I Can’t Help Myself

One day, (before finishing the churn dash quilt or doing that darn quilt photography) I looked at a picture on my photo board. It was a pretty quilt with large swatches of fabrics, and I had written–“be more adventurous in my quilting.” I just liked that idea of using big pieces of fabric.

And…I had an ulterior motive. I needed a new kantha blanket to work on in the evenings!

So I chose some fabrics that I loved, and I started putting this quilt together. Surprise, it only took me one day to piece these big pieces of fabric together.

I made a quilt sandwich, using Dharma Trading Company’s “harem cloth” which was a cotton gauze, and muslin for the backing.

I had bought a skein of hand dyed silk at the weaver’s convention, a similar size to #8 perle cotton. I marked lines about 6″ apart on the quilt, and kantha stitched those lines to stabilize the quilt. I don’t know if you can see it, but I decided to add two lines of perle cotton in a turquoise just for something different to do.

Of course, I have other embroidery to get back to. But when I don’t want to think any more, a kantha blanket is the perfect project to work on!

Taking Pictures

I wanted to take some good photographs of a few quilts that I want to enter in some quilt shows. That entails getting out my super big piece of black fabric to cover the design wall so that a white quilt will show up better. This quilt is 68″ X 88″, and so I have to hang it sideways on my design wall. I was sweating by the time I got the black fabric in the right place and this quilt placed just so on the wall. After all that work, I left the quilt on the wall for a couple of days just so I could admire it as I walked by 🙂

I also learned how to change the pixels in a photograph. Its just amazing what your computer can tell you how to do when you word your question correctly.

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Here’s a smaller quilt–so much easier! to photograph. I really like this quilt a lot. It has wording, embroidery, and beading all over it.

close-up:

And this third little quilt, that I photographed after I took the black fabric off the design wall.

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I also took the opportunity to take a nice picture of my Hallelujah! quilt while I had the black background up.

And that’s it for my photography sessions for a while.

Tradition!!

I decided to get back to work on the big churn dash quilt. And let me say right here–if you are looking for someone to learn about traditional piecing from–ITS NOT ME. As much as I tried to do everything so carefully, I sometimes had a hard time fitting things together! I read and re-read the instructions in the magazine. Oh, hmm. This is a KING SIZED quilt! Definitely the largest quilt I have ever made. So I would say that a quilt this big is not ideal for my method of putting a quilt sandwich together (steaming the layers and then pinning.) But here I am documenting the final corner of the quilt sandwich being put together. You can see that I carefully folded the quilt as I finished each section. That was a good idea.

And then, since it was so carefully folded, I decided to transfer it to the quilting table just like that. That also turned out to be a good idea. I have already quilted two out of the five rows of churn dash blocks. It was easier than I thought to manipulate such a large quilt.

And then, re-reading the instructions, and staring at the picture over and over (remember, I wanted to make this quilt just like the one in the magazine…) I found a mug with a 3 inch opening, made a plastic circle template from that, and drew the pomegranate designs in the setting triangles. I free-hand drew the leaves as they were in the photograph. It was fun just following the lines to quilt this!

I am very excited about this quilt. There will be lots of “fill” to go back and do after I get the main design done. But the quilting is moving along much faster than I expected it to!