Chester Creek

Bonnie Hunter has released the colors for her 2020 Mystery Quilt-Along. Link to Bonnie Hunter's Mystery here: Grassy Creek - A Quiltville Mystery (Introduction!)

Bonnie's colors were inspired by the countryside surrounding her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. For the first time, I am going to deviate from Bonnie's colors. I am going to take my inspiration from the creek and forest near my home in Alaska. 

 We don't have a lot of reds and oranges in the woods here, so I am going to replace Bonnie's red with a plummy purple, and I will replace her orange with a dark, bluish green. I will stick with the other colors Bonnie chose: gold, yellow-green, white, and gray.

I will not be going into shops at this time. I ordered all of my fabric from Missouri Star Quilt Company. They got it here very quickly. I had to buy pieces which were a minimum of one yard, so that meant fewer different fabrics. The result will be less scrappy, but it will still be scrappy enough, I think.

It is a little hard to get the colors right when you order on line. I had to let go of my usual obsession with finding the exact shade. I am forced to accept a wider range of tones within each color group. I think this will be good for me.

Golds

 

 

 

Yellow Greens

Dark Greens

 

 

 

Plums

 

 

Grays

 

Whites

 

 

 

This time around I decided to take the time to pre-wash my fabric. Even though it is all high quality fabric, I have concerns about colors running and fabric shrinking. I washed the fabric in warm water and dried it in a medium dryer. 

 

You wouldn't believe the amount of unraveling that happened. I started out sewing a basting stitch about  1/4 inch from the edge. It didn't seem to prevent unraveling. I ended up sewing a zig-zag stitch as close to the edge as possible. It still unraveled a lot.

 

And it shrank. I didn't measure it scientifically, before and after, but each one yard piece seems to have shrunk about two inches. Some of that may resolve itself when I iron the fabric. This makes me worry about some of my previous projects. Most of those are unfinished, and most were not pre-washed. How will the fabric behave once it has been cut into small pieces and sewn to other small pieces? Should I worry? 

 

Well, I am really excited to begin this mystery quilt. Tomorrow is the day the first clue will be revealed!

 

 

Merry Play

Wow, it's been a while since I posted about quilting. I've been traveling more and sewing less. Now I have a little time to sew and I have a new project I am working on. I know. You are wanting to see a picture of the finished Good Fortune quilt, or the surprise piece I am making for my friend. Well, unfortunately, I haven't made much progress on those projects.

Meanwhile, while we were away on our last trip, Bonnie Hunter started a new Mystery Quilt-Along. This one is called Frolic!. As soon as we got home I tried to dive into it. It took me a while to get the fabric. We are down to three local quilt shops plus Jo-Ann's. One of them is downtown and caters mainly to tourists with primarily Alaskan-themed fabric that I don't often use. The second shop, Seams Like Home, has a buyer whose tastes are the polar opposite of mine. Lately I haven't been able to find much there. That leaves one good quilt shop, The Quilt Tree, plus Jo-Ann's. (I recently heard a rumor that Jo-Ann's is going to move into a smaller location and the two local outlets are going to consolidate. Can this be?)

Now that I think about it, there are actually two quilt shops in Eagle River. I have never been to them and I don't like driving out there in the winter, but I must remember to check them out soon.

So, I wanted to start Bonnie Hunter's new mystery quilt-along because I love the colors she used. After about 5 trips to three of the four local fabric stores, I had enough fabric to start. Here is a good part of it:

My Dark Blues

My Raspberries

My Light Blues

In case you're wondering, one of the definitions of frolic is "merry play." What a perfect description of how I feel when I'm quilting!

Good Fortune, Introduction - Thanksgiving

We had a lovely Thanksgiving yesterday.
I am thankful for friends and family.
I am thankful that I have the leisure and wherewithal to pursue my interest in quilting.
I am thankful for Bonnie Hunter's inspirational mystery quilt-alongs.

Today is the kickoff of Bonnie Hunter's Good Fortune! mystery quilt. (Link to it here: Good Fortune!) 
I am so excited to be starting this quilt. I have eagerly anticipated it for several months. This is my fourth straight year starting one of Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilts on the day after Thanksgiving. Her generosity in giving such a gift to the quilting community is so uplifting and refreshing.

On Halloween Bonnie revealed the colors for this year's quilt. I was on a long trip and wasn't able to visit any quilt stores until this week. This afternoon I went to the Quilt Zone and was shocked to find an empty storefront with a "For Lease" sign in the window. What happened? When? I will miss this gem of a quilt shop.

I was also shocked to see that I haven't added to this blog in 11 months. I have spent a lot of time traveling this year. I guess that is why I have been feeling such a strong pull towards quilting lately.

A little more about Good Fortune! Bonnie drew on her recent trip to China for the the color palette for the quilt. It works for me! I just got back from a trip to China and other parts of Asia where these colors are prevalent. Here is a photo we took in the Philippines of goldfish in a feeding frenzy. This brings to mind the oranges Bonnie chose.

And here are my fabrics

To the golden oranges Bonnie added red, green, and blue. These colors are everywhere in Asia.
In Taiwan . . .

 In Okinawa (Japan) . . .

 and in Korea . . .

This traditional Korean dress is called a hanbok

 And here are my fabrics

To be honest, these colors are a little outside of my comfort zone. I suppose that's why I didn't have any of them in my admittedly tiny stash. (But it's so much fun to shop for them!) Bonnie always gets me to extend my horizons.

And then we have the neutrals. The one on the far right has a little bit of gold sparkle.

This time I am going to try something new (for me). I am going to PRE-WASH all of the fabric. I got a lot of these fabrics at Jo-Ann's. They had a big sale on fat quarters this week: 79 cents each! Wow! But I am worried that they may shrink or run, so all of it is going in the wash. I hope they don't unravel too much.

Lessons learned:

• I need a larger stash

Sea Grass

 In August I took a class with Rayna Gilman. On the second day our challenge was to make something with a limited color palette: two neutrals and a color. Read my blog about the class here: Kiwi, Anyone?

 I selected some fabrics - whites, grays, and greens. (The color is a little off in this photo.)

I sewed the strips together and flipped the piece around.


I squared up the piece. It was a little longer on one edge than the other so it did not lie flat.

After sitting in my sewing area for a suitable length of time, my project demanded to be finished. I tweaked it by narrowing a few of the pieces that were too wide at one end, and managed to beat it into a more one-dimensional piece. I decided to use the print from the focus pieces for the backing. (I have also been using this print for the focus pieces in the 2015 BOMs.)

Then I spent some time thinking about how to quilt it. At first I thought I would quilt only on the light colored stripes, or only on alternating strips. In the end, the focus print also supplied my inspiration for the actual quilting of the project. 

The fabric also gave me the idea to use a variegated thread for the quilting.

Initially I did not plan to have so many lines of quilting, but I just kept filling in blank areas, and in the end, I liked the densely quilted result.

Voila! (Did you notice that it got flipped around again?)

After completing the quilting, I made a facing using the same old focus fabric. (I made the label before sewing on the facing this time :)). It turned out much better than last time, and I only had to do the monogramming once, but it is still a little uneven. The variegated thread looked awful on my test label, so I went with a solid green. I wish I had used the solid green to hem the facing down, but I was too lazy to rip it out and redo it. Besides, it's only on the back, right?

I really like how this turned out. I like it a lot better than "Slice and Dice." I am going to have to try the "two neutrals and a color" idea again.

One last observation . . . As I walked through the living room holding my finished project, it suddenly dawned on me that it looked a lot like our Steve Gordon painting . . . which is my favorite piece in our house! Could I have been influenced subliminally to echo the "look and feel" of the Steve Gordon?

Lessons learned:

• After squaring off and adding facings, the project will be smaller than expected - in this case, about 10" x 17 1/2". Keep this in mind when you start the project.
• Plan ahead with regard to when to use variegated thread and when not to.
• Don't use fusible web to add focus pieces, if you can avoid it. If you are adding the focus pieces at the end, would appliqué look better?

Kiwi, Anyone?

Today was Day 2 of the workshop with Rayna Gillman. We were challenged to make something using a limited color palette: 2 neutrals and one color. This was intended to allow us to focus on design without being distracted by colors.

I have to confess that I am not sure what "design" is, or what makes a design "good." I guess the idea is to play around with it until you like it, then get some feedback from others and then play around with it some more.

I decided to use grey, white and green. I started out with strips, the same as yesterday, because I was not yet in touch with my inner designer.

On the design wall

I added a kiwi green focal point to one of the strips and sewed everything together. For no particular  reason, I flipped the piece around, in case you were wondering.

Here is my focal point. Ta da!

When it was my turn to get feedback I was encouraged to add a few more partial strips to complement the focal point. I did so (and I broke one of the rules by adding strips made of a print containing blue and purple).

I'm not sure whether I like it better with or without these additional focal points

I used fusible web to add the strips because I had already sewn everything and it seemed like too much work to rip out stitches and cut and sew partial strips together and then re-sew. It felt like cheating, but I reminded myself there are no rules.

Although I didn't feel that I was focusing overmuch on color for this one, I also didn't feel that I had much of a focus on design. If design is what order the strips are in and how wide they are, I did focus on that. If design is making different shapes and patterns, I didn't really do that. I stayed with what I knew from yesterday.

I like what I ended up with. It feels "artsy" to me. I plan to finish it and hang it up somewhere. Maybe.

After two days, I really feel that I have moved up to the next level of quilting. I have created two projects without using a pattern or instructions. This is SO not me. This is SO far outside my comfort zone. Rayna is so encouraging.