Aboriginal ???



The Aboriginal Quilt, 70 x 84 inches.
Quilted by Maggi Honeyman.

Looks like this one was about two years in the making. Started with a block made for fun and now has ended with the last binding stitches. You can read about the process here.

 

Love that fabric in the left corner. I think it's a Thimbleberries.
Also used toile, repros, text and part of a Halloween line!

The back. Not terribly exciting, but the fabric complements the front
(despite my photography skills) and was on sale.

I'm not sure what to call it. In my head it's The Aboriginal Quilt because I tried to use Aboriginal fabric in every block, but that name doesn't match the look. Suggestions welcome.

Top done!

The top is all put together. Boy, does that take a long time! Always longer than I expect. I try to piece in groups of blocks, like four patches and nine patches, instead of in rows because the shorter seams make the assembly go faster. At least it seems that way to me. All those long row seams are so tedious.

Not sure how to quilt it or what to do about binding. Maybe a knife-edge binding? Or if regular binding, then scraps of the block fabric or the text fabric used for the half-square triangles. Decisions, decisions.

One more row to go

Five blocks left to piece sounds better than "100 more half-square triangles to go!" I'm stopping at 30 blocks because that's all the cornerstone fabric I have, and the quilt will be plenty big by then: 70"x84."

 Some blocks from the past week.

 
The binding is on Zach's quilt, labels made and attached, quilts washed and packed up. This week I'll be shipping off quilts to four boys. Just a couple more quilts to make for special people, and I can start something new relatively guilt free. Ha.  

The front of Zach's quilt.

The back of Zach's quilt.

Evolution of a UFO

This isn't the UFO. This is progress on the Aboriginal quilt.

Or why the Internet is evil. Before the Internet, I would procrastinate doing something by cleaning, usually the kitchen cupboards or the junk drawer. Now I read blogs. Lots of blogs. And find lots of great projects to start. Usually I can stop myself from starting them. Usually.

But recently I was lured into beginning Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt Roll Roll Cotton Boll. Hey, it could be made entirely from stash, and I wouldn't have to think, just do whatever she said each week. A nice little break from my Aboriginal quilt and avoidance of the purse and tote bag I really needed to make for the nieces.

This is part of the UFO: Fabric and sewn units from some steps.

So I pulled lots of fabric, watched for each step to be posted, and promptly fell behind because that Bonnie is a task master. Then I saw the step that called for 600 HST (that's 600 half-square triangles!) I looked at the other steps and thought, "Oh no, I'm making the same blocks as in the Aboriginal quilt. The quilt I'm trying to take a break from."

More UFO parts with other project scraps.

After a half-hearted attempt to find a fast method to make half-square triangles that was accurate without requiring lots of trimming, I have not put another stitch in this quilt, but I haven't packed it away in a drawer yet as evidenced by the piles around the quilt room. I've seen a few finished tops, and it does look quite nice, but I'm so far behind now.

Getting the focus back on the Aboriginal blocks.

Hitting the wall on the mystery quilt did prompt me to work on the purse and tote bag, and I've made a couple more Aboriginal blocks, which I think I'll concentrate on now. Although I just got the Material Obsession 2 book, and I want to make every quilt in there! And Lori's doll quilt is terribly cute ... and small ... and could be made entirely from my scraps ... and I wouldn't have to think, just do whatever she said.

Slow progress

Seventeen pieced, and six more cut out. I've been enjoying choosing all the fabrics for each block position and then cutting them. I rummage around in my stash for something else that might work in a position, then rummage some more and reject most of them before making final decisions. I love the fabric selection process. I could do that all day, but I'd have nothing to show you except a stack of fabric. Maybe you'd like that.

The only rule has been a minimum of one Aboriginal fabric per block, but as I was admiring my handiwork the other day I realized I made one without any Aboriginal fabric! I also realized as I looked at this photo, that the yellow fabric in the large half-square triangles in two of the blocks (top row second from right and second row second from left) probably needs to be in three blocks to balance out its placement.

A busy couple of weeks

I made these newspaper placemats as a retirement present for my friend, who I met on my first journalism job more than 20 years ago. She was the cops reporter when I started, and when you went somewhere with her she would point out crime scenes along the way. She got me more interested in cooking and to subscribe to Bon Appetit, which I still do. Her party was great, and I got to visit with people I hadn't seen in decades, and we told lots of stories of my friend. Those were such fun times. I guess because we were young and had the energy to try anything. 

I was, of course, stitching these placemats up the night before I flew back to New England for her retirement party! I adapted the pattern from Penny's napkin tutorial at Sew Take A Hike, changing the dimensions to be placemat size instead of napkin size, and using two layers of newspaper fabric so the placemats are reversible. I used solid fabrics from my stash for the border, but because I didn't have enough of one fabric for all the borders, I used a different blue for each.

I'm still plugging away at the Aboriginal blocks. This is what they looked like before I took them off the design wall to work on a Halloween table topper.

I searched through Barbara Brackman's "Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns," looking up words related to autumn (fall, leaves, pumpkins, etc.) to find a block that would work for this project. I found Autumn Tints (1103c), which seemed perfect: simple construction that could be arranged into an interesting composition that matched the tone/mood of the fabric.

I made some sketches and started piecing. The center was to be a solid piece of fabric so that if you set a vase or something on the center, it wouldn't wobble on top of a seam or cover up the piecing. The black fabric seemed too stark, and the orange was perfect, but I didn't have a big enough piece.

So I cut the biggest piece of the orange I could, and then cut out the pumpkin stripe from Minick & Simpson's great Halloween Night fabric and mitred it around the edge. When I was done, I realized I hadn't calculated correctly (looked at the finished size instead of the unfinished size when I was cutting!) so I had to add some coping strips to make it a bit bigger!

The plan all along was to use the pumpkin stripe as a mitred outside border, and I like the way it looks even though the pumpkins don't match up on the mitres. I used Harriet Hargrave and Sharyn Craig's book "The Art of Classic Quiltmaking" for a refresher on mitring.

If you've made it this far, then you get to see the lovely little bouquet of flowers my neighbor brought me yesterday when she came to check on me. I was hit by a car Friday night walking home from work. I was in the middle of a crosswalk, when a man who was stopped at the stop sign decided to drive through the intersection. He drove right into me, knocked me down and stopped on my foot. Amazingly, nothing seems to have been broken. I don't know what is more shocking: seeing a car tire parked on your foot or having someone drive into you so purposefully! I've been trying to stay off it and keep it elevated, but it is my sewing pedal foot, and I have a whole long weekend of stitching planned.

Traditional modern quilting

The block that started it all. More photos below.

Before the long stretch of work travel, I read these posts about modern quilting. I had been thinking about modern quilting some before reading the posts. Seems to me that the current modern look is very much like old, traditional quilts yet I have the feeling the modern quilter doesn't want to have anything to do with traditional quilters. I find myself caught in the middle.

My mother quilted, starting in the mid-'70s, but I was never that interested until in my (early!) 30s when I was looking for a present for her and I wandered into a quilt shop. I was captivated by the fabric and the quilts and took a class. I've been quilting for more than a dozen years now.

I took lots of classes, learning as much as I could about different techniques so that I could make what I wanted the way I wanted. I've followed patterns, more so in the beginning, but I prefer to make up my own designs and pick my own fabric, which is the best part.

I look at the current modern stuff and it reminds me of my beginning quilting: simple designs, lots of white. I like it, but I don't want to make it. Nor do I want to make a Dear Jane quilt. And that's why I feel caught in the middle. Caught between too simple and too complicated. Current modern and traditional. Trying to find my own style by taking a little from this and a little from that, appreciating it all, but not feeling obligated to be one thing or the other.

I started this blog to document the things I was doing (so I could remember when, how, why) and so I'm taking the process pledge and will try to be more articulate about my choices.

Here goes:

Picking fabrics one block at a time.

That block at the start of this post started it all. I was working on the Sue Ross BOM and had ordered some Aboriginal fabric from Material Obsession. The fabric and the pattern came together in my head and I made one block. Liked it, and decided a bigger quilt was in order.

Normally my fabric selection process is to pull a bunch of fabrics, decide what goes together and use that pile. This time I made one block, and decided the background and corner squares would be the constants through all the blocks, and every block should have some Aboriginal fabric in it. Then I chose the fabrics for each block, pulling from my stash as I went, and not paying attention to how all the fabrics look together in a pile. They do seem to look OK piled together, but I'm not sure I would have pulled this particular pile of fabric if I had used my usual selection process.

Tools of the trade include a remote.

I make my half-square triangles bigger and trim them down. I'm a little anal retentive about accuracy.

Here's where I'm at: Six blocks made. Enough cornerstone fabric for 11 blocks. Enough background for 10. Wanting to make a much bigger quilt. Thinking of setting the blocks solid instead of the original vision for sashing.

So off to the quilt shop to see if I can find more of that background and cornerstone fabric.