#38 Prairie Point Landscape

#38: Prairie Point Landscape
Finished: 9/23/12
Techniques: Prairie Points, Machine stitches, Free-motion quilting
Size: 30" x 15"

Description: I've made prairie points before, but just as examples. I've never incorporated them into a quilt before, so it was about time I did. I had some purple fabric with white whisps that did well for sky (it really is purple but looks blue in the photo), and I used a green leaf fabric for the grass and tan for mountains. Cutting these into strips allowed me to add many prairie points creating a stylized landscape design. I used various browns for mountains, white for snow caps, florals for fields of flowers, and rock fabric for rocks.

Before sewing, I placed the prairie points on a design board on loan from Pam Jones (thanks, Pam!). I felt it needed something more, so I added a pine tree. Once I did that, the mini-quilt was too wide for the design board, so I took advice from another quilting friend, Jan Keder, and stapled a piece of batting to the wall. It works really well too!

And still, when I looked at the landscape, there was a lot of blue sky. So I added some clouds. Because I made the prairie points at different times, I didn't realize how many I actually made until I counted them all up. There are 66 in total. I was surprised - it really didn't seem like I had made that many. They are very easy to make.

I found two methods online for making prairie points. The first was to take a square of fabric and fold diagonally, then fold again perpendicular to the hypotenuse. This creates a prairie point with a pocket on the side in which you can nest another prairie point. I used this method for the majority of prairie points. For the pine tree, I used the other method for creating a prairie point. I folded a square lengthwise, then folded down the upper corners to the bottom center.

Originally, I had intended to simply appliqué a piece of brown fabric for the tree trunk. But it didn't seem right, somehow. I wondered how to construct a tree trunk from prairie points. When a prairie point is made, there is a raw edge that is usually sewn into a seam. I could have left a raw edge and sewn over it as I did with the snow caps, but I decided to turn under the raw edge and butt prairie points next to each other and zigzag over them. It made a nice effect.

Quilting was done with machine stitches and some free-motion stitching for the sky. I bar-tacked a couple of the larger prairie points so they would stay vertical, but most were left free standing. This is one mini-quilt that looks better in person than in the picture. It was fun to do!

#37 Autumn Kaleidoscope

#37: Autumn Kaleidoscope
Finished: 9/14/12
Techniques: Stack 'n Whack, Kaleidoscope, Stitch in the Ditch Quilting, Machine Stitches
Size: 17" x 17"

Description:

backing fabric

This is the first time I've tried this kaleidoscope technique, and I really enjoyed it. The key is finding the right fabric and having enough of it to have eight repeats that you can cut out. The fabric I used for this mini-quilt is also what I used for the backing, shown here.  I like it because of the variety of fall colors.

The Stack 'n Whack method means that I had to line up eight strips of repeating print design one on top of each other as precisely as I  could. This took time, but wasn't too difficult.  I made a triangle template with 45 degrees at the apex and cut into the strips. Then I inverted the template and continued cutting out triangles. Then I sewed the triangles together to form the kaleidoscope. I even sewed a fifth kaleidoscope that I didn't include in the mini-quilt. Adding the black background was simple, and I used various machine stitches and stitched in the ditch for the quilting.

unused kaleidoscope

If you look very closely, you can see that not all the triangle wedges are identical. Even being careful trying to line up the fabrics, things get a little off. But the nice thing about the design is that you really don't notice the little errors.

I was delighted by the variety of kaleidoscopes that were formed from one fabric. But my first attempt at a fabric was not at all successful. I started out with a beer bottle fabric. I thought that the variety of colors would make an interesting kaleidoscope. I now believe that the fact that the beer bottles are isolated (or in other words, surrounded by black background), made for a poor kaleidoscope. You can start to see a slight kaleidoscope emerge, but it doesn't coalesce. I'll just have to find another use for the beer bottle fabric.

beer bottle fabric

beer bottle kaleidoscope

Having a small amount of background does seem to add to the design of the kaleidoscopes. This combined with a multi-colored print in which the images overlap would make for good kaleidoscope designs. I would very much like to make a larger quilt using this technique.

#36 Prism of 100 Squares

#36: Prism of 100 Squares
Finished: 9/8/12
Techniques: Triple stitch quilting
Size: 20" x 20"

Description:
This mini-quilt came about because, as I was looking through my stash, I noticed I had a lot of solid fabrics. I have yards of some colors, but with other colors I only have small pieces. I wondered how many different colors I actually have. So I decided to cut a 2 1/2" square from each one. Some of the colors are very similar, but if I could discern even the slightest difference in shade, hue, or texture, I cut a square of it. When I counted them up, I had a whopping 96!

Now 96 is a good number. There are many ways to divide 96: 1x96, 2x48, 3x32, 4x24, 6x16, and the one best suited for a mini-quilt - 8x12. However, looking at all the colors and knowing how I wanted to arrange them, I needed a big square. 96 is so close to 100, I wondered if I could find just four more solid colors. After all, I was just using 2 1/2" squares. So I began digging through my buckets of scraps, and I was successful! Had I kept looking, I may have found more, but I didn't want to press my luck. I would have had to find 21 additional colors in order to make an 11x11 mini-quilt, and I didn't think that was going to happen.

I wanted the arrangement to start with very light and pale colors together and a little off-center, and then radiate out to the darker colors. By starting off-center, I could give the blues and reds and pinks more space because I had more of them. I had less space for the greens, yellows, and oranges, but I had less of those colors anyway. So it all worked out. The gradation from lights to darks is not even throughout, but I think the piece is more interesting that way.

This is another instance where having a design wall would have come in handy. Hmmm. I wonder how I might accomplish that on a budget. I'll have to come up with something.

Quilting was simple: A machine triple stitch (forward, backward, forward) through the diagonals in an off-white thread. I could have quilted each square with an X but thought that might be too busy.

#35 Purple Pinwheels

#35: Purple Pinwheels
Finished: 9/1/12
Techniques: Pinwheels, Paper-Piecing, Tessellations, Stitch-in-the-Ditch quilting
Size: 18" x 14"

Description: I love this pinwheel design that I found in Quiltmaker magazine #140. The designer, Barbara Cline, wanted a way to construct tessellated pinwheels without having to sew Y-seams, and this is what she came up with.

M.C. Escher tessellated print

Tessellations are where you have repeated patterns or shapes fitting together without overlaps or gaps. You may be familiar with the works of M.C. Escher, very famous for his tessellated drawings. I've always liked his work and have often thought several could be worked into quilt designs.

In choosing a design, I tried to create a simple bird figure that would tessellate, but was unsuccessful. I found this pinwheel design though, and am quite happy with the results.

The neat thing about the design of this mini-quilt is that there is only one pattern piece: a very simple triangular piece which I drew and photocopied. I chose four different purples from my stash with enough variety between them so that each would stand out. There are twelve combinations of the triangle that you can create with four fabrics, and since there are six points to the pinwheels, I paper-pieced 72 of these triangle to begin with. I had to sew a few more to make the mini-quilt the size I wanted, but it went pretty quickly.

It was a little tricky to keep all the pieces straight to make the tessellations work out, and several times I thought I had sewn pieces together incorrectly but hadn't. (OK, there were a couple of times I had to use a seam ripper, but not as many times as I thought I'd have to.) Having a design wall would have helped, but since this is a mini-quilt, I managed. After that, I sewed the pieces in columns, sewed the columns together, trimmed the edges, quilted by stitching in the ditch, then put the binding on.

The creator of the pattern also had four fabrics, but used only three for the main body of pinwheels. Her fourth, a light print, she used around the edges to good effect. I chose to do an overall design with my four. You'd have to use at least three fabrics for the design to really work, but you could make it a scrappy quilt and use many more than four. But I'll bet that would prove to be a real headache though, as the number of possible combinations would rise exponentially, and you'd want to make sure the fabrics all work together well.

I would love to make a big quilt in this design, but I think I'll stick to four fabrics.