Blogger's Quilt Festival - Jack's Chain

 

 

For my 4th time I'm sharing a quilt in the Blogger's Quilt Festival hosted by Amy's Creative Side.  This time I decided to share Jack's Chain.  Many of you have already seen my tutorial on how to piece the top - it's the single most popular post on this blog.  I did, finally, get around to quilting that top, just before Christmas, and gave the quilt as a gift to my daughter Tertia.

So here it is in its natural habitat, complete with Disney princess poster and dirty glasses and homemade teddy bear nightgown.  I think she likes it.  Plus, she's always happy to pose for a picture.

These are the newest pictures -- since I've blogged about Jack's Chain so much there were lots of pictures at earlier stages.  Here are a few:

Jack's Chain was a UFO for a long time, until I resurrected it and finished it last year.  The quilt is 67x94", with scalloped edges.  I backed it with a vintage sheet and used another vintage sheet to make the bias binding (probably a mistake, the high thread count made it difficult to push the needle through, but I managed.)  I like the picture above which shows the detail of the feathered snowflake quilting I did on the center hexagons. It's hard to see in all the other pictures.

 

I go into detail in the tutorial, but I think Jack's Chain is a pattern that is visually fascinating and charming in an old-fashioned way.  It is well within the reach of an intermediate quilter and one, like me, who is too impatient to do English paper piecing but still wants to do hexagons.  You do have to be somewhat stubborn to finish it -- after all, there are a LOT of little 9-patches and Y-seams.  But I'd love to see more quilters bring back this pattern from the golden age of quilting.

 

 

Cosmology: Creatio ex Foedo



I decided to enter this quilt in the Blogger's Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side.  I made it about 3 years ago as a challenge to use some really, really ugly fabric that my friend Joyce had bought and then thought better of.  It's called "Cosmology: Creatio ex Foedo"  Cosmology is a play on the fabric line Cosmos from Connecting Threads which I used to complete the quilt, and which is not ugly; and Creatio ex Foedo is Latin for "creation out of the ugly."

You can see the ugly fabric in the center of each block and in the cornerstones.  It is this wacky combination of grass green, magenta pink, yellow and orangey-green.  But!  If you combine the ugly fabric with a bunch of pretty fabric and make sure the ugly fabric is cut up in smallish pieces, it works. 

I used a pattern called Glory Bee from a book by Evelyn Sloppy.  The original quilt is in patriotic red-white-blue colors, but I decided to pull fabric in magentas, greens, and golds, including a lot of light greens and yellows as well as darker greens.  I used my collection of fat quarters in the "Cosmos" line and another collection of shot cottons by Kaffe Fassett, plus a whole bunch of other fabrics, and the pretty fabrics took the ugly right out of the theme fabric.  The quilt has an interesting effect of looking like dappled light in a vineyard or a garden because of all the variations of value, and it's now hanging in my dining room.  I think it's funny that the more quilts I make, the less "planned" and the more scrappy I tend to go.  I loved both of those fabric collections, but could never get inspired to use them until I had an ugly fabric to combine them with.

It's quilted in an allover squiggle pattern with variegated green thread.  It measures 60"x74", so would be a twin-size quilt if put on a bed. 

 

Be sure to check out some of the other quilts in the Festival!  It's a great chance twice-yearly for quilt bloggers to show and tell.

 



 

WIP Wednesday and Yarn-Along

Considering the fact that this is the most stressful time of year for a teacher, and that I have a son graduating in just a few weeks (why yes, he was just named valedictorian yesterday, and yes, I'm just a little proud!), the WIPs have been rolling along rather nicely.  This is Jack's Chain, just past the halfway point.  It's all about a billion little set-in seams from this point on, so smooth sailing.

The Framed-In Quilt came off the machine yesterday.  It just needs a binding and label.  This was my UFO for the month of May.

My Traveling Companion shawl (made from estate sale fingering weight alpaca) is finished and blocking on the guestroom bed.  It will need its own post in a day or two, but I was excited to finish it!  Debating whether/when to start a Color Affection, or just continue with Lady MacBeth.

I started spinning more of my blue hand-dyed Wensleydale yesterday, and I made a discovery:  if you start spinning using the Scotch Tension set-up and realize partway in that you really wanted the double-drive set-up instead, you can't switch midway through the bobbin, because they wind on in different directions.  I've been spinning almost 10 years and didn't know that.  But then, I never claimed to be a technical spinner.

And I'm supposed to say what I'm reading, but right now it's mainly grading papers.  Boring!

I'm linking up to Freshly Pieced and Ginny's Yarn-Along today.  There's also this amazing collection of giveaways going on at Sew Mama Sew, (I was too busy to come up with something for that this time around, but that doesn't stop me from entering!) and there is the Blogger's Quilt Festival at Amy's Creative Side, in which I do have a quilt entered (#265, just in case you wanted to vote for it).

Quilts of the Past: Once Upon a Time

Okay, there's this Bloggers' Quilt Festival going on over at Amy's Creative Side, and I have a quilt to share.  It's an older quilt, like the one I shared last fall during the festival then.  And like that one, it was a group project from when I was a member of the informal "Hearts and Hands" quilting group that met at Peggy P.'s house back in Denver in the late 1990's.  I estimate I finished it in 1999, maybe right before we moved out here, although my memory's a little hazy.  And it must have been the pregnancy stress at the time, because I committed the cardinal sin of not making a label for it.  Shocking!  ... and shame on me.  In my defense, we moved twice during that pregnancy, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and my daughter was born with Down syndrome, so I had other things on my mind.

Once Upon a Time

The story:  This is a round robin quilt.  We all chose a theme and a color scheme, and we all made a theme block as a focal point.  We had a foundation grid of cheap lining fabric marked off into 4" squares.  Each month the box would travel to a new person, who was responsible for making the equivalent of 6 4" blocks that elaborate the theme. It could be one big block or several smaller "filler blocks, or a combination.  Blocks would get moved around the grid a little every month but I had the final say on how they would get arranged.  It was a lot of fun because every member of the group had a different theme: gardens, a Colorado mountain town, camping in the mountains, the seasons of the year, school... those are the ones I can remember.

My theme block.  I was in my applique phase at the time.

A knight errant...

a fearsome dragon...

Jack and the beanstalk, the goose with the golden egg...

the cat and the fiddle, the little dog, and the cow over the moon (the dish and spoon are real little trinkets sewn on there)...

a treasure hoard...

the princess and the pea.

This quilt hung in my oldest son's room from about the time we moved here in 1999 until we remodeled his room to get rid of the ugly old paneling the quilt was helping to cover up.  It might have hung in Secundus' room for awhile too, I'm not sure.  After the remodel at some point it got shelved because some of the treasure needed to be stitched back on, and I remembered it a few weeks ago when I was doing the intervention on Primigenitus' room while he was deciding which college to go to.  So I stitched the treasure back on (I had saved it in a special little bottle in my sewing room!) and hung it up in the upstairs hallway by the staircase.  It had been put away so long, the girls didn't remember it.  And they love fairy tales!  So it's enjoying a new round of popularity.

I couldn't possibly have made all these lovely blocks on my own, and I am honored and humbled that so many wonderful and amazingly creative ladies spent so much talent making them for me.





Quilts of the Past: Tree of Life

I'm taking this opportunity to share a 12-year-old quilt with the Bloggers' Quilt Festival.  I've never blogged about this quilt before, but it was hugely influential in my development as a quilter.  And I love it.  I think I've mentioned before that I love tree quilts.  Ironic that all these years later, I'm teaching at Cedar Tree Classical Christian School and still making tree quilts.

This quilt started back in 1998, I think, when I was living in Colorado and connected with a lovely group of quilting ladies called "Hearts and Hands" (and if any of you read this, friend me on Facebook!)  I grew up in Ohio, and the dryness of the Colorado climate made me homesick for the big beautiful trees on my family's wooded property south of Akron.  So when it was my turn to choose the block of the month, I chose the Tree block, most of them in green but a few in Fall colors.  Since the blocks were slightly different in size, I framed them up with mitered frames and trimmed so they were all the same size before joining them together.  I knew I wanted to complete the quilt with applique leaves of all kinds -- I collected patterns by doing leaf rubbings with my son's crayons.  I made a special point of including some sassafras leaves and several maples, my favorites.  Also some aspen leaves in honor of Colorado.

It took me a few years to design the setting, do all the applique, and finally the machine quilting, which was the most ambitious I had ever attempted (and still is probably the most elaborate machine quilting I've ever done.)  I finished it sometime in 2000, after we had moved to Washington.  It hung in our dining room for a few years, and is now hanging in the fellowship hall of our church.

It's about 60" square.  The block in the center of the bottom row is mine, the rest are from my Colorado quilting buddies.  I did most of the applique leaves using the freezer paper and spray starch method, but a few leaves were done with glue stick where I had to cut through the back to remove the paper.  I quilted it on my Viking 630 with invisible nylon thread; in the ditch around the patches and applique, medium stippling around the borders and close stippling around the trees, with triangular feather motifs in the background setting triangles.