Quilts

City Quilter Gallery

June 11, 2013 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

I love to visit City Quilter in New York City, for not only do they have amazing fabrics, they also have an attached art quilt gallery. The exhibit when I was there was Deb Hyde: Sunshine and Shadow.

Sunshine and Shadow–Yellow

All the quilts were made of tiny pieces of fabric, fused to a grid, sewn then finished. That makes it sound so elementary and perhaps the technique is, but it is Hyde’s use of color and pattern that elevate these quilts to a new level.

The above are increasingly detailed photos of the opening image, and it’s easy to see that she makes good use of fabric that we might relegate to the side of the fabric closet.

Pink Dress

One of her talents is the way she defines the body, the shapes, but also makes the background interesting with varied tones and values.

Sunshine and Shadow–Turquoise

Check out the use of batiks to make the eye realistic.

Wishful Thinking

Detail

This quilt was up over the desk at the front of the gallery so I couldn’t get a good shot, but I love the way the light falls on the shoulders.

I became interested in how she quilted these. In my recent post I talked about Colorwash quilts and how we sewed millions of little squares together. The newer method — of fusing them down — is an easier way, but it does make the quilts stiffer, so I wondered how the quilting would enhance and become a part of the composition, since it would be more noticeable in the thicker texture. This is a simple diagonal quilting style.

Random box pattern.

All over. This piece (not shown in its entirety) is interesting because the grid appears to have been appliqued on top of the darker borders, with a scuffly, random stitching adhering and melding the two pieces into one.

The New York Times recently profiled the shop in this video:

And while there, I glimpsed Amish With a Twist II, the newest Block of the Month quilt; I signed up for it, and the two installments of this BOM were waiting for me on the doorstep when I arrived home. Quilting has kind of come to a halt around here, as my daughter and her three children have arrived for a week (circus circus, but really fun). Yesterday, while I watched waaay too many episodes of Wizards of Waverly Place (with Selena Gomez as the star witch), I started cutting out the first two kits. Other than losing my marbles with trying to figure out which color was which (Putty and Williamsburg Blue gave me extra fits of crazy), I successfully finish up the cutting last night.

Now I’ve got to run–time for breakfast for three little people and their Mom!

Quilts

Geek 8 Competition–Spoonflower Fabrics

June 7, 2013 Elizabeth E.3 Comments

The link to look at the fabrics, read about the designers is *here.*

Like many of you, I’m a fabric geek–love the texture, the designs, love having a wide range of fabrics to choose from. The theme of Spoonflower’s second annual Design 8 contest is “Geek Chic,” and the initial offering included all kinds of geekiness, including taped glasses, computer references, science allusions and designs–the whole range. I think these final few contestants have captured the full range of geek chic. I loved reading their biographies, as they live all over the world, from Santa Monica to Toulouse, France, and while they all begin differently with their sketching, they all end up on the computer, making their designs. Three of my four favorites are in the top row, and the other fav is the middle of the bottom row, so I’ll have to think hard about which one to vote for.

The contest voting closes next week, so hurry! Cast your vote!

Quilts

First WIP Post of Summer 2013

June 5, 2013 Elizabeth E.4 Comments

It’s the first post of summer–the first Works In Progress post, thanks to Lee, of Freshly Pieced.

I put together the sections for the Schnibbles block, trimming it up as the pattern recommended (we’re doing Dulcina this month–see Sherri’s blog for more info).

Whoa! Big Shrinkage. (The trimmed up squares are on the right.) If I make this quilt in the future, I’ll try to figure out the dimensions so that the trimmed up block doesn’t lose an inch in each direction.

Final center section, all sewn together. Now the borders. Because I have so much going on in the quilt, I’m looking to build some quieter borders than are shown in the design. But I’m putting this aside for now, to tackle my Big Project: Quilting the English Paper Pieced Quilt:

Click back over to Lee’s blog to see other quilts that are in progress. And happy summer!

100 Quilts

Using the Other Side of Fabrics

June 4, 2013 Elizabeth E.5 Comments

First off, after I finally figured out how to use Mr. Random Number Generator, and making sure that comment included a trip, I’m happy to announce that the winner of the Itsy Bitsy Scissors is Mary, of Needled Mom. Congrats!

I figured since I subjected you to a swath of vacation photos, I needed to get real and get some real quilts back up here on the blog. I started yesterday on the newest Schnibbles for June, Dulcinea, beginning with the background fabric in a navy-blue print:

A high-quality iPhone photo, uploaded, then recaptured as a screen shot. Love technology. Kidding, but it does come in handy.

I filled in with mostly Comma prints, but a few others (I hate doing one line of fabric), but it just wasn’t going anywhere for me, until I turned the background fabric over to the “other side,” not the “wrong” side (shown in pink circle). Why do I not say “the wrong side”? It comes from the era of watercolor quilts, when we tried to blend blend blend our tones across multitudes of itty-bitty squares. We learned to consider both sides of a piece of fabric as possibilities.

Here’s my version: Color Study: Night Infolds the Day. My friend Leisa got us started on this adventure–I think it was her first quilt ever. We cut about a zillion little squares, and since that cool gridded fusible web hadn’t been invented yet, we pieced them all.

So the technique was to smooth the colors across the colorful sections, and sometimes no matter how many little squares you browsed through, it just wasn’t possible.

So you flipped the piece over and used the “other side,” like the middle partial square in the upper row, and the full right-hand square in the second row.

I used an allover celestial print for the back–that was pretty daring for that time — all of 14 years ago.

The label. I exhibited this is a local quilt show, and stitched on their label, too. The best part of this story is that our friend Tracy adopted our six pizza boxes full of squares (we sorted them by value, from light to dark), added about a zillion white squares and made herself a wonderful quilt from our leftovers, another value of getting together in a quilt group. This is #29 on my 100 Quilts List.

Another quilt where I used the “other” side sometimes, was on the quilt I made for my mother (mentioned in last week’s post). We’d gone to a quilt show in Carmel, where I’d picked up a fat quarter pack of blues. This is titled The Blues of Carmel, and is #19 on my 100 quilts list. It’s named not only for the ocean at Carmel’s edge, and that pack of blues from the quilt show, but also because my mother has blue eyes.

The back of this is merely a whole cloth, allover design, which I used as a guide to hand-quilt. Pretty much the only people who machine quilted their quilts at that time were J. C. Penny’s or Sears. It was hand-quilt, or yarn-tie. Quite a range of options, right? Since this was made in my earlier days, it doesn’t have a label. I need to remedy that. This quilt was published in Joen Wolfrom’s book Color Play (page 64). Don’t know who Joen Wolfrom is? Google her. Her book, Patchwork Persuasion is ground-breaking. And just typing “#19 of 100 Quilts” makes me realize how far I’ve come, and how far quilting has evolved, in the nearly two decades since I made this. Of course, I’M not any older.

This was on my melon for lunch, which reminds me I need to get back to sewing that Schnibbles quilt, another one in Sherri and Sinta’s Another Year of Schnibbles!