In Joyce's hands....

The final chapter on my quilting of Joyce's quilt went out in the mail on Friday.  The post office in Cary says her carrier has it out for delivery so she'll have them today.

Above is one of the placemats and below is one side of the runner.

 

The hardest part of the project was getting all the batting fuzz off the black fabric.

The photo above shows the backing - I took the pictures on a dark and cloudy morning, just before sealing the box and sending these off. It's really a bright and beautiful batik, but the pictures that show the fabric don't show the quilting. Now Joyce, you can pick out a coordinating napkin fabric - two yards!

Joyce's quilt - Encore

When we made the borders for Joyce's quilt out of the beautiful yardage  Vicki Welsh custom hand dyed for us, we only used about half of the width of the fabric. I didn't want to put it in the drawers with all my other collected fabrics to get lost (and which color would I file it with anyway??).  I left it out and finally asked Joyce if she'd like me to make her place mats or a table runner with it.  Joyce said she could use either.

 

So she gets both!   This is going to be perfect in her very modern house with her black dishware.  I designed the mats to show the full gradation on each mat and get maximum use of the special fabric.

I've made her a set of coordinating napkins already - but I only had enough of that fabric to make six.  She can pick another fabric and I'll make her a full set of 8 napkins to go with these.  

Under the runner on the right you can make out a bit of the backing fabric from Joyce's quilt, which will serve to back the mats and the runner.  I've already started quilting the mats - they should not take long as the fabric tells the whole story:  the quilting just has to hold the layers together.

Joyce has a new quilt!

Joyce's quilt is completed except for a label - I told Joyce if the quilt is going to get a name, she gets to pick it.


I shipped the quilt to her on Tuesday and she got it today. On Monday, I put an old sheet on the slope of the driveway where it had no tree shadows to get a better picture of the colors than I could get in the studio - the quilt is too large to hang from my quilt display rack.




And of course there have to be a few pictures to show the quilting. I had the most fun with the curved rays in the accent triangles, and the triangles on the border made from the custom dyed fabric, by Vicki Welsh.


My goal was to keep the quilting graphic, fairly open, and to enjoy it, which I did.

Finally, I'll include one last view of the quilt in Joyce and Don's house - with Noni, since you always have to have a cat in quilt photos.


What's your next quilting project going to be Joyce?

Spectacular color!

Vicki Welsh's custom hand dyed fabric for Joyce's quilt arrived yesterday and it is gorgeous! Today I finished getting the quilt ready to start machine quilting. Vicki's piece could not be more perfect with the color wash Joyce created with all the triangles of red, purple and blue -

I've taken a couple of shots from closer up for Joyce to admire the new borders -

Vicki died a three-yard length of fabric so no piecing of this border was required. She put blue on both ends, red in the center, and a couple of shades of purple between on both sides. Here's a shot from the perspective of the bluest part of Joyce's quilt-


Usually, our camera turns purples into a weird red color. This time, it seems it got carried away with the reds, intensifying them so they look pixilated in this photo.

One taken from the opposite corner - I sent Vicki some sample triangles from the red and blue parts of this quilt - she filled in with the purples.


It was extremely easy and fast to get this custom piece made! Just as a reminder, Vicki's hand dyes can be purchased from her Etsy shop.

(earlier blog posts of Joyce's quilt can be seen by clicking on the "Joyce's New Quilt" label at the end of this post)

Joyce's Quilt - update

I managed to get the next phase of Joyce's quilt top pieced even with too much help from Moki. The quilt-in-progress was last seen when I was in Chicago for Roger and Laurie's wedding. At that time, I got one corner put together while Joyce worked out the layout for the color gradation with help from her daughter Niki. To keep their work intact, I brought it home with all the pieces pinned to a sheet.

Even though the pieces looked beautiful, there's something more special when you get them sewn together. This view is turned 90 degrees from how Joyce intends to use it.


Lily is proving she's a cat - I laid this out on the bed first and she was there, then I brought it downstairs and she was was in the photos here as well.

Now it's up to Joyce (currently on a cruise vacation with her family) to decide on the border fabrics so I can finish this up! Her last quilt had a gradation of blues for an inner border about three inches wide, and solid black to drape over the edge of the bed. We used Vicki's black-white gradation for those triangle insets - and a red-blue one supplemented all the fabrics we had for the pieced colored areas. So Joyce may be able to find something she likes in Vicki's shop for that border.

...continued from February

I'm in Chicago for my brother's wedding, so there won't be an update on the Civil War Block of the Week today - I'll get to it later this week, but it is going to be a challenging block: a five-pointed star pieced -- not appliqued -- into the background.

Meanwhile, I'm staying at sister Joyce's and we've got the king sized-color-wash quilt out for the next phase of construction - This is what the quilt looked like last night:



The little baggies contain the various shades of red, purple and blue fabrics we cut into 1/2 square triangles last winter. The larger black to very light gray triangles were each cut from a single hand-dyed gradient fabric purchased from Vicki Welsh .

And here are Joyce and Niki working on the layout of the final gradient, which shades from red to blue; upper left to lower right.

When they get a final layout of some of these triangles, I'll be starting the actual piecing at the sewing machine. Meanwhile, I'm doing a repair job on a pair of Niki's jeans.

Joyce's quilt - the center is complete

I have to post this so Joyce can see it will be waiting for her next time she comes for a visit.


As usual, you can click for a larger view - but it's also fun to look at the thumbnail of this one to appreciate all the work Niki and Joyce did getting those colors to flow.

Progress on Joyce's quilt

We worked hard today to get all the pieces Joyce and Niki had been laying out all sewn together.


We have positioned these large triangles on the design wall with black fabric underneath to simulate the accent strips Joyce will be using. Now she has to decide how wide to make the strip of black, but that's about as far as we'll get on her quilt this visit. She'll have to come back this summer so we can continue with the next stage of construction.

Palette for a quilt -

Progress on Joyce's quilt is now well underway - after cutting up some new fabrics, Cheryl is piecing the fabrics Joyce had laid out and pinned to a tablecloth and rolled up two and a half years ago. Joyce is working on the layout at the design wall.


Niki took a break from writing a paper for school and wound up with the job of helping Joyce sort the new pieces.


The quilting machine table is a handy work surface for the effort -

The cutting table holds the remaining pieces -

A Second-Time Quilt

Earlier this week, I posted a photo of the drawer of fabrics set aside for Joyce's quilt. She was nice enough to send me a scan of a photo of the original quilt we made, way back in the mid-1990's. I believe it was the second quilt I ever made.

(The kitty cat modeling the quilt is Stosh, who lived to the ripe age of 18)

The design was based on a tile Joyce and her husband used in their bathroom. They had a designer come to help finish the master bedroom design. The designer liked the tile motif and quilt colors and had a cornice made to match.

This photo is in color - it's simply a gray tile! Obviously, we made the quilt more colorful. Joyce chose fabrics that go from black to red diagonally across the outer part of the quilt, and from red to blue in the inner square on point.

Joyce's quilt has unfortunately suffered from years of use and exposure to sunlight -- one of the red fabrics has pretty well disintegrated. So we are remaking the quilt. Joyce learned to sew the same way I did - our mother taught us at home when we were very young and made doll clothes. Later, Mom was our 4-H club leader, so we got written instruction and were judged on our efforts at the County Fair. But Joyce has so far not taken any classes in quilting and has made all her quilts jointly with me.

By now, with ever more complicated queen-sized quilts for her three children under our belts, this remake will be more complicated than the original. Here's a picture of Joyce working on the layout of the red, purple and blue fabrics for one large triangular area.



If you click on the photo, in the upper left hand corner you can see a computer-generated color drawing of the new concept of changing gradually from one color to the other in the large areas that will be on the top of the bed. We are using some of the same fabrics Joyce used 15 years ago that I still have in my collection, but this time we'll need more of each color - and none of the darker reds. I've been looking on-line for collections of fat quarters and charm squares so she'll have more to work from when she gets here in late February.

When Joyce was last here, we pieced most of the large section shown. She took the parts home and I think not much has happened with it since. So we're both looking forward to getting on with this quilt!

fabric storage at Reems Creek Quilting

Dorry was organizing her fabric collection yesterday and asked how the rest of us do it. Unlike some quilters who like their fabric out and visible, I like to hide my clutter and had my sewing studio lined with cabinets. (It is also practical since the quilting machine generates an incredible amount of dust). The drawers are mostly organized by color, but some drawers contain projects - like this small one, with the Civil War blocks fabrics pulled to one place for the year-long quilt-making endeavor -

I recently added several aqua-blue fabrics to what I had originally selected.

And here's a drawer that's been reserved for my sister's quilt since I moved in to the studio.


The last time Joyce came to visit was just after we moved in, two and a half years ago. She helped me get all the pieces of fabric out of boxes and into the drawers, then we started working on her new quilt. The pieces in the lower right corner are fabrics I bought since that I think she might consider adding - except the lightest blues which are for another project. When I work on that one, I will need to borrow from "Joyce's collection."

I'll post more about the blue-red-purple quilt soon - Joyce is coming to visit us in February and we'll finally get cracking on her quilt again!

Norris' mother asked how Kason's quilt was coming along. Our local UPS service got behind with the weather we had the last few weeks, so my yellow sashing fabric was delayed a day. But it arrived on Tuesday, was washed, dried, pressed, and cut. Progress is pretty fast at this point -

The top part is mostly assembled -
The remaining two rows are still on the design wall but not for long.


It almost looks like it's going to be a yellow quilt with all those bars of yellow sashing, but when the final borders go on, it will be a blue and white quilt again, with some red and yellow accents. Kason's Grandpa Marvin is going to want a quilt like this I think.