A Hairy Feathered Bird

 My aunts got married on the 20th.  Congratulations to them!

I asked about the colors in my aunt's living room and she said, "grey, soft blue, with undertones of pink."  People who can say things like that always know what they're talking about.  It's so much easier to make a quilt for someone who says, grey, soft blue, with undertones of pink, than for instance someone who says, "well, kinda redish, but not really quite red if you know what I mean."

Her description put me immediately in mind of these fabrics and as soon as I had the fabrics out I was thinking about things archaeologic and things feathered.

I used a simple nine patch path across the middle of the quilt to keep from having just one huge chunk of each of the main fabrics.  The hardest part of the entire process (and I didn't manage to make it perfect by a long shot) was getting everything lined up on Terpsichore so that the corners matched up through all layers at all the intersections.

The feathers were FUN.  When I stood back and looked at the finished product I realized it couldn't be called anything but Archaeopteryx!*

If I had it all to do over again, I'd probably have used a lighter grey on the outer border.  My aunts liked it, and that's the important part of course.

*An Archaeopteryx is one of the earliest transition animals of the fossil record between dinosaurs and birds. I found out about them in the 70's whilst reading a compendium of B.C. comics.

Archaeopteryx Sneak Peak

It's a wedding present, so I can't show off the whole quilt yet as there's a chance the brides-to-be might peek in at the blog.  I'll show the whole thing on the 22nd when I get back from the wedding.

Boring Sashing Conversion

Beth whipped this up at the retreat we went to recently.  Nine blocks don't really make a whole quilt I told her.  So she added some area with very wide sashing (I practically FORCED her to make it really wide.  She has way more sense about color and proportion than I do and realized that sashing half as wide as the blocks was going to overwhelm the quilt.)  She snorted at it, tossed it across the table to me and said, "There's no way to make this pretty."  (Yes, it can be argued that it is very pretty even before quilting, but we're talking about the sensitivities of a color PRO, remember.)

"Heh.  Sure there is!"

First you stitch in the ditch around all the block elements. No problem. :)



Then you quilt a bunch of scribble roses all over the sashings. Ok, make two passes. One with a darkish pink, the other with a lighter shade. There. That wasn't so hard.



Still using the focus fabric as your guide, insert buttercups along the same path with the scribble roses. Wow. Those buttercups have tiny petals. But there. It's done.

Finally, go through the entire quilt again with a green thread. Make wee tiny calyxes (calices?), leaves, and stems along the floral path. Do it in 30 minute increments because your eyes are getting wierd. Phasing in and out of the universe as we know it wierd.

After just over a week of quilting on a small, donation quilt, there! It's quite pretty.

I do go a long way to win an argument, eh Beth?

Two Block Donation

My little group of quilting friends and I split up a few pieces of fabric that were donated to us and each of us made up quilt tops from our stash with that fabric as the focus. This top is one I generated from the millefleur donation focus. I tried Patsy Thompson's hyper-quilting technique on this one when it came time to quilt it up. I like the way it looks on her website, but either my second color choice for the veins wasn't sufficiently different from the outline choice to show up well, or my technique isn't very good yet or something. I'm considering putting it back on the machine and outlining everything in a nearly navy blue but am a little worried that it will be too dark. Any of you out there with hyperquilting experience have an opinion on this?