This week there has been more progress on my blue and green quilt. I have sewn all the blocks together to make the quilt top. And I have also dyed some fabric for the backing. I tried out one of the methods in the book “Color by Accident” by Ann Johnston. It is a combination of blue dye followed 15 minutes later with yellow dye. Before adding the yellow dye I rearranged the fabric in the bucket so that it was scrunched in a different place. I like the effect. I had run out of lemon yellow dye and had to use my golden yellow, so the green turned out more olive than I would have liked. But in fact it goes well with the greens on the quilt top - one of those fortunate happenstances.

My original sketch had figures on the quilt top. Once I had sewn all the blocks together I began to have doubts about it. I was worried that the log cabins would get lost behind the figures. After looking at the quilt top on the design wall for a few days I returned to my original plan. The quilt just wasn’t finished. I thought maybe I could make the figures from transparant fabric. I sketched my figures on paper and cut them out and pinned them to the quilt top on the design wall.

I realised then that they weren’t going to hide so much of the log cabin blocks and decided to cut them from cotton fabric. They are now fused to the quilt top and the quilt sandwich is pinned ready to sew around the edges of the figures and do the remaining quilting.

This is how my design wall looks right now:

This piece is going to be called “Blue and green should never be seen”. The strip of fabric on the right will be used to fill the holes on the quilt top. I was originally going to do half-sized log cabin blocks, but after I had made one and tried it out, I realised it would be too much of the same - as I had used all my various blue and green fabrics in the large log cabin blocks.

This quilt is another assignment from the QU course Self Expressions. We were to design a quilt that said something about ourselves, but along the way it turned into more of a piece about my mother. So I think that’s the way it’s taking me. I’m not sure now how much of my original sketch will end up in the finished quilt. Maybe quite a bit because I think we were very similar people in some ways.

I’ve been cleaning out my stash and finally getting round to washing all the fabric that wasn’t yet - because the bit I need next wasn’t washed Meanwhile I am pondering on how to progress after the next step that I have already decided on.

It’s also snowing here today - so a good day for doing things in my studio. Just when we thought spring had arrived, the winter we never had came instead.

My “dislike” quilt is finished now. I worked on it in the free evenings this week. It’s 12×9 inches.

I layered some green sheer fabric across the moon and then played “join up the dots” with machine quilting and rayon thread over the crackled effect from the potato dextrin dyeing attempts. There is extra polyester batting on top of the cotton batting under the moon to give more depth to the quilting. The green sheer was necessary, because I felt the white alone was too stark a contrast to the coloured surround.

The pink spots and the blue flow are fused on. As they are so small I decided not to sew around the edges in any form. I’m just trusting the power of glue! When I saw the black and white image of the original material, I realised that the coloured area is all more or less of the same value, which was why it was so boring. I needed to add some contrast to the piece - other than a big white moon.

The blue area in the bottom left was inspired by the difference in intensity in the original dyeing. I decided to emphasise the effect with the blue patterned material, which picks up the colours in the quilt, toned down a bit with a layer of blue sheer fabric on top.

The whole is completed with some extra machine quilting.

The texture quilt was one of the exercises from the “Self Expressions” course I’m currently taking at QU with Myrna Giesbrecht. We had to make a small quilt with something we really like in it. That was my velvet.

This week’s assignment is to make a small quilt with something we dislike in it. A piece of not so successful potato dextrin resist dyeing came to mind. Here is the entire piece.

I chose a section of the material as the starting point for my dislike quilt. It’s about 12×9 inches, as we are supposed to make just a small quilt.

I’ve also chosen some fabrics that might get included in the quilt top.

I’m working on a black and white image again to develop some ideas on how to proceed. I am going to continue exploring texture in this quilt. Current thinking includes augmenting the crackled effect that didn’t work so well in the original with quilting, maybe using some polyester batting to get more depth. I’ve also been looking at images of estuaries because the fabric reminds me of aerial views of silt flowing out of rivers into the sea.

That’s the state of play at the moment.

It ended up a little larger. It’s 17×14 inches now.

My first change to the small piece was to add some extra narrow bands in colour, taking the light into the dark and dark into the light. I made the strips longer than necessary and when I had it up on my design wall with the longer strips going out over the edge, I suddenly realised that it should be larger.

The background material is one of the pieces I bought on ebay. It’s an off-cut from bedding manufacturing. It is red and black, but the white and the orange vertical stripes are part of the material. I liked what I saw, so I cut a hole from the piece of fabric and inserted the small quilt top with a couple more narrow strips of colour to go out into the border. When that was done I decided that the rest of the design should be quilting.

Using a black and white image of the quilt, I played with various ideas for quilting. (I always use this method. It’s described in the Africa meets Amish gallery.) Once I was happy with the quilting idea I felt that one of the strips needed to move. After doing that I chose coloured thread for the quilting. As I wanted the quilted lines to be more prominent than usual I used double thread on the top as I didn’t have any thick thread. I combined polyester thread with rayon and black polyester with metallic thread.

I’ve decided that I like the smocking now. And the velvet has also found itself to be in a worthy setting.