Geisha - An Impulse Buy

I am not really an impulse buyer. In fact I sometimes feel so overwhelmed when I go to a fabric store that I end up not buying anything at all. This is another reasons block of the month quilts suited me so well. And today most of the material I use is either from my stash, recycled of printed/dyed myself.

This geisha panel quilt is an exception. Of course it was an easy quilt to piece together the quilting was machine done. On the blue I have traced a pattern onto the fabric and on the geishas and patterned fabric the quilting follows the lines of the patterns. It is a refreshingly simple quilt.

Row By Row

This was another block per month by Ngaire Brookes. It is part applique and part piecing. Some of the pieced blocks were quite tricky.

When Charlotte was a baby and quite little I used to babysit her while Kate went to work and this was her favourite quilt. We would make up stories about the blocks on the quilt - like where the grasshoppers might be going or why the rabbits had to run run run.

While I don’t make quilts in this manner these days it is a lovely jaunt down memory lane to revisit the ones I made on my journey. It is pictured here hanging on the fence during one of my quilts in the garden charity openings. It must be late spring/early summer as those are dahlias coming up in front of the quilt

Amish Wedding Ring

Being contrary again, I decided to make this quilt in non traditional colours - choosing colours the Amish often use in their quilts. My last year of school was spent as an AFS exchange student in Iowa and sometimes we would drive through the Amish communities and you would see the women/girls sewing in the window either by hand or on an old treadle machine. Their customs forbad the use of electrical machinery. The quilt sheet would then often be quilted in a community quilting bee but I never got to see that in progress. Their clothes were always in dark colours - black, purple, burgundy, blue - so that influenced my choice of colours here. You would also often see them in their horse and carriage coming to get grocery basics. It must have been extremely cold in the winter as the breath of the horses sometimes made ice around their muzzles, Instead of the usual white/cream inners I used a bluish purple creating the pieced circles out of scraps but concentrating so that the small purple circles joined up creating a secondary pattern.

About the time I finished this quilt golden papers came on the market and I was keen to try them out. This was an early machine quilted piece using the golden papers with the rose stencil traced onto them. It seemed such a good idea but removing all the little bits of yellow tissue like paper at the end was not such a fun thing to do. Maybe my choice of stencil was too detailed. I hsven’t used the paper for quilting since but I have occasionally used the left over part of the roll for stitching through to make portraits or similar for embroidery

This quilt is machine pieces and machine quilted.

A Log Cabin

Log cabin displayed over the side of the gazebo in the bottom garden

Early days in my quilting Journey: Using log cabin blocks to create a medallion effect and concentrating on the graphic effect of the barn raising layout.

Blue and white are always a traditional and refreshing combination. Once again I was forced to find a coordinating fabric for the outer border as my original amounts were not sufficient to make a quilt large enough for our bed. All part of the learning journey and pushing me more and more toward using multiple fabrics and back to where I started making quilts from remnants of hand made clothes.

This quilt was machine pieces and hand quilted

Even though my choice was to work in blue and white, I was fascinated by the tradition of building the block around a central square, representing the hearth and warmth of the home.

My First Pieced Quilt

This pattern was called Bear’s Paw and I was upset that I didn’t have enough fabric to create all the pieced squares the same. I certainly wasn’t into the scrappy look in those days. Focused on symmetry and everything being as the others. So this was a jumping off point of allowing things to be different. A long way from what I do today but still the learning is there. The Bears Paws are stitch in the ditch quilted and the dark green alternate squares are hand quilted. I still seem to be working in fairly “masculine” colours here.

The very first square was completed in a class and we had been told to bring fabric in teal colours. All the completed squares were put up on a board to show how a colour palette blended the different squares together. I still wanted my finished one to be all the same but it was a learning curve for me. Maybe not having enough of the pattered fabric to do the middle square was synchronicity.

A Crazy Quilt

Jewel colours in a traditional format

I had never really been a fan of crazy patchwork until my sister, Rae, went to a class and showed me what she was creating. Her work was much finer than my one but the ability to sit at night and embellish the squares appealed so this is the result. I tried to make each square different and each square had a butterfly and a hand embroidered flower somewhere in the square.

It was fun to work with satins and velvets rather than cotton. The rich colours and reflected light brought a whole neew effect to my patchwork. The sashing is black velvet but the finished quilt with all the embellishments is quite heavy. You will note, I am still working in the traditional block format.

Finding embellishments from broken jewellery and $2 shops was also part of the fun in creating the embellishments.

Hidden Designs within a Design

This knee sized quilt was a mystery quilt. It wasn’t until I had it all together that the circular nature and secondary pattern of the alternate squares became apparent to me. I have emphasised this feature in those blocks. Still working very traditionally and maintaining the block structure with the addition of sashing. I liked the way the plains and patterned fabrics play together in this configuration. The strong burgundy picks out the secondary shapes while the cream and floral create their own interaction. The blocks are machine pieced. Remember this blog is a Quilter’s journey so the quilts are very different from what I create today. These quilts have a more practical base as well as traditional construction.

From Darwin with Love - A Colour Palette Challenge

This quilt also owes its inception to Kim’s years in Darwin - “The Top End”. One Christmas a package of fabrics arrived in the colours of the Top End: Ochre, bright yellow and intense blue. I will always associated these colours with the Northern Territory. These were colours I didn’t usually work with and the palette was a challenging one - Kim was probably aware of that. I used lots of cream to tone down the complimentaries and this is the result. I was quite pleased with the result and the fact that I had lots of space to practise using machine quilting. A good example of how pushing past our comfort zone can push us into new creative practice.

The quilting patterns were traced onto the quilt and then off I went. There are back to back hearts in the squares between the large pieced blocks. This was the first time I had used a mixture of curved quilting patterns and straight echo stitching

Fancy Cut Dresden Plate

In this stage I was still working very traditionally in blocks. The learning from this quilt was to fussy cut the sections of the Dresden plate and join them together to creating individual mandalas. I really enjoyed creating the patterns in the central squares and if I get back into piecing I would like to try some of the more extensive fussy cut kaleidoscope ideas of Paul Nadelstern. I do have a hinged mirror which enables me to see what the completed fussy cut piece will look like when pieced. Here I have just used a single very patterned fabric but Paula creates her own initial section and then repeats those to create a whole. They are extremely complex. There never seems to be enough time in the day to try all the things I would like to delve into.

I often smile when looking at these old photos at how conditioned I was. The sashing quilting is within the green bands whereas today I would probably ignore those confines and quilt across the borders.

The first time I washed this quilt, the purple dye ran into the white blocks and I felt the quilt was ruined. But then I discovered Dylon washaway and a second wash with that and the quilt was pristine again. I tend to keep a packet of that in my laundry now - not just for quilts but as an insurance against dye runs in the laundry in general.