Day of the Dead Quilt

 I've been so good about working on finishing projects, that I decided to reward myself by starting something new.  It's going to be in the style of Dia de Muertos.  It is for my friend Boomer who survived a "widow maker" heart attack, collapsing as he walked into the Emergency Department. The full sized skeleton will be wearing the shirt they cut off him at the ED.

The quilt will be full of symbolism related to his life and hobbies.  The gear eyes are for his lifetime as a mechanic.  The white mouth surround and red nose are for his years as a professional clown.  The winged warrior is the symbol of his motorcycle club.  The teeth and warrior details are shown here on a plastic overlay and will be quilted in. 

My friend's roomate Frank posed for this picture so I could figure out how to add a hat tip (a feature of his professional clown portrait. 

I hope to make some progress on the spine & rib designs today.  My first draft was out of proportion since I tried to do it mathematically from an image and still match the size of the shirt.

Loud!

 Another finish!  This quilt was started Feb 2019 when I was testing a foundation piecing pattern for a friend who wanted to learn to quilt when she retired. It is called Nell's Star /Charleston Star  available at this link.    I am not certain where the purple/orange batik came from.  Nor do I understand what compelled me to buy it.  I suspect that I bought it on clearance. I decided to pair it with green to round out the color wheel.  That is one LOUD color scheme.

 This much color is not everyone's cup of tea.  But then I thought of my friend Lori.  She's a colorful character.  And she is constantly crocheting things for my granddaughter.  She never forgets my birthday.  She was long overdue for a gift from me.

 I had purchased Aunt Millie's Garden from Piece O'Cake Designs because I liked their funky flowers. (Click on the link above if you want to know what it's supposed to look like) I decided to rework them into a border.  Unfortunately, there was a delay of a year from when I started the project to when I picked it up again and I'd forgotten some of my plans.  Subsequently there's more design changes where 2 corners include the star/dot flower and 2 do not.  I kept wanting to add more leaves, but settled for quilting some in.

This was free motion quilted on my Singer Patchwork with a mix of Gutterman and Connecting Threads thread.  Batting is Pellon Nature's Touch 90% cotton batting.  Backing is unbleached muslin.

Slow Progress

The morning after my last post, I made a frustrating discovery.  I had been having trouble with alignment on the replacement panels that are marked with 1" instead of 1.5" grid.  The reason turned out to be that I was 1/2" off when cutting the panel.  So 80% of the pieces in the panels I had spent 2 days applying, had to be re-positioned and re-fused.

That is represented on the photo as the big blank spot of sky to the left of the lady. 

I was burnt out on that project, as you might imagine.   I went back to working on "Loud".  It's a quilt I'm making for a friend that has a rather complex floral outer border.  She wants a surprise reveal, so all you get is a sneak peak.  It's back basting needle turn except for the bias stems.  I estimated that there were around 450 pieces to stitch, and I'm down to basting and sewing the last 16 leaves and 16 dots.  I know that I'll be tempted to add more at that point, but will focus on talking myself into adding more details in the quilting.

Monet Progress

 Three full time days back into this project and progress is being made.  Last post showed the sorting of the panels that were fused a decade ago before I gave up on this project.  The lower left section of the boy and lower skirt has now been completed. WHOO HOOO!!!

I've spent the better part of the past 2 days on the placement of 897 squares.  The green umbrella was slow going as I didn't have a "palate" of colors and cut as needed to be sure I didn't waste fabric.  I also managed to lose a piece of fabric and spent  over an hour finding a replacement.  Later finding the missing fabric tucked in another fabric.  Bah.  Today discovered that I didn't have anywhere near the amount of very pale yellow that is part of the sky clouds.  Did find a replacement batik that's actually better as it blends blue and yellow.

There are still 26 rows down to the boy panel.  (23 wide)
And a 15 wide panel down most of the left side.  SIGH. 

What's that phrase again...Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

Monet UFO

10  or 11 years ago, I started a quilt based on Monet's "Woman with Parasol".  I bought a cross stitch pattern where someone else had worked out the pattern.  I proceeded to buy fabric and sort out the details over the course of the next  year.  2 years later I was in DC and took this selfie at a museum.  My version is exponentially larger. 

I bought an embroidery floss color scale and used it to pick fabrics.

I used and embroidery floss organizer to keep the 1.5" blocks organized

My last post on this project was on May 30, 2010 when I got the body portion of the lady sewn up.

 What I pulled out of the project box this morning was a pile of panels with 1.5" squares fused to a grid, ready for sewing.  It took me an hour to sort out where each piece went. 

 I was able to sort out the bottom left section which is the boy and the left side of the lady's skirt.  In this view, I've sewn the horizontal, but not yet the vertical seams. (photo is tipped 45 degrees off)

The process involves fusing the 1.5" squares onto a fusible web (marked with the grid).   Then a strip of mosaics are sewn in one direction with 1/4" seam.  In this case, I did all horizontal rows

Unfortunately, to avoid bulk at the seams, the intersections all have to be snipped.  The panel I worked on today involved 1200 snips which took 45 minutes. 

So at the end of the day, I have about 1/2 of the vertical seams done on this panel.  And while some of the background pieces don't have to be cut into individual squares, the final quilt top will have the equivalent of 75,000 One Inch Squares.     (Maybe why I lost enthusiasm for the project?)

Betty Jeanne

 I started a quilt for my mom in 2010, when I was also working on the USA quilt using 6" squares when the Farmer's Daughter quilt was all the rage. 

 While on a 6666 mile road trip with mom and my 2 teen aged daughters, we collected fabrics and brainstormed blocks to represent each year of her life (She was 80 at the time.)  The project fizzled out because the blue fabric she picked was an odd shade of blue that I couldn't match with any other blue over the next couple years.  Plus I'd lost momentum & desire for that much piecing.

  The morning of her 91st birthday, I looked at the collection of the 9 completed blocks on my design wall and decided to make a pillow to take to her in 2 days when I was attending a family wedding.  I was informed that she did not want or need a pillow.   I spent 2 hours looking for the file of blocks and list of what we were going to include.  No luck. 

Spent the next day and a half making blocks I could figure out mathematically and/or trim to size.  Then some mad machine quilting.   I failed to take any pictures of the finished quilt as I was up until midnight waiting for it to dry so I could bind it.  Still wasn't dry when I went to bed, so up at 5am to finish so we could be on the road by 7am.

Good news:  she liked it.  And I have another project of my eternal UFO list.

Vizsla

 My friend Stephanie commissioned a quilt to be used as a fund raiser for Vizsla Rescue.
Making a solid brown short haired dog that doesn't look like a brown blob turns out to be quite an adventure.  I collected fabrics on my quilt shop road trip a month ago.  80% were what I felt were the wrong shades of rust when I started pulling colors.

 The dog's face went together relatively easily.  I only needed small pieces and had some in the stash that I thought were perfect.  Like the nose and the end of the muzzle with dots to suggest whiskers.  This face is a composite of 3 of Stephanie's dogs.

The body was far more of a challenge, needing  bigger pieces and subtle gradations to suggest shading and dimension.  Fabrics I didn't like up close, look great at a distance.  To save time/money, I used raw edge applique and free motion machine quilting.  Having learned the hard way from the Octopus quilt, I cut away all but 1 cm around the outer edge of the individual pieces on the body/legs to keep it from feeling too stiff.   I also used machine embroidery thread rather than regular cotton thread.  It is thicker and adds some sheen.  There are 3 shades of rust which I also used for some shading.  Again, only noticeable up close. You can see the suggestion of texture from the wiggly line stitching that I used to suggest fur.  That texture will improve when it's washed & dried. I did some thread painting which for the most part is just a second or 3rd round of thread around the outside edges, But some other details you may notice if you enlarge the face photo. 

Next challenge is to decide on the background quilting.  I picked the fabric to represent a field.  I'm imagining a gradation of plants.  Leaves, grass, shrubs, sky.  Maybe cat-tails.  Stay tuned.