made 84 blocks instead of 80, and split the resulting into 2 quilts.

Fabrics - front: Kona Jelly roll, Kona white, and assorted patterned fabrics for the focus of each block (predominantly Amy Butler's Midwest Modern 1)

Fabrics - back: Kona (and generic) white, Kona Tarragon, Kona Medium Grey, leftover scraps from the Kona roll.

Fabrics - binding: medium grey and white 1/4" stripe (unknown) and medium grey with charcoal line art swirls (pedigree also unknown)

Cotton batting (warm & natural)

Quilting thread: King Tut, in White Linen

 

 

 

Reinventing the Wheel

{aka Great Minds Think Alike aka how Pinterest and Flickr can be self-confidence thieves}

 

(this pic from early 2008 is completely irrelevant to the post - I just love it - it was the promotions board outside the local shop at the end of our street in Rarotonga - and well, the choices are just so very Cookie. How do you like your doughnuts?)

 

I adore Pinterest and Flickr for their vast and ever-changing inspiration for, well, any creative endavour you could imagine, really. I love that I pop in a few keywords, and kapow - instant inspiration on tap! Of course, I am also slightly impressed by the sheer time suckage power that these sites have, for me at least!

 

Sometimes though, (and this happens both when I am actively searching for something for a particular project, or randomly Alice in Wonderlanding through all the eye candy - see *time suckage* above, ha!) the sheer volume of inspiration can be overwhelming, to the point where I lose the enthusiasm to make something because *it's all been done before*, or I am simply so overwhelmend with ideas my mind can't settle long enough to decide on one. (Rachel from Stitched in Color wrote very eloquently about this earlier this year - and her post's message has stuck with me)

And sometimes, in the midst of all this glorious imagery, you stumble upon something that is uncannily like the idea that's been percolating away on your noggin for an *original* design...already stitched by someone else. That's where things tend to get a bit shifty for me - obviously the idea I thought was the product of my imagination, has germinated in someone else's noggin too (which is really very cool if you think about it - great minds think alike and all that) but I confess it does tend to cool my enthusiasm for some of those intended projects - not so much the *someone else has already thought of it* aspect (because that is bound to happen), but because of concerns of accusations or the perception of plagiarism, even if it is a completely random or accidental development of a design by 2 separate people in a remarkably similar fashion. Sad but true - I'd simply rather not make a particular quilt (or not share it here, at any rate) than open myself up to that sort of criticism and confrontation - as I've seen those bombs explode elsewhere online and well, this is my happy place!

So, on the back of all this, you can imagine my surprise just a day or so ago - I was hunting through Flickr, hoping for inspiration to hit on how to use my Soul Blossoms collection (I have been hoarding it, and it is starting its siren call, begging to be used - does your fabric do this?)...when I happened to stumble upon this beauty - look familiar? The resemblance between this lovely quilt by Hideaway Girl and my Like a Record Baby quilt is pretty uncanny, right? Now, Hideaway Girl made her quilt nearly a full year ago, and I haven't seen it before now, and yet I still got antsy when I saw it, worrying that there would be this perception that I had taken her idea and made it my own, without attribution etc.

{And here we should pause for a moment to acknowledge that a. yes, I do think (and worry!) entirely too much; and b. a worrywort quilter who is also an ex-copyright law lecturer is just a combination that is not going to end well, ha! There's probably good reason for a third point as well so c. yes, I must not hang out inside my own head ofr extended periods of time - no good will come of this!!!}

That said, thankfully, I'd already shared the photos of my quilt before discovering Hideaway Girl's, so part of the mental tug-of-war was irrelevant since it was already out there, phew! And there are some definite differences - though gosh I love the sense of decadance that she has created by pairing Soul Blossoms and a dark grey!

And the really crazy thing? When I was first formulating the idea of the LARB quilt, I was seriously considering using my Soul Blossoms and a darker neutral - how freaky would that have been?!?! At the end of the day though I went with the Remix jelly roll simply because it was a jelly roll and so already cut, and laziness should always be rewarded, ha!

Plans

I have some ambitious ones. But I got to do some cutting, cropping and stitching tonight, and it's actually coming together rather like the plans I have in my head - I love when that happens!!! {cue *plans coming together*, cigars, and BA Baracus!}

Please excuse the grainy late-night attempts at photography...this is what happens when I decide to start things after 10pm!

Like a Record, Baby!

 

'Tis done! This quilt ended up with the 9 blocks marinating for a while whilst I decided on how to join them. I had originally intended to add in 2.5 or 3" sashing between the blocks to give it a bit of weight (I was still worried it was too crazy, with not enough places - or calm - to rest one's eye), but I was running perilously short on the green at this stage (Kona Green Tea) and so I tossed up the idea of using a slightly darker green Kona (Tarragon was what I had to hand) rather than ordering more online and needing to wait (there are no quilt stores anywhere around here, nevermind ones that stock Kona solids!). I ended up using the last of my Green Tea, and managed to eke out enough sashing - it sits between the other 2 widths, sizewise. After my initial uncertainty, I really like the finished quilt (Phew!)

 

 

I used the remaining bits of the jelly roll to piece a row across the back to interrupt the taupe cotton-linen that I bought (6m of!) 2 years ago and have been slowly using up - this is just about the last of it!

Wouldn't you know it, but today was miserable, dark, wet and overcast, so I raced outside between showers to try and get a few pics for you, but forgive the less-than-salubrious washing line setting!

 

 

I'm particularly pleased with my label:

 

This is yet another quilt made entirely from my stash, so I'm feeling terribly virtuous. And in the spirit of *using what I have*, I confess the batting was intended to be my new design wall, so I guess I need to go and replace that so I can actually put the darn thing up on the wall, ha!!!

 

 

I'm particularly pleased with how the quilting came out - I had originally intended to do diagonal cross hatching, but was loving the look of the diagonal straight lines by halfway through so I figured I'd stick with that...the fact it cut the quilting by 50% had nothing to do with it at all, ha! (oh, and I used Aurifil thread for the first time on this - awesome sauce!!!! I am in love)

 

 

The LARB Quilt Specs:

(almost) 64 x 64" square

Top fabrics: Anne Kelle's Remix jelly roll, and Kona Green Tea

Backing fabrics: cotton/linen blend (generic - intended for dressmaking!) and Anne Kelle's Remix.

Cotton batting

Binding: a (very) old quilting cotton that has been in my stash for many years...and no selvedge details, I'm sorry!