Spiderweb blocks received!

So, in mid-November I finally received all of the spiderweb blocks for my Seams Perfect Scrap Bee quilt (originally posted about here)! I actually ended up with a few more blocks than I had expected, due to some remakes for size issues as well as Jenn, our awesome fearless leader, stepping in and making angel blocks for a couple of the members.

So, yesterday I played around and arranged them on my design wall:

and I have about 3 or 4 orphans which will end up pieced into the back... but for now, I'm happy to have the top ready to put together. Yay!

And in addition, I FINALLY have a "new" quilt finished! The quotation marks indicate that the quilt top itself has been hanging around for, oh, I don't know, 2 years or so... but I just quilted it last week before heading up to the holiday bazaar so that I had some binding to work on while hanging out there last Saturday.

Monochromatic project, next installment

As promised, I'm going to fill in a few more details on my journey through this challenge, which I have since learned I did not place in, but one of my fellow Portland Modern Quilt Guild members, Jill, did! See her fabulous entry here and here.

The design process began, as most do for me, with a piece of graph paper and a pencil - oh, and the original theme of the challenge, of course. The first design was in my awesome graph paper composition notebook, but as I was playing with ideas I realized this quilt wanted to be based on 60 degree triangles, which meant switching the type of graph paper I was using. Thank goodness for the options we have!


I've talked about the fabric selection process a bit in previous posts, so I won't go too much in depth here. Plus, there's nothing too complex about it. Bluntly, this challenge came about at a time when I was making a concerted effort to limit my fabric purchases to specific projects, and knowing I was going scrappy for this, I started out in my stash. Choosing from a color that I seemed to have a fair amount of fabrics in a variety of values made the most sense to me, and so that's where I began.

And then I just started making strip sets, selecting sub-sets of gradients within the full "spectrum" of values with which I was working. Those strip sets got cut down at 60 degree triangles and from the dozens and dozens of such triangles I started laying them out and sewing them back together according to the layout in the sketch.


Now, one of the new techniques this project introduced me to was binding the serrated edge. When I have a bit more concentration (admittedly, we are watching "Dangeroud Liasons" while I am doing this - an excellent film that neither J nor I has seen in YEARS) I'll try to put together a tutorial on the binding process, but for now I'll just load several of my photos from the experience.








and like my little "binding cozy"? Just a swatch from an old knitting project and a safety pin, and it keeps the long bias binding roll in check, while allowing it to unroll as I use it. Yay for scraps of all kinds!

Monochromatic challenge

So, I guess I've been holding out on sharing much about my first major entry to a quilt contest. Some might say I play by the rules, and those same folks would also say that I take thing rather literally. And both are more or less true.

I did, once before, enter a quilt into a contest, or rather a juried exhibition. It was only a couple of years after I had started quilting, and though I still stand by the inspiration and theme of the quilt, I acknowledge that the technical aspects were not exactly museum worthy. I was looking for ways to combine my relatively newly discovered love of quilting with my more steady, consistent love for photography. It is a black and white "Trip Around the World," both literally and figuratively.



I designed this quilt using photographs I had taken while traveling. I printed the photos onto ink jet printer fabric (NOT Printed Treasures... in fact I don't even remember the brand) which ultimately discolored and became more charcoal and mauve than black and white,

plus I hand quilted the piece, with little to no experience. (Experience now tells me that my hand quilting will NEVER be jury-worthy!)

And enough with the tangent... Back to the matter at hand - the Modern Quilt Guild's Project Modern 2 Challenge. The theme, as you most likely know, was "monochromatic" with a bit of discussion about how stringently they would be sticking to that definition. I tried to do my best, though I battled with WHITE and the family of TEAL just a bit. However, I was happy with what I came up with. I started out with these guys
and started building out from there.



My first step was playing around in the sketchbook, and the first design I came up with, I figured was both more complex than I wanted to try for this, and would perhaps not be best realized as a monochromatic quilt. So I played some more and came up with a quilt based primarily on scrappy, string-pieced patches. After much playing around and adding to the fabric pool, I landed on what worked best for me.


Over all, this process took about 2 and half months, a few pieces of paper, and a fair amount of fabric. The quilting and binding of the quilt are something else entirely, and I shall devote another post to them, but for now I will stick with the overall picture and just say that I am glad to be in the game (even though I don't know the results just yet...)