Bloggers Quilt Festival May 2014

Double photobomb!

Here's my entry for the May 2014 round of the Bloggers Quilt Festival.  This quilt was made for my aunts to celebrate their marriage last July.  Quilting took far too long and it didn't get finished until just last month.

The greens were supposed to be sage, but they just aren't.  I tried to tone them down a bit by using grey/green and grey/blue threads.

The pattern is just a traditional Carpenter's Wheel block made large enough to be a quilt.

I was especially pleased with the Invisafil thread in the outer border.  Nice subtle texture and unlike many of the thin and shiny threads, didn't break all the time.  The rest of the quilting was done in various shades of green and plain white A&E tex 40 quilting cotton.

The snails and pebbles background fill worked well, but from time to time it got boring so I threw in a few easter eggs.

From any distance at all the quilting is almost invisible on the front.  But if you get up close...

...the details come out.

Using a little bit of green thread on the back gave it some character.

The center medallion got a monogram, well-wishes, and a traditional curved crosshatch background fill.  You should see the three foot long MDF curve template I made out in the shop.  Thumping it around on the quilt for about six hours while I worked around the intials was a hoot, I assure you.

If I had more time I would probably have embellished these letters more.

Scraps from the green batiks joined end to end made the binding.

Thanks for stopping by, feel free to say howdy in the comments.  I reply to all of them.  Enjoy the rest of the festival!

Four Generation Quilt

This oddball wall hanging is the lemonade from a recent post.  The binding is all finished and buttons added to corners.  It's a pretty silly piece because it's so haphazard, but I still love it because it is my step mother's first try using Terpsichore and I went back and filled in empty spaces with little background feathers and such.  The colors are right for my soon to be grandbaby's nursery, so Great Grandma and Grandma signed the corner and dated it and it will hang in the nursery until my poor daughter can't stand it any more!

Reef World Mach 2

The octopus went in just fine. No sweat. Lots of little oval suckers, sure. In fact I still want to go back and put in a little more detail. But basically this went without a hitch. HOWEVER...



I've stitched and frogged and stitched and frogged on the diver (no picture because he's currently completely frog stitched out) all day long. I think maybe I'll just scroll around to a whole different section of the quilt until that corner has learned its lesson. It could be several days.

The original Reef World quilt can be found HERE. Mach 2 should end up looking similar but hopefully more professional. We'll see.

Ivory Spring - the next photo is just for you. Keep after it! (I named this bear Umbearto Eco after one of my favorite authors. He has snaps for joints and was made from less than 4" of bear fabric. The coin in the picture is a dime, not a quarter.)

Quilting Experimental Bubbles

It was a toss up between the title I chose and "Too Much Spare Time".

I recently designed a quilt (which hasn't been built yet so I can't really show you anything) that I wanted to quilt spheres on. Now you have all probably just stopped and said to yourselves, "but tirane, spheres are 3 dimensional and quilts are only 2 dimensional!" I'm with you on that. I considered things like trapunto which definitely gives a 3D feel to a quilt, but I don't think it would have suited my goals here. Instead I went for the sketcher's solution, shading. I loaded up a piece of boring white on Terpsichore and threaded up a pale color. I outlined a circle and then meandered almost all the way to the center. Then I threaded up a medium shade of the same color and meandered from the outer edge to about halfway into the center. Finally, I put a dark shade of the same color through the needle and meandered just around the outer edge of the circle. I made several of these practise spheres, changing the density of stitches, the size of the meander and the focal point of the sphere.

The only hard part of this technique will sound astoundingly simple-minded to those of you who don't meander, but for those of you who can meander in your sleep, you'll understand. The really tricky part is when you're going over the first meander with the second thread - because you're so inured to the idea that you NEVER CROSS YOUR STITCHES you end up almost following your first meander. Of course, that'd ruin the look, so you have to bravely cross the first lines over and over, pretty much ignoring the first run. It makes you sweat and twitch the first few times, but then you get used to it.

I turned the experimental bubbles into a baby quilt. I don't currently know any babies in need of a quilt, but I'm sure one will turn up. They tend to do that.