Finished Group Quilt

After I sewed the borders, I passed the top on and sat back to await the finished product.

(You last saw it here.)

Anne and Betty made the back.  I don’t have  photo–I’m hoping to get one from te photos from guild show ‘n tell. Anne snagged a nice backing fabric white with a BIG blue dot.  They sewed a strip from top to bottom using pieces from the front and pieced the dots with a small strip of the dot fabric offset.about half  Then Betty quilted it and Tam bound it.

The title now is What If?

We have entered it in QuiltCon. If it gets accepted I won’t have to blog about it; you will have already heard the squeals of joy. If it doesn’t, no matter.

Its final destination is to the charity projects of the guild; they are always needing more larger, boy friendly design quilts.

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Group Project: 9 Cuts

It all started with Thomas Knauer‘s Quilt Design Coloring Workbook. The small group in my modern quilt guild that focuses on design was working on some of the starters. One in the ‘Chance and Intuition in Modern Art’ suggested seeing how many shapes we could make by drawing 9 lines. One member made a block using 9 cuts of random fabrics.

From that the idea morphed to make a group quilt.  Each would have two fat quarters of the same fabric, one a background color and one a print. Each would add a third coordinating fat quarter of their choice. Basically we would make a cut, then shift top fabric to bottom on one piece, then either cut again or seam. Eight times.  We saved the 9th for when we would get together.  Here are my three blocks.

We had a sew day yesterday.  I wish I had thought to get a photo of each person’s blocks; however, we were too into next step planning. We set aside one of each set to keep whole, then piled two stacks of three and one of four and made the 9th cut, shifted one piece and added small insert strips of accent colors. We did this to better distribute the colors.

Next we had a discussion of whether to trim to standard squares the size of the longest possible edge on the smallest block or to trim each block’s four sides to the largest they could be. We did the latter.

Here is an early layout.

Of course much rearranging followed. And since the blocks were not all the same size, much measuring as well. We added varying amounts of blue on the sides of each block and  blue wherever it was needed to get to a straight seam across.

And here is the top, all but the final border to get it to twin size.

It was quite fun. If you plan to try something similar, be forewarned that it took a lot of time. We started at 10ish, took a lunch break, and packed up  a little after 6.  Early on we had two sewing machines, then three. But often we had to wait to see a row before making final decisions on the next row. Or a third seam couldn’t be sewn till we got a piece back from its second seam. We used some of the waiting time for math but some was just waiting.

I’ll be linking with Ad Hoc Improv Quilters and Tuesday Colour Linky Party (buttons in sidebar).

Lotto Tops

I’ve been making lotto blocks for Sunshine  (an online Yahoo group for making charity quilts) and winning them back occasionally for the last several years. Although there is a monthly theme, it is sometimes a challenge to make all the blocks play well together.That, plus choosing colors for sashing and borders, is all the design work involved–sometimes it is enough to stretch my brain. Sometimes I keep one block that doesn’t work into groupings in the hope of getting some mates later on. Sometimes I make blocks to add in. Sometimes i make do.

I have won bright blocks a couple times, boyish prints, novelty prints, floral prints, and a couple color groupings, most recently blue and yellow. I finally gathered them all together and started making tops.

42 x 48

This one was a color experiment.  I am not unhappy  with it, but not thrilled either. It was intended to be 50 inches long, but I’d been cutting 3 1/2-inch strips for sashing and forgot to shift to cutting for 4-inch HSTs. It was easier to make 8 more HSTs than to start over. Then 4 more because I’d forgotten to add in the width of the sashing. I decided that was enough HST work for a while. On to straight borders.

42 x 50

I was considering a narrow red border then navy, then I remembered the striped fabric.I’d wanted something to tie in the “extra” colors in a couple of the blocks. The planet print block, lower left above the Ohio Star, is one that had been waiting for mates. Happily there was a space themed block in this blue and yellow set.

The next quilt tops don’t have a border–they can be used as is, or I may add a border later when I dig into fabric for backing.

42 x 42

This one also benefited from waiting. I’d laid out the arrangement sans the middle top and bottom blocks. I’d wanted something somewhat like the white, gold, red blocks. These came in a more recent batch.

36 x 48

This one had been laid out ahead, but I’d had only one purplish block. I was happy to be able to add two more from a more recent winning in place of what I’d made do with before. Most of these blocks are from the boyish-print month. See the big bugs? Another top that benefited from its time out. If I add borders, they will be dark green or blue.

36 x 36

I gave about one-minute of thought to setting these blocks on point, but 33 inches or 50 inches seemed too hard to work into the preferred measurements of the groups. I decided that baby quilts are often wrapped on the diagonal, so the hearts would show then. These were from the floral month winnings.

36 x 48

This one started out with orange as the unifying feature. Needless to say that got to be too orange. So I swapped out blocks one by one until I got it toned down just enough.

When I have pairs of matching blocks and am working with a big variety of blocks, my formal balance instincts kick in even though I like to work asymmetrically otherwise.

I still have enough blocks for 4 or 5 more quilts, depending on what size I make from them.

ETA: Linking with Oh Scrap! because at least some of these blocks were made from other peoples’ scraps and Move it Forward Monday (links in sidebar).

 

Group Crochet

Today I joined with a group at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in a crocheted sculpture project. The leader of the project, Bonnie Meltzer, makes her own sculptures of wire; however, because of weight considerations, this one was made of yarn.  Here is a Facebook post showing photos of the group around the table. (I used to be able to drag photos off of FB and use them; doesn’t seem to work now so hope the link works.)

And just to prove I was there.

Claire and Bonnie combining two rounds

This was improv beyond not preplanning a design.  The core was wound around approximately, and sometimes it was loose and sometimes tight.  No problem, just created texture variations.

A little more work needs to be done: finishing the attaching and hiding ends.

Participants covered a wide range of age and ability. The young ones did quite well–they are learning crochet and knitting in school. Some of the adults were just learning while others were quite accomplished. More texture variation.