Vicuña Visit

 

New project begun, a black and white baby quilt. I'm using the black and white print layer cake my DH gave me for Christmas to make a bunch of HST.  There's been a lot of research about high contrast black and white being good for retinal development in babies. Plus it looks cool to grown-ups too.

I love the measuring part. The new Sewline pen is working out great for this.

8 HST at Once! I love this technique, it feels so efficient and effective.

These HST will be on the top and bottom of this panel in some sort of arrangement or other, tbd for now.

And the backing will be this animal alphabet flannel. A Vicuña mention FTW! Oh no, I just realized this will not help a kiddo learn letters beyond the first ones in the animal names because the words are written out in cursive. C'mon now, fabric designers. But yes, the cursive looks so nice with those big blocky first letters, it really does.

Beginning Doors

Moving on to the next thing,(there's always a next thing!) which is a quilt for Stretching Art & Tradition 22. Our theme this year is "When One Door Closes".  My design is partly inspired by some of the lyrics in the Rolling Stones song, "Paint It Black."  The quilt, entitled "Doors Unopened" is going to be 24"x 36"h. The quilts travel as a group between many of the Mancuso quilt shows in the US.

I started off by doing some background quilting before adding the other elements via appliqué. I think I might actually use batting behind the elements to have them stand out from the quilted surface even more. Not exactly trapunto, more flat than that.

Design Wall Backup

Current design wall back-up because of all my workroom inactivity. There's a whole lot of traffic stuck in a jam up there. Two quilt sandwiches that are all ironed and ready for spray basting. Courthouse Steps is in front and behind is the Kitchen Sink Quilt.

The rows I've assembled for the Japanese Village quilt.

I got the biggest (and oldest) quilt, Safe at Home layered and spray basted, it's lying on the fabric/quilt heap. Has been since October, sigh.
 

In-Process Triangles

 I worked on my triangle study quilt a bit at the CQFA retreat. Here's how it looked on the table right before I packed it up. The lumpy folds are the piece of fabric I'm using for background, ie it's not all pieced together yet.

I'm working on placing those last couple of triangle units and then squaring the whole thing up in the end.

Trying Triangles

 I rediscovered these pieced triangles that I'd begun an attempt at a Curated Quilts entry last year. The colors still really speak to me so I decided to play with them.

 I decided that I wanted to float them in some grey, and found a nice dark one to use.





































I thought a lighter one wouldn't work as well with these intense colors.

Here's how it looks at the moment, there's still some triangles left to add in, and yes the plan is to square it up by the time I'm done.

Slushie Stitching

After many long years of intermittent effort, the hand-stitching on my Slushie quilt is finally done! This was the one thing I did manage to stitch on as I recovered over the last few months. I think because it was a project all ready to be worked on, it was all in one place and I didn't have to think about it at all. After surgery, one's brain doesn't work well for quite a while, and if there are pain pills involved (oh yes there were) then all bets are off on any complicated thinking getting accomplished. So this was a simple, color-by-numbers project to get my hands on, so I did.

 I love the overall look and am happy with the variation in colors and stitch sizes. I still need to decide if I'm going to stitch down the edges of the fused fabrics. After so much handling parts of the edges of have come up.

 I might just have this framed so maybe I can leave the lifting up edges alone. I think a lot of machine stitching at this point would take away from how it looks.

And we'll see how squared-up I can get this thing too, I tried as I stitched to not go right to the edges on the larger pieces of background fabric. I just don't want to cut off any of the hand-stitching, because it'll all unravel--*gasp*! No way after all that.

2018 Q1 Finish-a-long

Here's my 2018 Q1 Finish-A-Long list:

1. Solstice Quilt - Finish piecing backing and make binding, have it quilted, finish stitching down binding and label.
2. Slushie-Bind, label, hanging sleeve.
3. Blue Cherrywood Challenge - Finish stitching down facing, label and hanging sleeve.
4. False Flag Sorbet - Hanging sleeve and label.
5. Warmest Condolences - Sketch and plan completed, some fabric pieces made, print more fabrics, embellish tag, assemble, quilt, bind, hanging sleeve, label.
6. Italian ABC - Assemble, quilt, bind, label.
7. Color Collusion - Finish quilting, bind, hanging sleeve, label.
8. Between the Cypress - Design on remaining applique, finish quilting, embellish, bind, hanging sleeve, label
   
9. Technology's Spine - Finish quilting, embellish, bind, hanging sleeve, label
10. Line Layer - Applique, add more layers, quilting, embellish, binding, hanging sleeve, label
11. Taking My Lumps - Add more beading, finish quilting, hanging sleeve, label.
12. Harvest - Hanging sleeve, label.
13. Shenzhen Skies - Finish quilting, binding, hanging sleeve, label.
14. Contained Observation - Hanging sleeve, label.
15. Woven World - Finish appliqué, quilting, binding, hanging sleeve, label.
16. Five More - Finish quilting, embellish, hanging sleeve, label.
17. Corpus #3 - Hanging apparatus and sleeve, label.
18. Self Portrait- Finish quilting, binding, label, hanging sleeve.

Same as last quarters' list except for #2. We'll see how it goes this time around. And the Solstice Quilt has a home designated for it, so that definitely is getting done.

Q4 FAL - Herein Lies A List

Here I am finally jumping into this group commitment to finishing quilts idea, better late than never, right? I've seen it on my Instagram feed during the last year, and it seems like a good idea.
So here goes!

My proposed finishing list for the 4th Quarter of the 2017 Finish-A-Long is:

1. Solstice Quilt - Finish piecing backing and make binding, have it quilted, finish stitching down binding and label.
2. Bullseye Swamp Quilt - coming back from being quilted this week, just need to finish the binding and label in time for a gift.
3. Blue Cherrywood Challenge - Finish stitching down facing, label and hanging sleeve.
4. False Flag Sorbet - Hanging sleeve and label.
5. Warmest Condolences - Quilt for SAQA Loaded Conversations show, some fabric pieces made, print more, tags embellished, assemble, quilt, bind, hanging sleeve, label.
6. Italian ABC - Assemble, quilt, bind, label in time for Xmas gift.
7. Color Collusion - Finish quilting, bind, hanging sleeve, label.
8. Between the Cypress - Design on remaining applique, finish quilting, embellish, bind, hanging sleeve, label
9. Technology's Spine - Finish quilting, embellish, bind, hanging sleeve, label
10. Line Layer - Applique, add more layers, quilting, embellish, binding, hanging sleeve, label
11. Taking My Lumps - Add more beading, finish quilting, hanging sleeve, label.
12. Harvest - Hanging sleeve, label.
13. Shenzhen Skies - Finish quilting, binding, hanging sleeve, label.
14. Contained Observation - Hanging sleeve, label.
15. Woven World - Finish appliqué, quilting, binding, hanging sleeve, label.
16. Five More - Finish quilting, embellish, hanging sleeve, label.
17. Corpus #3 - Hanging apparatus and sleeve, label.
18. Self Portrait- Finish quilting, binding, label, hanging sleeve.

Yes, it's a pretty long list, but a lot of these are A) Small and B) Just need a hanging sleeve and a label. They've been lying around bugging me to finish them for a long time (Years!) so I think it'll be good to work through one by one and knock them onto the done pile.

And then I can get back to the other 61 things on my list (no lie), there really are sixty-one more in-progress.

Italian ABC's

 I have a new small quilt project going for my nephew that is based on a panel of Italian ABC squares. (ssshhh it's a surprise) Each one has beautiful illustrations of things that begin with that letter and the Italian word for them. It might be super confusing to him, but I bet he'll learn a few Italian words.

I used my handy-dandy color wheel to find the corresponding triad colors based on the background color of each square.

I selected an array of my hand-dyed fabrics that matched up with the colors that I needed to carry out the triad color scheme.

The Italian ABC's now brought to you without the letters J, K, W, X, Y.  One of those things one never considers, that other language's alphabets aren't the same as your own.
 I still have to assemble the blocks together and am considering borders/sashing options. Especially to highlight the horizontal strip of illustrations that I haven't used yet. I think it's going to be pretty cool, and I hope he likes it.

Eyes First

 Stitching on a self-portrait piece.
No my eyes are not actually peacock blue (neither is my face for that matter!)
I used a not very closed-up zig-zag, because I didn't want the weight and height of a satin stitch to outline the shapes.

 This piece has been in the works from a short class at CQFA a while ago about doing self-portraits using fabric with prints or colors to help represent things about yourself. Describing one's insides instead of just portraying the outside.
I had it all glue-sticked and pinned together for more than a year.

I brought it over to China with me, and finally stitched the pieces down. The rest of the quilting is yet to be done though.

Another Begun

One of the quilts that I started at the CQFA retreat in January. These are just six blocks so far (photographed on a shiny brown table).  I believe they'll be set on wide black strips perhaps with some of the background fabric as cornerstones.   All of the fabrics are my dyed and/or discharged fabric.  It was fun to go through my box of special fabrics and use them all in one piece.

There's a story behind them, the story of the broken tendons in my right-hand pinky finger which has so affected me these last few years.It's not meant to be overt, or graphically physiologically accurate of course.  But just to show the various stages in the process. I think I reached a good level of abstraction with this subject which what I was shooting for.