Nuts and Bolts

Working on slowly progressing projects can be frustrating.  I am at a stop and think point for at least two of my projects.... But I can't show them to you just yet.

Consequently,  I needed to do something that reached near completion... and brightened the sewing room and my spirits a bit against the gray winter we've had here. (I shouldn't complain about the weather, as it has been unusually balmy here.  So far no major snow storms or ice storms, and relatively warm temps.)  I didn't want to feel like I was spinning wheels and getting nowhere.

Anyway, I poked through some of Kaffe's books and really liked his bow-tie quilt in Simple Shapes, Spectacular Quilts.   I decided to go ahead and make it, but not copy it or use his fabrics.  Instead, I was influenced by a color combination that he has for one of his fabrics,  the yellow-green lotus fabric.

I pulled all the fabrics from my stash that fit the color scheme .  This is a picture of the "left overs".

Here's what I made:

I like the way the yellow centers seem to float over the quilt.









It measures 72 x 48.  It is now waiting for quilting... a finished flimsy, at least.

I kept it a secret

The cat is out of the bag.  With the reveal of Victoria's Festive Cheers quilt, I can now show you how her pattern inspired one of my recently finished quilts.  (My delay in posting is due to the lack of internet service at my home right now.... I'll be back on board by the end of the month.)

Before V knew that her pattern had attracted the eyes of the editors of Quilt Almanac, she had posted a tutorial on her blog.  It was there only briefly, but it caught my eye and I immediately sat down and made up a sample and sent a photo to her, as I wanted to give her proper credit.  Not long afterwards, I received an excited note saying that the pattern had been selected for publication and she had to keep things hush- hush. She even suggested that my quilt might be shown with hers... but by then my quilt had morphed to something a bit different.    I promised I wouldn't spoil the surprise. Furthermore, I wanted to wait until I had a way to link back to V's quilt and pattern.   Thank you to an ever inspiring Victoria!

Here is the sample picture I sent V.

Here's the final quilt.  It morphed into this form because I wanted to use and show more of Kaffe's fabrics than the sliver's that would show between the petals of the flowers.  I call this quilt "Daisies in Kaffe's Garden."    It was quilted by my friend,  Marilyn Lange.

Blue Chips

This quilt, which I call "Blue Chips",  made its debut in blogland when my friend, Teresa, featured it on her blog, Fabric Therapy in May of 2011.   I am a great procrastinator when it comes to finishing quilts. Today I sewed the last stitch on the binding.  ( I still have a pile of both quilts and flimsys that need to be ushered to the next step, so this finish barely makes a dent. Nevertheless, it is progress!)

This is one of those quilts that truly evolved. I started with the idea of making pillow of "shirt-stripe boxes",  a pattern by Kaffe Fassett , in his book, Passionate Patchwork.  This is a pattern I really like.  I produced a bunch of the 3.5 inch squares, but quickly came to the conclusion that I didn't want to go on.  Matching the lines, which makes this pattern so effective, runs against my liberated tendencies.  It became more work than I wanted to do.  Consequently, these squares were set aside.

Sometime later, I decided to do something to use a bunch of blue and white fabric that had been sitting in my stash for at least 9 years.  Again, the above Kaffe pattern was what I had in mind.  Having looked through several of Kaffe's books, I realized he has effectively used the same block layout to make quite different quilts. Large squares were partnered with smaller squares, etc.  So I gamely cut squares of different sizes from my blue and white stash. The result was mush.  It was very hard to look at all the busy-ness that resulted.  In poking around my scraps, I found the shirt-box squares I had made.   Ah-ha. They helped some, but something more was needed. 

In my mind, blue and white evokes Delft tiles.  Yes, that was what I wanted.  Now I needed to separate the blocks with "grout".  But, I didn't want nice neat lines of sashing.  Shortly before all of this, I had been poking through Quilt Mania, #78.  It featured a quilt by Pamela Goecke Dinndorf (Aardvark Quilts), which was a mosaic of simple tiles with wedges of grout.  Another ah-ha moment.  I could be as liberated as I liked!  I pretended that I had bought rejects and broken chips at the tile store, as that is all I'd be able to afford, anyway. 

I tied this quilt with white perle cotton #8.  I am a hand quilter.  There are a lot of irregular seams, which would make hand quilting difficult. Furthermore, any quilting (other than in the ditch)  would be lost in the busy-ness that is already there.  And, I didn't want to delay the completion any longer.