Color me fascinated!

My design wall looks about the same this week as last. I still have made no decisions about the piecing for the basket wall hanging and I am still appliqueing away on the border of the Moda quilt and the Tweets block. The good news is that I have nearly all the leaves pressed and starched for the next long border (there are 10 flowers per border, 4 leaves per flower and I make extra so I can be sure to have a good color selection), at this point I feel like they are chasing me around in my nightmares! The tweets block is also nearly complete.  To check out what other people have on their walls today check out Design Wall Monday over at Patchwork Times.

All this working on existing stuff doesn't mean I haven't been THINKING design... I have been doing a lot of doodling while listening in meetings (you know, stitching then would look rude, so I act like I'm taking notes!). I start out to practice free motion patterns, but I always end up with something else, like the flower. Not exactly a practical quilting pattern! I also got my camo scraps from Victoria over at Bumble Beans for Operation Uniform. I am dreaming of block designs for those, but no decisions yet. I also found a very cool tool the other night that really INSPIRED me and I will share with you...

The title of this post should really read "Kuler" me fascinated. I found an online color tool some time ago while looking for a good way to preview colors together for the purpose of choosing fabrics for the on-going Tweets applique project (and because I was hoping to find an online color wheel type thingy because I couldn't find mine!).

What I stumbled upon is Adobe Kuler. I didn't get too much of a chance to understand how it works at the time, but I did have a marvelous time playing with the palletes. How the colors are related to each other and why some of the colors will change by themselves when you manually change one is still a bit of a mystery. However, I discovered tonight that one can make a pallete (actually many palletes) based on an uploaded photo! My first photo was a shot of a freshly splintered piece of oak that fell in our woods due to a wind storm a few weeks ago. It is gorgeous range of light tans and reddish browns with lots of muted purple and some charcoal thrown in. I thought it would make a wonderful warm neutral pallete for a quilt. Kuler was able to pull out colors I hadn't even noticed like beautiful roses and subtle but rich greens that add a complimentary color.

I don't think I can actually post the pallets here because they are actually Adobe Flash entities (??) but I will give you the links to some that I came up with. I tried to come up with several different ones but I keep getting drawn back to the "fresh oak dark" pallet with the green in it. It must really be stuck in my mind's eye. Of course also lovely is the "fresh oak muted" and I am beginning to be very fond of the warm and inviting "fresh oak warm".  It might be fun to make a quilt with these colors... hmm, I have a Groupon for a LQS to use before December.  It might be enough to buy fabric for a lovely wall hanging, maybe a couch throw if I can use some of my stash. I will be exploring this website more and maybe planing a quilt... *sigh* all I need is to START something else new! I really need a few clones, or maybe a house elf or two. Which pallete do you like best?

It's all about the process...

I have seen the "process pledge" button (see below my followers) on several blogs I read and I finally went and checked it out. It is a great concept! I am totally late to this band wagon, but considering that this is exactly why I started blogging in the first place I thought it terribly appropriate. The "process pledge" simply means that the blogger is interested in sharing ideas as they develop, not just the finished product of inspiration. I completely need feedback and the little people around here really don't care much about my obsessions I mean pastimes. My loving husband either rolls his eyes at me, states out loud that he really could not care less or comes up with some ridiculously difficult suggestion that would probably look great, but would be totally impractical.
Now ideally this feedback function should be taken on by a local guild or bee or other quilting group. I simply have not found time to be a part of the local quilting group scene. Inevitably the meeting times are bad partly because nearly everyone else in the group is at a different stage of their lives (no small children) and they can plan accordingly. I did head a charity group for a while but the members were few and whereas they were happy to and quite capable of piecing lovely blocks, they were not necesarily into the design process per se. I gave them patterns and color schemes and they made blocks. They would offer opinions about border colors and block layout when the time came, but that is not quite the same as a back and forth about ideas in their infancy.

So this is what I hope to do through my blog, get design feedback... Have a dialog. Of course for this to happen I actually have to get a little traffic on the blog! So this is the pledge and the list of questions to think about when contemplating design blog posts.



I, ________________, pledge to talk more about my processes, even when I can’t quite put them in the in words or be sure I’m being totally clear.   I’m going to put my thinking and my gut feelings out there.  

Do you have any new sketches to show?
Is this design inspired by a past quilt or someone else's quilt you saw (link, please)?
Does the color palette come from somewhere specific?
Are you trying to evoke a specific feeling?
Is this quilt intended for a specific person?  How did that inform your choices?
Are you following a pattern, emulating a block you saw somewhere, using a liberated process, or totally winging it?
What are you hating about this quilt at this stage?  What do you love?
Did you push yourself to try something new?
In working on the quilt, are you getting ideas about what you might want to try next?  What?  Did you sketch it?

Wish me luck while I try this out!

PS shocking I know... A quilt blog post with no photos!

Feeling Kind'a Crumby

I am joining a "crumb along" over at Jo's Country Junction. See the pretty button over there on the right side bar?  KaChow! I added a button to my blog without (too much) technical assistance! Go me!

This will be my first quilt-along type activity! I hope I can keep up... I tend to quilt in spurts. You know, one can only ignore household responsibilities for so long before they suck you back into the vortex! I am not exactly starting from square one on this (no pun intended) as I got the crumb bug back when Jo was first working on her own crumb quilt earlier this year. I started making 4" squares literally out of my scrap baskets. I had gone through the bins trying to weed out the small from the medium and larger scraps. The small ones ended up in a shoe box; actually overflowing out of a shoe box onto the floor near my machine's foot pedal. About that same time I was working on some exchange blocks that had a lot of seams and I used the crumbs as a leader/ender type of thing. Well, when they began to come together they pretty much took over and I couldn't stop myself. Victoria over at Bumble Beans Inc calls this kind of thing "made fabric" and *claims* that is can be done "15 minutes of fun" at a time... I'm here to tell you, it takes me longer. I just can't stop! I finally decided to cut it off at 4" squares to give me shorter time goals... 'just one more 4" block' takes less time than 'one more 6" block', see. (OK, stop laughing) I ended up, after some very late nights of "just one more..." with something like 45 blocks. At that point I stuck them in a shoe box and left town; always a sure fire way to break a habit or cure an obsession. 

I may stay with the 4" blocks, I may make the 4" ones into wonky stars and make more blocks that finish the size of the stars so I can do an alternating layout... I will see how it goes. I do need to decide on a unifying color. Jo has her solid red, I think mine might be the bit of gold in many of the blocks. I will have to be more conscious about adding it now. I may also add some structure to some of them, like Jo's tiny stars and flying geese here and there. More experimenting, more fun (and more late nights - only the sewing room is now a bedroom for an 11 year old so maybe not). This could get interesting. Do you want to use up some of your crumbs? Check it out, follow the button, 'crumb along'!

What cha' been up to Monday

This is a little exciting.... My first linked post! I have long been a fan of browsing what OTHER productive people have been up to every week over at Patchwork Times' Design Wall Monday. I will admit to being drawn by the visuals -- may the most eye catching photo win the day! I have found some of my favorite BLOGS by browsing design walls and I am proud to say that being able to link my own weekly progress on things was one major point in considering starting a BLOG in the first place.

So here goes... Not a lot has been going on in the old sewing room these days, since it is now half the size it was with all the same stuff and is being shared by someone who needs to be asleep around 9pm. However... I did a lot of hand work over the summer while away from my machine so there are several ongoing projects that have shown lots of progress since June. The first are the borders I designed for the Moda Modern Workshop jelly roll quilt I made last spring from a pattern in Scrap Basket Surprises by Kelly Brackett. I also happened to have a charm pack from this line and I really loved the flower motif featured in many of the prints. I enlarged and slightly simplified the flower and am doing a border of them. I have one long border finished. The other is complete except for the leaves and both short borders are still pending. The border lengths do not evenly divide by the motif length so I am going to have to get a little creative at the corners. In the mean time, I have lots of little leaves to starch and some invisible stitching to do! Once the pressing is done this is a great take a long project for me when we go to gymnastics, dance and martial arts classes.

The thing that is actually "on the wall" this week is this wall hanging that needs some additional design decisions. The central basket was done probably upwards of 8 years ago. Early this spring, inspired by Erin Russek's flower designs and appliqué techniques I designed and added the corner motifs and early this summer I designed and stitched the top and bottom strips while teaching an appliqué class at a LQS. Now I need to decide what other piecing I need to set off and tie together the appliqué bits. I am thinking a row of small square in a square blocks to separate them and then I don't know. I think I need to add those and then see what else it needs.







As always, I have an Erin Russek My Tweets block in the works as well. Summer vacation and back to school has me a little behind. This is July's block so far and June's block is finished and ready to be added to the Flikr group for this block of the month.

Up for adoption....

Although some days this post title could be about my own dear children, they have been pretty pleasant so far this weekend and have even done some of their chores without undue harping. I spent the bulk of my morning wading through the morass that was my sewing room and is now shared by my oldest "tween-aged" son. I am attempting to impose a little order and organization to this previously freewheeling creative space and I am turning up all sorts of things that I kinda, sorta forgot about, but remember when I see them. This is my wall of orphan blocks...

For each of those pictured here there is assuredly another hiding somewhere still and at least one or two half finished, or even half started projects lurking. But these are the 'true' orphans. Some of them are sample blocks for classes I once taught, some are orphans left over from charity quilts put together by the group I ran for four years. Still others are pieced together from left overs in the hopes of including them in a priced backing, only to run out of space. I can see wall hangings in some of them like the blue Celtic knot and I would love a whole quilt of the red and blue That Thirties Thing blocks, if I ever get around to it. I think the tiny broken dishes at the top might be the seed of a doll quilt, but I can't picture the finished pattern yet. The floral wreath and basket could make cute tote bag fronts... but really, I have a million (and it doesn't feel like I am exaggerating much right now) other projects that I am more invested in. There are charity tops waiting to be finished, backings that are almost finished, all of them still in my possession need quilting. Then there are my own projects too numerous to count. Seriously, I haven't made a list of UFO's because it would just be too depressing. So at what point do you cut your losses with these orphan blocks and move on to other things? And what do you do with them? I have heartlessly tossed a few that were hopelessly out of square, but perfectly good blocks that you have no intention of using.... what do you do with them? I just don't have the space anymore, and would love for someone else to enjoy these, but I don't want to just pass on my own headaches either. So what would YOU do?

You know you are ready for autumn when...

OK, I'll admit it, I was ready for fall weather about the time I got home in the beginning of August. Now I am REALLY ready. I decided today that in the spirit of encouraging the seasons to change, I would change out my seasonal wall hanging. This is the one that is being taken down... a small wall hanging made with an orphan block and some MUCH loved purple fabric (can you tell?)

spring/summer wall hanging

I was pretty happy with the FMQ on this one, although I should have added more in the borders. I seem to either quilt in the borders, or quilt on the blocks, but seldom end up doing both. At some point when it is going well I want to quit while I'm ahead before my good luck runs out and I ruin it!

detail of quilting

more flowers and leaves

This is the one that is going up to celebrate the coming of autumn - I love this wall hanging. I designed it from  beginning to end and tried a bunch of new things. I was thrilled when it was selected to be shown in Georgia Loves Quilts 2009, a local show put on by the East Cobb Quilt Guild. This was my 'breakthrough quilt' for FMQ and the first time I had tried fusible machine applique. I was also in the middle of a period of doing machine trapunto on things so the pumpkin is a bit 'stuffed', making it look plump.

I started the design process with a fat quarter of the crow and pumpkin fabric and went from there. Orange is not my favorite color, but I love the rusty oranges and gold and purple in this combination. I also free-handed the background quilting which went amazingly well I thought for a beginner. I think the glass of wine I was drinking probably helped me loosen up and not over-think things! 

I had never done applique by machine before but I did NOT want to needle turn all the edges and corners on all those little leaves. So another first in this quilt is the satin stitching around the leaves. I wanted to get a good representation of the leaves that are around my house, so I actually went into the woods, gathered leaves and traced around them. I took the tracings to the copy store and shrunk them until they fit the size I needed and Voila, instant, realistic leaves of oak, maple, sassafras, tulip poplar and sweet gum. Of course to be totally accurate there would be a heavy sprinkling of pine needles in there too, but we won't go there! I had fun going through the scraps looking for the corresponding colors as well. I extended the satin stitching to form the stems, varying the width as necessary to make it look right. 

Again with this piece I should have quilted more in the borders as the hanging is a tiny bit wavy because of the dense quilting in the center and the top and bottom bands, but I hesitate to go back and alter it now that it is bound. I think a diagonal cross hatch in the borders might be just the ticket... maybe one day I will add that. 

For now, I need to get the sewing space set up again and reorganized so I can sew at all. I have a lovely spring wall hanging/table topper with pink and orange tulips and a broderie perse border that I would like to enter in something in January that really needs quilting. I have to practice, practice, practice to get back to where I was when I did these so I will be ready for that one. So what is up in YOUR sewing room?

About me, since this is the first.

I am a lifelong creator of art and craft, busy at the moment with the business of raising a family of three children. When time permits and I can delay, push aside or 'reprioritize' other responsibilities I make things. I have many more ideas than I have time; and much more fabric and craft supplies than I could use if I did have the time! I hope to share some of my inspirations, both ones that have been acted upon and those that have not yet been realized. Maybe those unrealized ideas will give me a little peace if I get them 'out there', otherwise they are terrible nags!