18 August 2017
Art and Design, design, Makery, textiles creativity, design, design process, fabric, quilt, quilting, quilts, sales, Sewing, sewing machine, watermountain studios Leave a comment
Well, I’ve posted some of my first quilts for sale at my Watermountain Studio website.
So naturally… it’s today that I learn that I can offer these things for sale directly through my blog, here. Ah, well.
On offer are some of the quilts depicted here:
17 July 2017
Makery, textiles creativity, design, design thinking, fabric, Geometry, hexagons, learning, quilt, quilting, quilts, Sewing, sewing machine, textiles, triangles 1 Comment
I want to learn the core angles of quilt sewing. Since most quilts are simply tiling patterns writ in fabric, a large percentage of this work is done in squares or rectangles on the one hand; or triangles, diamonds, and hexagons on the other. These shapes and their variants are pretty much the only ones that tile easily.
I started by making some six-pointed stars using a flat triangle pattern. When three flat triangles are grouped, one gets an equilateral triangle. when one groups six equilateral triangles, a hexagon results. Half-hexagons can be used to form an edge to a field of hexagons, turning a hexagonal tile patttern into a rectangular ore square field. Many hexagons and half-hexagons together form a quilt… Who knew??
Much of the early work consists of lining up sheets of fabric and then putting a template on them to slice out triangles. I felt like I cut out hundreds if not thousands of triangular fabric tiles yesterday. You can see the piles of them in the first photograph here, a lot of grays and blacks and very dark blues, with some Celtic knot work fabric, too.
Once that fabric gets sorted by color and type, it begins to feel like not enough, though.
Nonetheless, one has to keep going. Breaking up big pieces of fabric into smaller ones just results in a mess. Fabric has a warp and weft that holds it together. Once you start cutting into it, you break up its internal integrity and it will start to unravel. You’ve dissolved the bonds that hold it together. Now you need to begin to recombine it.
The key things to consider about that recombination are color, texture and weave. People like complementary colors rather than clashing colors. They like patterns, but they don’t want too many patterns next to one another. There need to be places where they can rest their eyes on relatively neutral hues, so that a patterned fabric can then grab their attention. That’s a lot to hold together in mental clarity.
And so we begin with somethiing relatively neutral, and matching the stars in certain particulars. 
Hexagons have a particular logic to them when you start with triangles, as I have. Quite naturally the three stars are going to draw the eye first and foremost. So the quilt has to be built out around them. I have enough fabric to make twelve or thirteen more of these two-grays hexagons, but not enough to make a whole quilt this way. So my next step is going to be to construct another pleasing hexagon design, and interleaved the two-tone gray hexagons with that new design, while trying not to distract from the stars. My partner also recommended making more stars but in radically different colors. That could work too.
Yesterday at the fabric store, I met a woman who was making fabric furnishings for a Russian Orthodox congregation: linens for the altar and stoles and robes for the clergy. She was working on the stiff linen and brocade chalice cover, and had come in to find some more gold braid for the cover. It was beautiful. I have a long way to go yet, but it was a reminder that all kinds of people need all kinds of custom sewing work. Increasingly I’m prepared to handle it.
14 July 2017
Art and Design, design, Makery, textiles creativity, design, fabric, quilt, quilting, quilts, Sewing, sewing machine, textiles 1 Comment
I finished assembling these three quilt tops today. They came out quite nicely. All three were assembled using jelly rolls strips, which usually come in packs of twenty. Like the earlier quilt, these were made by sewing together three strips, and then cutting those strips into squares of about 6.5″. These were then sewn into rows, and then columns sewn together.
I made use of four jelly rolls: one of white fabric, one of black fabric, one of blue fabric, and one multicolored roll where all the fabrics had golden dots on them. I wish in retrospect that I had distributed the gold-dot fabrics more broadly among the three quilts. Next time I should buy 5+ jelly rolls, make them all into squares, and then assemble the resulting squares into a wider variety of quilts.
I still have to choose fabrics for the undergirding, although I already have the batting. I also need to get another jelly roll for the edge binding.
My goal with these three quilts was to learn to work with jelly roll strips (usually 2.5″ wide and 42″ long) before learning to work with 60-degree parts, which is to say triangles and hexagons. Triangle and hexagon quilts are beautiful but they require an extra special level of work because of all the Y-shaped seams that make them up.
14 July 2017
Art and Design, design, Makery, textiles baby quilts, creativity, design, design process, fabric, jelly roll quilts, quilt, quilting, quilts, Sewing, sewing machine, squares, textiles 2 Comments
I made a quilt a couple of weeks ago from a jelly roll — not a fabulous pastry, but a roll of 20 or so strips of fabric sold in a bundle. Today, I processed the other three rolls that I bought at the same time into squares to make three more quilts. By mixing and matching the individual pieces, I got three more quilt tops for three more baby quilts. 
Two of the quilts are made of squares that are black, blue and white in various combinations — florals, polka dots, triangles, and other dot patterns.
So the result is that two of these quilt-tops are going to be very similar to one another. They’ll both wind up looking like variations of the pattern in the first photograph.
The third quilt is much more different. It consists of colored strips with gold dots on them. Those golden dots don’t come through on the photograph, but they’re there nonetheless. The use of color in this quilt makes it a significant departure from the regularization of pattern that emerges on the earlier quilt.
There, the patterning of the fabric faded out in favor of the black-and-white pattern of H’s or I’s that is visible to everyone who sees the quilt. Here what emerges is the color-blocks of purple and pink and red; the fabric patterns are less obvious, less important.
All three quilts are dependent on three important tools working together — the self-healing green mat from Olfa; the rotary cutter; and the quilter’s ruler. The three tools work together to create the blocks of stripes that are visible in all three quilts.
I’m going to need at least one more jelly roll of strips to be able to finish these three quilts, of course: that jelly roll will go into making the borders around the edge of each quilt, and the edge binding that holds the batting, the underlayer, and the top together. That process of assembly is getting easier for me, but it’s still not intuitive. In another jelly roll, I’ll likely use all 20 pieces.
22 April 2017
Art and Design, creativity, Makery, textiles creativity, design, fabric, imagination, makery, making, quilt, quilting, quilts, Sewing, textiles 1 Comment
I find that I’m enjoying a great deal the process of laying out a quilt, and then sewing the rows and columns together to make the quilt. These squares are 5″ to a side for this quilt with a penguin theme. The quilt is going to be much wider than a typical crib quilt, but about the same length.
Unfortunately, the dark blue fabric is polyester and slippery. I don’t know if this is going to work. I’ve found conflicting opinions about quilting with polyester fabrics — some people love them, some people hate them. I’ve decided on a 100% cotton backing fabric, though, so if the baby winds up being sensitive to poly they can always flip it over and display the quilt top to the world and wrap the baby in two layers of cotton away from the artificiality.
Why use poly at all? Do you know how hard it is to find penguin fabric to begin with? I also didn’t choose the fabric, in this case. This is a custom order, and I’m not sure that we knew it was poly when we ordered it.
In any case, there’s this delightful process that you can see in the third photo, where the rug gradually vanishes behind the fabric as the quilt takes shape. This one should be done later today, or at least it should be done later today.
There’s another thing that I quite like about quilting with these sorts of prints. When you look at the whole fabric, it’s very hard to admire it — it’s the same pattern repeated over and over again. It’s mind-numbing in its regularity. And it’s often dull to look at.
But then something happens when you cut it up. As the fabric is sliced in two directions, the pattern becomes more randomized. Sometimes it’s the father and mother penguin in the foreground, sometimes it’s in the background, sometimes it’s the large line of penguins in the middle ground that becomes prominent. The pattern’s regularity becomes irregular, as the rotary blade cuts and slices the repetitive imagery into squares that don’t respect the pattern’s repeat mode. And so something new emerges. It’s the original cut-and-paste, in some ways. Except that with quilting, it’s cut-and-baste.
13 February 2017
Art and Design, creativity, design, Makery, textiles babies, baby, baby quilts, creativity, crib quilts, design, fabric, quilt, quilting, quilts, Sewing, simple sewing, textiles 1 Comment
Normally the Monday article is a book review. I’m a little behind in my reading due to other projects this weekend. So that will appear later this week. Instead…
Quilts
Quilts are relatively easy. All you do is beat your head against the sewing machine while flogging your back with a quilting ruler.
Maybe it’s not that difficult. It does seem to involve a lot of cutting of fabric into squares or strips; sewing those together; the resulting squares into different pieces; and then sewing those together.
I tend to go more simple on baby quilts. After all, babies do grow up sooner or later. And then the quilt will be retired to an attic or given away — becoming an appropriate link in a chain as children become adults and bring children of their own into the world.
So far I’ve produced four baby quilts. I gave the two described here to the happy parents this weekend. They gray roses is for a small baby born a few months ago. The blue and red quilt is intended for a baby who will be born in a few weeks.
The essence of a simple quilt is this: make squares of fabric. The fabric squares should be all the same size or pretty close. The challenge with one of these quilts, the gray one, was that the quilt squares were neither squares, nor the same size. Getting stuff to line up was challenging. The blue and red quilt is more regular, with squares of 10″, all of them pretty exact. 
These two quilts are what are known as “crib size” meaning about 36″x54″. They’re not actually that size though. I wish they were. When you consider the common denominator between those two numbers, though, it means that we’re looking at squares smaller than 10″… probably about 9 1/2″, to account for a quarter inch seam area around each square. 
The most difficult part of making a quilt, for me, is sewing the backing and batting and front of the quilt together. Making squares, particularly these single panel squares with no decoration, are easy. Sewing rows together is easy. Sewing columns together is easy. It’s the challenge of sewing through three layers — the decorative front, the batting or felt layer, and the backing fabric — that wrecks my sewing machine and tangles my thread. 
The specific challenge with these quilts, and the assembly of the layers, was a question of thread. every time I got more than a few inches into the quilting of thr three layers together, the thread would snap. Then I’d discover that the back side jad become a whorl of loops and tangles — what experienced sewers call birdsnesting. When the sewing machine creates birds’nests, the cause is either the tension disks, or the tension on the needle thread, or the tension on the bobbin thread, or the motor…. But! I learned this week that sometimes it’s cheap thread!
Cheap thread. Who knew? When you use badly-made thread, wound on a substandard spool or bobbin, the thread often snags or breaks. It doesn’t come off the bobbin smoothly. The result is birds’ nests on the underside of your sewing!
So now I know that. And now I have to remember that… because the risk is always to save money on materials and not to go to too much expense on a project. But going down to the cheapest available materials usually results in complications later in the project — usually at exactly the point that the finished project is nearing the point of looking professional or amateur.
I think, at this point, I’ve made as many simple-square quilts as I want to make. I think my next challenges are hexagons and triangles.
