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Archive for October, 2006

Frog stitching (rip-it rip-it)

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

I’m making a 40th birthday present quilt for a friend of mine (never mind that her birthday was back in June), and last night I spent some time working on the quilting part of it (the quilt top itself is complete — I’m to the quilting phase). Then I realized I didn’t like how it was looking, so now I’m picking it all out. Amazing how you can spend about 45 minutes doing some quilting that subsequently takes five times that length of time to rip back out.

*sigh*

‘Sokay. I’m really excited about what I’m GOING to do for the quilting now. I just need to return to the ready-to-quilt place so that I can actually DO it.

Blink

Friday, October 27th, 2006

And here’s one I did late last year, at the end of the same Art Quilt series.

It’s just three fabrics, with Solvy water-soluble stabilizer used to hold down random threads and fibers that I sewed down with a basic stitch across the fabric. Then I dissolved the stabilizer, couched down any loose pieces, and cut apart the new fabric and pieced it to the second interior fabric.

I used embroidery stitches on my machine to do the quilting, and created a bias binding for it so that the edges didn’t have to be straight.

Blink

I named it “Blink,” because when I showed to my friend Ronda, she said, “It makes me want to blink. A lot.”

It’s weird, I’m glad I did it, and… did I mention that it’s weird? Not one of my favorites, to be sure, but I learned a lot making it.

Sticks and Stones

Friday, October 27th, 2006

I took an Art Quilt class at my local fabric shop, and the first lesson was on unity and repetition. I chose to try to make a blue and green quilt for my husband, using ONLY materials from my stash. I did finally have to buy another spool of thread to finish the quilting on this one, but the financial outlay for this quilt was a whopping $6.48 — everything else I already owned.

I named it “Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But I LOVE ORANGE” because as hard as I tried to go with just blue and green, I failed. My favorite color, orange, found its way in. As it almost always seems to do.

Here the blocks are on the design wall, in process:

funky4.jpg

And here I am with the quilt (and our second place ribbon!) at the local quilt show last fall:

img_3708.JPG

Because I’m a math teacher/private tutor, I’m fascinated by numerical patterns. So I relied heavily on the Fibonacci numbers for the final design of the quilt. There are 40 blocks (5 x 8, which are Fibonacci numbers) in this quilt, the borders are 2″, 3″, and 5″ wide, and the back of the quilt (not shown, sorry), is a Fibonacci study of my own design. I will take this quilt back to the classroom when I start teaching again so that I can help students see the beauty in mathematics. I really enjoyed making this quilt, and it went together very fast — especially in comparison to The Green Albatross.

Started out traditional…

Friday, October 27th, 2006

I started this quilt in 1992. I went to a fabric shop about 30 miles from here, and picked out fabrics that would go with my college dorm room, with the goal of making a twin-sized quilt. I designed it and started making it, and all the blocks were coming out in odd sizes, instead of their intended sizes. So I abandoned it.

Ten years later, I picked it up again as part of a block-of-the-month with my local quilt shop. This is one of the blocks I made in that program, using the old fabrics:

ohio-star.jpg

The 1992 greens were very blue-based, but I didn’t have enough of them to make an entire quilt top (especially since now I wanted to make something larger than a twin-sized quilt). So I bought more fabrics — and discovered that 2002 greens were very yellow-based. They clashed with the 1992 blocks. So I had to come up with ways to tie them all together, and decided upon a log cabin block with purple flying geese in the corners:

flyinglogcabin.jpg

Here’s the entire quilt, which I arranged to have strong diagonal elements. This is the most traditional quilt I have ever made, and probably will ever make. Named “The Green Albatross,” I finished it in February, 2006:

albatross.jpg

I finished it so I could take it off my guilt list, and because it was such a challenge. I free-motion quilted it in seven pieces (the five interior strips, and then I had to add on the two extension strips on the edges to make it wide enough to cover our bed) on my home machine and then attached the strips to each other after quilting. There are over 140 feet of binding strips covering seams on this monster. Here’s one of the strips after it was quilted (the pink post-it note in the middle of the bottom block is telling me which strip it was and how to orient it in the final piece):

strip in process

From here, I got much more experimental with my quilting efforts.

Introduction

Friday, October 27th, 2006

Greetings from the Sewing Room!

My name is Elaine, and I’m enslaved by my need to make stuff. Quilts, mostly. I’ve also recently gotten tired of making traditional quilts, so I’m starting to try new things — dye work, painting, foiling, fusable applique, threadplay, etc. When the opportunity to start this blog came up, I jumped! Hopefully by having readers, I will feel more inspired to experiment, and you can encourage me and suggest new things to try as we go.

Thank you for the opportunity!

About Vertical Quilting Curve

Quilting is an arts and crafts medium that many different people interpret in a multitude of ways. Vertical Quilting Curve will explore those different paths and techniques that make up the quilting world. You will find news, resources and as the blog evolves, ways for the reader to become involved. Please feel free to look around and leave feedback of what you would like to learn about anything quilt related. At Vertical Quilting Curve the sky is the only limit!

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