Memory Quilt revealed

It’s time to reveal the finished memory quilt!  It took me months of standing and staring, calculations, deep breaths, and actual sewing time to create this special quilt.  This isn’t a show-stopper, or a ribbon winner. Initially, I rolled my eyes in despair at the mix of fabric prints I had to work with.  I admit to saying some not nice words when I had to completely re-make those Basket blocks.

However, in the end, I believe that I created the best quilt that these fabrics–unrelated by color,theme,scale,print– could be.  The lesson I learned?  The fabrics might not have been pulled from a quilt shop, they might not have been designed as a fancy collection to be shown off in a glossy magazine.  But they were chosen with love by a grandmother for her beloved granddaughters.  The dresses were kept and cared for by a mother, and entrusted to me to create a gift that would bring the fabrics full circle back to the grandmother, as a special gift of the heart on her special day:

Memory quilt tutorial part 7

Thanks for sticking with me!  The quilt parts are all finished, and now it’s time to put it all up on the design wall and start sewing it all together.  Cross your fingers that all the blocks play together nicely!

See how adding the floating dark green corners helped create an easier-to-use sized block?  The on-point Baskets fit beautifully (and without lots of hard math and icky fractions) with the conventionally sized flying geese blocks.  The extra bit of dark green gets absorbed into the background of the flying geese blocks.

Once all the Irish Chain and Square in a Square blocks are sewn together, it’s time to start thinking about final borders.  My feeling is that the interior of the quilt is busy enough to call for simpler borders.  But since I have limited dress fabric remaining, I will cut lengths from whatever dress fabric I have left, and sew these lengths together to create a simple but colorful border.  I think I want to give the blocks some breathing room from the colorful border, so I audition the border with some dark green strips:

Memory Quilt tutorial part 6

I have most of the components finished for the quilt, but I need one more:  sashing to separate the Basket blocks.  I decide on  flying geese blocks, to tie in with the points from the baskets.

Flying Geese blocks call for a special Flying Geese ruler in the Wild Onion Studio!  I love this ruler because it simplifies the math for me.  Yes, you could figure it all out yourself.  Go ahead, grab your calculator.  Meanwhile, I’m zipping away with my Flying Geese ruler!  Zip!

This ruler is made by another piecing genius, Lazy Girl Joan Hawley.  I also highly recommend her other ruler, the Lazy Angle.  But that’s a whole ‘nother post.

You can see the ruler, the dark green background fabric, the soapstone pencil I bought at my very first big quilt show, Quilt America, in Indianapolis, and my groovy new eyeglasses which make me look like a sexy librarian that’s my story and I’m sticking to it I am not old.

A few cuts, and I have my flying geese blocks.  One tip I learned from a Sharyn Craig, is to cut small notches in the corners of the squares before you cut apart said square to create 2 half square triangles.  This eliminates a lot of bulk in the seam when you open up the half square triangle.   If you squint (or put on your sexy librarian glasses), you can see the notch I made on the square to the right of the Flying Geese instructions.

Or you could just look at the photo below, with the casually placed pink scissors pointing jauntily at the notched corner:

Home again

I am home from teaching at Quilting with Machines, tired but exilerated! What a terrific experience; the show is packed with wonderful classes, terrific teachers (ahem!) and lots of interesting vendors. I overheard that next year, there will be quilts on exhibit, too.

I did not even take my camera out, I was so busy teaching, chatting, and laughing, so this is a text post only!

The best part of the show: hanging out with online buddies and catching up with in-person friends that I don’t get to see nearly often enough!

like: meeting Gayle McKay in person, after years of online chatting! We spent all afternoon and evening chatting about our lives and our twin brains!

Ditto Judy Whitehead (sodypop!) and her friends, Sherry and Kim. We spent a hilarious dinner together, and I got to hear Judy giggling throughout two of my classes. Good thing she was giggling, since I was using her as an example in class. A good example, of course. I am the only bad example. Well, and Suzanne.

I got to spend an evening sharing a table with Renae Haddadin, who I haven’t seen in person in a while. Keeping in touch via e-mail is good, but it’s better to hug in person. She scooted out of town while I was in class– bye Renae! See you soon, I hope!

There was another best part, too! I got to spend lots of time with Jamie Whallen and his sister Sandy, and my other bad example buddy, Suzanne Earley. I miss you already! Come to California, it’s cold over by you and I fear that the snow reports are gonna start up again from Iowa….

I met a lot of other wonderful new friends, and had an absolute ball teaching my techniques. It is thrilling to watch other quilters as the lightbulbs in their heads start popping on, and then the wheels start spinning faster and faster. I can’t wait to see what interesting things come out of my classes– I know I came away with some new ideas of my own! If you were in any of my classes, please please please can I see what you’re doing? It’s just so much fun to share!

Anyway, laundry duty calls. I hope to get the opportunity to go back to Quilting with Machines again, and I will certainly start sending out proposals to other shows, as well. If you have an opportunity to visit a quilt show, please do. Ideas are all around, and you never know who you’ll meet!

Memory quilt tutorial part 5

Put on your big girl panties, ’cause it’s time to make some basket blocks!  I chose a fairly simple basket to make, as basket blocks go.

My original background fabric was a cream colored floral that the customer had pulled from my stash.  She loved that fabric, and I made  all 4 basket blocks using it as the background.

I chose some of the more graphic dress fabric to serve as the basket itself, and some floral dress fabric to serve as the “flowers” in the basket.

I decided to float the baskets in the dark green background, in order to make this center portion the right size for the rest of the quilts.  Blocks on point are odd sizes, and I needed some way to make these 4 blocks fit into the center of the quilt.  This is an elegant solution to size control, akin to “coping strips” in a scrap quilt.

I got all four baskets finished and sewn into their outer green corners…

When I put them up on the design wall, the cream tone wreaked havoc with the white of the gauze dresses.  Since it was all about the gauze, I gnashed my teeth, and remade the baskets, substituting the very last bits of gauze for the background.  In the end, I knew it was the right decision.

But it was a lot of extra work!!

Memory quilt tutorial part 4

Now that the Irish Chain blocks are ready to go, I turn my attention to the alternate block for the Irish Chain blocks, which would be a Square in a Square block (SNS).

For these blocks, I used the lighter colored dresses, and in case you were wondering, the gauze dresses with the fusible stabilizer worked like a dream!  I was really happy with them, and so glad I could feature them so prominently as the customer had asked for them specifically.

One of my most favorite piecing tools is Jodi Barrows’ Square in a Square ruler, and out it came to make short and precise order of all these blocks:

Here you see all the components– the gauze dress fabric, the strips of dark green which will become the outer corners of the SNS blocks, the ruler, and the instruction book.

At the bottom of the photo, you see the ladder-like piecing, which is how you chain piece SNS blocks, the Jodi Barrows-way!  With a few twists of the ruler and some judicious and simple cutting, you end up with perfect SNS blocks.  Love love love this ruler!

Memory quilt tutorial part 3

After washing and cutting apart all the dresses, I had a nice useable stack of fabric.  Cutting them apart at the seams also rendered them a bit less intimidating; after all, if I messed up the dress, I was ruining a bit of the family history.  A stack of fabric?  That’s comfortable and reasonable!

I thought I’d warm up with some nice strip piecing, cut apart to become stacks and stacks of 4-squares blocks:

See how the unrelated fabrics all of a sudden become less startling when they are smaller bits, all jumbled together?

I then put the 4-square blocks together into the Irish Chain blocks, using the dark green background fabric to calm down the bright mix of dresses fabric:

Memory quilt tutorial part 2

After several weeks of staring at the bag of dresses, wondering how to work with these precious fabrics so that the end result was pleasing, I decided to treat them as I would a scrap quilt; that is, instead of trying to view the fabrics as a collection, I would view the fabrics as scraps of bright colors.

I chose a dark green fabric with very little pattern to serve as my dark background and sashing fabric, and the gauze dress fabric would serve as my light background.  I decided to use a quilt pattern with lots of smaller pieces; that way, the unrelated colors/themes of the dress fabric would be scattered throughout the entire quilt top.  In this way, I was able to make the dress fabrics support each other, instead of fight with each other.

After looking through quilt books and my own quilts,  the customer decided that she liked my Baskets quilt the best.  I played around with the setting, and came up with a center of basket blocks, surrounded by a variation of Irish Chain blocks.  Received a thumbs-up from the customer, and  began ironing fusible stabilizer to the back of the gauze dresses to give them enough strength to withstand being used in a quilt!

Memory quilt tutorial

Last spring, an acquaintance hired me to create a quilt for her mother’s 80th birthday. Her mom was a sewer, and I was given several dresses that she had created for her granddaughters over the years.

The parameters of the quilt were to use as many of the dresses as possible, make it queen sized, and the gauze dresses were a must -use.

The challenge as I saw it was how to successfully integrate Halloween fabric, with pink rosebuds, with sunflowers, with balloons, all on one quilt fit for a mature woman!

Interview in Wardrobe Refashion blog!

I have been interviewed!!  Click here for the interview!!

In the midst of working on my classes for Quilting with Machines, I was also  interviewed for Wardrobe Refashion!

Wardrobe Refashion is an online community of fashionistas who pledge to sew or refashion their clothing for a set period of time.  The list owner, Nichola Prested, is based in Australia, but the community is world-wide, and very active.  Even if you don’t plan to sew any clothing, it’s a pretty inspirational site, and might give you some good ideas for your own work!

Back to me?  OK!  I was tapped for an interview this summer, and have been uncharacteristically mum about it– oooh, mysterious!  Anyway, the interview is up, and it’s full of photos and information about me and my refashioning.  Geesh, I hope my head fits through the door– I need to get back into my studio!!