Commentary about works in progress, design & creativity
I know it is January 2014, but I am not quite ready to pack in the cutting for FOTY 2013. I’ll start arranging and piecing it later this month, with any luck.
I wanted to include these fabrics, because some of them are from projects in December. I also added a few from Attack of the Hexies and may add a few more, if I have any left.
I also have washed a few fabrics that I thought I would use for pillowcases, but it didn’t happen. I’d like to add those in as well.
I thought I would have been able to choose a background from the previous post, but it wasn’t to be. It occurred to me to think about what I wanted. I do want the background to be a player. I don’t want it to just fade into the background, so to speak. I also don’t want it to overshadow the foreground fabrics.
So, I spent some time on Sunday pressing greys and trying different greys with my octagons. It meant that I didn’t sew, but it also meant that I was carefully and deliberately engaging in the process.
Above is a batik that I bought at The Granary. It has a bit of blue in it. I thought it wouldn’t work, but I do like it. It gives movement to the background. The dark grey bits remind me of swirling fog.
It isn’t directional, which is a bonus. The blue doesn’t show up very well in the photos.
This background goes with the blue flower in the upper left of the photo above. It is from the same line. I may even have bought it at the same time. It is a true background, in the sense of it doesn’t add anything.
Again, has a directionality, but I wouldn’t say it is directional — or the directionality wouldn’t look weird if the pieces were cut different ways.
Dots are always a safe bet. This dot is the right size not to interfere with the other dots, even the red ones.
Not directional.
I am not sure why I bought the amount (2-3 yards) of this. I think I was expecting the color to be a little different. Since I was pressing greys anyway, I decided to press this, but I don’t think it is appropriate for the project.
Very directional. I don’t want to worry about the way I cut so that the lines of dots lined up. I am not sure I would want to worry about that.
Lots of movement. If the pearl bracelets don’t interfere with the foreground, then the fabric adds a lot of movement. I would err on the side of this being too busy for the piece, which is a little busy anyway.
Not really directional. I only have a yard of this and would have to buy more.
I have a boatload of this fabric, because it is a good background and I had the foresight to buy plenty.
Not directional.
Between the the choices above and the previous choices, I think my favorites are below:
Of the three above, I think the batik is the most likely. I don’t have enough of the Happy Go Lucky, and can’t get anymore so that doesn’t seem to be a real option.
The grey dot is perfectly fine, but doesn’t really add anything to the piece. If I decide I don’t want to add the movement I discussed above, then that fabric would be a good option.
That leaves the batik.
My SIL commented that I only showed the light blue on one of the backgrounds. This time, I used the same octagons for all the different backgrounds. I did rearrange them, however.
Russian Rubix posts:
Process is messy.
I spent a lot of time cutting over the weekend, which served a few purposes:
I really wanted to make progress on cutting for my Super Secret project and for the Russian Rubix. I just wanted to see what the fabrics would look like cut up.
It turns out I am using the same fabric for both projects. I like the combination so far. Probably not the same background and I will probably use the more colors (fabrics) for the Super Secret project than for the Russian Rubix, but the base colors and fabrics are the same.
Most of the fabrics on the right (above) are fabrics I am using for the two projects. The group shown is small, because the design wall is full of the RR octagons.
I cut octagons from all of the fabrics chosen so far, but there is a pile of them on my cutting table that won’t fit on the design wall. I need to move them to my portable design wall, but the Attack of the Hexies project is there and I am actually working on it a bit, so I don’t want to lose the momentum by taking it off. I’d really like to get that project out of my life. It was fun for awhile, but I am ready to be done with it. Working on it makes it more fun.
It really has been awhile since I filled up part of the design wall enough to post some squares for this project for you. Summer was busy; I wasn’t ironing. I don’t know what I was doing. Read the blog, then you’ll know.
I got two Recchiuti boxes of windmill pieces last week from Friend Julie. I think I have mentioned that we are cutting for each other and doing the same shape this time.
She really has the best batiks. Almost all the pieces she sent to me were batiks and I really like them. I didn’t photograph all of them; just a sample of what she sent.
In the course of putting them away, I realized that I have to find another storage container. I crammed these into the current containers, but no more will fit.
I use plastic scone containers that I get from Whole Foods. I am out of those storage containers. I’ll have to stop at Whole Foods and get some more scones. 😉 It is a requirement since I can reuse the containers to hold my quilt patches.
I am still cutting squares for FOTY 2013. You can see a lot of the squares from the Round Robin piece in this group.
I was trying to put the squares in color order, which is a good exercise. It is also hard if you are working with what you have rather than being able to select specific colors to fill in. I did pretty well, but was having trouble with the pearl Bracelets purple. It is so dark.
See the last group.
There is something I like about this 2013 Fabric of the Year project. I like having a piece of each fabric. Once the quilts are finished, I love walking by them and thinking “that fabric would be perfect for this project” or “OH! I remember that fabric. It was such great fabric.” It is like looking at a scrapbook.
I am afraid I am getting tired of it, though. Perhaps I am just tired. I know I am tired, but having the feeling seep over into fabric is scary.
These are blues from the end of the Star Sampler project. Mostly, I made the 4″ Sawtooth Stars from these fabrics. Yes, I did arrange them purposefully to be only a blue batch. I have a whole additional group that I’ll photograph later that is all different colors.
I have cut more pieces for the Fabric of the Year 2013 quilt. Many of the fabrics in this group turned out to be more greyed… or not as bright perhaps as I thought. That is the problem with buying fabric online. The colors just don’t reproduce as well our eyes see them.
Still I am pleased with Texture Basics pieces (dots, stripes, diamonds & houndstooth). They are not ugly and the red and teal are particularly nice.
I am already cutting them up for a project, which is great as well.
I am still plowing through the piles of fabric to iron. I iron fabric when I need to think and when I am under stress and it it calms me. I suppose the tactile nature of the fabric helps, but, as I probably don’t need to say, the color and design help, too.
This year’s shape is a 3.5″ square and I have an idea to do a kind of waterfall effect. Stay tuned to see what actually happens!
I had two fabri-lanches in the past few days, so I finally started pressing fabrics and cutting the squares for Fabric of the Year 2013.
There are fabrics for projects in process and also fabrics that just came up on the ‘to press’ pile. I might need to take a day off work that I dedicate to pressing fabric.
I had a good amount of time off over the holidays. I was able to spend some time pressing fabric and cutting pieces for this project. It is a meditative process and was a good way to transition from the difficult last quarter at work to vacation.
The end is drawing near, so I need to speed up the process or work with what I have.
One thing I like about this is that looking at the fabric patches and thinking about the projects on which I am working as well as the new fabrics.
I haven’t taken any kind of inventory of pieces that I have. If I do I can fix any problems, if I don’t it will be a design challenge.
While I am making progress on preparing to sew the FOTY 2012, I still have a pile of fabric to press, not to mention the other pile I have to wash AND press. There is no way for me to get it all done, but I will get as much done as possible before I start sewing at the CQFA Retreat in January.
I do enjoy this process, however. I like seeing these photos and thinking about what I made from the fabrics.
I have FOTY 201o hanging in my hallway and I keep walking by thinking “I need to find that fabric; it would be perfect with X project.” That is really fun.
And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Yesterday was fun, but I am ready to get back to normal blogging. It was exhausting trying to keep up with the questions and the comments. Look for winners and more tomorrow.
I have been cutting and pressing fabric a little at a time. I realized that I needed to get my act together if I am going to work on this quilt at Retreat at the end of January. I do enjoy looking at the patches on my design wall and thinking about where I bought the fabric, what project I was working on when I cut the smaller squares and future projects I am planning.
I did find that this process was good for putting fabrics together that I might not thought of putting together. I got a Chicopee solids pack (Thanks, Temptress Adrianne!). While those fabrics were waiting to be pressed, they were on top of a large floral by Philip Jacobs and I noticed they all went really well together. There was another dot fabric that was perfect, too. Not sure what I will make, but something.
I have a big stack of fabric to press and cut and another big stack to wash, press and cut. Not my favorite tasks, but not horrible either. Great for calming me down in stressful situations. Too bad they won’t give me the space to set up an ironing board, iron and cutting mat at work. 😉
The time is really flying by. I was thinking about ordering my turkey next week (maybe the week after). I bought some pumpkin for Thanksgiving and Christmas pies last week in my attempt to get ahead of the major shopping in the next few weeks. I am behind. Behind in blogging, my house feels like a wreck, behind in cutting new and used fabric. Everything.
Case in point: it has been almost two months since I last posted FOTY fabrics. The last blog post was in late August! Gracious!
Still I was able to get some new fabrics cut up. I was also able to scrounge some squares from fabrics I have been using. Are you able to see the projects I was working on in this group?
I see some blocks I made, a journal cover I made and a few fabrics slated for journal covers I will make. One reason I love this project is that it is like a memory book in fabric.
Julie posted about her Windmills/our joint Windmill project and it occurred to me that I hadn’t post anything about this potential quilt.
I am still very much in the Hunting and Gathering stage at this point and I don’t know how large it will be, what the background color will be or anything about it yet. It is not yet up on my radar, which it why it never occurred to me to post about it.
Julie and I went to lunch last week and she gave a bunch of windmills she had cut for me. The photo shows some of them. Lots of lovely and luscious batiks!
We are cutting windmills for each other and we are using a Come Quilt With Me rotary cutting template/ruler. It is a piece of Lucite thick enough to use with a rotary cutter. It was very slick, so I put True Grips on the bottom to keep it still while I cut. True Grips are expensive, so I use the background as well as the dots. I think they work better than the sheet of plastic that can be adhered to rulers. True Grips are easier to put on as well.
I cut Windmills whenever I am cutting into a new piece of fabric or pull out a piece of fabric from the fabric closet, so there is quite a variety. Lots of dots, pinks and turquoises. 😉
For the moment, I am just going to continue cutting. I have other projects on my plate that are higher up on the list.
Sometime ago I wrote a generic post about organization in my workroom. My workroom is somewhat organized considering it isn’t large enough and I don’t have enough bookcases. 90% of the time I can find what I need and I am less and less surprised by things I come upon serendipitously.
One of the major things I do is, what I call, hunting and gathering. I prefer to make quilts, usually, that use a lot of fabrics. I think many different aquas will be more interesting than just one. This means that many projects, I need to cut a lot of patches from a wide variety of fabrics. It doesn’t work for me to decide to start such a project, open up a fabric bin and start cutting. I can’t stand that long, I get bored and the whole situation results in me hating the project or just stopping about halfway through. Also, if I use that strategy, I get tend to have too many of one color and not enough of others. None of this is good for my stress level and definitely not they way I want my quiltmaking to be.
Also, I don’t know of a way to really randomize this type of fabric selection. Cutting from fabrics I buy new or pull out to use seems like as good a way as any. Also, as an added bonus, I use fabrics that I like right now immediately.
Another problem I had was that I would take fabrics out of bins and NOTHING would be cut from them. Not one square or anything. Shameful! This problem was alleviated by the Fabric of the Year project, which TFQ thought up and I ran with. You can read about the beginnings of that project for me in a post from 2008. Doing this kind of started the solution to my Hunting and Gathering.
As I got use to cutting one shape, the Fabric of the Year shape, out of new fabrics, it became easier to cut more than one shape. I thought it was a good idea and it became easier to use this new system to make progress on projects I was not yet ready to start sewing. Pretty soon I was up to the number of pieces I am cutting now. The other thing is that the fabrics became less precious. I started not to save them for a better project. I also knew, which I have talked about in terms of the FOTY projects, that I knew which fabrics were going to work for other projects so I could go and buy more before it was 3 years later and too late to go and buy more.
In addition to the above I also cut 2.5″x4.5″ pink rectangles, 2″ red squares and 2″ aqua or turquoise squares.
The idea is that after I identify a project I want to make that requires a ton of cutting, I figure out what kind of cutting I need to do (coordinated fabrics or scrappy fabrics as well as size). Either can work with my system. Then I put the shape and color on my list. I keep the list near my cutting table so when I have a new piece of fabric (after washing and ironing) I know exactly what to cut. By now I have a sense of how much fabric these shapes will need (now approximately 5″x18″) and I know by the size of the hole in the fabric whether I am finished.
The bonus result of this cutting is that fabrics became less precious to me. There are many fewer fabrics that are free from any kind of cutting. I make progress on projects that require a lot of cutting and I get to see new fabrics appear in projects I was making immediately.
One of the great things about cutting pieces from new fabrics is that it is a great warm-up. Sometimes when I need to get started, pressing fabric and cutting new pieces from new fabrics is a good way to get started. If I have 10 minutes, I can cut, feel like I made progress and got a little stress relief in.