All the log cabin blocks are finally complete!
Stacked in sets by color, I can already tell it will be a wild quilt, but I’m loving all the great color and the pattern play.
I’m going to set up a design wall to lay this one out. It will be much easier that way to get the full effect of the interplay of patterns so I can place the blocks in the best arrangement.
Can’t wait to see it!
3G
2018 CVQG Raffle Quilt and show layout.
It has been a busy year preparing for the Catawba Valley Quilter’s Guild 2018 quilt show. The show, offered every 3 years is a big deal for our guild. We expect to have over 300 quilts created by the guild members (only) on display at the Hickory Convention Center.
I’ve been proud to be part of the huge team working on this show. So many of our guild members have contributed time and energy to create this incredible show. For my part, I designed the raffle quilt that is a big fundraiser for the show. It was created by the team guild members on the raffle quilt committee and quilted in great detail by the very talented Rebecca Mullins. It is pictured here hanging in the entrance to the show to entice visitors to buy a raffle ticket – or 20. Isn’t the quilting phenomenal?!
In addition to designing the raffle quilt, I volunteered to do the show’s floorplan and the ‘hang’ layout for all the quilts. It’s an interesting challenge to design a show when you don’t really know how many quilts or what sizes to expect. But using the information about the entries from the 2015 show, as well as a empty floorplan from the convention center, I was able to maximize the space for a little over 300 quilts, 20 vendors, the Lily Boutique (items made by guild members for sale), a QOV space, and a demo space.
It was a nice easy layout with lots of roomy aisles all the way around. And based on the data from the last show, we should have room for 325-350 quilts to display.
~3G
In the previous post, I showed how I built the large graduated background for the sun quilt. In this post, I’ll share how I created the sun and attached it to the background.
I attached the finished rays to the round body of the sun to create the full sun. With the sun fully together and the background fully pieced, I was ready to attach the sun to the quilt. I laid out the background and pinned the sun in place on it. Then I used a blind hemstitch with monofilament thread and attached the sun and rays to the background.
Now for the scary part: cutting away the background from behind the sun.
Turning the quilt top over, I was able to see the blind hemstitch line around the sun and its rays. I drew a 1/4″ line inside the stitching line on each ray. Using scissors and lifting the backing away from the sun rays I had just appliquéd onto the backing, I cut away the excess backing, being careful not to snip any portion the sun.
Finally, quilt top was complete!
The next post describes how I planned and executed the quilting design, binding, and backing.
Sometimes you just don’t know how to construct a quilt design that is easily drawn. A sketch is simple enough but when it comes to actually putting it together, a little engineering is sometimes required. The Hickory Sun Day quilt I made for Hickory Day School, was a ‘figure it out as you go’ quilt.
The quilt’s design is based on school’s sun logo. I envisioned a cross-fade of small bits of blue fabric for the background, getting lighter the closer it gets to the sun image. Almost like a blue fabric mosaic. For the sun, I imagined that it would also cross-fade from dark gold to pale yellow from the sun’s body to the tips of the sun rays.
I made a quick sketch and began collecting fabrics in wide range of blues and yellows. At first my selections were strictly batiks because of their color intensity, the range of values, and the variation in a color range within a single fabric. But I found that sticking just to batiks was too limiting; I couldn’t get the colors I wanted, so printed cottons eventually found their way into the quilt.
But how could I construct this quilt?!
With only 3 finished quilts under my belt, I didn’t have a clue how to put it together. My previous quilts used only squares and rectangles. But this quilt had circles and triangles laid out over a large graduated blue field. How could I get that effect with just squares and rectangles?
That’s when I discovered foundation piecing.
Foundation piecing is a simple way of using paper patterns to help quilters piece designs that are too complex for success with traditional piecing. Fabric strips are sewn to paper in overlapping straight lines and the paper is peeled off when the block or shape is complete. These complex pieced blocks then can be assembled into quilts using traditional piecing.
Luckily, I had received a free quilting book with a recent AQS fabric order. Quilts with Attitude by Deb Karasik contained instructions for foundation piecing, and that seemed like a good solution for the sun rays. Deb’s book explained in detail (with photos) how to foundation piece strips of fabric. It was exactly the solution to create the effected I wanted.
Using butcher block paper craft paper, I made a life-size template of the sun and one of its rays. Using a string with a pencil at one end and an brick at the other, I formed a simple compass. I traced the sun’s arc and then used a yardstick to draw the sun’s rays.
Cutting out the the sun’s body and one sun ray gave me exact size paper templates on which I could create the radiating color effect. I wanted the use a chevron effect within each ray to give it movement and direction. This served as the pattern for how I wanted the finished sun to look, but to achieve it, I needed paper foundations.
Foundation piecing is best achieved by using a thin paper that is easy to tear off the finished block. So I traced the sun ray’s chevron pattern I had designed onto a artist tracing paper (a thin, translucent paper) to created the foundations papers. It worked like a dream!
For the sun’s body, I drew concentric circles on the Kraft paper, then created patterns by tracing the circles once again onto tracing paper, adding 1/4″ to on both sides of each concentric circle for seam allowances. From these pattern templates I was able to cut out and sew together the concentric circles for the sun’s body. The outcome was exactly as I’d hoped for: the sun’s body was luminous and had even had dimension because of the graduated colors I used.
Want to know more? Find out how the background blue mosaic came together in the next post.
3G Quilts 