Now Three of Diamonds

I started playing around with the Slopes blocks currently covering my design wall because I wanted to photograph my completed Checkerboard-ish piece. That ended up happening on just a wall, because it would have been too hard to remove enough blocks without screwing up things.

Once I got started I realized there were some things I wanted to make sure I was doing with this, I really liked the diamonds shapes and particularly I like the ones where there were three out of four triangles of the same color fabric. 

So the game was then on to make sure there were at least one of each color. I stuck a pin in the center of each one to make it easier to rearrange.
 

It was looking better as far as having those three piece matching fabric diamonds, but I pushed it further to have two of each color.

That meant more pins in more places.

Then it became obvious that I should go for three each of the three matching fabric diamonds.

The quilt is now named Three of Diamonds. Now I had to look at things in mono to make sure there weren't unintentional blocks of dark or light that I didn't want.

I discovered that there were some blocks that had a dark on darker fabric combination that read as rectangles. Those blocks needed to be better spread out for balance, I think this is the final version I'll be going with, so it's now time to get sewing these together.

Sightlines Triad

 

After getting the printing done that I wanted to accomplish I chose my three favorites to put into a quilt to enter into the Print/Quilt exhibit. It was going to have to be on the small side to get done in time, but I really didn't want to cut up the prints. The initial idea was to call this quilt Sightlines and have quilting lines going between all the eyes.

Based on a sketch that took a triad view from my color wheel, I came up with these combination of hand-dyes to sort of frame each one. The cerulean blue print would be framed with chartreuse and blue-red. The Blue Green print would be framed with red-violet and yellow-orange. The orange-yellow print would be framed by aqua green and violet.

I decided that I needed something in-between the print and the much more intense hand-dyes, so I chose a lighter hand-dyed and manipulated one that would tie all three together and had the additional dye printing work of dots which echo the backgrounds of the prints. I thought that looked a lot better, but I still didn't like them all in one piece. Too crowded, too formal, not enough space to have a dynamic design.

So I decided to make three separate but much smaller (but not too small). Much better. 

What's this? Another triptych?

This works much better for me. It's really fun working with my hand-dyed and surface designed fabrics, it's been a while. If I can figure it out, I'm going to quilt them keeping the Sightlines idea in mind to have the quilting lines connect between the three quilts and the eyes.

Hot Five By

 

I worked a little more and made up some more blocks to play with for my Five By Five arrangement. One is just solids, another is just prints. The rest of the new blocks use up the majority of the remainder of the strips I'd initially cut out. A potential title is Hot Hot Hot, even that green is hot in this setting or maybe Hot by Five. I haven't tried out too many arrangements of the blocks yet.
 

Here's how it looks in black and white,  Looking at it in this way, I see that I may need more big squares of solids or maybe of the prints, but I have to do the math and also check that I have enough of the fabrics. I also have to think about what size I want this to end up as. I'd initially just wanted to play around with this idea from the class, but now I'm at that in-between size, it would be nice to have a usable lap throw size as this isn't something that I'd make for the wall.

Here's a closer up view of the prints.

And another. These are the pictures I take while I'm sewing so that I get the order right when sewing together like sized pieces. Easy piecing in these blocks which I'm finding is somewhat relaxing.

Prism Design Start

Starting my work on making three quilts to enter in Prism Play. The assignment is color, based on the Joen Wolfrom Ultimate 3-in-1 Color Tool.

The size is long and kinda skinny. I want my three quilts to be a triptych in a way. Yes they'll be for sale, but if they don't get sold, I'll hang them together.

There's going to be a Yellow Green/Chartreuse, Aqua Blue, and an Orange quilt. I like the starting place I'm launching from.
 

Tracing Trees

I started converting my picture of the curving oak trees into a state that I could abstract out the lines for a quilt design.

First, I printed out the black and white version and traced it. But it kind of ending up being too busy and I got lost in all the details.

To get some of the details out of the picture I flipped the printout over. 

Then I traced the flipped over printout. I think this was much better and will be easier to transition into a quilt design. The class I'm taking uses various size widths of bias tape to make a quilt top, and this sketch will lend itself pretty well to that. I'm feeling pretty ready for that class now.

I also had the idea of using the shape of the trail that we hiked as an additional design element.

I traced the trail that we followed and it looks like kind of like vague country outlines. I think that it's also the wrong size to incorporate with the size of the tree tracing. I'm thinking this might be good to use as the quilting design once the top is done with the tree outline curves, but blown up much much bigger. Almost like the topographic curve lines on the map printout give another dimension.

 

Starting With a Title

Last week I made a small quilt (18x36") for a show that had a loose theme of Vision.  Here's where I started out.
Well, no I actually started out with a title: Dream Vision and a sketch:

I free-motion quilted several sections.

And zig-zagged the edges of the "hills" along with some quilting in various colors.

And then I pinned the rest down securely, packed it all in my car and drove up Highway 1 to the CQFA retreat in Half Moon Bay, taking pictures as I drove (I know, I know) and what do I see when I look at them when I arrive (and am no longer driving)??

Look familiar?

The color and shapes of the coast side hills and vegetable crops right up to the edge of the sea.

I had no idea, truly.

Closeup of vegetation edges and quilting.