OK here’s the result of the yesterday’s work:

Here we have the weft woven into the warp. And then you have to sew down all the edges, so that they don’t fray or get caught on anything:

This is very time consuming - especially as the checks are about 1 inch square. I was restricted by the width of the strips that I had precut. I don’t know what I was thinking of at the time of the log cabin episode, it would have been a Sisyphus task to sew those strips. It took me 3 hours this afternoon to edge about one third of the squares. I’m using a 3-step zig-zag and can’t go up to full speed with the machine or else the whole table starts vibrating This is the first time I’ve used the large table on the Bernina that I bought from Gudrun. It really makes a difference to how easy it is to cope with the size of the work. This piece is about 150 X 100 cm.

And this is where I’m coming from. The grand design on a 10 x 10 cm note block:

All mod cons used in this process

Thought I give you all a tantalizing peek at my next structured fabric quilt:

This is one of the ideas that has been fermenting in my brain for the last couple of weeks. It all started with a browse through my book on the art of Vasarely. One of the works of art depicted there caused something to click in my mind. After a few nights sleeping on it I decided on using the colour burst piece of fabric from my Shibori dyeing as the weft fabric for some structured checks. On Thursday evening I did some experimenting with other fabrics from my stash. I discarded the original idea of using gauzey fabric and was surprised to find a good use for some strips hanging around from a long abandoned log cabin idea.

This afternoon I took the rotary cutter to the fabric, which was a bit nerve wracking to start off with. But once over the initial reluctance was actually quite fun. I have finished all the weaving now and the WIP is presently residing on the cellar floor. It’s time for a rest and maybe a nice glass of wine now, while I contemplate my next move.

Where do people get their inspiration and ideas from?

Although I enjoy looking at the art quilts and other textile work that people are making and showing us on their blogs and webpages, it’s not where I get my ideas from. One of my favourite ways of finding new ideas for quilts is to use the vaste source of information available on the web. I think of a word or phrase and do a google search on images. The things you turn up are sometimes quite surprising and for me it’s a kind of visual brainstorming. From the many images that appear, I then choose about 5 - 7 with a maximum of 10 to save for future reference. Obviously the images never get translated one to one into a quilt, that would be piggy backing on the creativity of others, but from them ideas are born, which I then allow to ferment in my brain. And some of them finally make it into a quilt.

Another source of inspiration for me is looking at paintings by various artists. There is a series of easily affordable books by Taschen called the Basic Art Series. They have excellent photographs of the paintings and plenty of them. Again just browsing through them from time to time puts new ideas into my head. Other books I enjoy browsing are catalogues from art exhibitions that we have visited, and books of photographs (those coffee table books!).

And finally there are the many photographs and slides from our holidays and my favourite photoblogs on the web. We are currently in the middle of a marathon process of scanning in all our slides. So that is one more resource that will be more accessible to me in the future.

Yesterday I printed my first quilt labels on the new Epson printer. Up to now I had been making them by hand with a laundry marker biro having discovered that the felt tip pens blossom out on some fabrics. They really didn’t look too professional though:

In one of my QU classes I received some good information from Lily Kerns about printing fabric with your PC printer. She pointed me in the direction of Epson printers and their DURABrite™ inks, which are smudge proof and water proof, and guaranteed fade resistant for up to 80 years. I bought some finely woven pfd cotton popeline and some freezer paper, cut A4 pieces of both and ironed the fabric to the freezer paper. It went through the printer without any problem despite being a bit curly. One of the leading corners did get a bit inky, but Lily also suggested cutting a tiny triangle off each leading corner, if there were problems with the paper feed. So I shall try that next time. The results are pretty impressive though.

I designed the label using combination of Photoshop Elements and OpenOffice.org software. The background image of the centre of “Africa meets Amish” was loaded into an OpenOffice.org document that was already formatted with the label template to contain 6 labels of 7.5 x 7.5 cm plus border for the seam allowance. The text was added in the label document. Printing from OpenOffice.org didn’t work due to incompatabilities between the Apple and Windows versions. But after converting into a pdf file those hassles were also overcome.

This is the label in the actual size:

It’s not actually a photo of the label, but an image made from the design file, but believe me you can’t tell the difference between the image printed on paper or printed on fabric until you have them in your hands.

My Mariner’s Compass quilt is finished!

I spent quite a few hours in the evenings last week at the sewing machine and finished all the quilting. Including unpicking a large chunk and re-doing it. On Friday evening I dyed the fabric for the binding and the hanging sleeve. Saturday afternoon I attached the binding and Saturday evening sewed it down by hand while watching the telly Today I made the hanging sleeve and attached it, so that we could take some photos. It’s now in the washing machine to remove the chalk and pencil markings for continuing the compass and spinning stars into the border with the quilting. The rest of the quilting was freehand without any markings. Although I did have a sketched plan to follow - made on a black and white print out of the quilt top. This being my preferred way of designing the quilting.

I’m getting much better at the bindings. The corners look really neat on this one. I’ve combined the best of a number of tips from books and the internet to a method that works well for me. I’ve also stopped attaching the hanging sleeve with the binding, as I was taught originally. It makes the binding too bulky at the top. I now make my hanging sleeve separately and sew it on by hand allowing some extra fabric on the outside to provide room for whatever it’s hung on. This stops the quilt front bulging when it’s hung.

The quilt has also now been given it’s final name: Compass Rose. And here it is:

It’s made entirely of cotton fabric that I have dyed myself, even the backing and the binding. The quilting is all with Maderia thread in 3 colours on the front and red on the back to match the red backing fabric.

I have added some new quotes to my quotes page. I discovered one of them while browsing Beate’s Fabric Art. I like the collage she was inspired to make. Take a look!

I have finally made a start to the quilting of my Mariner’s Compass quilt. Today being a public holiday here in Germany, it is a bonus day for quilting. I’ve had the backing material dyed for some time now. I just needed to get started. On Sunday I drew up a new quilting design. I had already produced one way back in the summer. Then we went to Lyon and having seen the wonderful quilting there, I threw the old design away and reworked the best bits to give a more balanced design. So sometimes procrastination pays off. I have been able to incorporate what I learnt from looking at the best into my quilts.

I took the Pfaff Grand Quilter off the frame and set it up alone on my sewing table. It is amazing how much easier the machine quilting is when you have more space in the harp for scrunching the quilt through. Also the large table that comes with the Pfaff is a vast improvement over the smaller tables. I have a large table for my Bernina too - bought from Gudrun when she upgraded her machine - but I’ve not had any reason to try it out yet.

Here are a couple of shots of WIP:

This is me in my sewing room with the Pfaff all set up. I’m sewing in the loose ends here. It is time consuming and tedious, but I still think it gives the best finish. The Pfaff doesn’t have any fancy stuff like a memory, so that it’s not possible to use the sewing on the spot technique. Although to be honest I’m not really a great fan of that either - you can end up with some nasty knotty bits that don’t exactly enhance the quilt either.

This a small area on the edge that is already quilted.