Category: Planning the Quilts

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I Might Be Onto Something

I think I got this!

Over this past weekend, I had a full day to spend in the sewing room, so I started out working on a very overdue gift, but then had some time left over. I started sewing more of the double-wide strips, and I took out some of the lighter sky blues and replaced them with darker sky blues. Again, mistakes were made, decisions were reversed, math was done incorrectly, and the seam ripper got a workout.

After sewing four more of the double-wide strips, I decided I needed to see how they looked cut in half and mirrored. Ignoring the fact that there are regularly things that don’t line up (‘cause I’m me), I’m actually really pleased with how this looks so far.

I feel like it’s actually starting to look like some mountains with a beautifully clear sky above, reflected in some very clear water. Which, frankly, is what the original picture is. There’s a lot more to the picture, though.

While I am happy that it’s starting to look like it’s supposed to, there are still some things that need to get resolved:

  • The current plan is to do quilt-as-you-go quilting on this, with the strips being sewn together at the same time that they’re being sewn to the batting and backing. But I may have to throw that out, depending on what my solutions to these other issues are.
  • What, exactly, will I do for a water line? I was going to completely ignore it, but the more I look at this, the more I think that it needs to be there. There is, in fact, a clear water line in the original image. SO…white or blue? How will it be created? (Current thinking on that is embroidery floss, but I’m still contemplating.)
  • Same thoughts, only for snow. There is snow on top of almost all of the mountains. I would like to add that in somehow. The jury is completely out on that one…no idea how that’s going to go off, especially with the quilt-as-you-go method.
  • Look closely at the rightmost two strips in the picture. The lightest mountain blue – which is the second-lightest of all of the mountain blues – almost disappears against the sky blues. If my solution for the snow does not solve that issue, I’m going to have to figure out how to set those off so that the lightest mountains don’t just blend into the lightest sky colors. Although…if you look at the original image, the furthest mountains do just sort of blend into the sky. Again, not quite sure what I’m going to do about that.

I have some work ahead of me – design choices as well as a LOT of sewing. I did cut and sort the remaining mountain blue pieces – I have 45 little piles of mountain blue strips pinned and labeled with the column letter, ready to go. I may try to get some of them sewn tonight, in fact.

I’ve completed nine of 54 strips. As my friend Joe said when I was telling him about it, “You’re almost 20% done!” Dude, that did not help.

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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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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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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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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.