Commentary about works in progress, design & creativity
|
As you know, I used this Flea Market Fancy fabric by Denyse Schmidt for one of the Teacher Pillows. 
I used all that I had and decided I wanted more, so I could include some in the Chocolate Box quilt. Lazily I looked online. As I searched and didn’t find, I began to worry that I wouldn’t find any. I searched harder. I found a piece on eBay and bid, but someone else wanted the piece, too and bid at the last minute while I was at work, so I lost. St. JCN looked in Seattle, but no joy there either. I e-mailed various local shops to see if they had it, also to no avail. As I had less success, I became more desperate. Finally, after no success locally, I put out a call on a list of which I am a member and people around the country began looking for me, too.
Success!!! Julie over at High Fiber Content and good friend found it! Hooray. Read about her fabulous adventure looking for this fabric. She doesn’t have a permalink, so scroll to May 10, 2007. Since the great search ended I have been casually looking and this particular fabric just seems to be gone. Weird.
When a person needs a fabric fix, a person needs a fabric fix and here is no getting around it. I went on a small fabric buying binge this weekend in order to get my fix.
Fast Threads should be given a medal for the quickest service. I ordered fabric from them on Friday and here it was on my doorstep today. I found them through the Quiltshops.com search engine. I was looking for some new dots to add interest to the Pineapple. That project makes me feel cheerful, but it certainly is a fabric hog. Not in amounts, but in variety.
On Saturday, I stopped at Black Cat to get some rotary cutter blades and found 3 background fabrics for the Pineapple. The one on the right I already had, but think it will be useful in another dot quilt I have planned, so I bought some more.
Seams Sew Right quilt shop, also on Quiltshops.com search engine, is in medal contention as well. I only got two fabrics from them, but probably should have gotten more of the background dot. Nothing stopping me, I suppose. I love the purple with the white dots and will probably have enough to choke a horse eventually. I like their tag line: the Quilter’s Candy Store. The dots sure look like candy!
I also bought some fabrics from eQuilter yesterday, but haven’t received them yet. One black on white I really liked is out of stock. Oh well. It sat too long on my wish list.
In a effort to update the Catholic Church and make it more appealing to a younger audience, I think that requirements for sainthood should be eased. Sending virtually unsolicited fabric to people really should count towards the sainthood list of requirements.
A nice box arrived on my doorstep on Thursday (accompanied by my taxes, which was not so nice) literally stuffed ot the gils with fabric and little prezzies. St. JCN had gathered together my post-Birthday box and it finally arrived. The fabrics above were in it.
I needed a little infusion of new dots for the Pineapple and St. JCN supplied that for me. I am also ready to do the Chocolate Box with the addition of the Denyse Schmidt pinks.
I washed them yesterday (along with some stragglers that had been laying around) This morning I am pressing them and cutting pieces for the Cross Block quilt. Since I am there, why not?
I think I found the batik swirl I was looking for at Batiks Plus. If you search on the site for swirl you can see it on page 3 of the search results. Or just look below. The colors range quite a bit, so I will have to see when I actually get it. The design looks similar, though.
Luana has some new coffee fabrics, which got me to thinking about the coffee fabrics I have been collecting.
I have quite a lot of coffee fabrics, which I was collecting about 4 years ago for some unnamed/undesigned/unstarted project. At some point I realized that many of them were brown and I didn’t like brown. Now that turquoise and brown are popular and look good together, I think I can use turquoise with them to make the brown more cheerful.
Still, I do like the fabrics and would like to think of something nice to do with them. St. JCN and I did “She Had to Have Her Latte.” The Tarts Come to Tea is supposed to be a coffee quilt. However, the name is much better than the Crabs Come to Coffee or something, so I guess it will secretly be about coffee.
I don’t want to do something like attic windows just to showcase the fabrics. I want to do something creative and original. Perhaps a “She Had to Have Her Second Latte”?
I also have some great Dutch coffee fabrics that I bought at Black Cat Quilts. They are pretty special and I would like to do something special with them. Some kind of breakfast quilt? I am not sure. I suppose they have to go to the cogitation pile.
I have made some progress on the Pineapples. I am working on them in between everything else so I don’t feel guilty about starting a new project. Yeah, yeah, I know guilt is not productive. Above is the first bits of the second two blocks.
I have made more progress on the second two blocks. I am about 3 rows away from finishing. One thing I did differently in the last few rows is add new backgrounds. the size and spacing are different from the background fabrics I have been using. We will see how they turn out and if you think they scream “INAPPROPRIATE.”
I also added some fabrics with smaller dots. In these photos they look like tone-on-tones. We will see if I use them again.
Here is my last try at figuring out which fabrics to use for the sashing. I decided against the larger print background fabric. The background of that particular fabrics is not as bright as the background on the others. Also, the motifs are so big that they mostly got cut off.
Once again, I am trying to sew it together in chunks (rather than rows) to keep the piece straighter and more manageable.
Essentially, I have two more seams to sew to get this baby done. I can’t avoid them being long seams. Of course, there is the border. I, also, already started the back.
The Pineapple class, about which I have been talking on and off for the past week, is today. I began packing my supplies and materials and got into a panic that I don’t have enough dots in enough different scales and colors. I want to have a wide variety to provide interest. I rummaged through everything to find more and came up with two that I had washed last week, but needed to be ironed. I ironed them, but the stack still looks pathetic. One of them is a Michael Miller fabric similar to the one below, but with more of a sky blue background than the soldier blue depicted below.
I hope I am just having the last minute jitters and really do have enough fabric.
That is a quote (without the Serendipity Puzzle part) from Lorraine Torrence. It is a great ‘rule’ to remember, at least for me. I find that the picture in my mind’s eye often looks better in my mind’s eye.
To that end, I cut some sashing pieces to try and figure out if I was on the right track.
This example was my original idea for the sashing. I am not fond of it, but it is also not terrible. It looks busy and is not restful. Not sure if this quilt can be considered restful in general, but I certainly don’t want to add to the excitement. I may have to sew some pieces together to make sure this is not the right sashing design before I decide.
To me, this screams “look at the cross.” I think the contrast between the light background and dark sashing does not add to the overall design.
Think, so far, this is the best, which surprised me. It gives some space to each block so you can see the design and alleviates some of the busy-ness. I would put pieces of the three different lights instead of just the blue on white.
I worked, yesterday, on selecting fabrics for the Pineapple class, which takes place next Friday. These are the fabrics that I have selected so far. As I looked through my dot fabrics, I felt like some were missing, but couldn’t find any others, so I guess I just have the impression in my mind that there are never enough dots! I am pretty happy with the selection, but am still contemplating whether or not the dot sizes are too similar and whether the colors are too similar in value.
In this selection, I didn’t include any of the Fusions fabrics by Robert Kaufman, but am considering adding some to add a little motif size interest. Some of the colorways are very light, however, so if I do add them I need to take care. I don’t want the background to bleed into the foreground creating visual confusion. I can certainly bring them with me, so if I need them I will have them, but if not, no harm done. Opinions are welcome.
Ignore the checkerboard, as that is my ironing board cover!
The two pictures above are the same group, so you will see some overlap (e.g. the red).
Value too similar? I might have get rid of the red one in from the right as it seems to read as a solid.
I read a bit more of the Amish-Inspired Quilts book. One thing I noticed, as I was reading, was the picture of the quilt, Lorna’s Vine. You can only see a bit of it, but the thing that struck me is osmething that St. JCN and I discuss all the time: more fabric is beter than less. St. JCN has recently accepted that she prefers making scrap quilts with lots of fabrics. In this picture, the vine and leaves use many different solids, which adds a lot of interest to the quilt. Why in the world should a quilt be boring even if the fabrics are all solids? It shouldn’t. More fabric is better than less.
Happy New Year!
I received a gift certificate to eQuilter.com so I spent it on some items in my wish list that were threatening to expire. Quite bright once I saw them all together.
The Evil Quilt Fairy enticed me again with her shiny, pretty fabrics.
I spent the weekend of 8/10-8/14 visitng the fabric that I sent to Seattle with TFQ. I sent it to Seattle to visit its cousins and have its spa treatment (read: washing and ironing). Of course, visiting TFQ was much more important than the fabric. 😉
We spent the weekend immersed in fabric related activities, eating, sleeping and chatting a mile a minute. It was fantastic! I left my house stressed, catching a cold and in pain and returned refreshed, no cold in evidence and pain-free. it was a good reminder that fabric fun is good for my soul and good friends who don’t judge my whacky, and sometimes misguided ideas, are invaluable.
One of our main activities was visitng the Association of Pacific Northwest Quilters Show held at Seattle Center. The layout of the quilts was the same as 2004 and I was disappointed. I really thought that they should have returned to the layout they used in previous years. Despite my problems with the layout there were a number of wonderful quilts. Good colors, great execution of patterns, wonderful choices of fabric combinations. Unfortunately, however, nothing that made me say WOW! Photos of some of the quilts are posted at:
APNQ 2006 quilts pt.1
APNQ 2006 quilts pt.2
We also got started on an auction quilt that St. JCN promised to an organization, The Healing Center, which helps adults, children and families deal with grief. The quilt started out as multi-colored half square triangles so that it would appeal to parents of boys as well as girls, but St. JCN thinks that she will stick with predominantly blue and green and perhaps change the white to a light green. Even if she doesn’t use any of the squares we made together, it is always great to work together.
Here is a picture of the design as I left in Seattle:
As usual, I purchased a number of pieces of fabric. Many dot designs were purchased in order to add to my dots collection. Other fabrics were purchased with some specific projects in mind. I bought nearly the entire line of Denyse Schmidt fabrics. These were new designs to me – not design types and colors that I normally buy- but interesting none the less and it is always good to branch out form the norm. You can see the fabrics I bought in my Weekend Photos post. I also saw a quilt by Sugata Shah at the Quiltworks Northwest booth (for which they were selling the pattern) that I will probably make from the Denise Schmidt fabric — or at least start out with that idea! I didn’t buy the pattern, because it was just squares and I can manage something similar without a pattern. I have been thinking about that pattern, though and whether I should have purchased it for the inspiration. We’ll see. I will certainly credit Ms. Shah. No, there is no creativity involved, but I think it is important to get sewing. Of course, as projects move along, I tend to deviate from my original plans quite frequently, so who knows how the project will end up? In any case, I still need to get some browns for background.
Mostly St. JCN and I talked, caught up, shared tips and tricks for various things, shopped, did car required errands and relaxed. The worst part was the airport. I spent so much time in the airport that it was a major time sink for the trip, despite the fact that there were no real holdups. Earlier in the day there were major delays, especially at SeaTac once the British terrorist story broke. Fortunately, my flight was later, most people were well behaved. The no-water rule is really a problem for me, though. I was extremely thirsty after both flights.