Revisiting a 10 year old quilt!

 Re

I made this scrolls quilt at a Quilting Adventures in New Braunfels in 2010 or 2011.  Recently I've been having family and friends choose quilts of mine that I can leave them as legacies, either when I am no longer walking on this Earth or when we move from our present home, where so many of my quilts are displayed.

I wanted the woman who said she'd like to have this quilt to see the quilting on the quilt in a close-up photo, but somehow I can't lay my hands on that picture.  I remembered, though, that I had written about the quilt years ago on this blog which now I rarely post on!  

So I plan to send her an email so that she can see this close-up!

Anyone Want Some Diamond Blocks ?

I've been working on a Bordered Diamonds quilt from Kaffe Fassett's book SIMPLE SHAPES, SPECTACULAR QUILTS.  I've gotten all the blocks made; now all I need to do is to sew the diagonal rows together.

In straightening up my quilting studio, I realized that I had cut out far too many of the diamond centers for these blocks.  Way too many!  As in about 30 too many!

I'd love to give away these diamonds cut from Kaffe Fassett Collective fabrics to someone interested in making this wonderful quilt.   I'll post a photo of an assortment of the diamond shapes.  And I have pulled some sample quilts made by this design from FaceBook which are also posted here.

If you're interested, you can contact me via private FaceBook Messenger.  Just go to my FB page (Alice Baird), send me a private message from there.  In the message, send me your email address.  Via email I can I can send you more information.  Then you can reply via email if you'd like to have these already cut out diamonds.  

In addition to the diamond shapes, I could also send some strips of the fabric I used (also KF fabric) to border the blocks.  And I could send you directions on how to attach the strips for the borders in the most efficient manner.

Getting Caught Up Again!

Wow, I've not posted here for so long!  Our art quilting blog, The Material Mavens, is still going strong.  We are now in Round Three, and our specifications have changed.  Now we are posting or not--it's up to the quilter to make this decision--and we post every three months.  The themes are already chosen.  They appear in the left sidebar on the blog for that group, which is called The Material Mavens.  You can visit it at:  https://thematerialmavens.blogspot.com/

But I know that some of Round Two quilts have not appeared here!  The first two below are some of these.  Beneath the quilts are the themes and then my title for the quilt that I made for that theme.  The Round Three quilts I've made are the last three.

Looking at these all together anyone can tell that I am drawn to the color BLUE!  I need to branch out, for sure, in terms of colors in my art quilts!

I need to check to see if there are other MM quilts not yet posted here on this blog.  I can post again for those, if so!

Rock-a-Bye Baby quilt; "Rock" theme

The theme was "Blues"--My title was "String Pieced Blues".  When quilters "string piece," they use a foundation, in my case, a square of muslin, and to it add strips of fabric.  I started in the middle with the light blue fabric that has a white flower at one end.  To that fabric I sewed strips on either side.  Then after trimming the middle section,
strips of fabric are added to it on either side.  After the foundation piece is covered, then you trim the block to size.  It's a fun way to make a block and a fun way to use up scraps.

Theme "Wild"-- My quilt I called "Killing Two Birds with One Stone"
This title sort of baffles me now, but I think I had made these blocks using the "Mile a Minute" technique, and I "borrowed" four of them from the quilt for this theme's quilt.  These are all Kaffe Fassett fabrics.  The blocks look as if they're made like the string pieced quilt above it, but they aren't.  The "mile a minute" technique is quite different and not pieced onto a foundation, as are string-pieced blocks.  Two different techniques result in blocks that LOOK very similar, admittedly!
  Anyway,  back to the quilt's title:   I "killed two birds with one stone" by using 4 blocks that I'd made for a larger quilt!  That larger quilt became a birthday gift for a dear friend from Boston; another fan of Kaffe Fassett's fabrics.

The theme was "Joy" and my quilt title was "Grandchildren and Their Mothers."
Obviously my daughters and my grandchildren have brought me great joy!

The theme for this time was "Treasure."  My quilt is called "Epiphany or The Coming of the Wise Men."
This quilt was made during the season of the church year called "Epiphany," so named because of the arrival of the Wise Men who had followed the star to see the child Jesus.  

Getting Caught Up!

I confess that I have neglected this blog!  Since I last posted, our art quilting blog has had five other themes--Modern, Neighbor, Time, Circle, Pun, and Doodle.

As I look at these quilts posted since my last blog post on this blog, I am struck by how much I like to use the color red!  Only one of the quilts below departs from that color.  That fact had never dawned on me until I started working on this post!

So, here are all the quilts I've made since my last post.  This has really been interesting and fun for me, to revisit all of these quilts.

My Modern quilt was called "Buttons on Silk.  I composed a "modern art" quilt using silk fabrics which had begun life as silk blouses!  I used the plackets from several of the blouses for the buttons.

The next theme was Neighbor:  After attending a workshop with Sheila Frampton-Cooper at Quilting Adventures in the spring of 2014, I constructed an abstract art quilt using "neighboring" colors.  Sheila taught us a technique for piecing curves that was extremely useful.  I put that technique into practice for this quilt which used colors that are "neighbors" on the color wheel.

My Time Quilt was called "Time in a Bottle," based on the Jim Croce song of the same name.  I assembled a still-life of watches suspended in bottles.  All of the watches are sentimental to me--an old man's pocket watch once given to me by my mother, the watch my parents gave me for my high school graduation, and a watch given to me by my daughter Susan.

For my Circle quilt, I composed a scenic quilt using as many circles as possible.  I named this quilt "How Many Circles?"

My own theme choice was Pun!  This at first seemed to throw the group, but I really think that everyone rose to the challenge and produced great quilts!  My own quilt was called "A Pair of Pears, Pared," and thus the title gives away the pun!

Our last theme was Doodle.  I chose to depict Yankee Doodle in my quilt:

My Latest Material Mavens Quilt: The Spirit Tree

The Material Mavens are now in their second round of quilts.  The group elected to have the option of making our quilts either 12"x12", as we did in the first round, or 11"x14", and we could either use the portrait or the landscape view.  We have also moved to an every-three-months Reveal.  Our theme this time was Contrast.

So I chose to use the new size.  While pondering how to interpret the theme, I was also reading the wonderful book THE INVENTION OF WINGS.  This book, based on real-life sisters who pre-Civil-War were active abolitionists and even advocates for the rights of women, featured the relationship between a slave girl, Handful, and the daughter of her owner.  In a chilling passage in the book, Handful is presented to the daughter as a birthday present.

The CONTRAST between the life of an enslaved girl and that of a wealthy slave owner was striking and powerful.

Handful's mother, a slave on the same plantation, told her daughter about the African custom of choosing a spirit tree and then investing one's spirit in this tree.  And so mother and daughter choose such a tree.  When the mother steals a spool of red thread from her owners, they begin to wind the thread around the tree.  To me, this symbolized the surreptitious rebellious spirit of the mother and daughter.

The mother also made quilts, and she often used a pattern of triangles and favored the contrasting colors of red and black.   She explained to her daughter that the black triangles were the symbols of birds and of slaves who had learned to fly to freedom.  Of course, I realized that this quilt block was the traditional flying geese block.  Thus the background of my quilt is a mini-quilt made up of flying geese, black geese against a red background.

I used a copy-right free image* of a realistic flying goose, printed it onto ExtravOrganza, and super-imposed it onto the quilt top.  I loved this theme, love the new format, and greatly enjoyed the construction of this quilt!

I agreed to credit the image I used, and so the citation is below.

*<ahref="http://www.geekphilosopher.com/GeekPhilosopher.com/photos/photos.aspx" target="_blank">GeekPhilosopher: Instant download of free stock photos, images, backgrounds, and desktop wallpapers. Pictures can be used for personal and commercial web sites.</a>

Yellow is the Color of Friendship and Cousins Make the Best Friends!

After nearly three years, the First Round of the online art quilting group that I helped to organize is now over!  For our final Reveal, the theme for the 12"x12" quilts was Friendship.  Early on I choose a charming photo of our two youngest grandchildren to use in the quilt.  I was eager to try screen printing, too.  Trying new techniques and using new-to-me materials has always been one of my personal goals in being a part of this group.

A friend with a Thermofax machine graciously made the screen for me to use.  It took many tries for me to get an image that I liked.  Around the same time, the sunflower fields between Ft. Worth and Waco were at their most glorious.  Somehow I wanted to combine sunflowers with this image of the little boys.

I didn't get a photograph of the fields that suited me, but then one appeared in the local newspaper, the Waco Tribune-Herald.  I received permission to use this image, went down to their offices to pick it up and purchase it, and then I used Transfer Artist Paper to transfer the image onto fabric.  

Still--how to work these two images into a coherent quilt?  Somehow I happened onto a list online that connected colors with emotions.  Yellow was the color associated with friendship!  Hurrah!  Now I had a way to link the two.  I added a third element, a silk flower sunflower and tacked it onto the batik background, a luscious fabric of red-orange, yellow, and white.  I quilted the background by hand, using Perle cotton and an embroidery running stitch.  The quilting hardly shows, so busy is the background!

As I worked I thought about the older two grandchildren.  Would they feel hurt that I didn't include them?  The photo of the younger boys was taken in 2006 at a wonderful beach house on Lake Michigan.  We had gathered there as a family to celebrate bachelor son Rob's 40th birthday.  And so I included on the back of the quilt not only the photo that led to the screen print, but also photos of all four of the grandchildren (at ages 2, 3, 4, and 5), as well as their beloved Uncle Rob.

It is bitter-sweet for me to remember that the California grandchildren's mother, our beloved Kathy, was the one who first had the idea to celebrate her brother's birthday together.  She knew that without a wife, there would be no one to engineer any sort of celebration for this milestone birthday!  So this quilt is, in a way, a tribute to Kathy's thoughtfulness and love for her brother, who was born 21 months after her birth; Kathy departed this Earth in February, 2012.

Below are close-ups of the front and back of this, my last quilt in the first round of The Material Mavens!

Tribune-Herald staff photographer Rod Aydelotte took
the sunflower-field photo.

I superimposed these images onto a Jacquard ExtraOrganza printable
sheet that can be used with an ink jet printer.

The top two photos were taken on the big, wrap-around porch
at the house on Lake Michigan.  Uncle Rob sits with the
children on our last morning there, they still clad in
their PJ's!

The bottom image. taken the same summer, is of the children in Waco, at
the Mayborn Museum, a place we visit yearly when they come to visit.

My "Sarah's Gypsy Throw"

Is this an art quilt, or would this belong better on my blog that discusses my more traditional quilts?  Well, for now anyway, I am going to say that this quilt, based on a Kaffe Fassett design and using 80-90% of his fabrics, is a work of art!  Not an original design by me, and usually I think of art quilts as being an original design, but the truth of the matter is--I prefer this blog over my other personal blog, and so here it is!

I've been working on this quilt off and on for many months.  Not that anything about the sewing of the blocks was difficult, but getting the blocks arranged to suit me was challenging!  I can't tell you how many times I moved blocks here and there, exchanging one for another, etc.

I finished the borders only today, and I am amazed at how adding them made this quilt come alive.  The  Ikat Dot outer border fabric and the Fruit Basket paisley inner border were suggested by Fassett, and I am so glad that I purchased these two when they were available.

Fassett suggested that in each of the perimeter blocks you use two darks (either black or brown background fabrics) and two gold paisleys.  I had two different gold paisley fabrics by Fassett, but I wish I had purchased more when he was "doing" paisleys more often.  When it came time to make the quilt, I had to use some other fabric designers' paisleys to get enough to complete the quilt.  Actually, I rather like how these more traditionally designed paisleys give my eyes a rest.  I also like how the occasional brown-background triangles are sort of a surprise!

Kaffe also suggested that the four corner triangles in each of the perimeter, hour-glass, blocks,  be four different floral fabrics that were medium values.  Fortunately I had plenty of these fabrics.  For the "cornerstone" triangle square blocks within the inner border, he used four different darks and four different golds.  I did use different gold paisleys, but I decided to use my very favorite of the floral fabrics, red and purple flowers on black, for the dark triangles.

Perhaps I ought to have waited to publish photos of this quilt when the quilting was done, but I am just so delighted to have finished the top and so happy with it, I have jumped the gun on this post!

Eventually I will rename the quilt with a name original with me.  Kaffe called it Sarah's Gypsy Throw, using the name of the long-ago quilter Sarah, which I like.  This design appears in his MUSEUM QUILTS book--quilts from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a museum that I have visited and dearly love.