Month: January 2025

The other two quilts – the College Fjord quilt and the Hus Ved Havet quilt – are both coming along nicely, but I am getting to the end of my tolerance of the fiddliness of the bargello, so I am glad that I limited myself to these two in that style. By the time these two are completely sewn together, I will be DONE and ready to move on to new things.

Last time we spoke about the College Fjord quilt, I had discovered that the vertical strips had gone wonky and refused to make a decision right then and there what to do about it. I have since made the decision (rip it back to where it started going wonky and resew), and the resewn version was within an eighth of an inch or so and – more importantly – no longer looks obviously weird. I have continued to sew the strips on – I’m within 10 or 12 of the end, and I just need to devote a couple of hours to finishing that up. Easier said than done, but it’ll happen. After that, it’ll just be sewing the buttons on to form the clouds, plus a binding. I’m hoping to get this done by my guild’s annual quilt show in mid-March. I work well with deadlines, but I would not put it past me to be finishing the binding the day before it has to be delivered.

The Hus Ved Havet quilt is also coming along. Very happy with the fabric choices, and I think that in the end this will be a stunning quilt as well. Slowly but surely, I am cutting the verticals and sewing them together. You’ll see some change from the picture from early January, but let me explain the work I’ve done since then.

In the picture from early January, the blues and grays have been sewn together, and the greens have been sewn together, but the greens have not been sewn to the bottom of the blues. I wasn’t at all sure about the bluer greens (representing bushes), and those had not been sewn to anything except each other, either. Here’s what it looks like now:

Now, the greens have all been sewn to the blues. Everything that is not sky in that image has been sewn together horizontally. Nothing has been sewn together vertically yet, but that will come soon. The sky fabric is pretty much perfect for this image (and you can probably see why it would not have worked for the College Fjord quilt). I still have some clouds to insert in various places in the sky – that will come later – and there’s a ton more green, plus an applique house, yet to come. But I am pleased with how it’s shaping up so far.

I decided a while ago that I wanted to include some of the words from the song “Hus Ved Havet” somewhere in this image. Which words? Dunno yet. Still narrowing it down. Where? Dunno this either. I want to decide the final location when the top is done and put them somewhere that feels empty. I don’t feel like it’ll be on this side of the quilt – there’s no element here that feels like it needs something else. I suspect that when I see the whole quilt top put together, there will be one area of the quilt that just screams out for an added element, and that’s where the words will go.

I spent today fiddling with the lettering stitches on my machine. I used them in a quilt once before – the national parks quilt – and was happy with that result. But I was hoping that maybe one of the other lettering styles would be better for this quilt. Unfortunately, there are only three styles, and they only come in capital lettering, so…no. I need to decide on something else. I used to cross stitch and am not entirely opposed to finding some sort of cross stitch lettering style (I have a whole book of them) and using waste canvas to create the lettering. That may be the direction I go in. If I do go in that direction, that will influence how many words I want to use from the song. Lots to decide!

You’d think that sewing straight lines would be easy. You’d be wrong. I started working on the College Fjord quilt today, sewing more vertical strips onto the batting and backing. I realized after I’d worked for a while that somehow, I’d gone wonky. The top of what I’ve sewn together is now half an inch wider than the bottom. Still trying to figure out what exactly I want to do about that. I have three options: ignore it and move forward while not correcting for the discrepancy, try to correct for the difference as I move forward, or remove the strips back to where I’m pretty sure the wonkiness began and fix it. I was not up for making this decision today, so I put down the College Fjord quilt and started cutting up vertical strips for the Hus Ved Havet quilt.

First note on this one: seam allowances take up more space than I think when I estimate in my head. I estimated that the mountains/water of this image would only need one strip of each color, but it’s going to be a stretch. I still have several vertical columns to cut, and I think it’s going to be OK, but I may need to cut out more small pieces.

Second note: Apparently what I think is a quarter-inch seam allowance when I sew is more like a three-eighths seam allowance. Fortunately, I’m not following a pattern, and I am remarkably consistent when sewing, so the fact that my 1” blocks are actually more like ⅞” blocks is not a problem. I really need to mark a quarter inch on my sewing machine – just not until I’m done with this quilt.

Based on what I see so far, I think this is going to be a successful quilt.

When I look at this on the design wall from across the room, I see the mountains and water and land in the foreground, which of course is what I’m going for. The jury is still out on the bush (the green bump on the right) versus the rest of the green vegetation in the foreground, but I need to see those side-by-side before I make any judgment. There are many bits of this that haven’t been sewn together yet, so some things look weird, but I was mostly cutting and not sewing today, so the sewing will have to wait until another day.

What’s interesting to me about working on this version of a bargello quilt is that it’s not a mirror image like the College Fjord quilt, but it’s also not like a regular bargello in that the colors don’t “move.” In a regular bargello quilt, each color moves up and down in the vertical to create movement. There’s almost none of that here. The greens at the bottom do it – the dark green is always the one that’s closest to the blue of the water, but that blue changes depending on how far away from the water line it is. The blues of the water and the grays of the mountain stay still.

When I was working on this quilt on paper at my guild’s Open Sew, I asked the other folks who were there what they thought of keeping the colors in the same place across the mountains and water. I wondered if there would be enough movement in the quilt to create interest. Someone said that I could create that movement with the quilting, and that was an excellent reminder for me. Since I’ve been using the quilt-as-you-go method with the College Fjord quilt and will be adding the buttons as additional “quilting,” I haven’t really needed to think about quilting that will be added later. The quilting on the College Fjord quilt is largely invisible. But using this color arrangement for the Hus Ved Havet quilt will give me an opportunity to do some surface quilting to add some visual interest where perhaps the colors don’t provide it naturally. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out as I continue to build the quilt.

I still like the color choices, and I still like the way they blend together. I’m reserving some judgment for when I get the sky fabric cut up and added to the image – that will change things, I’m sure. There are a lot of decisions that will have to be made there, so I’m trying not to get too excited about this yet. But I’m happy with what I see so far!