I love collaboration

Warning!  This is a long post with lots of photos.

My sister-in-law, Willa, is visiting from Virginia.  She brought with her the piece from the International Round Robin that I started.  To see what she brought, go here.  To see my original piece, go here. She also brought several wonderful red and blue fabrics to audition for the next round.  Before we started, however, we took a trip to Shibori Dragon and found even more wonderful fabrics to play with.  That evening, we started playing around with the layout on the living room floor.  After we found something we both liked, we moved everything to the design wall in the studio. I see things better when they are on the wall.

First, we had to cut the pieces to the right width. Willa did most of the cutting while I measured and put them up on the wall.

Cutting is serious business. Willa is on the left.  See my Woodstock t-shirt? 

As we added strips to the wall, Tom was worried about all the white space and how we were going to fill them in.  I think he was worried until it was finally done.

Little by little, it started coming together.  At one point, we had decided to add a curved element to the left side to complement the other curves in the piece that I like so much.  Then, Willa suggested adding the three strips to the bottom piece and I wanted the strip at the top because I really wanted to have a little bit of that fabric in the piece.  When Willa saw the angled bottom to that top strip, she suggested that the bottom strips be angled as well.

Here is the piece with all of our additions. We added the different borders in a deliberate way to create the hint of a Torii gate.  It is hard to see in the photo, but the top piece is a beautiful piece of traditional Japanese indigo fabric. 

Willa and I don't get enough time to quilt together, so this was great fun for me.  She has a wonderful sense of color and design, and as a teacher, she has great collaboration skills.  We have known each other for a long time and have done a number of arts and crafts together over the years, from gardening to crochet to cross-stitch to quilting. It has all been a wonderful journey, but I love the quilting the best.

 I love the way this piece has come together.  There is one more person who will add to it before it is done, but I am really happy that Willa and I got to play with it to this stage.

Joyful quilting, everyone.



More fun in the studio

I really get upset when I can't get the colors right on the screen.  Oh well.  This is really much cooler in person.  The teal in the stars is much more vibrant, and the red in the strips is not so vibrant.  Very frustrating.  Anyway, here it is so far.

The other thing I worked on today was for the International Round Robin.  Here is what I started with.

After looking at this for a long time, I decided to make some diamond stratas and add another piece of applique.  See that piece of KF, third wedge up on the bottom right?  I had another piece of that so decided to make a curvy shape to put on top of the border to bring it all together.  Here is the result of that idea.

This piece goes to one more participant before it goes back to the originator.  As it is with round robins, it has been really interesting and fun to see each piece change from beginning to end.  I already have the last piece I will work on for this robin.  I have no ideas about what to add, but I am sure something will come to me after I look at it for a while.  If you want to see all the pieces, just hop over to our flickr page.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Joyful quilting, everyone.

Seeing stars

I don't know if you can see how stunning this fabric is from the photo.  It is "Flowering star of Ghana" from the 2001 Alexander Henry collection.  When I was visiting my friend Sharon in her studio, she was pulling fabric from her basket of silks and brocades when she casually set this one aside.  I fell in love with it, and she gifted it to me.  It was a one yard piece, with a small 9" square cut out.  Not her colors, she told me.  I have been looking at if for a few weeks now, pulling other fabrics from my shelves and putting them back.  Then, I found a 1/4 yard piece of the teal flowers from Sandy Gervais Tranquility and knew that was it.  I spent a few minutes doodling, and then set to work.

At this point, this is what I have.  These will all come together as a liberated medallion of sorts.  The hsts are left overs from the stars I showed in the last post.  I am also going to use strips of the orange fabric to fill in.  I may use some narrow strips from the dark teal in the hsts.  I want to make sure the liberated stars really stand out when all is said and done.  I have only made these a couple of times before, and I really like them, even though they take much longer than regular stars.  Sometimes, it takes more thought to be liberated.

This is going to be another one of my process, or intuitive, quilts.  So far, all I have is a seed of an idea for the middle.  I have to dig through my stash and see how much teal and orange I can find.  That will dictate the final size of this piece. 

 Joyful quilting, everyone.