A Quilt without Borders

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Margaret is a lovely member of the NYC Metro Modern Quilt Guild and her niece - a quilter who lives in France and who volunteers for the International Festival of Extraordinary Textiles - asked Margaret for her help. 

Margaret guided members of the guild to create a modern quilt that will be used during a picnic in the Jardin Lecoq park. The picnic will be done "flash mob" style with people showing up, a quilt under their arm.  Then when a text message arrives the quilts will be opened and spread on the grass. After the picnic the quilts will be auctioned off to benefit Doctors Without Borders.

The quilts have to be made of recycled fabric - which is more than close to my heart.

The quilt Margaret put together is made from old sample upholstery/drapery fabric.

I sewed together left over cotton batting remenants to ensure we kept the theme going and used odd bits of thread cones I had left over for the quilting. 

I practiced my feathers. 

 

I had a lot of fun quilting this mainly because every patch of fabric was different and gorgeous. I'm not sure that the photos do the materials justice - but there were plush velvets, ...

... silks, fake suedes, gold threads and plush richness all over this quilt. I kept 'ooohing & aaaahing' over the various different textures and colors. 

When I quilt I tend to quilt with the longarm I quilt one handed the other hand laying softly on the fabric and often that feeling of touching the soft fabric on my hand makes me feel very calm and centered - does that sound like the weirdest thing ever - or do other people experience that textural induced zen???

I didn't have enough time to bind the quilt for Margaret - but she seemed very pleased with the result.

I have quite a stash of random upholstery material - both donated and from our own house projects. This quilt has given me a huge amount of inspiration to put them to good use.

Camouflage Broken Bar Quilt

I've had some military material sitting around in my workroom for a while now - I got it so that I could start to experiment with how much material I can squeeze from various uniform/clothing items. When I saw this quilt - Broken Bars by Rebecca Roach - sent to me through the Modern Quilting Guild - it screamed army stripes to me.



I set about taking apart one army short sleeved army dress shirt. I used EVERY possible piece of this shirt - apart from button holes & buttons. I used a bright yellow cotton for the yellow arrows/stripes.  I didn't have enough material for the last two rows of the original design - perhaps this is one reason I'm not in love with this piece. You can see here how I pieced all the scraps together to make more material.  You can also see the serial number of the shirt printed on the fabric at the bottom left.

The quilt measures approx 56" x 56". While I am not blown away by the look of the quilt - and I am not sure that I chose the right quilting designs for the materials & look of the quilt top. I am happy with the technical aspect of the quilting I did. Here is the back of the quilt. I used spiral feathers, leaves & pebbles. I like the way the back looks!!!

Back to the front and yes - we are now in the 2nd week of March and we still have a substantial amount of snow (well really ice now) in the garden.

For me this was great practice and I did learn a lot from both the piecing part & the quilting part of things. If you have any opinions on how I could have improved the result of this quilt I would love to hear your input.

I have been wondering how the quilt would look rotated .....

Diary of a Long Arm: Week 3 - Flowing Feathers

I have been finding feathers really hard on the longarm. I wanted to practice them. I still have my peacock that started my progression in feathers on my domestic machine. I decided to add some fabric to the peacock and just quilt feathers - all sorts of different feathers. Why not have both my first feather practice pieces together?

I really regretted the seam I put in that goes across the top of the peacock - I wish I had worked out a way to have one continuous piece of fabric to avoid this seam.



My feathers are really began to come along after a little while and that seam was still screaming at me - I didn't want to waste fabric on a practice piece - I didn't know it was going to look so nice.

Kid Painted Quilt #2 - Throwing Paint

You might remember my girls throwing paint at fabric this summer. Here is what the fabric looked like after we had washed & dried it.

Many of you might not see my vision here - but I decided I wanted to try to piece together curves. I used the Drunkard's Path block - I found this great tutorial at Stitched by Crystal. These blocks were very quick easy to make.  

I liked the circles layout to begin with - the design made me think of moons & planets.

 But in the end I settled on this design.

I am very pleased with this quilt - for a couple of reasons. I really love the fabric the girls made and the way it looks in the quilt against the bright white.

I feel like I pieced the blocks together well & accurately.

And I have conquered my fear of free motion feathers. I have feathers on a curves & bends, feathers in corners - feathers in the middle of other feathers. This quilt is covered in feathers.

Some of my feathers are not perfect - but on the whole they have improved so much. You might remember my feather peacock - which was obviously a good exercise and helped me learn some skills.

Once you have the feather pattern down - you can cover the quilt really quickly. Although I have to constantly remind myself to slow down - speed seems to be my biggest enemy when it comes to free motion quilting. 

I am really liking these little projects with the girls. They provide fun activities for us. They give me something to work with that the girls created. And they give me valuable practice in piecing & quilting skills.

Our other kid painted fabric projects this summer have included:

Kid painted Teepee

Kid painted Garden Picnic Blanket

Kid painted Quilt #1 - Blotter Art

Kid painted Quilt #3 - Spraying Paint

Kid painted Quilt #4 - Shaving Foam Paint