#52 Happy New Year

#52: Happy New Year
Finished: 12/30/12
Techniques: strip piecing, couching, appliqué, raw edge appliqué, ribbons, 3-D, free-motion quilting, satin stitching.
Size: 14 x 15 1/2"

Description: The last mini-quilt of the year! And since we're heading for 2013, I created a simple festive design to ring in the new year. This one was just for fun.

The party hat and party horn were strip pieced, cut out and appliquéd onto the background with a satin stitch. The numbers for 2013 were satin stitched on using tapered ends. The confetti was made by adhering fusible web to the fabrics, cutting them into random sizes shapes and ironing them onto the background. They added a nice touch. I then couched some silver bead strings around the party hat leaving a length fairly free for the chin strap part. More beads were couched on top of the hat and by the end of the party horn. For added whimsy, I curled some silver ribbon and attached pieces to the top of the hat and end of the party horn for a 3-D effect.

Quilting was done with a loopy free motion stitch meant to simulate the path of the confetti.

Here's wishing all my good friends and family a joyous new year!  Watch for my next post for a wrap up of this year's mini-quilt project and for what I plan to do next.

#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.

#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.

#29 Tumbling Blocks

#29: Tumbling Blocks
Finished: 7/22/12
Techniques: Y-seams, Metallic thread, Invisible thread, Stitch in the ditch
Size: 26" x 25 1/2"

Description: I like the tumbling block design because of its three dimensional illusion, but I've never tried to create them before now. Traditionally they are pieced using what's known as a Y-seam. Where the three colors meet, you see a "Y". I found the Y-seams to be a little tricky but not too bad. Some of them came out really well - perfectly pointed! - but others were off a bit.  There is a way to create the design using straight seams, but this creates a line through some of the diamond shapes which I find distracting. However, if I had used a busier pattern for the fabrics, it may have gone unnoticed.

The outer border was actually my inspiration for this mini-quilt. It was fabric I picked up, I believe, at an ARC thrift store some time ago. I used fabric from my stash to correspond to the blue, yellow, and reddish orange in the border print to create the large tumbling blocks. The solid blue inner border was added because I felt the eye needed a resting place before adding the outer border. When sewing on the outer border, I oriented the fabric to correspond to the larger tumbling blocks. This meant that I had to cut some of the fabric cross-wise and some lengthwise, but I'm glad I did it that way.

I haven't used metallic thread much in the past, because I found it difficult to work with. But here was a perfect opportunity to try it again. In the border fabric, the little tumbling blocks are surrounded by metallic gold lines. When I tried simulating those gold lines with metallic thread, I was using old metallic thread that jammed up right away. Then I switched to an unused spool of gold metallic thread that I had bought years ago but never used. It worked very well, so the lesson I learned is to use good new metallic thread in the future.

It doesn't look too bad in the picture, but some of my stitching in the ditch was not evenly applied.

Using a multi-colored print fabric as your focus fabric and then choosing other fabrics that match and blend with it is a good way of designing and choosing fabrics for a quilt. I've used this technique in the past for full-sized quilts.

I put the picture in extra large, because this is the largest mini-quilt I've done to date.