Making my DQS10 quilt for Diana really lit a fire under me to try and do more circle design work so I thought I would try another small project to test the ol’ skill set. I also wanted to contribute to the Pillow Party  over at Stitched in Color- I have been loving the goodness coming out of her contests and it has really inspired me.  I started out by sketching and doodling some circling on an artist’s pad:

I like where I was going with the sketch and I was digging the whole ‘looks kinda like a dahlia’ thing so I decided to ramp it up and make a full scale draft of the picture:

Left: Revised sketch, Right: initial Sketch

When I looked at it from afar I really didn’t like the proportions that I was seeing, it seemed a bit stretched out to me so I tried it again with some slightly different circle ratios and got the sketch you see above on the left.  I like this one better.  Now onto the color options! I am not much of a pink and purple gal and blues, browns, and greens aren’t really flower colors so I narrowed it down straightaway to reds, oranges, and yellows.  And of course some green to represent the leaves.

This was the initial color combo I came up and when I quit working on it that night I was convinced I was a genius color matcher:

Too harsh and dark

Lesson: always sleep on your fabric decisions…sheesh I would have made a stoplight quilt!!

Here is my revised color combo:

Lighter, brighter, and less harsh

Much better I think.  A little softer and not so harsh but still vibrant.

Here is how I did it:

1. The whole thing is really only five shapes organized around a central hub; therefore I took some freezer paper and made templates of the five shapes plus the central piece:

2. I then laid a piece of lightweight fusible interfacing (fusible side up) over the full sized sketch and taped it to secure:

Lightweight fusible laid over my sketch

3. After I cut out my pieces of fabric from my template, I laid them over the interfacing, just like a puzzle.

4. I very carefully removed the tape and moved the interfacing over to my ironing board and fused all the pieces onto the interfacing.  I then cut off the extra interfacing and voila! You have a flower looking thingy! I centered this on a 21″ square piece of solid (Kona Bone) backing.  stitching around the perimeter secures the flower to the backing:

Pin it lots so it doesnt shift while sewing it down

Now I have to make the bias tape to go around each border.  I used this guy to make my bias tape–these things are handy! Make sure you are cutting your fabric on the bias—don’t shortcut here cause it’s next to impossible to manage the curves without the fabric being on the bias.

Once you have all the bias tape ready you can start covering up all your raw edges.  Here is the key: start and stop your circle at a place where the next bias circle will cover it. This way, when you are done, you will only have one raw edge in on the whole thing. In theory.

After you have attached all of your bias tape borders, you can make your quilt sandwich and start quilting! For this technique, I recommend quilting around the borders of the bias tape so that they really stay put AND pop out when the rest of the quilt is quilted:

Quilted in the ditch along bias tape

Backside showing quilting in the ditch

Here are some more pics of the pillow in action, I hope this guide to improvisation has inspired you to try this technique for yourself.  If there is enough interest, mayhap I will put together a proper tutorial. Please please post questions in the comments or email me if you would like further clarification.

pretty pillow, ugly ground

I like having a zipper pull for my zips!

I got the idea for a covered zipper from here.

bright Sun, growing flower

The middle is my favorite bit

Such a happy quilt!

And here is the quilt I made for Diana:

Circling the Sun

I like this picture because I think it shows the texture more:

No border on her yet!

I had such a wonderful time doing this swap. It really is one of the best quilty swaps there are.  The inspiration just overflows when looking at all the amazing quilts.  There is such a variety of techniques and the swap mamas do a great job of matching everyone up. To see all of the Doll Quilts click here.

The ideas I pulled from her likes/dislikes were yellow/gray combination, graphic, and nine patch.  I settled on a variation of an Amish quilt pattern called Ocean Waves.  It is a pattern that was found in midwestern Amish quilts, which is appropriate because I am from Wisconsin. I think/hope I nailed the whole “modern take on tradition” thing. It was really fun to try and make a quilt for someone else. This was also my first time making a doll quilt and I really liked the process. It really frees you up to explore a technique you might not otherwise attempt.  And so quick!

The thing I love most about making a doll quilt is how easy they are to quilt!

I really wanted to play with texture with this quilt so I did very different quilting patterns on different parts of the quilt.

I also used a kind of piping technique to get the 1/8th inch white borders.

Overall, I learned how quilting makes different parts of a quilt stand apart from each other.

I am so happy with the swap! Thanks to Mary for being such a great partner and to Modify Tradition for organizing the swap!

2. Stimulating. So I gotta figure out a quilt that someone I don’t know would like?  This is kinda hard. But fun hard.

my partner's inspiration mosaic

3. Petulance. I don’t wanna give it up.  I don’t care.  There’s NO WAY some random quilt some random lady is sending can POSSIBLY be as cool as the one I just spent all this time on. No. Way.

It belongs to Smeagol!

4. Anxious.  The quilt is on it’s way! Receiving it Thursday! It’s kind of like a blind date. Will I like it? Will it like me?

5. Confusion. This can’t be mine. I didn’t sign up for the SUPER AWESOME Quilt Swap.  What should I do? Should I alert the organizers? Should I smuggle it out of the country before anyone realizes the error?

6. Elation.  I think this might be mine.  My name is on the label! Jiggity!

7. Confusion (again). What is this thing?  Did my partner forget to clean out the box prior to packing it up? Does she know she’s missing it? Should I email her? Or go back to my leaving the country plan?

8. Overwhelmed. It’s for me. A GIFT. A perfect gift. Unexpected. Generous. Thoughtful.

9. Embarrassment.  Oh jeez, this is INTERMEDIATE?  I put myself as intermediate. This is awkward.  Note to self: in the future, write in beginner so as not to embarrass myself.

10. Satisfaction.  Look at the fabric! Look at the points! Look at the way it lines up perfectly the way my quilts never do!  Where should I hang it? I want to pet it.

11. Gratitude. To Pat, my wonderful swap partner. To Modify Tradition for organizing the swap. To the online quilting community that continues to amaze and inspire me. To friendship! To generosity! To ten galleons a hair!

12. Anticipation. Okay, when’s the next round?

Cute tutorial for a needle book

The rightmost one caught my eye one cause it’s supercute and two cause it’s got orange and blue!  I decided to pull all my orangish and bluish solids to see if I could coordinate with the fabric:

And well, I kinda like them all on their own:

So I decided to do an all solids quilt using the tutorial/process that I describe here. The last quilt I did I used fat quarters that resulted in a rectangular quilt but for this one I wanted to try square components to make a square quilt.  This worked out for the best as I had 16 fabrics so I cut out 10 inch squares of each color and threw em up on the design wall:

Then I made a sketch that (somewhat) resembled the squares as I had them arranged:

I cut this up and rearranged it (described better in the tutorial) to see how it would look.

I liked it so I went ahead with the quilt.  First, I sewed all the 10 inch squares together:

Then I cut a vertical section off the right side of the quilt and a horizontal section off the bottom and rearranged them:

I then did the same for the left and the top.

I then cut a then section from the center of the quilt and turned it upside down:

Same thing horizontally:

Not so fond of the middle:

In the future, if I do this same quilt again, I will make sure the middle four squares coordinate better

Here is the finished quilt:

I think this quilt would have looked really cool with a ton of straight line quilting, but I wasn’t sure and this was kind of an exploratory quilt so I decided to do a basic meander/stipple even though I felt it wasn’t the BEST quilting approach for the quilt. Also, I always struggle with the choice of thread color for quilting. On this quilt, a light color thread would look bad on the darker side and a dark thread would have looked bad on the light side!  So, I used a clear thread which I don’t really like in general because it can look shiny. On a side note, laying the quilt on the ground during early sunset really makes the quilting stand out:

I backed it with a vintage quilt and bound it using a dark blue solid.  I usually bind quilts in with a quiet binding that matches the outermost border, but I like the way the dark solid binding frames the quilt.

Here is the sun side:

Here is the sky side:

This quilt is 36” X 36” square. If you want to make a quilt similar to this, use the guidelines I talked about in the last post.  To help you plan the quilt, here are two pdf’s that you can color in to predict how the colors will turn out. The numbers in the first pdf correspond to the numbers in the second pdf.  In other words, if your “1” square is red in your first pdf, then all the “1″ squares/rectangles in the second pdf will be red.  Hope this makes sense!  Email or comment with questions and I will answer best I  can.

foursquare 1

foursquare 2

I, Sarah Hawkins, pledge to talk more about my processes, even when I can’t quite put them in the in words or be sure I’m being totally clear.   I’m going to put my thinking and my gut feelings out there.

Here in the next day or two, I will be puting up my first process post; about this quilt:

Sun and Sky Quilt

Hi Everyone! Here is a nifty way to whip up a quilt really really fast.  If you can believe it, I made this quilt start to finish in about three hours.  I came up with this pattern(ish) for all us participating in the vintage sheet swap graciously organized by Katie.  All you need to piece the top is 12 coordinating fat quarters.  You can use all FQ’s made from vintage sheets or mix in FQ’s from your stash to complement them as I do here (I think I have 7 sheets and 5 quilting cottons in this top).  The important thing here is that they are all accurately cut and all the same size—hopefully your swap partner did a good job when cutting them up!

Okay first off-a little caveat emptor here:  the process of piecing the top I describe here is a little different and requires some work on your part.  I am showing you a way to design a quilt top rather than giving you straight up directions for the top shown here.  So, needless to say, there is some tinkering and improvisation needed on your end.  If you are are not up for this, then this tute is not for you.  But hey, the worst that can happen is you fudge 12 FQ’s from the swap and if you sent in 80 FQ’s that means you are out about 30 cents a FQ.  So you are dropping $4 on the quilt top so get over it you cheapie and take a risk why don’t you!

Here are my 12 FQ selections:

Okay, first take your 12 FQ’s and arrange them (randomly) in four rows of three and sew them all together using the standard ¼” seam allowance. I like to press my seams open, but hey whatever works for you.  At this point you should have a really boring quilt top made up of 12 rectangles measuring roughly 65” X 70” and it could look a little something like this

So here is where it gets a little hairy (and fun!).  Using Powerpoint, Adobe, Paint (does anyone still use this?), or even just a paper and colored pencils, make a scaled print of your boring FQ quilt top.  Here’s a little math (skip this if you are not numerically inclined):

fat quarters = 18” X 22” and 22/18 is about 1.25. This means that your rectangle’s height to width ratio is 1:1.25. So for any height you use for your miniature model take that value and multiply it by 1.25 to get an accurate width that will be to scale.

Or don’t worry about anything in the preceding sentences  and use a 2”X2.4” rectangle for your mini model.  If using this model you should have a 4X3 grid that is 6” X 9.6.” Now color or fill these in such that your mini model resembles your boring FQ quilt top.  If possible, make at least a few copies of this.  Here is what mine looks like next to the FQ’s that I pulled for the quilt tops:

Trim the excess paper away so that you now have a piece of paper that resembles your boring top.

Now here is the fun part: Using a ruler guide and an old rotary cutter (cutting paper greatly dulls the razor) cut strips of your mini quilt and rearrange these strips in a new way.  Tape this new arrangement together and then cut and tape again.  Here is one attempt I made:

Here I cut a sliver off of the right side, flipped it around and taped it to the left side.

Here is one attempted rearrangement next to the original

It’s a good idea to look at your model from far away so you can get a different perspective:

I don’t like this one so I will try another one:

I like it!  So this is the “design” I am going to be using for my boring FQ quilt top.  So here is the thing: You are going to mimic all the cutting you did on your model on your real quilt top!  For example, in my model, I cut columnar strips wherever there was a seam or an edge:

I then rearranged these strips using my mini model as a guide and sewed the top back together again.  Then I did the same thing horizontally (sorry forgot to take a pic here!) to get my final quilt top.

Here is the finished quilt:

It measures 52”X58”

Here are some important points to remember/think about:

-       You are probably wondering how to cut an entire quilt top?  Use your ruler guide and rotary cutter; and measure from seams or from edges.  Just keep repositioning your quilt on your cutting mat and overlap your ruler guide with what you have already cut so that the cutting line stays consistent.

-       Generally speaking, you should only use vertical or horizontal straight lines when cutting your model and your quilt. You could use diagonal lines, but the seams won’t line up properly.

-       You don’t have to use every cut strip in your final quilt!  Look at this picture here:

-      

-       I left out the side cuttings completely and just utilized the two inner strips.

-       Remember, for every cut you make, you are going to lose about a ½” on your final dimensions.  For example, this quilt started out 65”X72” and ended up being 52”X58” because of the cutting and also because I left out some of the cut strips.

-       Keep track of your cutting in the mini model and keep it simple for your first try. This quilt can be as simple or as complicated as you like.

-       I use a 4X3 grid utilizing 12 FQ’s in this example, but you can easily scale up or down depending on your needs.  You can start out with a bigger 4X5 to make a full size quilt or 2X3 to make a baby quilt.  You don’t even have to use fat quarters, you could use fat eighths, charm squares, a layer cake, etc.

I guess this is really more of a technique than a pattern.  You can adapt this to any size or setup you want really.  This is my first tutorial, so I am a little nervous that this makes sense to people not living in my head.  So please email or comment with feedback, suggestions, critiques, etc.  I’m a big girl, I can take it, and it will help me with my future tutorials.

Thanks and happy quilting!

Teaser shot for my Modify Tradition swap partner!! I am overall very happy with how it turned out, I don’t have the heart to send it–it is ridiculously difficult for me to pack this up and mail it. This is my first swap. Maybe sending off the “kids” gets easier the more you do it?