Scrap Control

Are your scraps out of control?  This past week I found myself with some time on my hands and I decided to start using them up or cutting them into usable sizes for future projects.  Starting with cream/white, I cut 2.5” and 3.5” squares, and then used the leftovers to piece some improv slabs.

You can see I also did a few dark gray/black blocks too.  I had no idea how good this was going to look until I started laying out the blocks and took the photo.  I made a serious dent in the lighter scraps, but still have tons of other scraps to work through…

I’m thinking of focusing on aqua and orange for the other blocks to include in the quilt with the cream and dark gray.  What do you think?  Maybe lime green, too.

I also finished up quilting my nested churn dash wall hanging.  It is not perfect by any means, but I’m really happy with how it turned out.

I did not follow Angela Walters’s advice to use thread that will blend.  Instead I used what I had, which was light aqua and highly contrasted with the charcoal fabric.  I really need to work on either starting and stopping more unnoticeably or learn how to bury my threads…

My regular sewing machine was having issues again and is in the shop (it went in the day after I finished my Michael Miller challenge quilt), so I’ve been using my daughter’s Janome in the interim.   The binding on this wallhanging will have to wait a while because my daughter’s machine doesn’t have a walking foot, a necessity for machine binding!

Thanks for visiting and have a great weekend!

Can I make a modern quilt?

Now that I can sew a 1/4 inch seam consistently and have paper-pieced, chain pieced, and sewn curves, I’ve spent my sewing time concentrating less on learning how to sew and more on figuring out what I want to sew.

Last week the Modern Quilt Guild offered a free webinar for members by Heather Grant called “Design Fundamentals of Modern Quilting.”  She talked about negative space, scale, color, and grids.  Many of these aspects of design were totally new concepts to me—a little scary considering I’ve been quilting almost 6 years now!    My husband always asks  me to put into words why I like certain quilts, and now I have some useful vocabulary to help me do so.

One thing I learned from this webinar is that I’ve never made any quilts that are really, truly modern in design.  I definitely follow the modern quilter’s philosophy, but don’t necessarily follow the aesthetic when it comes to making design choices.  The most important thing I took away from this webinar is that I want to challenge myself to think more about what I’m sewing from a design perspective.

It was very convenient that I watched this webinar after reading this book.

I ordered this book from Amazon about a month ago, kind of on a whim as it was recommended when I was purchasing something else.

I’ve thought about this book and the people in it so much over the past few weeks.  I read it cover-to-cover the day it arrived.  It contains 1-2 page interviews/summaries of/biographies of notable quilters who are part of or have influenced modern quilting.  While some reviewers on Amazon complained that the amount of information was not in-depth enough, I found it to be just the right amount.  If I wanted to know more, I could Google that person and find out whatever I wanted to know or resources to point me in that direction.  Many of the people in the book are important contributors to modern quilting and I had never even heard of them.  Since watching the design fundamentals webinar, I’ve read this entire book cover-to-cover again.

With all this in mind, hopefully my next quilt will be modern in both philosophy and aesthetic.  My friend CeLynn joined the triangle quilt along by The Sassy Quilter.  I’ve always wanted to make a quilt with triangles and already had the ruler, so I cut my fabric last night.

This triangle stack is made from the darker prints from Lizzy House Constellations and a few other fabrics from my stash, and then solid creams, whites, and grays.  One of the words Heather Grant used a lot in the webinar was “graphic,” so I chose fabrics keeping that in mind.

Whether or not this quilt turns out to be modern, quilt alongs are always fun!