What's Next

What's Next

64.5" x 64.5"

 

This one gave me a perfect distraction and escape this last year while taking care of my mother. It was one of those projects that you could work on for just a few minutes a day, and still feel like you were making progress. I wanted something big and modern for the wall in my studio, and this looks WONDERFUL there!
The sections represent different stages of my life. I am wondering what is next in my life as I navigate a world without my mother. The grief so far has been hard to bear, it just leaks out unexpectedly. However, if I were to guess, when more time has passed, I think my next stage will have some joy, as that is part of who I am.

I usually start with a color palette. This got me into some trouble because I originally started with the idea to change the color palette for each section. I ended up hating what I was making, so I stripped out the inner corner, and decided to stick with the original color palette for the entire quilt. I kinda love the new inner corner now. Perfect! 

I also had to laugh because my color palette matched the color of the flower pin heads!

In the beginning I was cutting individual pieces of fabric and stitching them together.

By the time I got to the very tiny piecing of the outermost section, I decided to change my process and sew long strips together, cut them into chunks, and then sew those chunks together. It was much easier!

I also have to laugh at myself because of my quality check. If my work looks good next to my Unikko mug, then my quality of design must be good enough!!  Ha ha! I call it the Marimekko test!

Yep, it passed this time!

Sewing the last strips on,

A few close ups of the quilting.  

I still need to take a photo of it hanging in my studio.  I hung it as soon as I put the hanging tube on. It looks marvelous with my red Ikea couch!

Complements finish!

Complements
79" x 80"

I have some new finishes to share.  This one was first posted about last fall (here) when I finished piecing the quilt top. Now, it is quilted, bound, and labeled! 

It took a long time to get to this point, especially because I had trouble deciding if it would be a two-sided quilt or not.  However, I happened upon this wonderful fabric, and that was it! Pefecto! And it is really soft!

Unfortunately, I did not realize that the fabric has a very stretchy weave to it.  It was really difficult to work with.  So I opted to hand baste this quilt. I am finding that I like hand basting more and more because it holds the layers together more accurately than pin basting.

I opted to do long close 1/4" quilting lines for the solid sections, and a back and forth straight line quilting for the tiny pieced section.  I didn't want the quilting lines to distract from the beautiful simplicity of the design, I just wanted them to enhance that quality.  I was also a little concerned that the quilting might warp the quilt out of shape a bit as I worked, but it really didn't.  I feel like I got extremely lucky!

It left a lot of threads to tuck for the solid sections, so I took it outside on a beautiful weather day, and got to work!

Here's another close up of the final quilt:

I love the way this quilt turned out.  The colors are intense but the quilting gives them a wonderful softness that is hard to convey in the photos.  I also love how much detail you can see in the tiny pieced fabrics, even though the sample size is really small.  Those kittens and bears are adorable! 

Last, you can't tell in the top view, but the quilt binding is a wonderful purple, which also surprised me. I auditioned many fabrics before picking this one, and is was so obvious when I saw it, that I just knew!!

the Caterpillars

the Caterpillars
64"ish x 64"ish

Here is my completed top for the first side of the Caterpillars quilt. I am still debating how to quilt it while considering the butterflies on the back....However, if you were wondering how all the different segments previously posted are going together, here it is!

It's kind of bold and in your face!  It is also rather large, compared to a real caterpillar.  Imagine if the real ones were this big? That, my friend, would be a pretty colorful world, possibly a scary one too? I like how they look so different from each other, but really have a lot in common.  I will leave you to think about that.

Next week, I will have the back, all the butterfly segments sewn together.  Cheers!

Caterpillars part 4

Caterpillars part 4

project

This last panel is based on the hawk moth caterpillar. I don't usually post photos that are not mine, so you can use this link to google images if you would like to see what a real one looks like. Apparently, there are all kinds of hawk moths and this is just one, but for caterpillars, it's kind of cool!

All the tiny dots....I thought of making them into tiny pieced squares, like really tiny! Then I decided because this moth has big white dots, that I would make the little dots into circle dots too, to repeat the shape.  This led me out into the batik studio to try my hand at making lots of little dots.  I also calculated the size of fabric I would need so as to not spend too much extra time making dots that I didn't need.  Yep, that's how excited I was....until I got started.  The first row took a long time, or I had short patience.  The next day I put in more rows.  The next day I did half of the entire piece, and then finished it up in one more day.  This is definitely a 'chore' that grows on me!

That's a LOT of dots!! Right?  Are you wondering how many?  I was, so I counted them, even the practice dots on the side that would not be used.  Grand total: 4663

Then the delicious and wonderful black dye!

I did not stamp these dots.  They were individually applied with a tjuanting tool.  I did have some fabric very similar to this, but I didn't like it as much for a number of reasons.  One was that it was stamped, so all the dots are very consistent.  I like how my fabric is more varied, but just slightly so.  It has the hand of the artist in it, so there are some places with different densities of dots, and slightly different sized dots.  I think for an organic creature this works better. I also like that my dotted fabric looks darker, closer to black. 

Then I held it up to the appliqued larger white dots...(these were hand drawn approximation to circles)...

Looks good to me!!

Next step was to cut up the fabric, carefully. 

I also pieced some tiny orange and white stripes to go with it, and last the assembly of all the pieces:

Yeeaassssssss! This may be my favorite panel of the four! I am loving that vertical stripe of darker orange-red down the middle!!

Caterpillars, Part 3

Caterpillars, Part 3

project

This little caterpillar does not have any humps or blobs at all.  It is mostly just stripes.  Modeled after a real life caterpillar, I am in love with the colors and simplicity.  As seen above, I have selected all the yellow solids I have and threw in some white as well.  I cut many, many strips, and then randomly selected them for each section. I stitched them together, and I know that I keep saying this... but I am in awe of how much fabric it takes to make such a small section! It was easier to keep it all parallel by sewing every group of 2 strips together first.  Then I joined strips of two's together to make a block of 4.  Then I checked those against a ruler and trimmed if necessary. And then repeated until the entire block was built up to the correct size. When working with so many tiny strips, it is easy for a small mistake to get multiplied and eventually make everything wonky.  And, I seriously love wonky, but it was not what I wanted for this project. 

Once I had a long strip of yellows, I cut it in half (as seen above), and inserted a 1/2" black stripe down the middle.  I added black and white wide strips above and below.  The actual panel looks more like this, though this is still just a detail section of the overall panel:

I am loving the bold use of color and wide stripes with the narrow ones!  Great contrast! One more caterpillar to go!