Sunday, January 29, 2012

Silk Tie Quilt

I'm not very good at finishing a project before I start on the next one.  I've been prepping these ties for a couple weeks.  I machine washed them, let them air dry, then used a seam ripper to disassemble the ties.  After ironing the ties flat, I used a lightweight fusible interfacing on the back of each of them.

This weekend, I cut 6" squares from the wide part of most of the ties.    Some of them had wear marks that showed when they were opened up.  I also set aside the yellows and a green for later.

Remember how I complained about this technique for HST?  It put all the joining edges on the bias.  Since the tie was cut on the bias, it makes the outside edges straight of grain!  Well, at least for the tie pieces.  I found a yard of blouse-weight grey silk in my stash (purchased 20 years ago, before children, when I wore silk all the time, and thought I'd have the time to sew clothing. LOL) which I used for the contrast color.

The grey edges are on the bias, but the interfacing that I used is keeping it from stretching.

Here are the first 4 of 16 pinwheels.  They are currently at about 7".  Next step will be adding some tie strips around each.  I'm letting this quilt evolve one step at a time.  Stay tuned to see what's next.

I continue to make progress on hand quilting the Double Wedding Ring.   I've been hanging out a lot on Celebrate Hand Quilting.  You can see my recent post about this quilt and give your suggestions on that post.

And I have a few more panels put together from my old-stash green for the FMQ panels that I started working on earlier in the month.   I actually thought that I had a lot more of these greens when I designed this project.  I'm either going to have to use some that are more olive, or buy new forest green to finish up.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I wouldn't worry about starting and finishing projects - you are way better than me at finishing. And you are finishing some super projects ;o)

quilthexle said...

What a clever and unique idea for using up some of these ties !! I'm sure it will look great, will be fun to see how you add strips to your pinwheels.

Celeste said...

Wow, those are some old greens! The combination of yellows with them is making me think of daffodils..and my spam word is sping, so maybe it just means I've had enough of winter already!

Rosa said...

Your silk-tie project is very interesting for me. I have been collecting silkties now for a couple of years and still can't decide witch pattern to use.
I tend to be too ambitious and have been thinking about handpiecing and copying one of the many old silk quilts I have photos of but I'm a bit afraid of that project.
I'll look forward to your progress on your silk-tie quilt :-)