My Favorite Colors - Chapter 1

What is your favorite color? Answering that is like deciding which one of your kids is your favorite - IMPOSSIBLE.

Before quilting, I used to have favorites - in my clothing, my home decorating, my car. I loved green and mauve in the 80s, blue and burgundy in the 90s. I wore olive drab everyday from 1979 to 1995. Not my favorite, but it brought out my green eyes.


Now that I am quilting, they are all my favorites - each one like a special, well-loved child. I have this feeling that since its not paint, an expensive couch, an expensive car (all cars are expensive these days) or clothing I wear, I can use any color I want. In fact I am trying to experiment with different colors and color combinations. I even have an entire board on Pinterest dedicated to color schemes. 

I love rainbow, or I call them color-wheel quilts. I've got a couple of quilts going that include 24 colors of the color wheel. The first one I started about 3 years ago - Technicolor Galaxy. The other one I did with a small group from our guild and is called Eclipse.


Technicolor Galaxy by Alyssa Lichner at Pile O' Fabric is a absolute explosion of color and shape. I really enjoyed collecting FQ of lots of different colors. It was tough to find exactly the right shades to make that color wheel effect.  Yellow-green, red-violet, orange-yellow, turquoise-green. I even like saying the colors and imagining their deliciousness.  


I am almost done with this one - I just need to do 3 more outside corners, and then I am ready to quilt the sections. I quilted the center section a few weeks ago and I really like how it turned out.




Eclipse is a foundation pieced quilt by Kimberly of Main Street Designs. A small group of us in Kaw Valley Quilters Guild did this together and we are all showing ours at the upcoming quilt show. It is really cool to see how different they are in different colors. I used color wheel colors with a black background. It just came back from quilter Sandra Cockrum, and as usual she did an outstanding job. You can't see all the fabulous quilting in the pic, so come see it in person at the Kaw Valley Quilt Show on 7-8 April.

So, enough for now, but not nearly enough about color. I'll post later about the other colorful quilts in my studio. 



Keepin' it Curious!

A Different Kind of Paper Pieiceing - English Paper Pieceing

I'm deep into several paper piecing projects - not foundation paper piecing (see Foundation Paper Piecing ) but rather English Paper Piecing (EPP). 

Paper Piecing / Foundation Piecing? What's the difference? Foundation piecing uses a foundation (usually paper) to sew and flip the pieces, enabling you to get really good points where it would be difficult to piece. English paper piecing uses forms (usually paper or card stock) in different shapes (hexagon, diamonds, squares, or triangles).

So, as is usual, I sort of over did it. One project led to another, then another. Before I knew it I had so many I had to organize them and make sense of what I have. 

It started innocently enough - Grandmother's Flower Garden. My Quilting Bucket List includes making a traditional quilt by hand, so what better choice than a Grandmother's Flower Garden? I even used reproduction 30s fabrics for it. To date, I have 40 out of 54 "flowers" completed. I'm going to put them together with green diamonds - so it will look something like this one. 

The Grandmother's Flower Garden got me hooked and now its a full blown addiction. Enter Katja Marek of Katja's Quilt Shoppe in Kamloops British Columbia. She has this wonderful book - The New Hexagon. In 2015 she facilitated an online Quilt Along to make a gorgeous and challenging quilt called Millefiore. It is constructed of about 14 Rosettes using the hexagons from Katja's book. This was one of the most challenging projects I've ever done. The construction is fairly straight forward, but choosing fabrics so that each round flows smoothly is quite a challenge.  I got two Rosettes done and decided to put it away for a while. Even now when I look at it, I think I might want to redo some of it.

Katja teased me again the next year with Quilts on the Go. For this Quilt Along, I decided to use Asian fabrics from my stash. This lasted through the first hexie and then I figured I'd better buy some more. Now I have 3 good sized totes filled with focus Asian fabrics to fussy cut and a bunch of fillers. This project is mush easier than Millie because each hexie stands alone. Once made, the hexies were appliqued to a backing and they were quilted. So, each one could stand alone as a mug rug; put a few together and you have a table topper; put them all together and you have a quilt.  I progressed a little further on this one, but I still have a few to make and then I'll whip-stitch them together into a quilt.

The next couple of Quilt Alongs that Katja has done are in the "collect and do later" category. We have Hex-Plosion and Perpetually Hexie. Cool projects and I couldn't stand not adding them to my EPP collection.

Katja is not the only designer doing cool EPP stuff. Tonya Owens from HillBilly Quilt Shop designed a mystery EPP with cool fabric from Paula Nadelstern (see my previous post).  Although I didn't keep current with the Quilt Along, the out-of- this-world table runner is ready to be quilted!

Another forerunner in EPP is Australian Sue Daley. I met Sue at the first Missouri Star Academy in Hamilton in May 2017. During her class, she showed (teased) us her new EPP BOM (don't ya just love the acronyms) called Round We Go. They are circles! I love them. Quilting Bits and Pieces in Eudora is hosting the BOM - starting August 2017. Again, these are in the "collect and do later" category. 

In addition to all being EPP, most of these projects have something else in common - they use lazer cut paper pieces available from PaperPieces.com. If EPP is an addiction, PaperPieces is an enabler. They carry all sorts of shapes in multiple sizes. They also have packages with all the pieces for projects. If its EPP you want, look no further.


Join me in my addiction! 

 

Quilt As You Go Hexies

This year, I've done a couple of sew/quilt alongs. Fun, Fun Fun!

One of my favorites is Katja Marek's Blocks on the Go for Quilts of the Grow. There are 52 different EPP (English Paper Piecing) hexies based on Katja's book The New Hexagon.  The year is almost over, but I'm still working on August's hexies. Not too far behind I'd say.

I decided this project would be a perfect use for some of the Asian fabrics I've been collecting - of course I had to purchase some additional fabrics to go with what I had. Since the blocks are hexagons, if I want to fussy cut (which of course I do), I'll need 6 repeats of the fabric.

My friend Kim is doing this project too, so we combined orders for the papers from Paper Pieces. The papers are sized to make a 4 inch block.

As the title of the quilt along implies, the hexagon blocks are quilted as they're made. So after doing the fussy cutting, glue basting, whip stitching the pieces together, and finally removing the papers, I appliqued the blocks onto a batting-filled background. A little stitch in the ditch quilting and the blocks are ready for some big stitch quilting around the edges with perl cotton.

I love doing these blocks. Picking the fabric, paper piecing, and working to get my big stitch quilting stitches nice and even. I haven't started putting them together yet - I want to get them all done and then lay them out to see how they look together. So far, I am stoked!

Here is a little sample of some of my hexies.
I'm ready to go cut some more fabric so I can baste and whip stitch the hexies during TV time.

Thanks to Katja. Can't wait to see next year's quilt along!