Art Quilts by Kathy York

No. 3

25.5" x 25.5"

I had several ideas about how to make this one. I opted for drawing a template for each block that had a curve to see how well that works. It worked great! I made the shapes exactly how I was hoping! Sadly, it was so tedious and not fun, that it is unlikely I will want to do this again. That's the way it goes sometimes. However, I LOVE this little quilt. It is so pretty and simple, and it brings me joy!

First step was to draft it on paper. I was worried about getting confused with color on the blocks, so I used some colored pencils to color in the pattern. I also numbered the blocks in hopes it would help reconstruct the pattern, and that did help.

Then I cut the blocks apart. Many of the blocks have no curves, so I could easy construct those with a simple HST method. There were some aqua and black, and some yellow and black. And, the blocks that had a curve were cut along the curve with hatch marks for matching back up during the piecing process. For each little piece, I traced onto a piece of fabric with a pencil. And then I cut each piece out by hand, with scissors, making sure to add 1/4" seam allowance.

These were pinned and pieced, as you might expect...

And after making a set of two, I would place them on a black square block to sew them into HST's. 

The black piece is still one piece of fabric, so it stabilized the stitching while sewing along the diagonal edges. After cutting down the middle, I had two blocks ready to trim and put back on the design wall.

I worked one or two blocks at a time, so that I didn't get confused about their placements. I also anticipated that the paper templates for one quadrant would be able to be used for other quadrants if I flipped or rotated them. Unfortunately, that did not work at all. Only one set of templates was able to be used twice. This meant that I had to finish and cut out the paper templates for the other two quadrants of the overall square composition. The other problem I had, is that when working with solids, and tracing pencil marks on them, it is important to put the pencil marks on the backs of the fabric. And since they are solids, there is no obvious 'back'. I usually just experiment, and either do it wrong first, or get it right. Either way, it requires some thought, and some ....what do you call it? ....remembering.... Ha ha!

I also made changes to the composition after I finished the quilt top. I had planned to make a big circle, like this:

And, I did. But the more I looked at it, the more I wanted to rip it apart in the middle and reposition the halves. So I did that too. And I like it better, thus, the finished piece at the top.

The last part was the quilting. I have an irritation fear of quilting. I never believe that I can actually do it, and have it look good...which makes it hard to start. Regardless of my successes and years of practice, this fear is my nemesis. I confess that I was eventually able to start, and it was challenging, but it all worked out. I love the circular lines in the yellow section, and the contrast of the straight lines in the blue section. I also frequently annoy myself with the quilting design by coming up with something that requires a lot of stops and starts and thread tucking. But it all works out! And it was nice to try this on a small quilt because it was so much easier to push through the machine. It was also fun to finish something so quickly after years of making big pieces that take a lot longer.