leather strips

This is the third lap quilt that I made.  I used a package of 2 1/2 strips that I bought from the Santa Rosa Quilt show.  Up close, the fabric looks like suede, but it is not as good a quality as the Cherrywood.  I challenged myself to use all the strips in the packet.  It was fun to make.  First I matched two colors and made 4 patches.  Then I put them up on the design wall and made the pattern I thought looked the best.  Then I sewed them together.  It is quilted in the ditch on both the horizontal and vertical seams.

Lava flow

 This is a lap size quilt that I made using my hand dyed pole wrapped shibori fabrics. I pulled out all the pole wrapped shibori fabric and decided on 8 fabrics that matched the border Kaffe Fassett shot cotton.  I have made this pattern before and I was hoping to highlight the fabric.  I tried to make it look like it was flowing like waves.

This is a closeup.  I quilted it with a variegated Superior 40/3 King Tut thread.  First I drew the quilt pattern with a white pencil, then used the walking foot to quilt the pattern.  The last time I used this triangle pattern, I had a hard time with the bias and stretching.  I think the walking foot helped without too much distortion.

Chez Moi

The last 3 months, I have made 3 lap size quilts.  This is the latest which measures 48 x 48.  How do I know?  The block finishes 8 inches by 12 inches.  Joan found this pattern from a magazine and showed it to our group.  I think she was on her second huge quilt when she shared the instructions with us.

 This is how the pattern is supposed to be put together.  I am using my hand dyed fabric that matches the 6 fat quarters.  They are "Chez Moi" from Moda.  I thought they would make a good background fabric.  Joan used batiks in complementing colors.  Very beautiful.

 This was another possibility.

 This is the layout that I chose.  According to the directions, you start with a 10 inch square.  Lay the 2 pieces together.  Cut. Sew. Flip the fabrics around.  Cut 4- 2 inch pieces.  Flip and Sew.  It almost looks like a pineapple without all the little pieces.  Thats why it was fun to play with the blocks.

This is a closeup of the quilting.  The thread is an Aurifil 12 lime green top.  I made this up by doodling on a piece of plastic with a erasable marker.  A tip I learned from Jenny Lyon.  The problem I had with this pattern is I wanted to use the fat quarters which are 18 x 22.  Because the pattern called for 10 x 10 inch blocks, I used 9 x 10 inch blocks so that I could get 4 cuts out of the fat quarter.  It still works, but next time I'll cut it 9 x 9 inch.

Ulu

 Ulu is the hawaiian name for the breadfruit.  It doesn't have much of a taste but it is a starch and can be made into poi.  This is a quilt that I started years ago.  The size is 65 ' wide by 95' length. Enough for a twin size bed.  The fabric is from a scrap bag that I bought from the Sig Zane store in Hilo.  I could have bought a nice Hawaiian dress, but instead came home with 4 bags of scraps.  Sig Zane is a designer of hawaiian shirts and muu muu.  He designs the patterns and is very popular with hula dancers.

 This was all in one bag.  The pieces were pretty big and it was a challenge putting the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle.  I'm glad I decided to finish this quilt.  I stopped years ago, because I was having tension problems with the free motion quilting.  I was using a #12 top thread, but I don't think I had the right size needle.  I finished the free motion quilting using a regular #50 variegated thread.  No more tension problems.

It was nice to finish an unfinished project.  Surprisingly after years stuffed in a closet, it still looks pretty good.  The light blue against the dark black background is striking.  I'll have to start on those other 3 bags of scraps.

Confetti Ties

 This is the third quilt that uses the leftovers from the Woven forty two quilt.  The border squares are the leftovers from the bowties of the Woven Ties quilt and the scraps are the leftovers from the first Woven forty two quilt.  Cool.  It is so satisfying using up scraps to make something.

I took a class from Stacey Sharman called Confetti Quilts.  She had 3 basic rules.  Sew at least 1/4 inch seam.  Sew a straight seam to a straight seam.  I forgot the third rule, but it was very basic.  I just started sewing all the scraps together to a shot cotton purple fabric.  The purple actually comes from a red warp and a tourquoise blue weft.  I love this fabric and color so much, that I had purchased it three different times.  I kept forgetting that I already had it.  Fortunately I usually buy 1 yard lengths, so altogether it was enough to be the base color for this quilt.

I took Mabry Bensons advice and quilted it in simple lines.  There are double lines to create interest in the quilting.  At first I started quilting from the top to the bottom and then started at the top again.  After 3 squares, I realized it was a lot of stopping and starting and tying and knotting.  So the rest of the quilt is quilted by moving the quilt around and straight sewing with a walking foot.  It was easier to quilt this way.  The border was just quilted in the ditch.  The binding is the same shot cotton purple.  I decided not to do any more quilting in the sashing.  The woven fabrics are busy enough, that your eye needed a resting place in the calm borders.

woven ties

This is what I made with the leftovers from the Kaffe Fassett woven forty two quilt.  There were 42 strips of 10" x 18" shot cottons.  I went through all my fabric to look for wovens to match the woven shot cottons.  I pulled the plaids, the stripes, the ikats, the squares, the dots, the woven feathers, the guatemalans, the japanese stripes and the feathered ikat.and made a classic Bow Tie quilt.  Isn't it striking.

These plaids were from a 5" charm pack from the Voices in Cloth show.  I think the brand was named Olympus japanese fabric that were yarn died.  I also bought some Japanese woven plain colors that had a wonderful feel to the charm pack.

The orange and green ikat fabric was used in the binding.  Because only a quarter of an inch shows on the binding, you see only the orange and green as if it was a stripe and not a square.  I just love the look of the fabrics.

With such a large selection of stunning fabric, I first sorted them into groups, plain arrows with woven outs, woven arrows with plain outs and plain arrows with plain outs.  The woven with plains were put in the center, the plain with the woven surrounding those and the plain on plain in the outer border.  Somehow those woven plaids in the center have a illusion effect on your eye.

I used red sashiko thread to tie the corners.  Because this is a tied quilt, it is not admissible into PIQF.  Too bad. 

woven forty two

 the Kaffe Fassett shot cotton quilt is finished.  There are 21 warps and 21 wefts to make a woven forty two.  I had to come up with a title because I want to submit this to the PIQF competition.  The deadline is coming fast, and I still have a lot to do to submit it.

 The photographs do not do the fabric justice. Because the shot cottons are woven, some with different color warps and wefts, there is an iridescence to the fabric when you see it in different angles.

For the quilting, I used 42 matching color threads.  That is also hard to see in the photograph.  For the 21 warp threads I used the matching thread to stitch in the ditch for the 2 warps or up and down colors.  For the 21 weft threads, I chose to quilt on the diagonal.  I thought there would be more contrast doing it this way and yes you can see the diagonal threads better than the stitch in the ditch up and down threads.  But when you stand back, or take a photo, you hardly notice it.

I chose to use the red Cherrywood fabric for the border.  Why? Because it was already made and waiting for another project that I am working on.  Now I have to cut up more Cherrywood to finish that last project.