This is a little bit of a cheat, because it is definitely for sure happening, but it is also something I’ve been interested in attempting for awhile.
January 15, 2012
Some movement on the quilting front, with an explanation.
My aunt K decided, very generously, to me a quilt for me. Part of the making of the quilt plan, involved my participation, as something to do together. Being a non-quilter myself, this is my chance to learn. Late last fall, we had a couple brief visioning discussions, and then K found the fabric that is acting as the border and the thematic colour around which the rest is based. It is a lovely soft yellow with muted sunflowers and butterflies on it, which I have failed to photograph. Then, at the end of December, we went to a quilt store’s end of year fabric sale and got the rest of the fabrics we’ll be using.
This weekend, we started the cutting process. We’ve cut all the borders and trims, or just about all, and started in on the blocks. The quilt we’re doing is a twelve block sampler, with a triple stripe motif for the borders between the blocks. We made up two of the blocks last night. The rest will happen at a later date. One thing I’ve learned so far is that you can’t rush a quilt. It is really important to get the cutting as accurate as possible, and just as important to get the pieces together in exactly the right way. If not, your points and joins just won’t match up. There was definitely some stitch ripping of some of the pieces I put together going on last night.
January 22, 2012
Another great day of quilting this Saturday. This time, at my house – with a room set up for mass production of time bits of fabric sewn together. Not pictured is the ironing board on the other side of the sewing machines.
Like last time, we got two blocks completed. The first one we tackled was really complicated, but offered an opportunity for me to learn paper piecing. For the uninitiated, that is a technique involving stenciling the pattern onto paper, and then pinning the fabric to the paper one piece at a time and sewing directly over the paper. This allows you to more accurately sew intricate things – like lots of interlocking triangles – together, without stretching the fabric badly and with maintaining even seam distribution. I really enjoyed this technique because I am not particularly good at sewing in a straight line by eye. However, it takes a long time, and this lovely block took us a number of hours to put together.
One of the fun parts about making a sampler is that each time we start a new block we get to play with the colours and fabric patterns to design how it will look. We have a number of fabric, so of which are also being used in borders or ribboning between blocks, and some of which are just for the blocks, so there is a lot of planning that has to go into making sure that we have good mix of the fabrics represented each time, while also having a pleasing colour combination.
The second block we put together this weekend has a pinwheel motif on it. K took care of the difficult asymmetrical triangle/rectangle parts, and I got to practice some of the skills I learned last weekend with the triangle parts. I really like how this particular block turned out. We opted for a subtler colour differentiation in the pinwheel than they have in the original pattern, and I like how that turned out.
