and checked and stripe-y.
I happened upon this quilt and thought the design was really great. It It is definitely about showcasing the fabric.
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You can see the post at: http://bayouquilts.blogspot.com/2007/05/circles-and-squares.html
Archive for May, 2007
Teacher Pillows Finished!
The Teacher Pillows are done and wrapped. HOORAY!
I found the cute bags at Walgreen’s, of all places. They are so adorable (thank heaven for no boy teachers this year!) that I didn’t feel bad about not making gift bags for them. I delivered the Principal and Assistant Principal pillows before I left. P will deliver the rest next week in stages.
Now I have to think about next year. St. JCN said that he fact that the project went well towards the end made no difference to her torture threat. She suggested a different project, so I will have to think on that. Suggestions, always welcome, of course!
Another Quick Bite (or Byte!)
This was a weird shadow I saw on my wall. Don’t you think it looks like a bear sitting in a chair with one leg crossed over the other?
New fabric.
More new fabric
Pineapples 13 & 14
Kristen, over at Ardent Peace saw the Pineaple blocks in person recently and said she hadn’t realize how large they were. The size, apparently, does not come through very well in the blog format. She asked me to give my dear readers some perspective. This block has a spool of red Aurifil thread on it. As you can see the blocks are quite large.
These are the Pineapple ’scrap babies’. As I work through the strips, I find that I have litle bits of the strips leftover. I began setting them aside for who knows what. Finally, I decided I should use them up, so I used them on the beginning parts of Pineapples 15 & 16. The above two Pineapples are made from scraps to the point you see above. After this point, the sides get too large for scraps. Notice how much green is in them. I seem to have a lot of green strip ends.
Scrap babies grow up. These are Pineapple blocks 15 & 16.
Updated: Kaffe Fassett Confusion post
I found some links to the fabrics so go back to the post and look.
Quick Bites
Technorati relaunched their search service yesterday. As a work project, I had to try out the new and expanded Technorati service. In addition to searching blog comments, it now searches for music, videos and images. Of course, I had to use ‘quilt’ as my term. I know the subject better than any other subject, so what better topic to use? Very interesting results, including some how to videos on quiltmaking. Here are a couple of blogs I found that I thought were worth looking at:
Mosaic-It: http://mosaic-it.blogspot.com/. The post I saw was about a mosaic floor in Venice (Italy, not California). As you may (or may not) know, I, obsessively take pictures of mosaics wherever I go. I really liked the floor in this post as I thought it looked exactly like a quilt. I also thought the tiles looked like they had little patterns on them, mimicking fabric somewhat. There seem to be only two posts, so stay tuned.
Sister’s Choice: http://sisterschoice.typepad.com/sisters_choice_quilts/ This seems to be a relatively new Typepad blog (3-4 months old). The pictures are really clear. Her fabrics seem to be a little dark for my taste, but she does use Creative Grid rulers, which are my new favorite. (I’ll write a review sometime) She also uses interesting patterns. The Evelyn Sloppy pattern, Fall Frolic, uses ugly colors IMO, but I like the way those four patches stand out. Not sure I could strip piece it the way Sister’s Choice describes.
Quilter’s Buzz appears to be a news site for the quiltmaking world. She has lots of posts from Quilt Market, especially of the booths. Her colors are similar to Sister’s Choice. Perhaps these are the colors of the day and I am the only one not using them?
Go take a look at what you can find at Technorati. If you are looking for me, though, you won’t find me there, so put me in your RSS reader. 
High Fiber Content Take on Pamela Allen Class
Julie has written an article about taking Pamela’s class with a lot more photos, so you can get a different perspective here.
Kaffe Fassett Spots
Be*mused turned me on to Kaffe Fassett’s new dots. She says has been trying to cut back on buying dots. I haven’t and keep buying more in case they stop making them. Follow her directions below to see Kaffe Fassett’s dot collection. Even though he forgets to put the fabric lines in his books, the man know how to design fabric!
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Reflections on Pamela’s Class
I know I overloaded myself with photos posted to Artquiltmaker blog on Saturday after the class with Pamela, so I must have overloaded you all as well. This post is about focus and reflection on the class.
Here is my first draft, so to speak. I had looked at my previous effort, from the first class with Pamela, before this class and had an idea that doing a related quilt would be a good idea. I was also looking at Collaborative Quilting by Freddy Moran and Gwen Marston last week, which made me think about houses. The sun and the flowers are in common, I think.
One thing I realized is that I have not been working with scale much lately. The Pineapple, the various square pieces including Thoughts on Dots did not require me to work with scale in any meaningful way. I did pay attention to dots were in the various prints I used for Thoughts on Dots. I didn’t have to worry about scale overall in terms of the elements of the quilt. So, this piece made me stretch. When Pamela came around to help me the first time, scale was what we focused on. I needed larger flowers and larger rays of the sun.
Final piece (sans quilting)
It wasn’t quite so easy as making some elements a little bigger, though, because I had the previous garden quilt (below) on my mind as well. Some of the intermediate “drafts” of this piece had many more flowers. You can see the various drafts in Saturday’s post.
I brought scraps per the directions, so I didn’t have a lot of choice of background. I had a lot of variety in fabrics, but not a lot of variety in size. My scraps are relatively small in general, so I put some darks in (per Pamela’s instructions) and really had trouble working with them, as I also mentioned. I have not been working with black and the checkerboard is interesting, but it doesn’t read as a cheerful fabric to me. I have gotten some feedback that it isn’t too dark, so I am considering it stretching and moving on.
Pamela’s technique of cutting directly into the fabric is a very freeing way to quilt, however, and I think it is good for me. Now that I have two of these garden type quilts, I might try to make two more and have a quartet. We’ll see.
I enjoyed her handstitching techniques with Perl Cotton as well. One of the things about this is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. The stitching adds to the charm, but I don’t think it looks like the fake folk art kind of look. I could be wrong, of course!
My 2006 Pamela piece. I am more excited about getting back to it now. I machine stitched some of it down, but plan to go back and work some more with the Perl Cotton on the flowers, especially.
I highly recommend Pamela’s classes. She is a quilt teacher, but she has been trained in art and knows about design principles. That is the focus of her class with fabric as the medium. She seems to truly want people to do good work. I am glad she directed me, in her gentle but firm way, to scale, because that is what I needed to work on.
Yarnstorm Does it Again
Yarnstorm and Be*mused (I have added them to the Blogroll) are my two new favorite blogs. I love their work, their photographs and, occasionally, their writing. Yarnstorm finished her Allotment Quilt, which is gorgeous.
A Day with Pamela
This is all the stuff I took to class, except my sewing machine is not in the picture. (above)
Pamela’s work (below)
Tooth Fairy
Tooth Fairy (detail)
more Tooth Fairy detail
This is what it looks like when I work in a class. (above)
My background
First draft
Pamela working on my piece
Lots of flowers and flying dots.
Not so many flowers and flying dots.
Not so many flowers and no flying dots.
Final composition. I like it, but I have to admit that I had a very hard time working with the darker colors (the black around the flowers and the blue/black checkerboard. All I could think of was that I wasn’t used to it. I haven’t been using much black lately and, as you know, have been trying to make cheerful quilts. This quilt-let seems a little dark to me.
Pamela working with Julie
Julie’s piece. I love the line up the left hand side.
Group Sampler project. We had 15 minutes to make our part of this piece.
Julie’s two fish. Can you find the second one?
My fish – with dots, of course!
I am tired and about to sign off, but I thought I would put up some photos for all of you to drool over while I go recover from a FAB day. More tomorrow.
