#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.

#34 Cathedral Window

#34: Cathedral Window
Finished: 8/26/12
Techniques: Cathedral Window, origami
Size: 9" x 9"

I've wanted to try a Cathedral Window quilt for some time, but shied away thinking it was too difficult. On a recent trip to Nebraska, however, I was reacquainted with a Cathedral Window quilt that a friend's mother had made. Leone Gustafson's quilt is quite lovely, and it inspired me to give it a try.  I found instructions on the web that required folding of fabric, rather like origami. At a certain point, colorful printed fabric is folded separately and inserted to create a stained glass cathedral window effect. Because of the folding of the fabric, no batting is needed to complete the quilt.

Four petal quilting on reverse

I had a little difficulty with the hand stitching; I don't do
very well with keeping my stitching invisible, and I didn't
like the effect. So I switched to machine stitching and was
much happier. I still had a little trouble with puckering near
the center of the piece but it's not terribly noticeable. And the machine stitching creates a nice four petal quilting design on
the reverse of the piece. It's not easy to see, but you can just
make it out.





I like the way this mini-quilt goes together. It's a "quilt-as-you-go" design. I could have added on as many rows and columns as I wished, working out from the center. I chose to stay with just the four windows, making this the smallest mini-quilt to date.

#33 Milky Way

#33: Milky Way
Finished: 8/19/12
Techniques: Paper piecing, Appliqué
Size: 16" x 12"

Description: Years ago, I made a quilt for my niece utilizing a dozen or more of paper-pieced stars similar to these. I had also used a polka dot batik to simulate the galaxy. I still had some of that fabric left over and decided to re-create that quilt on a smaller scale. Using Carol Doak's designs from her book, 365 Foundation Quilt Blocks, I paper-pieced 5 different stars in different colors and used the polka dot batik for part of the background.

But I didn't use enough of the polka dot in the construction of the red/pink star. When I sewed the pieces together the red/pink star stood out too much. It looked disjointed. At that point, I could have taken out the odd star, made a new one and inserted it, but that seemed like too much work. So what I did instead was to apply Steam-A-Seam to the back of the fabric, cut out some dots and appliqué them to strategic places to minimize the contrast. It actually adds a bit of interest to the mini-quilt.

#32 Double Helix

#32: Double Helix
Finished: 8/10/12
Techniques: Convergence
Size: 12 1/2" x 19"

"Sine Me Up" by Kent Williams,
reprinted with permission from the artist.

Description: I was reading 500 Art Quilts edited by Ray Hemachandra and Karey Bresenhan and fell in love with a  quilt by Kent Williams entitled "Sine Me Up". As this was more of an art book and not a quilting technique book, there were no instructions for how to create this quilt - just a photo and a small close up. So working from the photo, I had to figure out how it was done.  I could see it involved alternating rows of fabric strips, but at first I thought I would have to work with curves. I tried that but failed miserably. I could see that there were curves going to the left and curves going to the right, but it drove me crazy for a while trying to figure out how to put it together.

Then I realized I was making it too complicated and knew I had to look for a simpler solution. It turns out that this is a very easy construction technique. Very easy, yet quite ingenious! I created rows of alternating strips: 1) light purple, red, pink, olive, and light blue and 2) dark blue, yellow, green, orange, and dark purple. I then alternated the rows, moving one row 1/4" to the right while moving the other row 1/4" to the left when adding each subsequent row. That gives the appearance of curves in two directions.

Now if I had been smart, I would have done some strip piecing of the five row fabrics and then cut them out, but no, I cut out individual rectangles and then pieced them together. Strip piecing may also have helped in making cleaner, straighter rows. Ah well - I'll know better for next time.

My mini-quilt is not as elegant as Mr. Williams'. I didn't achieve the nice curved effect, but I attribute that to facts that my rectangles are not as long as his, nor do I have as many shifts to the right and left. It may also be because he shifted the rows less than 1/4" but I am not positive of that as it is difficult to determine the scale. So my mini-quilt came out more angular than curved, but the overall effect reminded me of the double helix of DNA, hence the title.

Another interesting note: There is an optical illusion that occurs here, and it is most evident with the orange (although you can see it somewhat with the other colors as well, to varying degrees). Look on the right side of the mini-quilt. Does it appear that there is a dark orange diagonal to a lighter orange? It's all the same orange fabric! The illusion occurs because the orange looks lighter when it is next to the light blue, and darker when it is next to the olive color.

Thank you, Kent Williams, for allowing me post a photo of your quilt! I encourage others to check out his website gallery of quilts. They are phenomenal! http://www.rkentwilliams.com/galleries.html