High Fiber Content

Monday, January 09, 2017

Calendar Quilt 2016

My first new project of the year is all about last year. I'm calling it Calendar Quilt 2016, it's inspired by the calendar towels that I made for holiday gifts.

And also by friend Jaye's series of Fabric of the Year quilts. She usually chooses a shape and cuts one from every piece of fabric she buys during a year.

So those are my starting points or inspirations, the idea of a calendar and the fabric that came into my studio during that year represented on the calendar.

Taking off from there, I accumulated fabric last year, and didn't sort it into the rest of my stash. It's all in one (or more honestly, two, ahem) boxes. So, I'm taking a cut of each piece and running it through the Sizzix to cut some triangles to piece some blocks.

I'm cutting the larger piece into two that will fit on the triangle die, flipping one of them over. So I get two isosceles triangles, two right-hand and two left-hand triangles.

Here's the waste left over though :( That's a lot to me, definitely some bits that are worth using.

Some of the excess pieces are ending up in my scrap basket.

I am keeping these big chunks out of the scrap basket though. I think I'll piece them together for some sort of a border for this quilt.

And the other triangular waste piece is run back through to get another set of the small triangles.

After cutting a few fabrics and having a stack of triangle pieces to play with, I started trying out different designs.

Kind of tempting, but I'm not sure I'm up for doing this kind of piecing for a whole quilt.

This seems like the kind of pointless piecing that doesn't show up or have an impact that I'm not into putting that much energy into. Plus piecing the two small triangles messes up the patterns of the prints too much for me.

I really like the look of this one, so this is the one I'm going with. It highlights the prints really well and will be easy enough to make a whole quilt out of. And since I was trying to get the look of a calendar square, but not just have squares this will work best.

As I cut more fabric, the whole look of it changes. It's going to be a fun project, stay tuned for more updates.

Sunday, January 08, 2017

Holiday Gifts

This was the extent of the holiday gifts I managed to make this year. Calendar towels from prints chosen off of Spoonflower, printed out on toweling. It's a nice, sturdy toweling fabric and they are pretty easy to hem up.

Unfortunately at least one of the calendars was inaccurately printed (30 days in February was the giveaway!) which my giftee noticed and pointed out. Very embarrassing, but hey it's still a cute towel, and the gift-giving thought hopefully still counts.

The squid one was for me, because why not make a gift for yourself (a fairly new holiday motto.)

Saturday, January 07, 2017

Makelight Report

Some really fun and interesting stuff from Makelight Courses, a report based on my last years' worth of images I posted on Instagram. Pretty colorful stuff, especially thanks to the #100Days100Blocks project.

The first picture is the whole year in color, I kind of want to make this into a quilt! If only I was up to the curved piecing that would be involved.

My nine most popular instagram posts:

The month by month palettes are interesting, there's always some green, except for February...

It might be fun to do some monthly blocks based on the color palettes. And then that would result in a quilt that would represent the colors of the year. Hmmm, I'll have to think about that one.