Author: Allison

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And the Sewing Begins

I found sky blues. Seven of them, to be exact. A new-to-me quilt store in Rhode Island had a whole wall of solids, and I was able to come up with the blues I needed. They have all been washed and cut, and I have sewn all of the sky blue strips together. I actually really like the shading of the seven sky blues in order. I would have liked to have more subtle transitions from one fabric to the next, but barring my ability to find an appropriate blue ombre (no one seems to think this exists), I’m going to have to claim artistic license here.

The sky blues, once I found them, were easy. They go in the same order every time, so I was able to just sew them together in strips. (Strip piecing FTW!) It’s those mountain blues that are going to be the death of me. I sewed five of them together. It took me a whole evening. Granted, mistakes were made, and the seam ripper got a workout. But the picture below shows one evening’s worth of work.

(I swear the darks are really blue and not black!)

Five down, fifty left to go!

The pieces you see are double wide – I have not yet cut them in half to produce the mirror image that goes below the waterline. So this is not what the final thing will look like. But it is definitely an approximation. 

I am not 100% sure I’m happy with it yet. I feel like I need darker sky blues (which I do have), and I feel like it’ll look very different once I cut these pieces in half. I need some time (maybe this weekend?) when I can devote a day to just working on this and fiddling with it while I keep track of what works and what doesn’t.

One thing I am rather pleased with is the clear difference between the mountain blues and the sky blues. I was worried that there wouldn’t be a clear difference, but I absolutely see it. I think it also helps that the sky blues are two-inch blocks while the mountain blues are one-inch blocks. I think the contrast between the size and the color is very clear, at least here, with these blues. My opinion may change once I get into the center of the image, where the blues are lighter and it will be harder to tell them apart when they’re next to each other. But that is a long time away. I’ll get there eventually, but at the rate I’m going, it’ll be well into next year.

One of these days, my life will calm down, I’ll get my weekends back, and I’ll have time to really dig into this and get into a rhythm to get a lot done. One of these days…

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What Do I Do With All of Those Blues?

So…once I find all of those blues, I actually have to DO SOMETHING with them. Remember: this is a bargello project. I’m still firmly convinced of that, even after I had to make a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet, folks. I must be off my rocker.

The first thing I did for this quilt was project the image on a wall where I’d taped a large piece of paper. I used the image to draw a rough outline of the shapes I wanted to mimic in the final quilt. The image on paper is 30” high and about 54” wide, so that is what the final quilt will be as well. 

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with a ruler and laid out horizontal lines an inch apart from the water line to the top of the mountains in the image. The water line is 16” from the top of the image, so the image is slightly top-heavy – more of the image depicts above the water line than below it – but the water is basically a mirror, so what I do on the top of the image will be mirrored below the water line. The mountains aren’t really a large part of the image – I think the largest mountains in the image only extend 6-7” above the water line. The rest is sky.

The sky will be fairly “standard” – it will be like a traditional bargello in that it will be the same colors, in the same order, simply staggered to create the appearance of movement. (Remember that I have mother-of-pearl buttons to create the clouds in the sky, so much of the sky will be covered by “clouds.”) 

In a traditional bargello quilt, the height of the blocks is usually standardized – 1” finished, in most cases, but sometimes 2” finished. The width, however, varies depending on the effect that the pattern needs to create – a steeper angle needs pieces with smaller widths, while flatter curves can use wider pieces.

To create the mountains for this quilt, I squared off the contours of the mountains into 1”, or sometimes ½”, pieces, and varied the widths according to the changes in the coloring. I’d already assigned the six muted blues – I think I’ll call them mountain blues – to parts of the traced image, so all I had to do was number each of the squared-off pieces with the number of the mountain blue that it covered. I ended up with 54 columns of widths varying from ½” to 2”.

Here’s where it gets complicated. In a traditional bargello, the colors stay the same and appear in the same order. In this one, not a single one of the 54 columns is going to be the same as any other (except its mirror image below the water line). And therein lies the challenge…and the spreadsheet.

I labeled each column with a letter. And when I ran out of letters, I doubled them (AA, BB, etc.). And when I ran out of those (I didn’t use I, II, O, and OO for somewhat obvious reasons), I used the three extra letters in the alphabet of another language I speak, and doubled those as well. (Fortunately, I ran out of columns about the same time I ran out of letters and didn’t have to resort to Cyrillic.) I put each of those into a spreadsheet. I wrote down the width of the column, added a seam allowance, and doubled it (for its mirror image below the water line), and then I wrote down the number of 1” and ½” strips of each color that I would need. The spreadsheet is detailed. I am a dork, but I am an organized dork, at least on paper.

This is what the paper drawing looks like with all of my scribbling on it.

In the image, the water line is the straight line on the left, and the squiggly lines are the original tracing of the actual image. The rectangles with numbers in them will be pieces in the quilt; the numbers represent the blues – the higher the number, the darker the blue. The open space to the right is sky.

I hope it still makes sense to me when I sit down to actually sew the dang thing together.

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The First Steps to College Fjord

The College Fjord quilt is going to be the most difficult quilt I have attempted so far. I made a SPREADSHEET. It’s ugly.

Let’s discuss, for the moment, the fact that I still cannot find the solid blues I want and that the indecision surrounding said blues has (temporarily, I hope) paralyzed forward momentum on this project for my ADHD brain. (Also, let’s ignore the fact that I have had a metric crap-ton of other things on my plate for the last few weeks, and I have not really been able do sit down and do anything in the sewing room beyond finishing a couple of bindings and watching old episodes of “All Things Great and Small.” (So excited about the new season in January! But I digress…)

I actually shouldn’t say that I haven’t found the blues I need for this project. I have found the blues for the mountains. Six of them. Muted blues, ranging from so-dark-it’s-almost-black to so-light-it’s-almost-white. Found them in one store actually – it was pretty perfect. 

My issue has been finding solid sky blues. Bright blues. None of this muted nonsense. The morning sky (and the sky in this photo) is a brilliant, sapphire blue ranging from deep royal blue to, again, a blue that’s almost white, but a different almost-white than the muted blue almost-white. I can hear you now – “A blue that’s almost white is a blue that’s almost white. You can’t have different shades of it.” I (and the people who make paint chips you can get at the hardware store) beg to differ. Trust me, there is a difference.

A few weeks ago, I found a jelly roll of Kona solid blues and thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It looked perfect in the roll, inside its plastic, in the store. I got it home and unrolled it and…it was no longer perfect. Some of the colors stuck out like sore thumbs. There were 12 different shades of blue. I put them up on the design wall and picked out a couple of them as being wrong. I’ve been staring at them for weeks, and I can’t decide whether I need another roll or two (one roll doesn’t have enough for my project), or if I should just start over from scratch. And I also can’t decide whether I should use the 2.5” strips as is or cut them down to 1.5” strips for a true bargello (and a better blend from light to dark). At it’s longest, the sky needs to be 13.5” – with 2” (finished) strips, I only need 7 blues, but with 1” (finished) strips, I need double that, which means finding even more blues.

See why there’s a ton of indecision paralysis? I feel like I need to decide how many blues I actually need before I can go out and find them, and at the same time, I feel like I need to see how many blues I can find before I make a decision about how many of them I need. I don’t want to decide I absolutely MUST have 14 blues, only to find that I can only actually locate ten of them.

Ugh.

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Horseshoe Canyon Is Done!

I finished the last of the binding on the Horseshoe Canyon quilt while I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago (finally catching up on the blog), and I’m really happy with it.

The binding wasn’t quite done when this picture was taken, but it was close enough. 

It’s rare for me to think that a border fully completes the quilt, but in this case, I totally believe it. I wasn’t entirely sure I liked the quilt before I put the border on it, to be honest. Once I put the border on, it felt…right for the first time. 

While I was at it, I hung the Crater Lake quilt over the fireplace for the first time as well. Here’s that update:

I think I started that quilt almost two years ago, and it’s finally up over the mantle. I’m glad it’s done, and I think it looks exactly like I was intending for it to look. That’s pretty rare in my house.

I’ve also been working on the College Fjord bargello, but it is slow going and I am still trying to find solid blue fabrics, so an update on that will have to wait.

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I Was Not Kidding…

…when I said I was going to have a busy fall.

Having said that, the abstract iceberg is done! I found an evening to quilt it, which took a lot less time than I thought it would. As a result, I was able to get the binding machine-stitched on that night as well. And a few nights later, the hand stitching was completed. I was even able to spend a couple of hours sewing the sleeve for the dowel onto the back so I could get it on the wall yesterday. Here it is in its displayed glory, hanging in my living room above my workstation.

I’m so pleased with the result!

I did post a photo of the quilt on Instagram and tagged Oscar, but he either has not seen it yet or has not reacted. (I suspect the former – I don’t think he spends a ton of time on Instagram.) I’ll let you know what he says if he ever sees it.

I wasn’t sure whether or not I would like the quilt without its borders, but the more I looked at it, the more it just fit, and the less I could imagine it with any sort of border around it. And now, where it is on that navy blue wall – I think it’s framed enough.

Now to get the sleeves for the Tracy Arm iceberg quilt and the Crater Lake quilt sewn on so I can hang those, too!

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A Busy Fall Commences

We’ve come to fall. Autumn in New England, actually. What everyone puts off during the summer – and there’s a lot of it – gets done in September and October. You’ll be reading this in early October because of the timing of my posts, but I’m writing it in mid-September, and I am about to enter the busiest fall I have had since my teaching days (fall of 2019 was my last fall in the classroom). If ever there were evidence of my ADHD, here it is – my commitments for this fall!

  • Prepping five photographs for submission to the Small Stones Festival of the Arts  
  • Beginning my term as president of Cornerstone Quilters Guild in Charlton, MA
  • Continuing my term as Vice President of Information and Technology for the Worcester Chorus, plus four concerts (Oct. 8, Oct. 27, Nov. 9-10, and Dec. 7) with the chorus or with the Bachtoberfest Chorus. Each concert has a different repertoire.
  • Beginning my term as Newsletter Editor for a local group of a social organization I belong to
  • Attending as many of my nephew’s football games (it’s his senior year) as I can
  • Trying to get my kitchen cabinets painted before the weather gets cold

Oh, wait…you want me to make quilts, too? Don’t worry! I will. It’ll just be a little slower than I’d like it to be.

So here’s what I have on my plate in the world of quilts:

  • Horseshoe Canyon quilt: still sitting, ready for stitch-in-the-ditch whenever I have a long enough time frame to devote to it.
  • Abstract iceberg quilt: also ready to be quilted! I layered it with the batting and backing and basted it all together sometime last week.
  • Oregon waterfall quilt: have fabric, ready to create paper templates and move on it, but needs a good long stretch of time to get in the mindset.
  • College Fjord quilt: still looking for fabrics. The blue ombre I ordered online isn’t going to cut it for the sky. Search begins anew. (Repeat after me: “I will NOT start dyeing my own fabrics. I will NOT start dyeing my own fabrics.”)
  • The other bargello quilt (which I will call “Hus Ved Havet” quilt – I’ll explain later): ironically, the ombre fabric I ordered online may be the perfect sky fabric for THIS quilt, but I am not willing to start sourcing the other fabrics for this until I have proof of concept with the College Fjord quilt. Stay tuned.

So the three quilts that are well underway are at a kind of standstill until I have a good chunk of time to devote to one or the other. The exception is the quilting for the abstract iceberg quilt, which again is stitch-in-the-ditch and could probably be done in an evening one of these days, if I can find one. The fourth quilt is at a standstill until I find fabric(s) for the sky. The fifth I won’t even consider until the fourth is well underway. So…here we sit.

In the meantime, I did a little binding work on a quilt that’s been waiting for the final hand stitching on the binding for probably close to a year. This quilt has absolutely nothing to do with this project, but it’ll be nice to free up some space in my box of UFOs. Maybe I’ll even get the quilting done on a Halloween door hanging I started years ago. Boo.

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Fabrics Before Grids

As mentioned earlier, I also went to the first two of the quilt shops in the All New England Quilt Shop Hop this past weekend. The shop hop runs through the end of October, and there’s no way I’ll get to all 91 shops, but it was a nice day on Sunday so I thought I’d go out for a drive. I particularly wanted to look for fabrics for the bargello quilts. I actually decided to start with the fabrics for only one of them, even though I drew out the plans for both on paper. I figure if the first one is a disaster, at least I won’t have purchased all of the fabrics for the second one!

I decided to start with the College Fjord image (above). I measured out the image at 30” x 50” on paper, and I had a general idea of what I thought it might look like. In my head, this quilt only involves solid fabrics (especially the sky), and it only involves shades of blue. (We’ll talk about the clouds in the picture later – I have a plan for those.) One of the stores I visited this weekend had not one single solid in the whole place, but the other shop had a whole section of solids, which I brazenly raided for the blue shades for the mountains. I started to also pick shades of blue for the sky, but I really quickly realized that I am actually going to need a blue ombre to achieve what I want to achieve there. Online fabric stores for the win! Ombre ordered – waiting for it to arrive in the mail.

I can hear you asking about those clouds in that image. The clouds – along with their reflection in the water – make that image what it is. I can bargello the heck out of a million shades of blue, but if the clouds aren’t there, the image just wouldn’t be the same, would it. My secret weapon – mother-of-pearl buttons. A little backstory…

When I travel, I try to buy fabric or yarn from small local shops, rather than trinkets, to take home with me. (I’m still trying to figure out what to do with a particularly lovely skein of purple, green, and yellow Mardi Gras yarn from New Orleans.) On the Alaska cruise I recently went on, we stopped in Alert Bay, a small First Nation community between Vancouver Island and mainland Canada. I found the mother-of-pearl buttons in a small shop on my walk back from the U’mista Cultural Center with Caroline, one of my cruise-mates. My thoughts, even then, went to using those buttons to recreate the clouds of that image when I finally made a quilt out of it. I am SO looking forward to actually doing so!

Looking for local fabric and yarn has become a really fun thing to do when I travel. In each town we went to on that cruise, I looked for a local yarn or fabric store. In Haines, AK, I found some yarn and a new-to-me-but-not-local maker of lovely knitting needles. In Sitka, I found a shop with both yarn and fabric and came away with a panel of Alaska national park images and some yarn made by a local-living-elsewhere. In Wrangell, I never found the fabric/yarn store (or maybe it was closed? we were there on a Sunday), but I did enjoy the Stikine Stitchers’ annual Fourth of July quilt show in the windows of all of the shops. How lovely that even in such a small town (pop. just over 2000 people) there’s a quilt guild that’s organized enough to put on a show each year! I found the buttons in Alert Bay, and in Vancouver (where the cruise ended and I met up with a friend for a couple of days), I found some fabric AND some gorgeous beads whose color mimics the iceberg in the Tracy Arm quilt. How much fun I am going to have with all of this stuff!

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Paper Piecing the Hard Way

On Saturday, I got out the projector and some large pieces of paper and outlined three potential quilts – the Oregon waterfall and the two bargello quilts. I’m pretty sure I have all of the fabrics for the Oregon waterfall quilt, but I haven’t yet started putting that one together yet. I think I need a full day for that one, so I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon. (I have some pretty busy non-quilting weekends coming up over the next few weeks.)

This was an interesting process. First, trying to trace an image that disappears into shadow if you stand in the wrong place is a pain in the ass. Second, trying to line up a ruler – in this case, a yardstick – with a projected image is actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. I mean, how hard could it be? Line up the straight edge of the yardstick with the straight edge of the image. So, so much harder than it looks. One side of the image was shorter than the yardstick, so that one was easy. But the other was not, so I needed a waypoint. I am 100% sure none of the horizontal lines I drew are straight. There’s no way.

The Oregon waterfall image was far easier than the other two. After all, it was just a matter of outlining the different areas of the image that would be covered by different areas of fabric. For the most part, this was straightforward. I drew lines, I made notes, I labeled different parts of the image. Now all I have to do is make all of the template pieces and put the thing together. That is a project for another weekend.

The bargello quilts were another story. I drew out both of them because I had the projector on and it was just easier to do both while my brain was immersed in the logistics of them. All I really did was draw a rudimentary grid, labeling the water line and providing some structure for the rest of it, then outline each image as if I was going to do it with the technique I’ll use on the Oregon waterfall image. Each of the bargello quilts will be about 30” x 50”, and I was a little surprised to find that some areas of the images were much smaller than I’d imagined they would be when projected on the wall. I’m not quite sure how well that will translate to the bargello pattern, but I haven’t yet overlaid the full horizontal grid lines over it yet to see how well it’ll work.

Now that I have the images on paper, I can start to produce those grids to see whether or not what I have in my head will actually work!

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Two Steps Forward…

I put the border on the abstract iceberg quilt. And then I put it up on the design wall, and I stared at it for a bit. And I went and did something else for a while, waited a couple of days, and then came back and stared at it a little while longer. I even took it with me quilt shop hopping this past weekend (the All New England Quilt Shop Hop is on!) and looked to see if I could find something that I liked better for the borders, but noooo. It just…didn’t work. I even disliked the extension of the water as the bottom border. 

People who make all of the decisions about a quilt – fabric, borders, backing, binding – all at once utterly fascinate me. I have a pretty good visual imagination. I can see pictures in my head, and they usually look reasonably like reality. I can see all of the fabrics of a quilt top together. Sometimes I’m off – I was once in the middle of making a pieced quilt top and put some of the pieces up on the design wall to see how it would look, and I realized something was off. I ended up changing just one of the fabrics, and it was like night and day. So much better with that one different fabric! But for the most part, I pick the fabrics and I can see what it will look like in the end. To also pick the borders and the backing and the binding at the same time? Rarely. I want to see the whole thing together before I try to imagine a frame for it (which is what the border is). The binding usually ends up being the same as the border or very close to it, so I can’t decide that yet. And my ADHD brain doesn’t deal with the backing (which is out-of-sight-out-of-mind) until I get to the point where I need to quilt it – then I realize I don’t have it yet. My process bites me in the butt occasionally, but it mostly works. 

I came back home after shop hopping, put the abstract iceberg quilt back on the wall, and stared at it again. And the longer I looked at it with the borders I’d chosen, the less I liked it still. So I spent tonight with a seam ripper and a halfway decent movie and took all of the borders off. Made a colossal mess, too, while I was at it. But I think I’m just going to quilt it without the borders and be done with it. I found a shimmery white that I was planning to use as the binding, and I think I’ll still use that, but the borders have been nixed entirely. And I’m actually really happy with that. It took me a while to get there, but that’s the process!

Also in front of a movie or two this weekend after I was done shop hopping, I finished up the Tracy Arm quilt. Here it is, in all of its finished glory!

Once I clean all of the cat fur off of it, go buy a couple of dowels to use to hang it with, and figure out where to hang it, I’ll do something with it! As of right now, I’m not sure where I should put it. (For reference, I still have several cross stitch projects – professionally framed, of course – and several other pieces of art that I haven’t hung up yet despite having lived here for a little over two years. This could take some time.)

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A Productive Weekend, Part II

Besides the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, I was also able to work on two other quilts this past weekend. First, I quilted the Tracy Arm quilt. Because this quilt is so small and mostly applique that has been top-stitched, it didn’t need a ton of quilting, and I actually did it with the clear monofilament on top with white bobbin thread so that it’s there but it doesn’t show at all. I just quilted a couple of lines along the edges of the water, the iceberg, and some of the mountains, and then I went around the outside of the inner border. Pretty straight-forward quilting that, as I’ve discussed, doesn’t interfere with the image in any way. Once the quilting was done, I was also able to sew the binding on; the last element that needs to be finished is the hand-sewing of the binding. When it’s done, I’ll post a picture.

The last part of my productive weekend was finishing the abstract iceberg quilt top. I was able to slog through the remainder of the block piecing, and then once that was done, it was a fairly easy process to just sew the blocks together. I did end up with a couple of pieces that were upside down when I sewed them together – I need to remember that for next time I do this pattern. Fortunately, I caught those errors quickly and was able to fix them easily, and I learned how not to make the mistake again.

a quilt top that mimics the colors and textures of an iceberg

The issue that came up once I finished piecing the blocks together – which I am very pleased with! – was trying to figure out what to do for a border. I briefly toyed with the idea of just quilting it without a border and then binding it like that, but the more I thought about it (and tried to imagine it in my head), the less I liked that idea.

The modern world has made it easy to seek design input from others, and someone I regularly seek input from is my mother. It is not at all unusual for me to get stuck on a piece and take a picture of it to text to her, usually followed up by a phone call where we talk about what I’ve considered, what direction (if any) I’m leaning toward, and what she thinks about where I should go from here. I don’t always take her advice, but usually something she says gets me unstuck in some way. But this time, even she said she wasn’t sure what she would do for the border of this quilt.

We did agree on one thing – the border couldn’t be one of the fabrics already used in the quilt. To use one of the fabrics from the iceberg pieces would have brought too much emphasis to that fabric in the iceberg, and that would have been weird. We disagreed on where to go from there. Knowing that my plan is to put this quilt on a navy blue wall in my living room, I didn’t want the border of the quilt to be dark – it would just blend into the wall if I did that, and then what’s the point? So the border needed to be either light or bright. We toyed with the ideas of darker teals or grays. My initial idea was to go with a white of some type – I didn’t know what type, though. Mom hated that idea. I later texted her two border possibilities from my stash, both of which she rejected as being too “busy.”

I ended up at the fabric store the next day, where the owner reminded me that the border doesn’t have to be the same fabric all the way around. I ended up with one fabric – a darker teal with some blue in it – for two sides, a metallic-y white for a third side, and more of the water fabric (which I had at home) for the bottom. I haven’t yet attached it all, but we’ll see what it looks like when that happens. The plan is to use the metallic-y white for the binding as well. So the plan I ended up with is really a combination of all of the ideas we had, which probably makes the most sense given that neither I nor my mother had strong feelings about any of the single-fabric plans.

Yet again, the plan for this one is stitch-in-the-ditch quilting on my domestic machine, but this one is a far more reasonable size. Still lots more work to be done – I’ll post a final picture when it all comes together! I have to say, I’m really looking forward to posting the final picture on Instagram and tagging Oscar so he can see it.