Shower Epiphany

I always get the most amazing ideas in the shower.  It must be the timing of when the subliminal stuff from my dreams hits the morning caffeine.  Friday morning I solved 3 quilting dilemmas at once.

I had designed a fall themed quilt for my friend Carol.

The idea was to make the gold, orange and red as long strips of crazy patch with solid greens between.

I had finished about 30 inches worth of crazy patch before I decided that I wasn't loving the idea.

Last night I drew out the design that popped into my head in the shower,  and today started cutting out fabrics.  The idea is to make the stripes in smaller sections (typically 8-12 x 12-16 inches) and use those blocks for my FMQ Challenge blocks (project solution 1). I need more than 12 since I also want to try Trapunto this year and I want to try some designs to use on my Ojibwe Beadwork Inspired quilt which is waiting for me to become good at FMQ before I attempt to quilt it (project solution 2).

 By lunch time I had managed to cut out all the gold and yellow sections that will go into the quilt.  After I got those sections cut to size, I had enough yellow fabric to use on those stripes on the back of the quilt too.   I had another idea for the extra fabric....

...but first, I needed to finish 2 sections of yellow crazy 8x24, which I accomplished by early afternoon.

Meanwhile, I've been admiring string quilts on line.  And I absolutely loved the yellow zig-zag quilt that I made for my sister-in-law.  So all that gold fabric I had left over seemed a perfect candidate for a yellow & white string quilt.  Plus I could do a quilt-as-you-go method AND use up the bin of poly batting that I just found in the garage (project 3...maybe 4 & 5 too if using up terrible batting counts as a project as does learning an new QAYG technique).   I found a great QAYG technique tutorial at Welsh Quilter that I will use for both the string and the FMQ project.

Technically, these projects also solve quilting dillema 4 (or is that 6?), which was that I bought the green, red and gold fabric originally to do a Baltimore Album Quilt.  I've been collecting fabric for that quilt for so long though, that I'm now disappointed in the quality of many of the fabrics I collected.  This can be my excuse for only making pillows rather than a full Baltimore Album quilt.

I need to get all that done, because I've been taunting my brother Rick that since he was retired, he could send me a bunch of his old and/or ugly silk ties.  They arrived this week.  These are the ones that I think I can manage to play nicely together.

I'm still deciding on a pattern.  I'm planning to stabilize with a lightweight fuseable.  I'm psyching up to pre-wash so it won't have to eternally be dry cleaned.


OK...back to the sewing machine.  No, wait, football and hand quilting.

Garden of Stitches - The Ashley Quilt

Hurray!  I'm done!!!
So here's the whole story on this quilt.  There's a quiltshop in McCall (Huckleberry's) that years ago only carried what I consider "muddy colored" fabrics. (They've expanded a little in recent years, but still love earth tones.)  They had Garden of Stitches by Lisa Bongean displayed.  I loved the shape of the flowers and bought the pattern with the plan to make it in bright colors for my younger daughter.  The next spring, a family member was diagnosed with cancer and I spent a lot of time waiting in doctor's offices.  This became my waiting room project and for a time I referred to it as "the chemo quilt".   Meanwhile, I finished 2 quilts for the daughter, so the need to finish this one was eliminated and  it remained a work-in-it-whenever project.

Then in 2009, I decided to make quilts for each of my nieces and nephews with a self-imposed rule that they had to be made with "stash" material.  Fortunately, my niece Ashley liked the colors I was using for this quilt and it became hers.  The applique was nearly done, but last summer I had to figure out how to piece it together from the stash.  I decided that the half-square triangles in the original pattern were too busy and distracted from the applique.  I framed the flowers with a pink print that is not noticeable from a distance, but makes a subtle frame on close inspection.  Which is a good thing b/c I ran short and had to make some adaptations.   I also am not a fan of scrappy quilts (they make me anxious for some reason), so I set about taming the outer border to just 2 colors.  My other challenge was how to quilt it.  With all that pink space b/w the flowers, I felt it needed a lot of interest, so decided on echo quilting.  That decision then creates a new problem in that lap quilting works best.  But it was summer.  So I tried something new.  I sewed the quilt into 4 panels, quilted those up to 2" from the joining edge, then sewed them together and quilted using the approach used for Hawaiian style quilting.

The other interesting story that goes with this quilt revolves around a quilt retreat in June 2009.  Joanne invited several of us to her cabin the week of the Council, ID quilt show. The evening before the luncheon, I was working on this quilt and trying to convince Diane that she'd like applique if she just tried the back-basting method.  She agreed to try and was working on a flower from this pattern to add to the back of a quilt she'd planned to finish that week.  We got to the luncheon.  I hadn't paid any attention to who the speaker was since I don't know any quilt designers.  As I was looking over the display table before the trunk show...I had to laugh.  It was Lisa Bongean, the designer of the flowers we'd been working on.