Monday, October 29, 2018

UFO - Improv seeds

First off I have to thank my DH for purchasing this lovely Ottlite for my sewing room.  It's great to be able to have a bright light to see my work.

I started this improv about 2 years ago and it's been sitting in my UFO pile waiting to be machine quilted.  Today, I decided to get it out of the pile and finish it.  Since I don't really care too much how it is quilted, I just started with vertical lines and added a few spaces with swirls and pearls to practice. This is strictly a scrap quilt, as you can see, I wouldn't normally  choose these colors to go together.  I just pulled these randomly from my scrap bag, chopped them up and went to work sewing them together.  What I really like about this quilt is the scale of the "seeds".

 When I attended City and Guilds quilting course in the 1990's, my favorite artist at the time was Georgia O'Keefe and her enlarged flowers and landscapes.  I'm happy I have a finished UFO, but now I would like to explore more on the enlarged scale and see where that will take me.  I certainly have enough scraps to experiment with.


Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Petal Tiles - Part 3

Here they are, all 16 of them ready to be trimmed and sewn together.  But, wait, I don't want to just sew them together with the white edges touching each other.  This seems boring to me, so I go to work figuring out what is best.  I love the Kaffe Fassett fabrics and have a lot of them in the full range of colors which were used in all of these blocks along with other designers that worked well.

After throwing them on the floor and arranging a few fabrics between blocks, I decided I didn't like using just one fabric for all the sashing strips, however I did use the same corner stone fabric for each intersection, but a different color of KF's paperweight design for each sashing strip.

Blue is my absolute favorite color, so I went with the blue snail KF fabric in the final outer border.  I fussy cut the cabbage rose fabric for each outer corner square.  So, this is the top ready to be sandwiched.


Now, I've got it all sandwiched and pin basted ready to quilt on my machine.  A simple design like around each petal in the white grout  and echoing to the sashing strips is what I have in mind.  All done in free motion quilting as I am not patient enough to draw out any lines or designs.

The border may have a feather design for each side of the quilt, think that will go well with the swirly shapes of the petals.  Even that won't be drawn, I will just sew a curvy center line from one corner to the other all around the border, then start free hand sewing the feather shapes.

I estimated almost 200 different fabrics went into this quilt, so it would be a great scrap buster design.
Not finished yet, but I wanted to see how it looked on my bed.  Have a great sewing day.  :o)

Catherine's Wheel

 I posted December 17, 2020 about making an ornament which is called prairie wheel (USA) or Catherine's Wheel (UK).  The latter being of...