Tag: photography

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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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Horseshoe Canyon Is Done!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I Was Not Kidding…

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

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

I’m so pleased with the result!

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

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

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

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Fabrics Before Grids

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

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

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

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

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

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Paper Piecing the Hard Way

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

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

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

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

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

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Two Steps Forward…

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

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

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

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

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

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A Productive Weekend, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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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!