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A Productive Weekend, Part I

There aren’t many weekends that I can spend all or part of both days in my sewing room, but this was one of them. The entire day Saturday and some of the day Sunday were spent working on various items. With some bonus time on Friday evening, I was able to layer the Horseshoe Canyon quilt with backing, batting, and top. That is ready to be quilted, and I’ve got a good idea how I’m going to quilt it – I just need to gather up the courage to attempt it with my domestic machine. I don’t normally quilt projects this size on my own, honestly. But in this case, the quilting will be stitch-in-the-ditch, and it involves either straight or almost straight lines, so I think I can handle it.

The question of quilting for these projects is an interesting one, and it goes back to the thoughts I had about quilting the Crater Lake image. Quilting is a necessity for these projects – after all, it’s not a quilt unless it has those three layers sewn together! In a traditionally pieced project, the quilting is an opportunity to enhance the piecing. Let’s take another project I’ve got started (but have clearly shunted aside for the moment) as an example: Getting to Know Hue.  I’ve been in love with this project since I first saw it hanging in the quilt shop where I got all of the block-of-the-month patterns and fabrics, but it’s a very different type of project. I am actually planning to leave out the applique in the corners of the center block with the star. I’m not sure what I’m going to put in there in its place, but one of the options is to work with the long arm quilter (because let’s be honest – I will not quilt this on my domestic machine!) to do something design-wise with the quilting rather than trying to piece something together. In this type of project, the quilting has a chance to enhance the piecing – to bring out the colors and enliven the background. To quilt this project with a stitch-in-the-ditch method would be a TRAVESTY. Could it be done? Sure. But why would you do it that way?!

These picture quilts, though, are very different. There’s no background fabric in the same way that there is in the Getting to Know Hue quilt. Everything is part of the image at a higher level than the “main fabrics” of a traditionally pieced quilt. To quilt these images any way other than stitch-in-the-ditch takes away from the image, unless the stitching is meant to be part of the image in some way. (Like quilting around bits of the tree in the Crater Lake quilt. Doing that enhanced an element of the image.) But to recreate an image, even in the abstract, such as I did with the Horseshoe Canyon quilt using fabrics to mimic elements of the image renders intricate quilting unnecessary. All of the image elements are there already – in the fabric. Why try to distract from that with quilting?

The question is: does the quilting enhance the quilt, or does it distract from the quilt? Intricate quilting on a traditionally pieced quilt enhances it, if it’s done right. Intricate quilting on these picture quilts that I’m working on, in my humble opinion, would detract from them – at least for the ones I’ve done so far.

And so the Horseshoe Canyon quilt sits until I can gather up the courage to shove it into my domestic machine to do some plain ol’ stitch-in-the-ditch.

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Thoughts in the Shower

I really need to learn to keep a notepad near the shower so I can take notes on things that I think of while I’m in there. While half of my brain is occupied by the repetitive (and boring) act of showering, the other half gets to wander far afield. Sometimes it focuses on work that I have upcoming. Sometimes it repeats conversations I’ve recently had, heavily notated with the things I wish I’d said at the time. Sometimes it hits on five different topics, so that I forget about the first one by the time I step out of the tub. Yesterday, I visualized and planned quilts.

I won’t take you through the whole thought process that went into this, but I was thinking about this whole idea of using a published pattern, or a traditional way of piecing, and trying to build an image around it. Because I’m me and I know that I get bored easily, the established pattern needs to be easy – something that’s not terribly intricate and doesn’t involve absurd amounts of planning. (For some people, what I’ve already done for the abstract iceberg quilt constitutes “absurd amounts of planning.” The definition of “absurd” is simply “something I don’t wanna do.”) Side note: along this same line of thinking, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to incorporate a log cabin pattern into one of these things, but very few of my images lend themselves well to squares, or even rectangles. But I digress.

Somehow, the image of a bargello quilt came into my head. (Yes, I hear you yelling “I thought you said you DIDN’T want to do absurd amounts of planning!” Bear with me.) And I must admit, I got a little excited at the prospect of figuring out a way to do one of these images in the abstract with bargello. I mean, think about it. Bargello curves. It moves. Like a picture, it is designed for your eyes to travel across it. It is the perfect quilty medium for interpreting hills and mountains and movement.

I have done one bargello quilt before. It was a small table runner, and I swore I’d never do one again. Even though my piecing has become more consistent over the years, it’s still just inconsistent enough that I can pretty much guarantee that very few seams will match on any bargello quilt I make. But perhaps, with a bargello quilt that imitates nature, matching seams isn’t really the point. Let’s be honest – who’s going to notice when it’s hanging on a wall?

I’m trying to imagine myself attempting bargello on a larger scale. I’m not going to lie – it mostly terrifies the stuffing out of me. But I have not just one but two images that would be pretty much perfect to attempt using this method. One is a mirror image picture – mountains and skies over mirror-smooth water. (I’m DYING to do something with this image and was kicking myself that I hadn’t yet figured out a way to do it well.) The other is another scene from the Lofoten Islands in Norway that just contains a lot of that kind of undulating movement that bargello quilts do spectacularly well.

So I will most likely be breaking my oath to myself never to attempt another bargello quilt. May the Flying Spaghetti Monster have mercy on my soul.

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Another Busy Day

My machine is home! It was gone for all of four days. It was a timing issue and covered under warranty, so yay! I picked it up at the sewing center yesterday, and it was all ready for me to go first thing this morning.

Today was a busy day. I hung the national park quilt, which took a lot longer than I thought it would because of things I couldn’t find (hello, ADHD). I’ve been meaning to do that for a while – I just got sick of looking at a blank wall and having my voice echo in the hallway. So that’s done.

I started in on the foundation paper piecing for the abstract iceberg quilt after that. It’s been such a long time since I last did any foundation paper piecing that I lost of my add-a-quarter ruler, probably somewhere in the move to my current house (which happened in May of 2022, so a little over two years ago). So…the trip to the store to get a new one happened. Fortunately the closest store is two miles up the street and open on Sundays. I was thinking I might find the old one once I bought a new one, but noooo.

Six of the 36 blocks (18 A blocks and 18 B blocks) are now done. Two of them got done twice ‘cause I wasn’t paying attention and screwed something up. Fortunately, I use David Sirota’s No More Tears paper piecing method, so the paper wasn’t destroyed and could easily be reused to do the blocks the right way. (I did find the instructions for that method in a project from the class that I took with David well before my 2022 move…which still isn’t done. And no, the ruler wasn’t in there. It was the first place I looked.) It’s slower going than I would like, but given my propensity to screw up, I will take my own sweet time, thankyouverymuch. I figure if I spend a couple of hours on it when I have a free evening, I might have it done fairly quickly. But then again, all of my other hobbies (chorus, photo club, quilt guild, etc.) are starting up again with the start of the school year, so who knows.

When I got bored with that (hello again, ADHD), I sewed the borders onto the Horseshoe Canyon quilt. I like it SO MUCH BETTER with the borders on it! I thought about putting the layers together to quilt it but discovered that I hadn’t gotten quite enough backing fabric because I forgot to add in the width of the borders. So this necessitates adding a 10” strip down the middle of the backing fabric, which I was just not going to get done tonight. Maybe tomorrow. But I am so pleased with the quilt now that it has borders on it. The border is a black batik with a navy blue pattern on it, so it looks solid black in low light, and it just helps to balance the dark greens in the middle. I promise to post a picture of it when it’s quilted and bound.

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Not What I Thought I’d Be Working On

A couple of blog posts ago, I talked about what I thought my next project would be, now that I’ve finished the Tracy Arm quilt. Well, that one has stalled out. I still don’t have a definitive image of what it might look like in my head, and when I really looked at it to start to source fabrics for it, all I really saw was green and white, and two colors do not an interesting quilt make. So I have, for the moment at least, tossed that one aside in favor of another one that is similar but has more color and texture variation.

The more I look at this one, the more I think I will like the challenge of it. I’m going to use the puzzle-piece-layering method that I learned from Trudy, but this will be the first time I use it on a piece that does not have a sky, and that idea sort of intrigues me. First, I have to figure out what the pieces will be, then I have to find the fabrics. (If I’m honest, I’ve already found a couple of them.) I think this one will be just a little smaller than the Tracy Arm quilt but larger than the boring Norway one, and of course, it’s a portrait orientation image rather than a landscape orientation. So it poses some interesting challenges.

What’s going to be a real challenge for me is recreating the waterfall. I’ve got a couple of different fabrics that I want to try out to see what works. One is a little darker but already has the vertical lines in it; I may just have to embellish those lines with some thread painting (which, by the way, I still have not yet attempted with the Norway fisherman’s cottage image). The other fabric is lighter with some muted colors on it, but has no lines on it, so those will need to be created from scratch. So the question now is – is sewing going to recreate those smooth vertical lines of the waterfall? Or am I going to have to get more creative than that? And of course, all of it has to wait until I get my sewing machine back. *sigh*

Depending on how long it takes to hear what’s wrong with my sewing machine and get it fixed, I may start collecting fabrics for other projects soon as well.

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Chipping Away at All of the Projects

I’ve been here, there, and everywhere over the last week or so, but I’ve been chipping away at the abstract iceberg quilt. First there was making a list of all of the colors of fabric that I identified when I labeled the foundation papers, and then figuring out how many of each of those pieces I would need. That, in turn, helped me figure out how much of each of the new fabrics I needed to get. Most of the fabrics were small amounts – I just needed one or two pieces here or there, not huge amounts. Then I went to get the fabrics that I needed.

After washing all of the fabrics, I started cutting the other night. Fortunately, the pieces I need for this quilt can be divided into two kinds – the piece for items 1 and 2, which are the same size, and the piece for items 3 and 4, which are a different size than items 1 and 2 but the same as each other. Fortunately, the strips of fabric I needed to cut were all the same! I’m still in the process of cutting up all of the fabrics I need and hoping I don’t get burned by the fact that some of the fabrics can be used on right and wrong side (read: batiks), but other fabrics not so much. I’ll deal with it…some other day.

The Tracy Arm quilt has also been moving along. For those of you following along in the peanut gallery, I finished applique sewing the pieces onto the background. I did have to take out and resew some of the sewing with the monofilament, which took some effort because sometimes when I went to resew it, the same thing happened again. My seam ripper got a workout. But the sewing is done and it looks great!

I found the fabrics for the borders (one 1” border closest to the image, plus a 4” border outside of that) and sewed those on. I was able to use some stuff I had in my stash for the 1” border, which was nice, but I did need to go find the correct navy blue to make the 4” border. (I also found the backing for this quilt in my stash!) I put it all together, and I’m really pleased with the result. 

Unfortunately, while I was working on the border for the Horseshoe Canyon quilt (yeah, I bet you forgot about that one), my sewing machine decided it was DONE with this nonsense, so it’s at the sewing center getting looked at (as of today). It’s still under warranty, and it seems like it’ll be a relatively simple fix, but it was just something I could not solve despite my best efforts. So…in the meantime, I have been finishing up the cutting for the abstract iceberg quilt, which will take me a while. The plan is to get all of that cut out, then to clip all of the pieces to their respective foundation papers, which will probably take me another couple of evenings to get done.

The Tracy Arm quilt got pinned with its backing and batting today, so that’s just waiting on the sewing machine, and I have a traditional quilt I was working on before this whole project that still needs the final hand sewing on the binding to be finished. At a trip to a different local quilt shop this past weekend, I found some fabrics for a different quilt I’d like to start, which will involve the layering applique pieces again (so, no sewing!). I’ll talk about that one in my next blog post. 

I will not be hurting for things to do while I’m machine-less!

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When Bored…

Today, I took an unexpected sick day when I realized that I needed to deal with both a dentist appointment and what looks to be an infected tick bite (we don’t mess with Lyme disease up here in the northeast!). I feel fine, but I just needed to deal with these two appointments, and that was going to take a chunk out of my work day, so I just took it as a sick day. I was done dealing with both issues by about 2pm, so I decided to tackle the abstract iceberg foundation papers.

As a reminder, I planned this quilt out a couple of weeks ago. I have a foundation paper-pieced pattern that I’m going to use, and I copied all of the foundation papers for it and labeled them according to a diagram of the quilt back then, but stopped short of projecting the image onto the papers and deciding which piece would be what color. I tackled that part of the project today.

What I did:

I started by taking my felt design wall down and working with the bare wall. Fortunately, I have very light gray walls, so I didn’t have to cover them with white paper or anything like that to get true colors. I taped the foundation papers to the wall in the formation that they will be in once all of the fabric is sewn to them. So in the end, the papers covered the wall exactly the size of the final quilt. Then I turned on the projector and lined the image up with the papers on the wall. It didn’t have to be exact; this pattern’s pieces are pretty big, so a few millimeters here and there weren’t going to make a huge difference in the end.

Once the image and the papers lined up, I labeled each foundation paper with the colors that the four fabric pieces would be, based on the image that was projected onto it. This proved to be far more challenging than I thought it would be. The fabrics I have for this quilt fall into four main colors – light ice blue-green, light gray (with or without silver on it), dark gray, and white on white. I found that I need more than that. I’ll use everything I have, but I also need a medium gray, a silver on white, and several blues I did not expect to need – a slightly darker ice blue-green, plus a light and medium sky blue (I did find a good medium sky blue in my stash). I was actually a little surprised to find that there was as much variation in the colors in the image as there is.

About halfway through labeling the pieces, after adding yet another color, I started to wonder whether or not I should have done this part first, before I even tried to go out and get a bunch of fabrics. It probably would have been a good choice. I have a much better idea of what the fabric requirements are for the whole quilt (me =/= a good estimator of size), so I might not have gotten nearly as much fabric as I did without really knowing what kind of quilt I was going to make. But I’m also not sure I would have come this far in thinking about the design of the quilt without some fabrics in hand. So I think it could have gone either way. Could I have done this without having any of the fabrics? Sure. But I think I now have a different mind’s-eye image of this photograph, so if I had waited to get fabrics until I had finished what I did today, I think I would be making very different fabric choices.

I imagine that this will be a technique I use moving forward with other images and published patterns. It might be a little difficult with a pattern that isn’t foundation paper-pieced; I think I might have to take a look for some larger pieces of gridded white paper so that I can map out what a pattern might look like if the pattern doesn’t already come with a coloring page to experiment with different color combinations (both of the patterns I’ve used so far for the Horseshoe Canyon and abstract iceberg quilts have had coloring pages).

A couple of things I learned today:

  • I am out of Scotch tape. I’m not 100% sure when the last time was that I was out of Scotch tape, but it has to have been many, many years ago. I could have sworn I have more tape somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. I used the last piece on the last foundation paper.
  • Tape the pieces to the wall, but not to each other. All of the tape has to be peeled off afterward, and it’s easier to peel one piece of tape off of one piece of paper, not multiple pieces of tape off of each piece of paper.
  • Draw the contours of the image onto the foundation papers, even if you won’t use them in the final quilt. I drew the line between the bottom of the iceberg and the water onto the papers. I probably won’t use that info when piecing, but it will be helpful to have if I have questions or want to make a different choice if the water ends up looking weird.
  • Take pictures before you take everything down! The pictures should include closeups of every foundation paper with the image projected onto it, plus the whole image with the papers “behind” it. I didn’t want to tape all of those papers to the wall a second time, so I made sure to document it ALL.

All in all, I’m a big fan of this process. The jury is still out on whether the result will live up to my expectations.

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Moving On…

So now that the Tracy Arm quilt top is (nearly) finished and all I need to do is sew on the borders, I need to come up with another project to do. Because, of course I do. My ADHD would ask nothing less of me!

Seriously, though. I am headed out to an area of my state I don’t normally visit this coming weekend, so I am planning to visit a quilt store or two while I’m out there. I’ll take the abstract iceberg quilt stuff with me so that I can round out my selection of fabrics for it, but I also want to bring another project or two that I’ll start sometime soon so I can begin sourcing fabrics for it. I don’t want to be limited to what I can find in my local shops, and sometimes the local shops don’t have enough variety in what I need, so grabbing even just a couple of fabrics for the next project or two will be useful.

One of the benefits of looking through the photographs I’ve taken over the years is that I’m finding lots of images that I had forgotten about but that are really nice! I am actively not limiting myself to the tried-and-true favorites I’ve leaned on over the years (we’ve already looked at why some of those won’t work for this particular project), so I’m digging into folders I haven’t looked at in a very long time. And I’m looking at all of the images in each folder.

When I look at a photograph, my mind immediately evaluates whether or not it’s a good image. Is it pleasing to the eye? Is there something in it that catches my attention? Would I put it up on the wall in my house? For the vast majority of the images I take, the answer is “no, there’s nothing interesting about this,” or more often “this didn’t come out the way I thought it would.” Sometimes it can be fixed through post-production work, but often it’s just “nope, this just didn’t work the way I imagined it would when I took it.” And that’s fine, honestly. I have come to understand over the years that I can take several hundred photographs over the course of a weekend and be able to count the ones I really, really like on one hand. (On a recent 12-day vacation, I took just over 3200 photographs and picked about 100 of them to share with family and friends. That’s about par for the course.) And I tend to take lots of different versions of the same image with the reasoning that when I get home, one of them will stick out to me. 

It’s fun to take a look back through images I literally haven’t looked at in years and look at them through the “would this make a good quilt?” lens. The one I think I’m going to work on next is one I’ve admired before – I have it printed out somewhere, and I had it on my wall at one point although it’s since been taken down in favor of other, newer images (I like to switch things up every once in a while). This image was taken in 2014 in Oregon, on scenic route 138 somewhere between Crater Lake and Roseburg. (I think. I didn’t take good notes.)

I’m interested in putting this one into the abstract bucket as well. Immediately, what came to my mind for this is a Lone Star in the middle, where the white waterfall is, with the greens and the browns surrounding it. I’m still sort of contemplating what this might look like, but I’ll probably begin working on sourcing fabrics for it soon. I have several Lone Star patterns, so I’ll also look through those soon to see if one jumps out at me as particularly conducive to mimicking this image. I’m also fascinated with the crossed fallen tree trunks at the bottom of the image, and that would be fun to recreate as well. So that’s the plan now that the Tracy Arm quilt is done (or nearly so).

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Making More Decisions

My guild has a Wednesday night Zoom meeting each week, just to hang out and work on whatever project we’re working on. I decided that I’d see if I could get more done on the Tracy Arm iceberg quilt. I ended up going to the quilt store beforehand to find the border/binding fabric. I took the quilt with me to get the border fabric (as one does), and I noticed that some of the iron-on adhesive had come unstuck, so I decided that I would need to sew things down. While I was there, I got some monofilament thread to sew down the iceberg.

So I spent the Zoom call sewing the fabric pieces down. Because I am remarkably consistent in my choices of colors for things in general, I already had all of the regular thread I needed to be able to sew all of the pieces other than the iceberg. The colors weren’t exact for all of the fabrics/threads, but they were close enough that the difference simply adds dimension rather than blending in seamlessly. I actually really like the sewing – it brings out some things that hadn’t been clear before.

Sewing with the monofilament on the iceberg was a challenge. I used regular thread in the bobbin, which may have been a mistake. Some of the stitching was perfect – it did exactly what I wanted it to do, and it’s invisible unless you look up close. But then there were occasional sections where the tension decided to go wonky, so the bobbin thread shows on top. I’m not quite sure what happened there, but I may need to make a bobbin of the monofilament thread just to finish it up. I gave up before I got to that point. I pulled out and sewed over one particularly long stretch where the bobbin thread was on top, and the same thing happened the second time I sewed over it, so I threw in the towel because I was frustrated and it was getting late. But I’ll go back at it at some point soon.

The fabrics for the borders – both the green for the inner border that you see in the picture I posted in the last blog entry and the darker blue I got for the outer border – went into the laundry when I got home from the quilt store, so I’ll tackle the border some other day. I do wash all of my fabrics before I do anything with them. I work with reds occasionally, and I have screwed up a quilt because the red ran in the laundry (even after I washed it!), so I do try to get everything laundered before I use it. It doesn’t really make a difference what you do – you just have to be consistent at it. 

One more decision that I’m going to have to make: the quilt top is stiff in places because of the iron-on adhesive. But the iron-on adhesive is not all over the top of the quilt, so some places are just…fabric, while other places are layers of fabric with the iron-on adhesive. If I’m just going to hang the quilt on the wall, that’s not a big deal – no one will feel it regularly and realize that it’s different. But if I plan on doing something else with it, I might need to figure out how to make the feel of the entire top consistent. My inclination is that I’ll simply hang the quilt on the wall so it’s not a big deal, but I do have to make sure that decision is the right one before I sandwich the quilt.

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When the Weather is Bad…

…spend the day in the sewing room. However, I did not get done what I had planned.

I thought today would be the day I projected the abstract iceberg image up on the wall and figured out what fabrics would go in which spaces. I was completely wrong. Instead, I worked on the Tracy Arm quilt. In fact, I finished the image part of it, which was a bit of a surprise.

I used a modification of a technique that I learned in a class in April taught by Trudy, one of the members of my quilt guild. I don’t think it’s Trudy’s original technique – if I remember correctly, she learned it from someone else. But she has done a lot with it, mostly with landscape templates that she has made up. I made this piece in her class the day she taught it to us.

The technique involves cutting out what are essentially puzzle pieces and adhering them to a piece of muslin using an iron-on adhesive. The selection of fabrics is crucial, and there’s a method to it. I used the same technique on the unsuccessful Norway image in the Choosing Pictures, Part II blog entry. The technique is fairly simple – an image can easily be done in a few hours – but a lot of thinking goes into it. That’s the technique I wanted to use for the Tracy Arm iceberg quilt.

As you remember from the previous blog entry, I had most of the fabrics for this, but I wasn’t entirely sure that the sky fabric was the one I was going to use. Well, I used that sky fabric – it turns out that once I laid it out with all of the other fabrics, it was perfect.

All of the fabrics with Post-Its are part of the Tracy Arm quilt

The plan was to recreate the entire image except for that awesomely fabulous iceberg right in the middle. I had the image printed onto fabric, and I planned to use that as a template – much like Trudy’s templates – get the fabric pieces to be the right size. I also planned to cut the iceberg out of the original image and basically paste it as the focal point – rightly so – of the recreated image. 

The challenge for this particular image was that it was much larger than a sheet of tracing paper, which is necessary to get the mirror image pieces you need of both the fabric and the adhesive. Rather than attempting to draw the full image out on one sheet of paper, I ended up tracing individual pieces of the image onto paper. Fortunately, I only needed to extend the paper for one piece, and I had some smaller pieces I’d cut off of the foundation papers for the abstract iceberg quilt yesterday.

One of these days, I’ll learn that I need to go back and look at the instructions for a technique like this if I haven’t done it in a while. I completely forgot about the whole mirror image part of creating the templates, so I had to redo some stuff about halfway through. But most of the fabrics were batiks, which are thankfully reversible, so I was able to get away with screwing up…this time.

I also didn’t have a piece of muslin that was big enough to act as a foundation for all of the pieces, so I improvised. I ended up using the sky piece and the water piece as foundations for some of the pieces, so I simply had to find a foundation for the middle 3.25” of the image. The printed image had about 8” of white border around it, and once I cut it off, I was able to use one of those pieces as the foundation for the middle of the image. It took math. I am not good at math. But somehow it worked. 

Since I was using a piece of the original image in the recreated image, the scale of the recreated image had to match the original as closely as possible. Where I and my ADHD might have just fudged it for an image that was entirely a recreation, I really didn’t want to get to the end and find out that the iceberg was bigger or smaller than the space that it needed to go in. So I measured, and I marked things with chalk to show where they should go. And the iceberg fit PERFECTLY in the end. I was rather proud of myself, honestly. I was so scared of getting to the end and discovering I screwed up somehow that I really took my time to get it right.

I’m really pleased with how it came out. The iceberg is, as it should be, the absolute centerpiece of this quilt.

There are still some decisions that need to be made. In the original image, there is snow on some of the mountains in the background, which I pretty much ignored when I was choosing fabrics figuring that I could add it later if I felt I needed to. I haven’t decided yet whether or not to do so, and if I did add it in, how I would do it. (More fabric? Thread painting? Paint? Something else?) I also have not yet decided whether or not I want to sew down the applique in some way. I feel like I probably should, but I am not sure how to deal with the iceberg, which has little fiddly bits I had to cut out that would be lost if sewed over them. So. many. decisions.

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And Sometimes, the Serendipitous Happens…

So today, I went looking for more fabrics for the Tracy Arm iceberg quilt and the abstract iceberg quilt. I needed water and sky for the Tracy Arm one, and I just wanted to see if I could find more of the silvers/whites/ice blue-greens for the abstract one. I went to quilt store where I worked part-time a number of years ago. It’s not too far from home, and I had a feeling I might be able to find some good stuff. I was able to round out the collection of fabrics for the abstract quilt, and I found a good water fabric for the Tracy Arm quilt. I did get a fabric for the sky, but the jury’s still out on whether or not I’ll actually use it.

But that was not the headlining story of the day. I think I mentioned when I posted about the Horseshoe Canyon quilt that I randomly found the pattern that I ended up using for it one day while I was sourcing fabrics for it. I don’t go into a project with a pattern in mind. For the abstract iceberg quilt, I was trying to find fabrics for it in hopes that I might one day be able to see a way to put those fabrics together, but I didn’t yet have a good picture in my head about what that was going to look like. Today, I found an awesome pattern for it!

The abstract iceberg quilt, to me, is very vertical, even though the image itself is in landscape orientation. The lines of the iceberg are up and down, not side to side, and while they’re not totally parallel, there’s a certain interval to them. When I imagined putting together that quilt, I thought about putting together tall vertical triangles – like really skinny Christmas trees. Some of them might have been upside down, but that’s the image I had in my head. I just didn’t know how to vary the colors within those larger triangles.

The Aura quilt pattern by Alison Glass caught my eye in the shop today. It was exactly what I was looking for. And I literally spent the rest of my day figuring out how I was going to adapt that (portrait orientation) pattern to the (landscape orientation) photograph.

So here’s the current plan: the pattern calls for a series of 8”w x 10”h blocks that are foundation paper pieced in A and B halves. I will make a quilt that will end up being 48”w X 30”h (so 6 blocks wide and 3 blocks high). The idea is to project the image (using a friend’s projector) onto my design wall at those exact dimensions and line each of the papers up with the part of the image that it will cover. Once the paper is lined up properly, I’ll choose a color – white, silver, dark gray, ice blue-green – for that piece of fabric based on the main color that’s in that piece on the image. Then I’ll be able to count up the number of pieces for each color and cut as necessary.

In theory, this will work. I was able to project the image at those dimensions on my wall, and I have all of the foundation papers copied and labeled. I have a mapped diagram of the blocks together (the pattern included a coloring diagram, which was helpful), so now all I need to do is put it all together and label the foundation papers.

I am still looking for fabrics, though. I have four ice blue-greens, four light gray/silvers, and a dark gray for the water at the bottom of the image. I want to get one or two white-on-white fabrics because I do think those will come in handy for a few spots. And I need a black for the sediment streak on the right side of the image, but I might be able to find something useful for that in my existing stash – I don’t need a ton of it.

I was supposed to go kayaking with a friend tomorrow, but the weather forecast is calling for thunderstorms most of the afternoon, so we called it off and will try again in a couple of weeks. I guess I’ll just have to stay home and work on this. Darn!