Category: Quilt Design

What was I thinking?

Since I had finished “Bridge Over the River KEW“, it was time to turn back to the Color Wheel quilt that I have been slowly working on for the past YEAR!!!

Now that the hand applique on the corner’s were finished I needed to turn these five pieces into one very BIG piece…..

I had been dreading this part of the process since it would be extremely easy to get the triangles off center and then the whole thing would be skewed. When doing the corner design I had marked all of the sewing lines, so it was easy to match those lines up, iron a crease where the sewing line would go and then simply sew along the marked line….

After the initial sewing, I laid the top out on the floor and used the laser square to see how close it was….

There was one corner that needed some work…..

….but a bit of ripping and re-sewing soon had that fixed.

The bottom line is that the final trim will be very close but I will get it quilted and then see where it is.

Next I needed to make a back for the quilt and at this point I started asking myself exactly what I was thinking when I designed this quilt and WHY did I make it so big!!!

It was fun using a number of multi-colored pieces of fabric for the back…..

…..especially the cute psychedelic VW Bug fabric!!

So for now, I will put this into the line-up for quilting….it is number three in the queue.

Kew Quilt…..NOW WHAT??

Now that I have the design drawn and the initial fabrics selected, it is time to turn my mind to EXACTLY how I am going to accomplish this quilt.

I don’t believe that the side strips will be super hard. I will just have to be extremely accurate and careful in my piecing!!

But, how am I going to make the center “ladder” section.

Applique would obviously work, but seems like a LOT of trouble!!

I really want to piece most of it but am concerned about how I will accomplish these dimensional areas….

Rather than making a full plan, I did what I normally do and started with the part that would be the easiest. I can always figure out the harder stuff when I get there!!!

Although it is not my favorite piecing method, I decided to paper piece each section….

….starting with the large (window) piece, adding the black side pieces and finally adding the “step” to one side.

After finishing with each section, I attached it to the preceding section…..

By doing this section by section, before I knew it, I had finished the top five window panes!!

There are three more of these “simple” sections and then I get to the hard part!!

To quote Scarlett O’Hara……

My new “thinker” quilt!!

When I posted the Inspiration Tuesday photo last week…..

…..I mentioned that it really was calling to me. I kept thinking about it more and more so this weekend, I made a start on the project.

My first task was to put the photo into Photoshop and start cleaning it up as much as I could. I started by applying the “Poster Edge” Filter to help further define the lines…..

photo with Poster Edge Filter applied

I knew that I didn’t need the lights that ran along the top so I started by roughly erasing those….

Finally, I knew that I didn’t want the hooked lines that ran out from the middle ladder, so it was off with their heads…..

When I was happy with the clean-up job, I put the photo into Powerpoint so that I could play with the sizing a bit. I made the photo 6inches by 9 inches and then printed it out using the poster function. This enlarged the photo so that it was printed on a 3×3 page grid, making the finished product about 18 x 30 inches…..

I cut out and taped the 9 pages together…..

….and voila….my full size pattern was born!!

Now, you may have noted that the orientation of the photo has changed. When I printed out a full size photo, Michael and I both looked at it and decided that it needed to be upside down…..

  • The original version
  • the NEW orientation

It was simply too top-heavy in the original version.

I started looking at the full-size pattern and realized that there were other unnecessary lines so I started cleaning up some more…..using correction tape this time!!….

So, the final pattern is ready to go…..

Now comes the fun part……

Inspiration Tuesday

How about this for some geometric inspiration……

This photo was taken inside one of the greenhouses at Kew Gardens in London.

We were there for Michael to speak to a group of scientists and had spent the night with two of them. That morning, as we all walked into the back gate of Kew, one of our hosts asked what my plans were. I said that I was going to stick around the area until the gardens opened. He said that there was no reason to wait and that I could enter at the back and wander by myself!!!

SO….I had almost two lovely hours to stroll thru the area without any other visitors…..just me, my camera and the odd gardener!!! It was heaven!!!

BUT….back to the inspiration. It would be fun to use this as a pattern for a quilt using blocks of color and trying to get the perspective to work!!

And now as I think about it more I am getting really excited about this one. Who knows, maybe it will be my new “BIG” project!!!