Friday, February 23, 2018

Roughly What It Will Look Like

2018 Winter Olympic Games = lots of time for hand sewing in my view.  I got a little project together.  It is called the mandolin quilt block, from Tales of Cloth.  I stumbled across the block on Instagram, where you can see this block (#mandolinquilt) in every color combination and type of fabric you can think of.  It is an English paper piecing design.

The photo below shows my fabric choices, cut and laid out to test the combination.  Actually, this is where I ended up, not where I started, but I neglected to take photos of the false starts.  


I glue-basted during the first night of coverage and have been sewing during figure skating, skiing, and snowboarding.



The design so far; two more rounds to go.  I'm making just one block and my plan is to applique it to background fabric, quilt it, and frame it using a large embroidery or quilting hoop. 

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Tuesday, February 20, 2018

A Pieceful Finish

I have a finish to show off!  I started this quilt in 2016 (you can read about the blocks in this post), sent it off to my longarm quilter, then it sat in my sewing room waiting to be bound.  Well, voila, here is Pieceful:


Pieceful is 78" square, a little larger than Mr. Main Street's wingspan, and my secondary quilt holder, Miss Main Street, moved away to Brooklyn to live the life of a recent college grad and pursue her dream of becoming a comedian.  So I have to make do. 

Pieceful is part of my Fig Tree Harvest series, an effort to finally make quilts from all my hoarded stash of Fig Tree Quilts fabrics.  You can see my collection to date under the Fig Tree Harvest tab at the top of the page or here.  The weird thing is that I've made all these quilts but the basket holding my Fig Tree stash does not seem to get any emptier!  There are still a few more in there. 

Karen Thompson did the quilting using a panto.  I like the quilting design very much.  The dense, wavy lines soften the hard edges of all the small squares and blur the colors together. 


Here's a closer-up of the quilting.


I even used fabric from stash for the backing and binding.  The backing is a large-scale floral tone-on-tone.  It's not Fig Tree and has been in my stash for years, I'm glad I finally found a good application for it.  And the binding is leftover fabric I bought for the centers and outer rings for Globe Trotting, an earlier Fig Tree Harvest quilt.



I have no idea what will be next in the Fig Tree Harvest series.  I have quite a bit of fabric left but it is a mish-mash of colors and designs, lots of small pieces, so will likely have to be something very scrappy.  But that will have to wait; I have other quilting fun planned for the near term.  Stay tuned!

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