WIP Wednesday

Here's (one of) my current WIPs: a  chevron quilt in a warm and sunny palette. I'm making this quilt for a friend who suffered a stroke during a medical procedure (she's only 36!). She's on the road to recovery, but I figure a quilt would be a good gift as she continues to rehab. 

It took me a while to decide exactly what to do. I wanted it to be fast (ish) to make because I wanted to get it to her sooner than later. Ideally I wanted the quilt design to have some meaning. And, she's a warm color person, while I'm decidedly not. Choosing the colors and fabrics for this quilt was starting to become a stumbling block. But once I settled on the chevron pattern (more on that later), I raided my stash of red, orange, pink, purple and rust batiks and then bought yardage of four different yellow solids.
An evening of sewing with my sous-chef quilter friend Kathy, and we had HSTs for half the quilt top complete. I'm on my way with the second half as well. The batiks are randomly placed and I will still do some adjusting to spread the color out, as these were simply stuck to the wall to see how the overall look was coming. I'm considering trying a version where the yellows are mixed up as well, but at the moment I like the relative solid-ness of the yellow zigzags.

Here's where I am as of today:

I'm starting to like warm colors for quilting...especially the yellow! Pay no attention to the mess on the floor. It is NOT a reflection of what the rest of my studio looks like. Not at all.

Delicious batiks and buttery yellow squares, cut by my mom this past weekend (they say a quilt takes a village...). Ready to be stitched into more HSTs!

Back to the pattern. I wanted a design with a message, and the up and down of the chevron seemed to work well--the ongoing victories and frustrations of physical and occupational therapy. But I also wanted something to symbolize an overall positive ending. The design below is what I'm playing around with; I have yet to try it with actual fabric, so we'll see whether it works or not. What do you think?

Linking up with WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced.

Time to Twist!

Today I'm part of the "Let's Twist to the 60s with Batiks" blog hop. I'm always happy to jump on the batik bandwagon--I love the colors, the richness, and the patterns of these dyed fabrics!

My quilt might actually be better described as "let's curve to the 60s"... was that a dance too?!

I've had the idea for this quilt for a while so the lure of batiks meant that this hop seemed like a great opportunity to try it out. I pulled out my brightest batiks, cut them into strips of various widths, and started piecing strip sets...

I joined pieced strips until I had sections that measured about 20" high. 

Then I used a curved ruler (the Leaves Galore Applique Template from Sue Pelland Designs) and started cutting. 

I originally planned to piece the curves together, but (shhh!) I got lazy at the last minute. I cut half of the strip sections into curves and simply layered them on top of the remaining sections. 

A little wavy line quilting and voila! Batiks that curve (and twist?)!

I can't end without thanking Madame Samm of Sew We Quilt and Mary of I Piece 2 Mary for being this hop's cheerleaders. And don't forget to visit today's other bloggers:

Hill Valley Quilter

Cherry Blossoms Quilting Studio

Sew and Sow Farm

Color My World - you're here!

Secretly Stitching.

InGa

As a thank you for stopping by during the blog hop, I'm offering a giveaway from my batik stash (pieces are approximately fat eighths in size). To enter to win, leave a comment telling me your favorite 60s song. (Feel free to sign up to follow my blog, as well!) Mine would definitely be either a Beach Boys or Jan and Dean song--I may not have been born yet in the 60s, but I grew up listening to that music with my dad! The giveaway is open through Sunday, October 6th at 11:59 EST. On Monday, I'll choose a winner through random generator and post the name here on my blog. Good luck1

Patchwork Prism Addiction...

...or disaster...we'll see when I start trying to piece it! I discovered this Quilt Along at The Sewing Chick. It's a pattern designed by Anna Maria Horner and presented in conjunction with Janome.  You can find more out about it here.

(http://www.janomespecials.com/annamaria/projects.html)

Gorgeous, isn't it?!?!
Just the fabric selection and cutting is a big project, let alone the actual piecing. Thank goodness for VERY explicit directions and layout diagrams.
To make matters slightly more complicated, my design wall is currently folded up on the floor out of commission. So I've started the layout on the futon in my studio, but will need to move to the design wall soon. I'm also doing the quilt at 50% of its actual size (still pretty size-able!).
My fabrics are all batiks. I've got the first couple colors laid out and am still working on cutting the rest.

I started by pulling out ALL of my batiks (yikes!) and sorting them by color:

Then I organized each pile so I could see of my available options:

Yum, right? I could happily quilt forever just using batiks.

And here's what I have laid out so far. I still need to play around with actual placement of each piece, but I wanted to start out by getting the effect of the various "rings" of color.

Here's to more triangle cutting!

Updated: I have all the purples (next round) cut and laid out now; working my way through blue cutting.

How to make everything appear effortless...or not

There's a link going around Facebook right now to an article called "Your Children Want YOU!" by April Perry of powerofmoms.com (read the article here). It begins by pointing out the pressure that Pinterest, blogs, Twitter, parenting magazines, etc. put on parents by showing images and telling stories of uber-put-together moms who keep toys alphabetized, create specially shaped sandwiches and pancakes every morning, and so on.

Star Wars pancake and cookie cutters from William-Sonoma.
Very cool, but not on my agenda at the moment.

The gist of the article is that your kids would rather have plain old time with you rather than less time with super mom and her fancy pancakes. I get this--as a mom of young kids, it resonates with me. I'd love to do all that cool stuff and focus my creativity on my kids. And sometimes I do. But between the kids, a full-time job, dealing with the house, spending time with my husband and friends, and, oh yeah, quilting, more often than not, it's just not gonna happen. But there's always that illusion that it could, isn't there?

As I was working on my wonky log cabin blocks this week, I had that same feeling of pressure settle down on me. I'm so eager to see where these blocks are headed that I'm giving up sleep at night, and I definitely want to share the process with you. But. A big but. How do I balance between quality, quantity and sanity? That is, quality of photos, quantity of blog entries (gotta keep you interested!) and my sanity ('cause my husband sure isn't staying up making sure I sew those seams straight!).

I LOVE looking at other quilting and sewing blogs. In fact, that's part of why I started this one, so I could join the fun. But I'm often blown away by how much sewing time these other bloggers find, and how seamless (pun not intended) everything they create looks. Are they all professional photographers? The step photos they post are well-lit, fabrics are pressed, no excess clutter crowds in. My photos so far have been only a little dark and  wrinkled, and that's with maximum effort and way too many attempts to count. How do they have time to sew AND take photos of what they're sewing as they go every day?

So I present to you my wonky block update and my template plastic experience, here.

Permission to Play

Most of the quilting I've done has always been purpose-driven. It's either a gift for someone or yet another quilt for my own house, so I pick a pattern, buy fabric, and make the quilt, following the pattern. I've made a couple quilts without patterns, sort of making up the design as I go, but they were still made for a purpose.

Recently I've decided to spend some time just playing for the fun of it. I'm using fabrics from my stash and experimenting with some different types of blocks. Sure, I'd like to use the blocks to make a quilt rather than adding them to my UFO list, but there's no set purpose (and more importantly) no hard and fast timeline for finishing.

Last week my husband was working late, the kids were in bed, and I had some time. I pulled out my batik scraps (my favorites...I could write a whole blog entry about batiks, but I'll save that for another day), some Kona white, and started playing. I knew I wanted to try some wonky blocks. After reading through some quilting blogs, I found this from the Quilt Dad. Perfect!

I sorted my batiks to pull out "my" colors (delicious blues and turquoises and lime greens!) to go with the white solid:

It needed something, though, so I grabbed these to add a "pop" to the center of each block:

And six blocks into my playtime, here's what it looks like:

I love how they turned out, and it's so much fun--just freeform and liberating to grab strips and sew. My left-brained self decided to time how long it took for each block: 20 minutes. I'm planning to sash 3 sides in white and the last side in the orange again and then lay them out, but first I want to make some more blocks. Here are close-ups of all 6 blocks: