New quilt

detail of my newest quilt, Coded Connections

This year I have been playing with the ideas of Gee's Bend quilters and the concept of modern art influenced design. I began piecing, putting together pieces of fabric, two years ago in earnest with the little scraps of fabric from my big yo yo project that took 40 years to complete. I saved lots of little diamond pieces and eventually pieced many of them into little strips of squares, by hand at first, then with the featherweight Singer machine. It led to the Fairhaven Cliffs Summer Quilt 2011. That was all intuitive and challenged my color theory and subjective choices of patterns and prints looking for combinations that pleased my eye. In between there was the Rose Star English paper piecing madness that possessed me for about a year... before the rose star was done I moved to a more freestyle designing my own block I called the Williamsburg fence design. That was built using a set of dark green solid fabric with natural muslin. Working on that small quilt is when I began to realize I wanted to do repeating patterns building blocks that would add up to a full bed sized quilt. I got carried away with the Rose Star quilt and finished that then came back to the green and white design for this new quilt.

Yo yo coverlet, 40 years of little circles full of memories 

Patchwork pieced with scraps of Yo Yo quilt became the Fairhaven Cliffs Summer Quilt 

Rose Star quilt English paper pieced all by hand. 

Green and muslin strips become my play time project inspired by Williamsburg's white fences and boxwood hedges 

On the felt wall are various blocks made from the green and white fabrics exploring how cutting and reassembling the strips made new patterns

My first finished machine quilted throw photographed by Elle from DC Modern Quilt Guild at NGA sculpture garden 

The resulting play with that set of green and off-white strips developed into the latest finish titled Coded Connections. I used the same green and off-white muslin and developed a fun playful pattern without repeats but echoing the Williamsburg Fence quilt by interval and color. During the months I struggled with this idea of a modern abstract design I kept thinking I needed a third color like red or orange or magenta and I experimented over and over with them and kept rejecting the high contrast that came from those colors until one day this bamboo green solid got hoisted to the design wall and it all of a sudden felt like the shift in tone I needed to complete the color design.  

Coded Connections finished 80 x 83 

 I used a Dark Parrot Green perle cotton #8 thread to quilt it all by hand in straight lines and a solid muslin back where that green would show nicely. The binding is made of the three fabric colors pieced together to reflect the inner design intervals. The batting is simple cotton. I hope to go back to my fence pattern and make a full bed sized quilt one day.

Label close up for Coded Connections quilt

Every time I go back to Colonial Williamsburg I find new inspirations in the formal functional gardens and numerous designs all over the city.

garden fences and greens are really great retreats from the busy streets in old Williamsburg.

boxwood hedges in a garden 

picket fence gate and hedge 

This year the leaves were orange, red and yellow for our visit which is a whole new color theme for a quilted Colonial theme. 

Laundry hanging by an encampment lot at the edge of Colonial Williamsburg was a new site this year. 

 What comes next? currently I am working with used men's casual wear shirts and making progress piecing and patchworking my way to a pair of unique quilts for cold winter nights by the fire. They are being filled with rich wool batting and I hope to finish them both in the next couple weeks.

walking foot

walking foot on the machine

a white plastic part of the foot catches the needle screw and rises and falls with the needle. That lifts the teeth of  foot to pull the fabric under the needle on top, matching the action of the lower feed dog teeth. 

walking foot 

New walking foot attachment arrived last week and I got right to work on the small green and white Williamsburg fence pattern quilt. I ripped out all the quilt stitching I did at the meeting of the DC modern quilt guild meeting in September using the flat foot.
I decided to do a test swatch and quilted a  pot holder square with the walking foot before I began on the quilt. it worked really well!

Then I added a bunch of new safety pins to the quilt to secure the layers. Then I began quilting the bigger project.  It works, it moves along so much better than the flat foot did. The walking foot pulls the fabric on top with teeth just like the "feed dog" does on the bottom under the foot. They move along in unison under the needle sewing very smoothly. The thick fabric, batting and backing is a fat sandwich of materials to pass under the needle of the sewing machine. It still needs to be basted together before sewing and I tried the safety pin basting trick. I was disappointed they didn't work perfectly but this was my first try using them. I bought a bunch more to make sure I had them pinned in about every six inches. It looks, as Keith says, kind of punk rock with so many safety pins.

quilt top with safety pins.

detail of the quilting with safety pin basting 

back striped side of the Williamsburg fence quilt 

Next comes the tape on the edges and some hand blind stitching to hold in on the back side... and this one will be done very soon. Then I can move on to the next project and practice more quilting on another small quilt. I know now that I am not ready to do a large quilt with this machine quilting technique yet. I hope with practice I will be able to do some very nice work on a full bed sized quilt. It's much faster than hand quilting as I expected. Thanks for loaning me your Singer sewing machine Mom, as you see the walking foot fits your Singer too!

new idea quilting

I had an idea as I was finishing up my Fairhaven Summer Quilt project last week for a design based on a fence pattern at Powhatan Plantation in Williamsburg, Virginia. I saw and photographed a few of the fences and one in particular faciated me for many reasons. I recall there was a moment when I realized as a kid that not all fences were put together the same way. These designs are very geometic and thus very good for flat designs like in a fiber art project such as a quilt. My father once told me about a design he and uncle Herb put in the banister around my Grandparents front porch... he also talked and pointed out some of those classical colonial designs he had studied when we went to Williamsburg in a book to me at some point. So this idea has roots in my childhood when I was learning about Architectural history from my father.

the railing at Powhattan to the left of the doorway. 

making green and white striped fabric to begin 

folding and cutting to create triangles from the stripes 

assemble the short sides of the triangles  to make a square

the resulting new quilt block design