Ocean Blues/Oil and Water - the Transparent Part

Ocean Blues/Oil and Water - the Transparent Part

74" x 74"

It was late afternoon and my quilt was draped over a table when I saw this. One might think I would start looking for this by now, but I didn't think about it. So here are the shots where you can see through the quilt and a glimpse of both sides at the same time. Sweet! 

I love this so much. As water is transparent, so is this quilt about water! Just so lovely! Light gives more information and shows a bigger and more complete picture, one that is more transparent.

And, that's a wrap for this quilt. I am hoping to enter it into some shows next year. We'll see how it goes! May you have a safe and happy new year!

Ocean Blues/Oil and Water - other cool stuff about this quilt

Ocean Blues/Oil and Water - other cool stuff about this quilt

74" x 74"

The quilting:

I usually pin baste my quilts, on the floor. Mostly because my quilts are big, and I don't have a table big enough for really big quilts. The floor is a pretty uncomfortable place to work, but it gets good results.  This time, I did pin baste my quilt. However, I also have had problems with machine quilting the further I get from the center. It is as if the backing fabric travels, regardless of having been pinned in place. My hand basted quilts do not do this. So, I opted to switch out the pin basting for hand basting on this quilt. I am not convinced that I need to do both, but there it is.

ready for quilting!!

I also wanted my quilting threads to kind of disappear into the back ground, but also provide a linear aspect to the quilting design.  I opted for these wonderful very thin polyester threads from Superior Threads. 

It was another expense to buy a whole new line of threads, but I was super happy with the visual effect after I quilted this.  As a bonus, one that I did not anticipate, because the threads were NOT cotton, they did not fill up my machine with lint.  I did not have to clean the lint with every bobbin change, which was awesome!!

I love the side lighting coming through the window for this shot!

A whale and all the quilting lines.

I had a very hard time dragging this quilt through my sewing machine. Usually a big quilt is already hard because it is bulky and heavy. This one was harder. Apparently the black fabric paint on the other side was creating more friction with my table. I decided to try using painter's tape to attach some Goddess sheets (teflon sheets) from Mistyfuse to reduce the drag. It worked great and made my job SO MUCH EASIER. Thanks Iris!!

A top view looking down on my quilt under my sewing machine

The hanging sleeve, hanging tube:

Before I quilted the top 5" or so, I had an idea, one that I have used before on a two-sided quilt. I decided to peel back the layers, and insert more fabric and batting to make an internal hanging sleeve.  It worked great! And the construction of it was seamless and I got to incorporate the quilting and the tube at the same time, which is very hard to explain, but it worked!

It is undetectable from either side! Here is a top view. It also works for a larger sized hanging rod, but this is the one I am currently using while it is hanging at my home.

The binding:

You may have already noticed that the binding changes colors with every block. I did not pre-plan this. I was indecisive about the binding for the entire construction of the quilt. It was only when I got to the end, that I decided my absolute best choice was to do it this way. So I dug out all the fabrics I used and started cutting new pieces to make the "blended" binding. So many pieces! ARGH!!

Then I stitched all the little pieces together. I opted to do only one side at a time to deal with the corners. I also opted for open seams to reduce bulk when turning the binding to the other side of the quilt.

I am happy with the way it turned out. It also looks really good from both sides of the quilt.

There is ONE MORE THING! But this post is already long, so I am saving it for next week. Hope you will pop back by. It is the coolest thing ever!! Cheers!

Ocean Blues

Ocean Blues

74" x 74"

I have finally finished my two sided pixel ocean quilt! It was delayed during quilting by my broken sewing machine. And it was such a wonderful feeling to have it finished at last! It is one of my favorites and is happily hanging on my wall now.

My intent was to create a wall of blue, evocative of the ocean. I began by selecting a color palette. Since it is impossible to pick accurate colors from a monitor, I have been collecting sample packets of solid colors from different manufactures.  

Here are three of them.  Moda Bella is on the table, along with a page of RJR Cotton Supremes.  I just got the Kona card standing up in the back. PS. These samples are a little expensive, and not available year round, which can be frustrating. Also, you may notice that some of the fabric swatches have been ripped off the cards. That is because colors are very fickle, they can look different in different surroundings. I pull off a little swatch, and then attach a sticker on the back with the name of the color.  Then, if I want to get some, I still know what it is.  The Kona is permanently welded to the page.  I have no idea how to separate those colors from each other, perhaps an exacto knife?

Moda Bella samples, with labels added

Next I kind of swoosh them around to see how they look next to each other. Once I am satisfied, I try to find these exact colors from quilt stores.  That is not an easy task!  For this project I think I shopped at 6 different stores to find my fabrics, and was unable to find 2 of them.  Some stores require a minimum purchase of a yard of fabric, which is more than I need.  So, it is inherently inefficient, and especially so when adding up all the shipping costs.  However, no one carries all the colors. What is up with that??? Ha!

Here is a stack of some of the new fabrics mixed in with the ones I already had.

Once I had my fabrics, I wasn't sure which idea I wanted to pursue on a large scale, so I made some little sample quilts first.  Perhaps you remember them from earlier posts in April and May of this year?

These are all so lovely, and I had other ideas I hadn't tried yet, but I knew I wanted to try the pixel one in a large quilt.  The stripey one I tried in two other slightly larger versions here and here. 

Let the rotary cutting begin! This part can be a bit tedious and led to repetitive use injuries.  I try to do it slowly with stretching in between.  It is FUN to see the different colors stacking up and ready for placement!

After I had a LOT of squares cut, I started putting them up on my design wall. I thought it would be fun and easy. And, it was fun, but it was not easy.  My original idea had more brown and greens and less blue. Like this:

It would seem that too much thinking sometimes gets in the way of making art. So, I took a lot of this down and rearranged it more than once, and kept trying.  I knew I was getting close when I had mostly blue. 

Next week I will post about the back of this quilt, because this is another one that has turned into a two-sided quilt! 

Oil and Water -the other side of Ocean Blues

Oil and Water -the other side of Ocean Blues

74" x 74"

I grew up by the ocean. I love the beach and everything that goes with it. When I was little the beach was frequently covered in sticky goey tar balls. They were hard to get off your feet, until you learned the trick about baby oil. The older I got, the more littered the beach became. When I go to the beach now, I have to pay a fee for a sticker for my car. The monies are used to bulldoze and scrape the beach of seaweed and trash (I'm assuming). And, I am not convinced that this is the best thing ecologically for the beach and the organisms that actually live there. There are also trash cans every 100 feet along the driveable part of the beach. 

When I graduated college, I got some temporary work on a research vessel. We called it Coring for Dollars and had some T-shirts made up. The program was run by a university professor who used the income from it to fund his own research and graduate students. We were taking piston cores and sampling them looking for traces of oil. I sliced up the deep ocean mud and put it into labeled bags that were frozen. Back at the lab, the mud was dried, and then extracted with multiple solvents. The left overs from the solvent washes were then tested in several different ways, including UV Fluorescence Spectrometry and Mass Spectrometry. If they found the "fingerprints" of an oil deposit, the results were sold to oil companies who then made a bid to drill for oil there. There is a huge amount of work and money that goes into oil production, and this is only the exploratory part. 

The thing is this. Oil is an incredibly valuable resource, but it is limited. It is not like a tree that can be regrown. Once we use it up, it is gone. Finding it and getting it causes huge environmental damage. Using it, or burning it, is also causing massive global climate change, but I will save that discussion for another day. It is not a hard sell to convince anyone that we waste it. But it seems like it should be a lot easier to convince both consumers and producers to stop using and making single use plastics that litter the earth and waste the limited resource. That is why I included plastic water bottles and 6-pack holders and straws and toothbrushes in this image. It symbolizes ALL the things we both waste oil on and trash our environment with. The earth is the MOST valuable commodity of all, and we have to protect and respect her. 

My life history infiltrated my thoughts as I was just drifting off to sleep after a long evening of sewing squares together. Such a INSPIRED idea that I was afraid I wouldn't remember it in the morning.  Ha! So I jumped up, went into the studio, and started sketching my idea and writing notes about it, notes that would help me to remember.

The next morning, I had a vague realization of what that idea would entail, and it was too much! Yet I couldn't give it up.  It stayed with me, unrelenting. I broke down the steps, drawing, editing and cleaning up my drawings, getting screens made, making the prints of each element, and then sewing all the pieces together. I couldn't decide if I wanted to make the screens myself (of which there are a number of different ways to do that), or simply paint or draw all the elements by hand? Since I wanted repetitions of each one, it made sense to make a screen and just print them. 

tracing the pencil drawing with a Sharpie

There was more planning. I had to decide the size of each design and how closely spaced vertically and horizontally they would be. I wanted to fill the space completely and not have any of the designs falling off the top or bottom edges. So, I drew the designs, and used photoshop to change the scale, then print and place on the design wall until everything was just right. 

The purchase of the screens were both expensive and expensive to have the image "burned" onto. I had a few screens that were gifted to me and very useful! But, I still had to buy a few. To save money I decided to try multiple images on one screen. I thought it made sense because I was planning to cut the pieces apart and sew them together. In reality it was not as simple as my plan. Here are a few of the double image screens:

The double screen did save money, but they took more effort and time to print. I did not have enough seam allowance to print them like this. So, I covered one side with plastic folder (cut to size) and then printed the other side. I used black fabric paint which dries very quickly in the screen, so all my materials were carefully planned and arranged to facilitate fast printing. It is stressful and yet fun to watch the images produced so quickly.

I thought I took more pictures of the printing process, but I was so busy trying to crank it out, there was no time for photos. As I was practicing with the whales, for the back another small quilt (here), I was printing outside and hanging the fabric to dry in the sun.  That was not the best idea. Working in the Texas heat made the paint dry faster in the screen. I had no idea how much I would need so I bought a lot extra, because I didn't want to run out during a print run. 

 

The ship was the hardest to print. The screen would kind of roll while printing and mess up the design after the first run. I think it took 7 prints to get 3 reasonably good ones. It was a learning process to be sure! 

After all the prints were made and dried, I heat set them with my iron, and then trimmed them with the rotary cutter and sewed all the pieces together. It was now ready to layer with the front, baste, and then quilt. :)

The Island

The Island

30" x 30"

This quilt is a reminder of where I grew up.  Corpus Christ is on a bay which is protected by barrier islands and has a seaport with a ship channel that connects to the Intracoastal Canal and the Gulf of Mexico.  We refer, affectionately, to the barrier islands as the 'island' or the 'beach'. And, I really love, love, love the beach! 

The barrier islands also serve a very important ecological purpose.  They protect the shoreline from big storms.  They also provide a protected wetland for many plant and animal species including lots of birds. This is where they form a very protected and cherished place in my heart. I always thought I would want to live there, until I took a geology class.  It seems very wasteful to build on a barrier island.  They are not permanent and are constantly shifting.  Not ideal, but humans live in NOW time, and geology is a much longer time perspective. The islands are also under constant attack by humans, from our waste, our concentrated industrial waste, and our constant desire to develop in such beautiful areas. 

I made a smaller version of this quilt, Sea, Sand, Sky and I liked it so much, that I decided to try a bigger version of it. 

1. I wanted it quilted, but with no quilting showing on the front.

2. And, I wanted to put something cool on the back (okay, this is not new for me!)

The main idea was to piece each strip by sewing the seam on top of the batting and backing. This will both piece the front while simultaneously quilt the back. This meant that before I even started sewing the top, I needed to have the back ready to go. Note: I was also working on an even bigger quilt with this color palette and had decided to do some screen printing for it.  You may have seen some of my Instagram posts with the whales, turtles, crab, and the oil tanker? This new smaller quilt was the perfect size for 3 whales, so I printed it on a whole cloth:

I love the way it looks like they are holding "hands"!!!

Then I cut all of those strips. The width of each strip is 1/2" after sewing. I needed 1" strips slightly longer than 30" (to have extra to wrap to the back for the facing). And, it is easy to calculate how many, because....math! Sixty strips were needed, with the top and bottom ones slightly wider so that they too can be wrapped to the back. For a while, I had these up on my design wall, looking ever so lovely, but then I needed my design wall for something else, and needed to take the strips down. I wanted to keep them in the order that I planned to sew them. I came up with this, and it worked beautifully!

I layered them on the safety pin, one by one, and when I pulled them off, voila! They were still in the same order! Ha ha! Reminded me of geology and the Law of Superposition, which states that younger layers of rock sit on top of older layers.  A perfect law for sedimentary rocks and sedentary work!

My plan was to sew as you go, or maybe it is called quilt as you go?  I don't think this idea is original, but it was new to me.  After finishing the quilt, and deciding to blog about it, I decided to google it, and sure enough, there are a LOT of youtube videos on how to do this! For this project it was perfect, because the piecing IS the quilting.  It will look simple and flat with no extra texture on the front, and yet it will still be quilted for stability of the piece. 

I started with the backing and the batting. I decided to hand baste these two layers before stitching the strips in place. 

With the basting complete, I added the first two strips of sky fabric, and then stitched it.

This is after opening the first seam and pressing. I also matched thread colors for piecing because I wanted the different colors to refer to the colors on the front for the back side with the whales. 

As I made progress, I started to notice that there was some slippage.  It was getting increasingly hard to sew precisely on top of this spongy batting sandwich. Arghhh! My solution was to press the next strip in place, then pin it.  I next turned the entire thing over, drew stitching lines lightly in pencil with a long rotary cutting ruler, and stitched on the back side.

There was not a lot of room for the pins with such narrow strips, but there was enough. This shows the pins and the stitching.  Here's a photo from the back side:

I find it interesting that even the simplest ideas require practice and problem solving.  I also found that changing the thread colors 60 times did not make much difference at all on the back side (see below).  It is so subtle that I question if it was worth doing.  You might notice it if you stand really close and put your glasses on! Otherwise, it was a bit of a bust.  Ultimately, the back looks quilted (because it is), and the front does not (even though it also is).  I really like how this turned out. 

Last steps are the finishing, facing the edges and adding a hanging sleeve.

Since the back was white, I used a very small white strip to face it.  Because some of the front flips to the back, it makes a really nice graduated color frame around the whales.  

Here is the back completed:

This shows the back with the hanging tube on it at the top.  The hanging tube was top-stitched with corresponding 9 different colors so that it blends it and does not distract from the imagery.  

I like the richness of the colors on this quilt and currently have it hanging in my living room.  It will be nice to enjoy it in it's new space before entering it into an exhibit.  If it gets in, I will be happy that it gets to be seen in real life and hopefully inspire or connect with others in a way that is qualitatively different than seeing it on-line. If it does not get in, I will get to enjoy it longer.  One of the perks of spending the time and effort to make it! :)  Cheers and happy sewing!

Sea, Sand, Sky

Sea, Sand, Sky
18" x 18"

This is number 5 of five in the little series. I wanted to try a view from the water and I love the way this looks! A great change of perspective, this one is my favorite. This might be my point of view if I were swimming in the ocean looking back at the land, or on a sailboat, or perhaps a surfboard. I didn’t quilt this one because I love the pure distinct lines of color. 

This one also presented a number of technical challenges.  Because I chose not to quilt it, it was substantially floppy. It was not really sturdy enough to hang on a wall.  And, I didn't make it big enough to wrap around a canvas.  Ultimately I decided to piece a white border on it, add some batting, and then wrap it around a canvas.  It made for a little bit of bulk on the edges and corners, but mostly those don't appear obvious. 

Here's a photo of it hanging above the mantel by my fireplace, along with some shells and dead coral I found on a trip to the Bahamas when I was a teen. Sharky is fond of it too! :)

Sand, Sea, Sky

Sand, Sea, Sky

11.5" x 11.5"

This is number four of five in my little series, a small abstraction of being on the beach and looking towards the water. Breathe in, breathe out. 

This little quilt has 24 different colors of fabrics, each one was cut 1" wide, and then the strips were sewn together to leave 1/2" strips visible.  I quilted each row with a variety of threads, some that were matching, and some that were not. It blurs the lines between the colors and makes the edges look a bit fuzzier. Kind of like drifting to sleep.

Here's a closeup of some of the threads. 

Ha! Sorry, that is not a very close detail shot! Trying again....

I also discovered that this many rows of stitching changes the texture significantly.  That can be a good thing or a bad thing, but I think I liked it better before I added the stitching.  So my next one will be THAT.  Just the pure simple strips of color.  

Sand, Sea, Sunset, Sky

Sand, Sea, Sunset, Sky

12..75" x 12.75"

This one is pretty simple.  I just wanted to make a slightly bigger grid of these colors, and keep the colors and values more horizontal in composition.  It is still a lovely abstraction of the beach and the ocean and the sky.  Then I kept seeing in my head, a brilliant contrast of orange between the top two lines of blocks, so I auditioned the fabric.  I loved it! I have always been a fan of orange and blue! Meanwhile, there is some irony here.  I grew up on an east facing beach.  We see sunrises over the water, the sunsets are over the dunes. My memories of sunrises don't look like this at all, this one reminds me of sunsets. And, if that is so, it cannot be an abstraction of my home beach.  However, and regardless of all the thinking about this piece, it is ultimately about the 'feels' that come with it. And, I really like the feels. It is even softer and more wonderful in real life because you can see all the thread colors in the different stripes, and it's fun to throw in some unexpected colors!  It adds interest and movement and texture, all wonderful!

Since this little quilt has more contrast than the previous two, I call it the high drama one! Ha! What appears to be a calm sunset hides the dangers lurking beneath (sunset is when the sharks come out!).

This next photo, I was playing around with adding some shark fins. I did not ultimately decide to put them on, but decided to share it with you because I find it amusing and laughing is good!