WordPress database error: [The MySQL server is running with the --read-only option so it cannot execute this statement] DELETE FROM `wp_options` WHERE `option_name` = '_site_transient_wp_theme_files_patterns-890b82f054d0977074a5148474f89490'
WordPress database error: [The MySQL server is running with the --read-only option so it cannot execute this statement] DELETE FROM `wp_options` WHERE `option_name` = '_site_transient_timeout_wp_theme_files_patterns-890b82f054d0977074a5148474f89490'
WordPress database error: [The MySQL server is running with the --read-only option so it cannot execute this statement] INSERT INTO `wp_options` (`option_name`, `option_value`, `autoload`) VALUES ('_site_transient_timeout_wp_theme_files_patterns-890b82f054d0977074a5148474f89490', '1740287391', 'off') ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE `option_name` = VALUES(`option_name`), `option_value` = VALUES(`option_value`), `autoload` = VALUES(`autoload`)
WordPress database error: [The MySQL server is running with the --read-only option so it cannot execute this statement] INSERT INTO `wp_options` (`option_name`, `option_value`, `autoload`) VALUES ('_site_transient_wp_theme_files_patterns-890b82f054d0977074a5148474f89490', 'a:2:{s:7:\"version\";s:3:\"3.8\";s:8:\"patterns\";a:0:{}}', 'off') ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE `option_name` = VALUES(`option_name`), `option_value` = VALUES(`option_value`), `autoload` = VALUES(`autoload`)
WordPress database error: [The MySQL server is running with the --read-only option so it cannot execute this statement] UPDATE `wp_options` SET `option_value` = '1740285591.9754970073699951171875' WHERE `option_name` = '_transient_doing_cron'
I am SO not doing another bargello. Now that I’ve (mostly) got all of the pieces together for the Hus Ved Havet quilt and definitely have it all hung up on the design wall, I am DONE with this bargello idea. I am going to love both of these quilts when I’m done, but whoo…never again.
In this image, the bottom is the left side of the image, and the top is the right side of the image. So the red house that’s layered on the top actually comes just to the right of the right edge of the bottom.
I adore this quilt. I am still working on a couple of things in my head, though, that I am going to try not to screw up.
First, I’m not 100% sure I’m OK with that red. I may try to go for a darker red. While the house is meant to stand out, I think it stands out too much, and that a darker, more “muted” red (if it’s possible to mute red) might be the way to go. Still contemplating this one.
Clouds. The original image actually has more clouds than clear sky, but I am taking a little bit of artistic license here and reversing it – the quilt will have more clear sky than clouds. (I love the sky fabric, though. It is perfect for this quilt!) I have the very light grays – three of them – that I intend to use as cloud fabric. My dilemma: do I try to substitute out pieces of the sky fabric – further becoming acquainted with my seam ripper – and sew in square blocks of the grays, or do I applique the clouds in, as I will do for the house? I am inclined to do the latter, as right now, the house really stands out as not-square against all of those bargello squares, and I think that including appliqued, “rounder” shapes in the form of clouds will balance the house out, especially since most of the clouds will be on the left side of the image. I will also have to figure out how the clouds will interact with the words I intend to cross stitch on. So much to think about!
My goal is to get at least one of the two bargello quilts finished for my guild’s quilt show in the middle of March. Will the buttons win, or will appliqued clouds win? Stay tuned to find out!
The College Fjord quilt top is finished! Well, the quilt-as-you-go portion is done, and it mostly came out well. It’s only slightly wonky, and while there are some things that are clearly not “right,” the overall effect is exactly what I was going for. I will save the final reveal for when the buttons have been sewn on to represent the clouds, though. That might be a while, depending on whether or not I can get a hold of the store where I bought the buttons.
I did not estimate the size of the buttons very well relative to the size of the quilt. A hundred buttons is a lot! Well, except when you want them to represent clouds on a 30”X50” quilt – then they become very small. When the quilt was done, I laid it out on my bed and took 50 buttons and scattered them across the sky of the quilt. It looked like a handful of buttons scattered on a quilt. I need more buttons, and I need different sizes of buttons.
I acquired those buttons from a gift shop in Alert Bay, BC, Canada when I was on an Alaska cruise last summer (the same cruise where I took the picture). Look up Alert Bay. It’s not that big of a place. I was able to locate the gift shop on Google Maps and find their website, and I sent them an email asking if they had any buttons I could purchase from a distance. I have not heard back. I need to call.
My goal is either to get another package of 100 buttons of the same size, or to get a package of 40 or 50 buttons that are slightly larger. My preference would be the larger buttons, but I don’t remember if they had any. I think a combination of bigger and smaller buttons would be effective in making it seem more like clouds. But first I need to see if I can even get any more buttons from the shop!
If I can’t, I might have to improvise. If anyone has any leads on 2” diameter mother-of-pearl buttons, let me know.
A key component of being motivated to finish things, for me, is being able to look forward to the next project. I have to finish things before I can move on, of course, but the planning for the next idea can take place while the actual construction is taking place on the current project. Sort of like building houses – you’ve got your architect finishing plans, and you’ve started to get the permits in place, and you’re ordering supplies for the next house you’ll be working on while you’re finishing up the final details of the one you’re building now. If you don’t do this, there’s lag time. Lag time is bad.
In the case of the projects I’m working on now, two are near completion. The Oregon waterfall quilt is all put together and just needs finishing touches to the top. I’m not sure what’s going to happen once the top is done – I’ll finish it to get some experience with the sewn details that I’m working on, but I’m not sure I like it enough to make it into a quilt. We’ll see once it’s done. Maybe it’ll get framed instead.
The College Fjord quilt is, honestly, a good weekend of work away from being finished. I have ten or twelve vertical strips left to sew on, and then the quilting is done because I’ve been quilting as I go. I’ll need to add the buttons and the binding. That’s it.
The Hus Ved Havet quilt is the one that isn’t nearly done yet. There’s still a ton of work left to be done there, and that’s OK – I can (and need to) work on multiple projects at once.
So…where do I go next? One thing that I’ve been wanting to figure out is a sunrise or sunset. I have taken many, many pictures of sunrises and sunsets over the years, many of which are very nice (if I do say so myself). One of the ideas I’ve been mulling over in my head is the idea of going horizontal this time instead of vertical. Horizontal stripes. The Hus Ved Havet quilt is a little like that – the mountains in the distance and the water are both composed of horizontal stripes that have been broken up by the bargello construction. But this time, I’m thinking of vertical stripes that have not been cut up into smaller pieces. Think jelly roll quilt, only 1” strips instead of 2” strips. (I’m going smaller this time.)
If you’ve ever done a jelly roll quilt, it’s basic construction is “sew the strips end-to-end, then cut them into lengths of a certain measurement (say, 50”), then sew them side-to-side randomly.” The idea I’m mulling in my head is similar: sew long strips together end-to-end, then sew them side-to-side. It’s not unlike the bargello construction in reverse, only there are no small pieces going in the horizontal direction, only long strips. Let me explain using one of the images I’m thinking about using.
This photo has been cropped to take out wide swaths of sky at the top and black land at the bottom. I took it in Acadia National Park, from the top of Cadillac Mountain at sunrise. There’s land, there’s water, and there’s sky with clouds. And there are colors.
Imagine this image divided into twenty horizontal stripes. Those stripes aren’t very wide in the image, but they’d be 1” wide in the final quilt. Let’s look at the stripe just above the water line. Most of that stripe is going to be a purpley-gray color, but for a few inches in the middle, that stripe will be orange. The purpley-grays on the left and right will be long pieces of whatever fabric I find to represent that color. The orange in the middle will be a small piece. So that one strip of the image will be made of three pieces of fabric. (Note: This construction sounds heavenly after sewing a bargello. Two seams instead of forty!) The bottom strip of the quilt would be one long strip of whatever I find for black.
I’m still trying to decide if this is the way I want to go, but I’m leaning in this direction for a couple of reasons. First, it’s different from what I’ve been working on. The structure is basically the opposite of what I’ve been working on for a while, so it intrigues me. Second, there are different colors. The blues and greens and grays and browns I’ve been working with for a while are fine, and they’re completely appropriate for the images I’ve picked so far, but working with pink and orange and purple sounds lovely. I also want to redeem myself a little bit after all of the oranges I used in the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, and I want to prove to myself that I can use orange responsibly this time.
I’ve got a little while until I’ll feel like I’m ready to take on another quilt, so this can simmer for a little bit.
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!
It’s the end of January, and I don’t know about you, but this January in particular has felt interminable. Neverending. What do you mean there’s still a week left?! Wasn’t Christmas three months ago?
At the same time, it feels like it has not been all that long since I last updated this blog on my progress on the three quilts I’m currently working on. Apparently, however, it’s been a while. Sorry.
To tell you the truth, much of the work that I’ve put in on each of the three quilts has come in fits and spurts. Sometimes, I do a whole lot in one day or one weekend and it seems like a good time to write an update. Other times, I plug away at a few things here or there, or I get sidetracked and end up ripping out a bunch of seams, and even if spent the day working, I don’t feel as if I got a ton done. That’s what January has felt like. Progress has been made, but in increments so small that each of them feels too small to merit an update on its own. So now it’s coming to the end of the month, and I now feel like I’ve accomplished enough that there updates to share all around. So here goes.
Update #1: Oregon Waterfall quilt
I sat on this for a long time without doing anything on it. The last thing that needs to be done is some thread work over the top of the puzzle pieces to show the pine branches at the top of the image that give a tremendous amount of depth to the photo. Without those pine branches, the image (and therefore the quilt) is just a lot of rock with a waterfall. The quilt really brings that home because so much of it is in that rock fabric. It desperately needs those pine branches sewn in.
I have been debating how to do them – going back and forth between a zigzag stitch alone against the fabric or a zigzag stitch over little strips of the green fabric. Long before today, I had pretty much settled on doing a combination of the two – some stitching alone, and some on top of green fabric. While trying to figure out how I might implement something on the Hus Ved Havet quilt (more on that later), I discovered a decorative stitch on my sewing machine that is perfect for this particular application. (Until the fall of 2022, I had a 1965 Singer sewing machine that sewed in a straight line and in zigzag stitches but did nothing else. I am still discovering the marvels of decorative stitches. I sometimes forget they’re there.)
And then…a snag. This quilt was constructed by gluing fabric shapes to a muslin background. (Heat N Bond FTW.) I encountered a little of this while I was doing the zigzag stitches over the edges of each fabric shape, but the decorative stitch apparently was too much for the machine. The glue literally gums up the works – I can get a few inches of sewing in – max maybe five – and then something happens and the thread disappears, and I have to rethread the machine and start again. I did that probably about 20 times today, if not more. Eventually, the needle gets glue on it as well, and the whole needle has to be chucked. (Fortunately, I have an extensive stash of machine needles, and the four I went through today didn’t make a dent in it.)
So I got some of it done today, and in general, I like the look and I think it’ll eventually be what I want. But it’s going to take some brainstorming (and maybe a Google search or two) to figure out if there’s any way for me to prevent that from happening. In the meantime, I think this is literally just going to be something I have plug away at over time – an hour here, an hour there.
Here’s what it looks like right now.
I like how the decorative stitches look, but they don’t show up against the rock fabric background. I like how the fabric shows up against the background, but the jury is still out on whether or not it’ll look like I want it to in the end. But it’s close.
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!
I took the week of Christmas off, and in between wrapping gifts, celebrating with my family, and reorganizing my sewing room, I was able to get a little more of both the College Fjord and Hus Ved Havet quilts done.
I decided once and for all that I wasn’t going to go back and fix the darkest blues in the College Fjord quilt. Even knowing that the blues were different, I couldn’t tell from a distance which ones were which. It just wasn’t worth my time.
The results are, despite the imperfections, pretty awesome. I am really happy with how this quilt is turning out!
This is the right half of the full image (with Fred the cat for scale). It has condensed quite a bit, as I knew it would when it was sewn together – the half-inch that disappears into the seam allowance for each vertical strip really does make a difference! The left half is still sitting on my design wall, but it’ll get sewn on soon. Maybe New Year’s Day.
I’ve also been able to cut the strips and piece them together for the Hus Ved Havet quilt. The colors are perfect – they work so well together. I never really laid them all out to check to see how they would combine when I was in the stores buying them. I got all of the blues together, and all of the greens, and all of the grays, but I never really put them together to make sure that they went well together. I consider it a happy accident that the colors work as well as they do together.
I’ve sewn all of the grays (mountains) to all of the blues (water) since those colors are consistently together. The greens are separate since the darkest green will be sewn to several different blues depending on how much water is visible. I haven’t yet cut the strips for the sky – that’s coming.
So…projects are moving along. I’m actually looking forward to January and the polar vortex that the New England Weather Guy is predicting through at least the middle of the month. A polar vortex is an excellent reason to stay home and work on these projects, among other things!
I finished up the vertical strips yesterday and started the quilt-as-you-go method of sewing them together today. It’s slow going. As I’ve always said, my ability to match seams in bargello quilts is quite frankly abysmal, so nothing lines up properly. You’d think that because I strip-pieced the sky, all of those seams would at least line up, but noooo. I literally don’t know how to make these things any better than what I’ve done. And I have little patience or motivation to go back and fix anything. Fortunately, the results look good from a distance, and I’m not looking to enter any fancy shows where people will be getting up close and judging my work anytime soon.
I started in the middle of the quilt and started working towards the right side, so I was working with the bottom half of what was on the design wall. I got about three quarters of the way through that bottom half, plugging away in front of Christmas movies and football games, when I realized that the very dark sky blues that I’d used at the top and the bottom of the quilt…are not the same. I used one from the beginning, and then switched to a darker one later, and then I switched back. Completely unknowingly. I started assembling the quilt using the pieces of the darker of the two colors, which is in the middle vertical strips. And then I sewed a strip onto the quilt that had the lighter of the two blues, as I got closer to the right edge, and I noticed it then. See if you can tell the difference.
Yep.
So now what? My sense is that I’ve been looking at these strips for weeks, in lots of different light, and I’ve not noticed a thing. So…since there’s precedent of leaving two different colors in the same spot, I’m probably going to go in that direction. Replacing any of them at this point would be a LOT of work. If it’s not a glaring error, I’m going to run with it and hope that no one but me notices.
I’m really glad that, after my adventure running out of one blue for this quilt, I got extra fabric for the Hus Ved Havet quilt. Need a 1” strip? I’ll take a quarter of a yard, please!
It’s been a couple of weeks, and I’ve slowly been working on these three different quilts. The Oregon waterfall quilt has been glued in place and the edges have been sewn over. I used several different stitches to sew the edges, and I’m very happy with the results. I’ve put that quilt on pause while I make a decision about how I want to add all of the greenery at the top of the image. I have a couple of options, but I haven’t yet decided which of them to use.
I spent some time last weekend crossing a couple of state lines to go to stores that I know have an excellent selection of solid fabrics, and I was able to find all of the fabrics for the Hus Ved Havet quilt. I came away with a total of eight yellow-greens, three blue-greens, eight brown-grays, five water blues, a red and a black for the house, and four off-white-ish things for the clouds. I’ll be using the ombre fabric that I bought online, thinking that it would work for the College Fjord quilt, for the sky. So far, the colors look very nice together. I’m hoping they come together well once the sewing begins. Thankfully, I was able to find everything in solids and didn’t have to resort to fabrics that just read solid. I have cut strips of everything except for the sky and clouds, but I haven’t started sewing the strips together yet.
Instead, I finished sewing together the vertical strips for the College Fjord quilt. This is what they looked like on the design wall when I was done:
You’ll notice the sun is there. I decided to find a very pale yellow to serve as the sun, and I think the color is perfect. Fortunately, the space where it needed to go wasn’t hard to switch out – just getting more use out of my seam ripper!
I also discovered that the blue that was meant to replace the color I ran out of is not the exact same color – it’s REALLY close, but it’s not the same. (I have since learned that the brand of fabrics is known for its inconsistency.) I was actually debating going back to replace all of the old blue with the additional strips of the new blue. But it would have been a ton of work, and I actually completely forgot about it as I was sewing the final strips yesterday. So when I realized that I’d forgotten and that the different color didn’t stick out like a sore thumb like I thought it did yesterday, I decided that there was no reason to go back and replace the original blue.
The Hus Ved Havet image (see previous post) will be divided into five sections, each with its own coloring and bargello method: the land in the foreground (greens/yellow-greens), the water (gray-blues), the mountain (grays), the sky (a blue-to-yellow ombre I originally bought for the College Fjord quilt but that didn’t fit there), and the clouds (creams/very light grays). There are three trees/bushes that will also be included, and the house, which I will claim artistic license on and make red like so many houses in Lofoten (where this was shot), will be appliqued.
In my head, the fabrics here are still solid. We’ll see how that goes, but that is currently the plan. If they’re not solid, they’ll be fabrics that read solid, but right now, I’m on the hunt for more solids. Currently planning an outing next weekend to two stores I know have a ton of them.
The College Fjord quilt has been fairly simple to put together because of the mirror imaging. This is very different. I can strip piece this (like how most bargello quilts are constructed), but each color group is going to have to be pieced separately and then all sewn together.
Like the College Fjord quilt, I started with the basic contours of the image sketched on a large piece of paper as the image was projected onto it. The vertical strips have to be the same from top to bottom, which so far has not been too much of a challenge but may prove problematic as I keep going (I got through about ⅓ of it yesterday). This is a sneak peek of what the planning looks like so far:
For reference, this is the center-ish of the image from top to bottom near the left edge. On the right, you can see measurements (1”, 1.5”, etc.) in blocks. The line to the left of those measurements is the water line. Anything to the left of that line in this image is the mountain moving to sky, and anything to the right of the water line is, well, water going into land. Adding the vertical lines (which in this image run left to right) is a bit of a challenge.
In the College Fjord quilt, I put vertical lines anywhere the contour of the mountain changed. But in this quilt, I also have to pay attention to the contour of the water against the land in the foreground, and if that changes, a vertical line needs to be added, too. Sometimes – in fact, surprisingly more often than not, they line up or at least can be fudged to line up. Other times they just don’t. It’s a lot to take into account, and I am 100% sure I will screw it up at some point. But so far, it’s working well.
One more design choice I made is that everything but the sky will be 1” strips; the sky will be 2” strips. This is exactly like the College Fjord quilt. I think it works really well that way – I like the contrast between the sky and the land. The one thing I haven’t decided yet is whether the clouds will be 1” or 2” strips. One inch might give me more flexibility, but two inches will blend better with the rest of the sky. I might have to do some experimenting before deciding that piece.
Still lots more to go on this quilt, but I’m really excited to see where this one goes. Let’s just hope I don’t need to create a spreadsheet this time!
