Traces of Progress

Other than the two days a week that I'm happily watching my sweet baby granddaughter, studio time has been in fairly full swing. Today the two donation quilts were delivered to the Center for Women and Families here in Louisville.

These were number 3 and 4 of the twin-sized quilts made mostly from that huge stash of lightweight upholstery fabrics I spent weeks tearing out of sample books last year and then washed and cut. Last week I turned the remainder of that fabric (hundreds of 11-inch squares and 2- to 3-inch strips) over to someone in our local FreeCycle internet group (a Yahoo group) to use for other projects. That's because these quilts are very much on the heavy side and I'm done with wrestling them through the machine. If they hadn't been QAYG quilts, it would have been impossible.

Anyway, here are some shots of them. Some closeup photos of these rather eclectic blocks are in a previous blog post titled Knights, Castles and Princesses.

Front and back of the quilt done in blues. Had to augment the backing squares with some batiks from my stash.

Front and back of the quilt done in greens. (Thanks to VVHH for being the official quilt holder-upper.)

Here's the blue one on the extra-long twin bed:

Okay! Time to start a new landscape quilt...that's my thing, after all.

Pulled this photo from the archives, a shot we took outside The Overlook Restaurant in Leavenworth, IN. There's a glorious mess of overgrown meadow in it, so some of that will have to be omitted, but I like the birdhouse and the bend of the Ohio River down by that cabin.

Printed a good-quality 4 x 6 color photo for color reference and a black-and-white photo to better see the color values. Then traced the main outlines onto tracing paper with a black marker.

Enlarged the tracing by scanning and printing it out in 3 x 3 page poster format, then taped the 9 pages together to make an actual-size tracing for a roughly 25 x 28-inch quilt.

Ironed a piece of muslin, taped it over the large tracing, and traced again, this time in light pencil. This muslin will be the base of the quilt top and I don't want dark lines showing through any of the raw applique that will come later.

Fused Pellon Featherweight Fusible interfacing to the back of the traced muslin. Took my time and got no bubbles or wrinkles. Yay!

Clipped and taped the interfaced muslin tracing to a drawing board (for easy portability), then cut a piece of upholstery vinyl a bit larger than the pencil boundaries and clipped/taped it over the muslin...

...and traced again. Then I marked areas in red, blue and aqua for offsite (separate) construction. It is much easier to assemble a landscape quilt top in separate units if you have a lot of small pieces in one or more areas.

These are Sharpie permanent markers, so if I mess up or change my mind about line placement on the vinyl overlay, these little guys on the right are my rescuers (a faint trace of the original lines will remain, but not enough to distract me). They also clean my ruler edges after drawing straight lines with a Sharpie--just don't get the alcohol on the ruler markings! It actually smeared some of the white lines and numbers on one of my Creative Grid rulers.

All set to go! The drawing board is now off the cutting table until I'm ready to start gluing and fusing. Meanwhile the cutting table is free for other things.

This is a nice size by the way, since as mentioned already it fits nicely on the drawing board for portability, but also because it's a manageable size for free-motion quilting on a home sewing machine. (Remember, larger landscape quilts can be not only stiff but quite heavy after all the layering and fusing. They can't be bunched up like bed quilts, and they don't move easily without help from the feed dogs--which are not engaged for free motion. That said, if you use built-in stitches and feed dogs for your landscapes instead of free motion, weight is not as much of an issue.)

Next time on the blog, I'll be fusing the sky fabric and constructing units offsite.

Off subject, two more recent photos (see the captions):

Zoe watching helplessly as her nemesis chills out in the flower urn.

Zoe's turn to chill. She's in the chair, Lucy's on the floor and Mokie's on the couch.
Grandma should have been napping, too, instead of snapping (photos).

Back on subject: linking up with Whoop Whoop Fridays, Free Motion Mavericks (the landscape quilt will be free-motion quilted, so hoping Muv will give me a pass :) and WIPs Be Gone. Have fun checking them out and their reader linkups, too.

Have a great weekend!

Linda

'Ghost Quilt' #3

Using the lightbox VVHH (very versatile handy husband)
 made from stuff around the house

Last week another 'ghost quilt' (see the explanation of that term here) was started, and for the first time I had to trace an element instead of drawing it freehand. No way could I have repeated these...grapes? olives?...without tracing.

It turned out to be kind of fun, and very relaxing.

So fun and relaxing, that other elements got traced and repeated in the border, too--like this beautiful leaf.

This part was drawn freehand (more leaves were added later).

After stitching, squaring and trimming, it was time to steam block. See all the wavy areas around the perimeter?

All that waviness goes away after steam blocking.








Here's the finished 'ghost quilt'...

...and some close-ups:

As you can see, the free-motion stitching is not perfect. It's not supposed to be. That's one of the cool things about these quilts. You are basically sketching out in the border--even if you do cheat and trace some elements. Believe me, when you are stitching over the tracing (done with very light pencil lines) you sometimes lose your way a little. But that's ok. It's part of the charm!


Now, totally off-subject is this jar filled with dead pine branches. They came down in our back yard during a storm, and I snatched them up immediately. Do you see why?

The bark was long gone, leaving bare wood with strange markings everywhere. Those are actually channels carved into the wood by a colony of pine borers. (The marks are made more obvious by the black paint my husband rubbed onto the branches and then wiped off, leaving the paint to dry only in the channels.)

It never ceases to amaze me how beautiful the process of decay can be in nature. Some of those markings might even inspire a free-motion stitch design.

Off to link up with some favorite blogs: Confessions of a Fabric Addict's Whoop Whoop Friday, Lizzie Lenard's Free Motion Mavericks, and A Quilting Reader's Garden's WIPs Be Gone. Lots of good weekend inspiration there and in their reader linkups!

Also off to work on a fourth 'ghost quilt.' I can't seem to get enough of these floral/butterfly-type pieces. Maybe I'm pining for spring. And it's so nice to finish a project in one week!

Linda

Line by (Missing) Line

This week has been all about two things: precision and patience.

I don't normally work from photos. Ideas usually just kind of pop into my head, sometimes out of the blue (thank you, Spirit) and sometimes when I see a particular piece of fabric. However, as mentioned in my last post, this new project is based on a photo (left) my husband took in February at Lookout Mountain in TN, altered by superimposing this medieval-costumed lady, from a free stock photo on the internet, over me. (Believe me, you will never see a quilt with me as the focal point.) I also blotted out the railing, using the cloning feature in my photo program.

So as mentioned in the last post, I printed this out in a 16-page poster-style, gray-scale shadow/highlight-mode photo, killing two birds with one stone--more easily determining color values and enlarging the photo to roughly 32" x 40".

The first thing to do was tape some freezer paper together for an overlay on top of the 16 spliced pages, then start tracing. In pencil, by the way--this is not the time to go permanent. Why? Several times the lines had to be erased and re-drawn, simply because in this particular photo mode, there were often no actual outlines--just shadows and highlights. When I wasn't able to guess at the outlines, I looked back at the color photo for reference and drew them in as best I could.

At this point it occurred to me that killing two birds with one stone maybe wasn't a good idea. Maybe I should have printed a separate photo for shadows and highlights. Tracing would have been a lot easier on a straight-up black-and-white photo with actual outlines!

Anyway, it got done. Then it was time to ink the lines. That turned out to be fun. A medium-point Sharpie glides beautifully over the dull (paper) side of freezer paper, and it's gratifying to see a simple line drawing at the end. (Shadows and highlights will be dealt with later.) By the way, the extra chunk of building I added in the righthand background with those barely visible windows--that's going bye-bye. I thought the photo needed that, but changed my mind after it started looking like an old office building to me. Way too modern.

Notice a few trees were left out. One reason: The large window is now in the clear, allowing a shadowy male figure to be sketched in behind the bars. The other reason: too many elements can clutter up the scene. But that's a personal choice. You just do what looks good to you.

Next, pattern pieces were traced--again on freezer paper and this time in ink, since the lines were no longer iffy--for the various elements in the scene: 26 pieces altogether. Overlap allowances were added wherever they would be needed, and the trees were numbered, both on the drawing and the patterns, for quick reference.

Having these pattern pieces to iron on to the various fabrics will not only give me the exact shapes to cut out, avoiding any wasted fabric, but will also allow me to easily position a pattern piece precisely over a particular area of the fabric if desired.

And now comes the real fun...choosing the fabrics! For the stone structures, walls, and flagstone path, here are some possibilities from my fat-quarter stash. I tried several combinations but still haven't made a decision. 

Getting ahead of myself, though, because first to go down will be the sky fabric. I have several purchased ones, but they were all too cut-up or too full of fluffy clouds (boring in this particular scene) or made it look like a storm was rolling in--not the look I'm going for.

Then I thought of the Kona PFD cotton I 'dyed' with Tsukineko inks months ago. The colors are fairly vivid, and if I can cut and piece these bits of fabric just right, it might work. The 'joins' will have to be hidden, which is where the tower (pattern piece not shown) and trees will come in handy. I'm fiddling with that now, and hope to figure it out today.

Foundation muslin smoothed out and clamped down over inked drawing. Reference marks will be made at key points, in pencil. Unfortunately, that water-soluble center line will have to be rinsed out--it's showing slightly through the sky fabric.

Time to sign off and get back to it. Hooking up with Leah Day's FMQ Friday (what is that secret project she's up to??) and Sarah Craig's Whoop Whoop Friday, where you can sign up to be the next recipient of the traveling stash--a box full of pretty fabrics and notions! Read about it there.

Have a great week!

Linda