I retired a few years ago, just when Covid hit, and decided to take up quilting as something constructive to do. I had made a quilt entirely by hand many years earlier and was less than pleased with the result. (Don't have a picture of it – second-handed it many years ago). My eldest daughter took up machine quilting about ten years ago and made several quilts, including a couple of bedspreads, and it looked like fun and a lot easier to do, so, now that I had the time to spend, I took a quilting class.
Of course, before I took the class I started the Purple Peril above, because I'm impatient and stubborn and I knew I could count on some helpful advice from my daughter if I got myself in a jam. I designed it myself, with colored pencils and graph paper. It's probably just as well I started it before the class, because I might never have had the courage to do it otherwise! Compared to the quilt I did in class, it was fiendishly complicated for a beginner – more than once I ended up with the wrong purple attached to the wrong blue, or a square turned 90 degrees from where it should have been, and so on. Why? Because you can't do a quilt all at once, and need to break it down into sections and sub-sections. And the problem is that each little sub-section looks great on its own – until you try to join them all together, and only later figure out you've blown it. Quilts-on-paper look nice and easy and organized. Quilts-in-reality work like computer programs: they do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do, and unless you keep close watch, things get out of control very quickly. But it was worth it. I leaned a whole lot of “dumb things not to do,” and quickly fell into a love-hate relationship with triangles – they are really, really hard, but so much fun when you get them to work! And I have my very own bedspread that, partly because it is so bizarre, I really like.
Compared to the Purple Peril, the in-class quilt was dead simple. And, in my opinion, dead boring,
Class Quilt
The class was loosely based on the book “Quilter's Academy Vol 1” by Harriet and Carrie Hargrave. I learned a few things from the book and the class, but most of what I learned I found less than useful, I'm afraid. The book is very, very good at teaching you extreme precision – for squares and rectangles only. (Perhaps vol 2 has triangles?) Extreme precision is great if you are doing a quilt to wow other quilters – but if you want to make lots of good, solid quilts for family and friends, you don't need to be quite so persnickety. (For one thing, I don't pin my seams – oh horrors! – because I've found that careful, attentive sewing does the trick most of the time, saves time, and you have to sew them anyway, pinned or not, so why not just get on with it?) And nearly all the quilts in the book, IMHO, are boring at best and downright ugly at worst. (On the other hand, unless you really like purple, the Purple Peril is probably ugly too, so there's that.) If you are going to spend all that time and effort on a quilt, why not make something vibrant and beautiful and even a little out of the ordinary rather than make something that looks like every other quilt that has ever been made? The class quilt is in two different color sets because I made one half and my daughter made the other half so I could teach her what I learned in the class. We used some cloth we had on hand, so it wasn't as harmonious as I would have liked, but it covers our futon well, so that's good enough.
The next quilt I did was for a friend of mine in Colorado. I love Colorado – one of the most beautiful states in the Union – and I decided to celebrate the colors of the place with the quilt.
Sunset Shift
So Sunset Shift was born. It's a queen-sized quilt with twelve colors for the three-inch squares and an extra black around the border. I used batik cloth for all of it. I love batik for a variety of reasons. First, the thread count is very high, so you can sew, rip out your seams, and re-sew as needed, give it a spritz of water and a quick ironing and it comes back smiling. I also love the fact that it isn't just one single, solid color, but a whole range of values within each color, and that the patterns in the colors have sort of a lovely constrained randomness to them which I find very pleasing.
After that I decided to make a quilt for my sister-in-law. I searched through several of the books on quilting my daughter had and also online to find a pattern that was both not too terribly difficult for a beginner like myself but was also interesting and unusual as well. (I don't ask for much, do I?) I came across one that I totally fell in love with while at the same time realizing that it was probably out of my league. It was called “Atlantic Seas” (https://www.quilterscache.com/A/AtlanticSeasBlock.html). The basic square is actually quite simple (even though it is made entirely out of triangles), and it not only uses the clever idea of alternating the colors, it is the careful orientation of the sub-squares that makes the pattern amazing. (I tried fooling around with the basic square with colored pencils and graph paper again, and discovered that you can make a lot of boring quilts with it – but put it together in the specific orientation it is in the example and there is a magical motion and delight to it that would make M.C. Escher proud.) However, joining all those triangles at all those points and getting them to work across a queen-sized quilt seemed more than a little daunting. So back to colored pencils again. I discovered that I could put a border around a set of four sub-squares and have at least some of the motion and magic still remaining. So that's what I did. The result is “El Nino,” It, too, uses batik cloth.
El Nino
I have to admit my technique was a bit sloppy on this one. Triangles on paper are easy, Triangles on cloth are hard. Cloth bends, twists, and distorts, especially with triangles, because you are guaranteed to have at least one side cut on a bias. Just sewing the darn things together distorts them! And, even with the assist of the borders, each main square was hard to put together with sufficient accuracy to make it work. You not only have to get them all to look good in themselves, you have to get them to match each other sufficiently, not just in the pattern and the placement of the points on the triangles, but in size and shape as well. And there are 56 main squares! (And a total of 2,688 triangles, if you are counting.) True, the two-inch borders made it possible to fudge a little bit if a square was slightly too big or too small – but even that can only go so far. It didn't help any that I was trying to get this done in a hurry – I was planning on visiting my SIL and niece in April of 2023 and wanted to bring the quilt along. I managed to get the piecing done in what would have been enough time – but the “sandwich” (pieced top + batting + backing) was a complete disaster. The backing cloth was of poor quality (as a beginner, I didn't know what to watch out for) and every time I tried to quilt I ended up with huge wrinkles and folds in the backing. I don't have a table large enough for a whole queen-sized quilt to lay flat, so I had to move things around a lot, and, even after extensive pinning, the wrinkles kept showing up. It was a complete mess. I tired to quilt as best I could to get it done in time, but in the end I finally had to tear the whole sandwich apart, cut the quilt into five pieces, put it together bit-by-bit so each piece could lay flat on the table and the backing cloth would behave, then claw all the pieces back together again. I got it to work, eventually, and sent it off in the mail a month or so later.
You would think, after all this frustration, that I would give up on this very difficult pattern and try something easier. Of course not! My niece was sufficiently impressed with the result that she requested a quilt of her own. She told me the colors she wanted, and I found them, not in batik this time, but another cloth series called “Chroma” that has a semi-irregular abstract pattern that comes in a whole variety of colors that are variations on that theme. (https://fortworthfabricstudio.com/cdn/shop/collections/Chroma_1200x1200.jpg?v=1665672947. Just for the record, I used Alabaster, Earth, Pineapple Crush and Sunflower for my niece's quilt.) Since her mom's was El Nino, of course hers is “La Nina.”
La Nina
This one worked a whole lot better from a technical standpoint. It helped that I discovered I had made one of my paper triangle templates just slightly too small in the first quilt. (That kind of error propagates and multiplies across the quilt– on one square it's not so bad, but across the whole quilt? Awful!) And I knew to get a higher-quality backing cloth, so the whole thing worked much better.
I have just finished a third quilt in this series, this time for the mother of my friend in Colorado. After three tries, I've gotten really good at this pattern and, while the end result is not superb by any means, it's really darn good from a technical standpoint. She chose the colors, and the whole thing is a joyous celebration of turquoise. Here is a picture of the completed quilt (Sand, Sky, Sea, Surf), and additional one showing a detail of two squares and the border between them. Just for fun, I did the binding with the same cloth as the backing; surprisingly, it worked quite well at pulling all four of the other colors together.
Sand, Sky, Sea, Surf
These are not quilts that will win any awards. They are not quilts that will end up hanging in the White House. And I'm fine with that, because they are are all made with honest, solid effort for people I care about in order to give them something warm and loving and useful that I had a lot of fun making. And that is deeply satisfying. May all my fellow DKOSians be equally as fortunate as I in that regard.
Detail
