Appliqué Quilt finish

Applique Quilt finish 46 x 59 inches all cotton.

This is the next new thing, appliqué pieces on top of an improvisational patchwork quilt top. I was inspired by several quilts and people to try this. Applique is hand sewing technique which has been used for centuries to decorate, using small shapes of colored fabric applied on top of a bigger surface. I used a simple big background improvisation and laid rounded squares on top with a layer of cotton batting in between to add extra puff to the attached applique pieces.

In this image you see the rounded squares and cotton batting cut and applied with long quilting pins to the background hanging on my design wall. I really enjoyed selecting fabrics and arranging my design before sitting down to baste stitch them in place firmly enough to finish sewing them down. The idea of making these rounded squares came from a hash tag on Instagram last year #squircles a word I had never seen but it seemed to be originating from the work of designer Carolyn Friedlander. She who advances the concept of "slow sewing" aka hand sewing and enjoying the meditation that ensues as you work stitch by stitch around a shape. 

I don't know who came up with the word and I am not sure I want to endorse it but square-circles mashed into "squircles" is kind of fun to say and it does make describing this sort of shape easy. Wonder if Websters will pick that up? I had hoped to join in a recent workshop on applique quilting with Carolyn my Washington DC Modern Quilt Guild held but I missed the entry time and had to settle for a great trunk show and talk given afterwards. It was fun because I got to see her and her quilts in person and compare my work to what I had seen on Instagram in her photos of these quilts. I was very surprised to discover I made most of my squircles many times larger than hers. She showed us the Aerial Grove quilt that really got me thinking I should try this, seen below. It's a series of squircles in almost a rainbow of colors which were selected very thoughtfully from a collection of 303 Kona Solids then sewn on to long blocks. Her squircles are about two to three inches in diameter. 

 The whole aerial grove quilt has these appliqued long blocks sewn together then surrounded by a low value patchwork improvisational composition to create a field around the rows of bold colored shapes. See a smaller version below.

Here in this last quilt we see a big collection of her shapes that are hard to name but very beautiful together as a series. She uses a very thickly machine quilted back ground to contrast her hand applique pieces. She gave us a tip I had to try when I got home about packing quilts. She folds them on the bias rather than squared to reduce the chance of making permanent crease marks in the quilt. The fabric is less likely to hold a crease when folded and stored on the bias and each time you unfold it you can refold in new places on the whole quilt to reduce fiber wear and tear.

I chose to hand tie the center of each of my applique pieces to secure the extra layer of batting inside the shapes. I was concerned that when washing that they might shift or even curl up inside and come out of the dryer with balls of batting wadded up. On the really big ones I added four ties. I big or long stitch quilted around each applique squircle and used a winding line to quilt the background. 

 These three images blown up by clicking on them will show you the overall quilting lines that wind in three rows back and forth over the surface. All hand quilted. I used a shirt striping from Denyse Schmidt, that I had been hoarding, for the binding. It was to bring all those darker sections together with the and frame the whole design with a little more patterning. I selected solid, striped, checked, tartan and doted fabrics for a more masculine quilt. All of the improvisation background and binding were sewn on my 1935 Singer #221 Featherweight portable sewing machine.

 It was a fun project and I learned a lot along the way about applique patches as with any new technique I feel like I could do it better next time. I would select smaller pieces to apply and do them on smaller blocks before I sew them together as a finished top. That will require a more planning than I did for this spur of the moment project. Since this is a nap sized quilt and I worked the applique pieces around the edges it went pretty well but I would have been easier to do this in sections, even perhaps in long strips like Carolyn did on her Aerial Grove quilt top.

Stacking pieces is another applique technique I would like to attempt for a future project. Shapes on top of shapes seems like it would be fun. In this quilt I decided to keep it simple and thought this form of applique piece, the rounded square or the squared off circle, brought to mind the shaped color field paintings and sculptures of a modern artist I admire, who recently died, Ellsworth Kelly. If you don't know Ellsworth Kelly's work yet, I suggest you look him up and try to find one in a museum because they are so wonderful in their simplicity of form and powerful colors! What an inspiration his work is for this modern quilter. From a recent exhibition at National Gallery of Art his printed shapes floating on the walls. He has other works in the free museums of Washington, DC

Fan Improvisation on a rainbow. Quilt finish

This is the completed Improv Fan Quilt which has been a long time coming.

I began with a request from Jessie Aller for some improv blocks for a DC Modern Quilt Guild charity project she was putting together in 2014  for a member named Angela. It was simple rectangles of mixed fabrics building a block using a scrappy theme. After I made several I decided it might be fun to try and make a bunch of these blocks to use as fabric in my own quilt.

My new blocks would be in the colors of the rainbow because our apartment is flooded with these spectrum every sunny morning and lots of quilters are really into "rainbow" as their color theme, I wanted to try my own version but I wanted to do it with black as my background like the Amish quilts I like. It was in part a reaction to all the gray and white used by many modern quilters. They rarely choose black to work into a quilt design. The bold colors of Amish and Mennonite quilts really appeal to my eye and they are usually dark and have black or dark blue as a ground. 

gratuitous chicken shot taken at the Zenzendorf Hermitage Pitman PA. 

Back in 2006/2007 I went to a retreat and for an artist residency to a magical place in the mountains of Pennsylvania called the Hermitage founded and run and created entirely by the Zenzendorf Brothers who have a huge collection of early American log buildings filled with all sorts of tools, furniture and implements of farm life circa 1800's from the many farms around their Pennsylvania Dutch valley. In the oldest house there was a sort of loft room with beds piled high with antique quilts. At the Hermitage they used no electricity and candles or oil lanterns (flashlights) under the stars.  A shower house with water from the well and a propane gas tank to heat the water and run a refrigerator were the only modern comfort luxuries. It was such fun to be there and In the 1747 reconstructed Moravian house (see image below) I discovered this antique fan quilt. I got a snapshot of it on the bed in the loft where I slept under it one chilly autumn night. The bed was antique too with no box spring just ropes holding the lumpy mattress off the floor. 

When I began I wasn't sure how I would use my rainbow blocks this row of colors with black edge and solid strips was an early sketch and it helped to keep count of how many improv squares of each color I had completed and how they looked as a group.

This shows one idea I played with before I moved on to add a magenta to this spectrum and then came to the conclusion I wanted to do a 2015 year of curved piecing in my quilts. I looked around for design ideas and realized that I would like to try a fan quilt like this antique crazy pieced fan quilt from The Zenzendorf Hermitage which I slept under years ago. I took the fan idea and built my blocks to be my color fabric in a curved pieced design using the black as background.

Cut glass crystals hang in my windows where they cast spectrum all over our living room in the morning when the sun rises. I took careful note of the order of the colors to do my layout then forgot it in the end as I split the colors up to place the orange near the center.

Rainbow lighting on the White house to celebrate Marriage Equality decision by Supreme Court last summer was just one of the many reminders about rainbows last year.

I made this rope bowl for a charity auction early on in the year which pushed me to create more blocks in more colors of the rainbow after the orange and blue ones I did for the guild quilt. 

It was challenging to cut and piece so many small curves my fan block size is 8" finished with the colored fabric having so many seams to sew over in danger of being chewed by the feed dog... By the time eight fans of each color were pieced I ran out of steam and decided it was big enough to be a nice nap sized quilt and laid them on the wall and pieced them together in a diagonal design that shows off the rainbow effect. 66" square is the finished size.  

I used pins to make each fan, that helped keep the colored improv seams under control as I rounded the curves. Then I got a number made and began experimenting with how to assemble the fan blocks.

Lots of ways to put them together with the black background were considered but in the end I chose to do the diagonal layout and save the stars for another quilt top design. 

The view across the 2012-13 English Paper Pieced Rose-Star quilt to the wall that holds my quilts in progress. You see on my design wall an early layout of the shapes. I had two shapes from my curved cuts pieced with matching curved black grounds. 

Once I got the fan top together I wanted to use the traditional fan quilting pattern to do my quilting on this project and I chose rainbow pearl cotton size 8 thread in colors as close to the row as possible.

 I don't have a great source for pearl cotton threads anywhere locally and I don't like to buy by mail order due to the high cost of shipping. I did it once and at $13 for a single spool it is just too high a cost so I continue to hunt for shops that sell pearl cotton #8 in a wide range of colors. 

 There you can see the orange red rows of quilting and then below the oval label I embroidered using regular two thread embroidery floss with a peek at the back a print that has butterflies and dots in a lavender gray on black ground. The binding is solid colors laid out in the spectrum around two times in a row all around the edges.

finished quilt on the wall 66 x 66"

Another antique crazy quilted fan quilt I saw last summer done by a lady Esther in 1896 which reenforced my creative process to building my own.  She did a nice hand embroidered label that puts mine to shame but it's not a new idea to embroider a makers label. 

That is all. Carry on, quilting whenever possible. 

Patchwork Improv "Floating Squares"

First project in the Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters is a challenge to set aside the usual modern quilter's tools and get back to a more intuitive use of scissors and build from a two sets of pre-cut squares. The assembly begins with a third color as the "filler"  to make these pre-cut squares fit together into larger and larger blocks. It was suggested one begin with a limited amount of fabric for each color and an unlimited amount of filler fabric to make it work until you ran out of squares.

 

I chose all solid fabrics which is a popular choice with modern quilters and I haven't done much work with pure solid color fabrics. I was always drawn to the tiny print calico style fabrics for it's interesting visual textures, but I am learning to use both and wanted to be pure in my first attempt at doing a Score from the Handbook. I used Kona Solids: Cinnamon and Chartreuse and Lilac as the filler color.  It worked out rather nicely I thought and I quit assembling them when I had three blocks that were about the same size. The total wasn't big enough for anything but a new born infant quilt so I decided to choose a second set of colors to work that would mimic my first set but be different. 

Next color selection was Salmon pink, dark Magenta and Silver gray for the filler.

Once those were joined up I took a third set of Turquoise, Orange-yellow and used Corn yellow as my filler.

 

Then I had enough to make a throw quilt top and started trying to figure out how to join them all together. It was an interesting project but I found in the end I didn't care much for the three sets together.

I was surprised at how easy it was to cut and sew fabric in straight edged shapes not using a ruler which is actually how I began before I had a set of rotary cutters and rulers and mats. In the future I will decide on all the fabrics going into a project before I get into a mix up like this one was.

finished top "Floating Squares" 43"x 56" 

Orange Raspberry Quilt finish

Orange Raspberry quilt finish 29' x 57' 

This was a small quilt project I made as a gift. It's for a friend from my college Printmaking classes at Pratt Institute who has a new home of her own she acquired last summer. It is her first home which Keith and I went to visit during our big road trip last August. She has a big collection of artworks and had reserved a special place for one of my quilts. While we were there we measured the spot she reserved, intending for me to match up the space to fit the finished quilts I have at home. It is a place of pride by the wood stove in an alcove right in the center of the living room. I suspected right away that my finished quilts are a little bigger than what would fit in this space but I kept quiet because the idea to create a custom quilt suddenly leapt into my head.

left or right of the wood stove spaces reserved for a quilt

The 1930s bungalow front porch

I began this quilt with orange fabric because of the reactions to my finished quilts she had given while visiting Washington, DC and I know she likes orange.  I wanted to experiment with several new techniques. The fabric colors I limited to orange, orange-red solids and a raspberry stain magenta print. I began with several blocks from the improv workshop with Denyse Schmidt last summer that I decided not to put in my bigger all orange quilt. It took off from there making new blocks by whacking those improv blocks up to making new ones.  Then I began using a new technique of the eighth inch strip stripe inserted in a block which I discovered on Instagram. This is an example below. 

these colors are closest to the real quilt colors. 

While working I was thinking about handsome mid century chair's upholstery color and dots and the lines in the architect's modern garden features as references to fit this angled improvisational quilt design with round dots and triangles of hand quilting on the finish. 

orange dots on pink mid century chair

garden view 

It fell together quite fast since it is small and I had a lot of fun playing with the colors and pieces to create the top. Once the top was assembled I used an art quilt technique to put the three layers together. Instead of a binding tape around the raw edges, I used an envelope or pillowcase technique for the first time. It worked quite well and gave a nice finish without a tape frame. 

The quilting was fun. I used a contrasting pearl cotton size number eight with big stitch to show the piecing off and followed the angles then added circles to reflect the chair's dots. As you may notice the quilt colors are different in each slide. While photographing these close value oranges and high contrasting magenta I learned it confuses the camera. In some lights it looks like yellow and purple but that is not the way it looks in person. I marked the slide that comes closest to the real colors.

I gifted the finish to my friend just after Christmas when she came to visit and it was such a surprise and I gather she is very happy. She went right home and hung it in the space she showed me she wanted to display an original quilt last summer on our visit. Bonus shot includes one very interesting cat named honeybee passing by the new art work and she is the reason this collector doesn't think she can take home a quilt to use on  her beds since miss Honeybee sleeps on them. I liked the cat and wonder if there is a color quilt I could make that wouldn't show her fur? 

Finished Orange Raspberry Quilt 12-21-2015 

size 29" x 57" all cotton 

hand quilted with pearl cotton #8

label on the back