Sunny Day Stars

Sunny Day Stars

72” x 72”

This was one of the oldest quilts from the Quilts Under Construction list. I looked back and realized I started it in 2007! It began as a free Block of the Month called Celestial Migraine by Planet Patchwork. Shortly after the year it ran the whole thing disappeared. (Planet Patchwork also appears to be no more.) I think I made 3/12 blocks. I do remember that the final quilt was quite lovely in a seemingly random layout with a lot of negative space, mimicking stars in the night sky.

Over the years I would make another star block or two when I was craving some precision piecing. Lucky for me there are a tonne of traditional, free star block patterns. A few modern ones too. Then late last summer I got it in my head to actually finish this quilt. Well, at least the top! So I set out to make stars.

Each star block is repeated 3 times, for a total of 12 different star patterns. Each one, however, has a different combination of fabrics. Orange, gold, green, grey, beige, and white. In truth, it is a rather spring coloured quilt. But I finished the top during a September snow storm and finished the whole thing in the summer thunder storms. Still all about the sunshine!

It was a lot of fun to play with fabric on this quilt. Some stars pop, others recede. By playing with the contrast between the stars and the background, or the different components of the design I could change the entire look. The key was making sure not one star was too bossy.

The quilt back started with the scraps from making the last of the stars. Little bits and leftover triangles sewn together for fun. I used that as the centre and raided my stash for the rest. That large floral just happens to go with the first stars I made years ago. All of them are from a collection by Heather Bailly. The rest was just stuff I had around to make it work.

Quilting inspiration came from Dara Tomasson and her book, Walk, Jog, Run. She shared a ribbon quilting pattern - essentially a large meander that you echo to look like a ribbon. It was perfect for this. I quilted the whole thing in a peach Aurifil 50W.

I won’t lie, I wanted a green binding. Alas, there was not enough of the right greens in my stash and these are Covid times. No in person shopping. Then I found the grey and white stripe hiding on the cutting table. Perfection!

This quilt is already in it’s new home. As I was finishing the quilt top last fall I decided it would eventually go to a friend of mine. I wanted to spoil her with something just for her. Giving quilty gifts is the best!

Morning Make - April 2020

Did you know that if you make one 12.5” square quilt block each day that you will have a quilt top at the end of the month? A lovely, cuddly size, perfect for couch snuggles. Also, perfect for mental health in the making of and finished product!

For Morning Make in the month of April I made one X Plus block each morning. It was actually quite nice to not have to think about anything but fabric selection. That’s one of the best parts, anyway! From start to finish - from picking fabrics to a sewn block - it took me about 30 minutes.

Let me tell you, I absolutely loved having a complete block at the end of each session. To have something tangible, something that marked the passage of the days, and something that gave me nothing but joy was EXACTLY what I needed this month. It’s probably what all of us needed this month! Covid Isolation is HARD, but we are doing all we can to keep our community safe and that means staying home. And for me, having this 30 minutes to sew before dealing with schooling and meltdowns (all of us) and keeping our business going was lifesaving.

Now when you make these blocks you cut off some decent sized triangles to be thrown in the scrap pile. Rather than be indiscriminate with these scraps I sewed the offcuts together as they came from the block. I was left with a pile of half square triangles. After doing some math and some sketching I decided to turn these HSTs into Sawtooth Stars. From 30 X Plus blocks I could make 30 Stars.

Two quilts for the price of one!

All the fabrics for these quilts came from my stash. Yes, I have a very, very deep stash. Quarantine is a great time to be able to shop from your stash, let me tell you. About halfway through I was worried I wouldn’t have enough light and low volume fabrics to get through but I dug through all the bins and was able to come up with some really great fabric combinations. Some fabrics are brighter than others, some even get a little bossy. I only chose fabric one block at a time and didn’t think about whether they would go together at all. Because my overall feel was low volume it comes together. Besides, the most successful of these X Plus quilts are scrappy and full of unexpected fabric delights!

Now if I did this for Morning Make every month I would have a great collection of quilt tops. Just the tops though because nothing would get quilted! Of course, that kind of thing has never stopped me before! And right now I am totally wishing I had access to a long arm because I would love to get these quilted right now. As it stands, I have 2 basted tops waited for their turn under the needle. I also think part of that may just be me wanting the change after nearly 8 weeks of social distancing. Let me go play in the quilt store! So I wish, but I am still happy to do my part and stay home (and shop online for curbside pick up).

My plan for May was to embrace Me Made May and tackle some clothing projects I’ve had on the list. But this happened toward the and of April. It seems 2/3 children are suddenly wanting to sew with the machine. While I am lucky enough to have a dedicated sewing room, it is not big enough to be set up for that many people with different sewing needs.

For those wondering, the X Plus blocks can be found as a free pattern all over the place. I believe the original block comes from the 1930s but it really peaked in popularity a few years back when we were all on Flickr. I used the 12.5” measurements in my Creative Live class on working with low volume fabrics. Indeed, I had 10 blocks leftover from samples from filming that I intended to use in this quilt, then decided to let April 2019 stand on its own. If anything needs to be defined it is these times.

Quilt Bravely - Say Hello to Prints as Background

This is the second in a series of posts encouraging you to be different, quilt different, quilt bravely. To bend or even break some rules while pumping up your creative voice. You have the creative confidence, I’m just here to remind you of it.

Most of the first few quilts I ever made - some 2 decades ago - were pretty colours with a white background. For those first few years I couldn’t imagine how I would make a quilt any other way because it just looked so perfect to me. Well, I’m not sure what changed, but it’s been at least a decade since I made a quilt with a plain white background!

To be clear, I was almost never using plain white, a solid. No, I was using that lovely stuff called White on White, or what we used to refer to as WOW prints. A pretty shiny white ink on white fabric. Now, of course, the whites were never all the same and this row of fabrics in any quilt store will read from bright white to eggshell to cream.

Side note: if you ever find that white ink to be too bright, use the wrong side of the fabric. You get the idea of the print without the glaring brightness of the ink.

Then I discovered low volume prints. There weren’t as many then as there are now, but they definitely existed. More often than not that can still be located in the black and white section of the fabric store. Only now you can get a lot more choices of coloured ink.

I do find that people are afraid to use prints in a background, worried that they will overwhelm the design. Or, they are used and the design disappears. Here are two fundamental lessons to making sure neither thing happen.

Antonio’s Quilt

Mod Tree Quilt, pattern in Modern Patchwork

Value Matters

Value is the relative light and dark of a fabric. The key word being relative. It is about what the fabrics look like next to each other. If you want your design to stand out, then you need good contrast between the main design components and the background. This matters especially so when all the fabrics are prints. It isn’t enough to just have colour contrast, or maybe you want a monochromatic look. Either way, making sure the value of the background prints contrast with the design elements is important.

You also want to make sure that your background prints are all of similar values. They don’t have to be match match perfect, but aim for similar. This leads to the next key lesson.

Sewing Machine Quilt, check out Pattern Drop

There is Peace in Pattern

Texture Matters

Texture is the look or density of the print. Is it a sparse, large scale print with negative space between design elements? Is is a dense text print with little space. Side by side, the dense print will look darker.

It isn’t that you have to pick prints where they are all the same density, but knowing that some will pop while others will recede allows you to balance their use across a quilt. And if you have one print that really seems to be taking over the background you can do two things: remove it, or add more similar prints, so nothing stands out on its own.

Compose Yourself from The Essential Guide to Modern Quiltmaking

Smooch

Colour can make a difference in backgrounds. Be willing to experiment with pale colours instead of white. Pick multi coloured low-volume prints instead of black and white. Mix grey with black and white. Or heck, make your main design elements a light colour and your background a delicious, dark print.

Have fun playing with prints. They are a pure delight. And we have such amazing fabric designers in the world providing us with endless inspiration.

Check out the first in the Quilt Bravely Series: Creatively Contrasting Binding.

For more details on using low volume prints as background make sure to check out my book, A Month of Sundays. It gives you all the lessons!

Snowflake Quilt Top

Unequivocally, I am a winter girl. When it looked like this last week I texted my two best friends and said we had to get out in that fresh snow for a walk. It ended up being a slippery walk. I neglected to wear snow pants and that was a mistake as I kept wiping out on the ice under the foot of powder. I was wet through to my skin yet I couldn’t help but smile. It was just so beautiful. And I had good company. It was all too good to resist.

That’s how I felt when I saw Nicole’s Snowflake quilt. Modern, bold, and the kind of thing - if I’m being honest - I wish I had designed. I tried to resist, but it is too good. So I slid into my stash and picked fabrics to carry this love of winter year round in a quilt. Her pattern is fantastic.

The pattern provides options for a scrappy look like I did, a four colour version like the cover, and even a really bold two colour one. If you’ve seen anything I’ve ever done you know I went for scrappy. Oh, and low volume. Shocker.

We had fresh snow again this week. I can’t wait to go out for a walk and to come home and quilt this so it is ready for snuggles all winter. It is Calgary, after all, I have many more months of winter left to enjoy both.

Thank you to Nicole Daksiewicz of Modern Handcraft for generously providing me with her pattern.