Quilters' Chat

It has proven a little more complicated than I expected, partly because I had no idea what I was doing when I started, and I had not intention of having a back entirely made of 4 !/2 blocks. I've decided along the way that color blocks of about 5 or 6 blocks per row is good for the fabric mix I ended up with, and that's how big the backing blocks will be for the quilt-as-I-go stage. Machine sewing has helped especially for the initial strips, but sewing between the raised seams is no easy matter on the machine and would be easier if somewhat slower to do that part by hand.

It has been an interesting color exercise. I thought the least of my colors was greens, but I think it was an illusion due to the lack of variety - I had lots of scraps of the same greens, mostly solid, slightly bluish green, but overall there is lots of it, so I have made only one block of black and gray fabrics, but three blocks of greens and I'm not sure I'm done with them, yet. And that's not counting the certain spectrum of green fabrics that are waiting for me to remake an old green applique crazy quilt. The color blocks will be shifting in color from dark to light, blues to yellows, yellows to roses to purples. It's a true rag quilt to the degree of being years of leftover fabrics and not a purposeful selection. I have too much of certain fabrics I am working on finding ways to use up, not enough of pattern ones that will help blend colors that don't go well, but maximizing the mix within similar groups, the slow rainbow progressions have meant that so far I've only rejected a couple of fabrics that didn't look good next to anything else in the group.

I don't know that I would make another one, but I like to try at least all the basic types of quilts, and I hadn't done a rag quilt before but like the fluffy look of some of those I've seen. I don't care for the ones that have very short, tight seams, as if they were trying to look like chanile (sp?). It looks like I will not have lots of leftovers, so what I do end up with will probably be pillow shams or pillow cases, depending on how many I end up with, the fabrics, and the color spectrum. If it is much of the heavier fabrics, I'll make it a sham for a decorative pillow, as they don't make the best direct sleeping. A proper pillow case should be a light, smooth cotton weave or flannel, not cordiroy or denim or polyester, and this quilt has them all.

Bring summer into winter with a lap quilt of summer colors in patterns or blocks reminicent of flowers, grass, or summer activities and sports.

Prompt: Find a star block you haven't tried before.

Large block variation: consider using several small stars to make a larger block, sampler-style

Designer's challenge: integrate two star block patterns into a single, more complex star

I blogged about the concept of concept crafts and my idea for a weather journal quilt on my blog, at:  http://home.earthlink.net/~wyverns/2013.01.01_arch.html

in sum, the idea is to "join the fun" or do something "with" friends wherein everyone does the same thing but gets different results, in this case by using the weather as the decision maker for design.  It was originally conceived as a knitting project, but translates and happily expands into quilting.  My quilting concept has several variations.  The one that follows the scarf design most closely is stripes formed by two rows of squares.  Each pair of squares together defines the weather of the day.  Each double row defines the weather of the month, and the trend in weather forms the design for the year.

The other design concept, more easily rendered as "block of the month" with either paired rectangles or half-square triangles.  My main hesitation over it was how to capture the flow of the weather from month to month, but I got an idea for that today: instead of arranging each month like a calendar, start in one corner, go pack and forth diagonally to the other corner for the month, then start the next block in the nearest corner.

I'm not planning to start any new quilts until it's too warm to lap quilt, so I was considering other years that I could do, like my birth year and the year I graduated from college, one for each half of a quilt of four rows of six blocks with a thin sashing around each block.  That still leaves some range for the half square triangles (or bow ties).