Quilting

Medallion Quilt V

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The corner has been driving me crazy. My brain has been working on it while I’m sleeping and wakes me an hour early with fresh ideas!

I’m slowly getting there. A couple of days ago I was searching for border ideas and came across photos of seminole patchwork.

Seminole Patchwork Sampler

I particularly liked the middle strip and decided to try it. My fabrics are on the heavy side so accomplishing this piecing when I want to end up with 1/4″ blocks has required quite a bit of careful piecing and pressing. I wanted to bring in a hint of the orange/golden colour which I was able to do. I also wanted to use the white/blue scroll fabric, which I also incorporated. So here is the sample strip; now to make seven more!

Seminole Patchwork

This is how I see using that border strip – I think it comes close enough to the “feeling” of the printed patterns that if I insert it along the middle of the white blocks (on each side of the bargello on-point border) and bring it up to the corner block (on all four corners) it will do a couple of things: first, bring in a tiny hint of the orange/golden colour and second, connect the corner to the on-point border.

Quilt in Progress

This is a close up of the corner as it stands at the moment:

Corner Detail

The single drunkard’s path block here balances the center – and the blue marble is almost right. If I had only bought a second medallion panel! Then I would have had more printed fabric with which to work. I’ve looked online but there is none of this fabric to be had (a few background bits of the brown colourway but no blue anywhere). So I’ve got to improvise.

The dark marble fabric is fine, but I have to do something with the lighter blue – I think the tone of the blue works, but the fabric doesn’t have quite enough detail to balance the rest of the quilt. Maybe this is a place where I might try some machine embroidery, perhaps even using an orange/golden rayon thread, to add detail to the blue marble. I’d piece it, if I could but think of a way to do something based on the quarter circle, but at the moment I can’t see what that might be. Could a narrow border of some sort be enough to tie the block in?

I’ve auditioned the corner with the scroll-y beige fabric but it’s too busy. Even if I were to border it with something it still is too strong.

Corner Detail with Scroll Fabric

Actually, the corner blocks need a border – I’d love to border them with the same gilt strip I used for the center panel but I only have enough border fabric for the outside. So if I were to border the drunkard’s path blocks it has to be with something else….

Medallion Quilt IV – Update

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Corner Block – In Situ

This afternoon, I finished and attached a second side border and then began playing with the corner block. I think the Drunkard’s Path is a good idea but the fabric is wrong – much too busy – and I’m not happy with the swirling layout – I’m going to take the block apart and audition the layout to mirror the center with the corner fabric on the outside. I’m OK with the four different fabrics for the outer element of each small block but I need something tamer for the corners, maybe a beige a bit darker than the background fabric I’ve used in the border, or a very pale blue.  I have nothing in my stash that will work here! So it’s off to shop tomorrow.

The outer border will work fine – the swirling design is a bit smaller than in the center but it ties the other elements together.

Medallion Quilt IV

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Medallion Quilt – In Progress

So here’s where I am now: I added a narrow light blue border to the central square, I also fused and stitched the small medallion in the centre of it yesterday (easier to do at this point than later when there will be a lot more fabric to handle).

Then I began working on the next border. I wanted to lighten up the  overall colour, so I stitched an asymmetrical block which implies an on-point border – I have the other three sets of pieces ready to stitch together. I discovered to my dismay that I had very little off-white fabric left so I went shopping to find something that would blend with the fabric I had already used. I came home with a couple of possibilities and chose one. If you didn’t know to look for the difference you wouldn’t notice it.

Next, I thought quite a bit about how to extend that border strip to fill the square. In the end I decided rather than piecing the ends with a block made from little pieces, I would just use a single light square extended with borders on each side. That leaves the corner piece (I’m placeholding the top left corner with an 11″ x 11″ piece of paper (the size of the finished block). What I’m planning at the moment is to piece four drunkard’s path blocks using five different fabrics and set them out in a whorl (with the same fabric in the rotated corner):

Whorl

That will bring back the circular motif of the central square. I thought about a block with pointed elements but echoing the spliced circle at the center is stronger. The last border will use a 6″ strip of printed border fabric that was part of the original Medici fabric set and I have enough to mitre the corners! Finished size will be close to 60″ x 60″.

I’m using the prints in the fabrics to create the detail rather than doing a lot of piecing. The challenge will be in the quilting – how to stitch the whole in a way that brings out the “layers” in the prints. That decision, however, is still a long way off.

Medallion Quilt III

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I’ve walked around the table for the past six days trying to decide what to do with the center medallion. This morning I decided equal sides was most important so I finally cut the medallion panel and squared the pieced fabric. Next I cut sashing from the original edge fabric and added it – since the pieces weren’t quite long enough to mitre, I created corners which I added to finish framing the center. Final size: 25 1/4″ – it’s a bit of a problem because the length isn’t divisible by 2 so I am likely going to add another narrow light border (maybe in lighter blue) to bring the finished block size to 26″ or 28″ that way I can start planning the next border in increments of 2″.

Center Medallion

I like how the finished center looks but I remembered I had an asian print with many different medallions – I cut out one of the symmetrical medallions, backed it with Pellon 805 (WonderUnder), fussy cut it. For the moment it’s sitting at the center. I probably won’t fuse it and edge stitch it in place until I have more of the bordering done. I like how the gold/orange brings your eye to the center and the blue is close to the lighter blue in the rest of the piece. I was thinking I wanted a small bit of extra colour in this quilt top and that small bit of gold/orange might just be enough!

Center Medallion With Center Appliqué In Position

That’s it for today – I need to stop and think about this some more – audition fabrics for the next narrow sashing to bring the center up to a workable finished size: 26″ / 28″.

Medallion Quilt II – Update

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Melanie McNeil commented: And of course you can shift them farther apart, too. This is exciting!

Here’s what that would look like (not necessarily using the lighter blue fabric – I have other choices):

Quadrants Separated

Doing that would overcome an interesting problem with the medallion itself – it’s not symmetrical – it’s 23 7/8″ in one direction, 23″ in the other. I can’t trim it much further to even it out – it’s printed slightly elongated in width. I might be able to fudge it better if I were to cut it out along the outer circle, and appliqué it onto a square piece of fabric. But were I to cut it, bringing the dark to the center and adding sashing to separate the blocks, I can trim the resulting block precisely and the bit’s of the medallion I lose in that trimming wouldn’t be noticeable…

Medallion Trimmed

This whole process is so interesting! That’s it for today. I have other things to do. This quilt is going to take a lot of “pondering”. People ask me how long it takes to make one – how can I possibly calculate the creative thinking time?

Medallion Quilt

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“Medallion quilts have a central area that dominates the overall design. Other design elements are added around the center, increasing the quilt’s size as new ‘rows’ are added around the center.”

The center in a medallion quilt is usually pieced, occasionally it begins with a single largish printed element. In this case I have a 24″ printed medallion – a Northcott Stonehenge Medici fabric panel which I bought a couple of years ago along with 1/2m of each of the accompanying fabrics. I thought it might make a nice medallion quilt with the fabric doing most of the work. Well, it will, but the question is do I want to use this medallion at all, or should I do a pieced quilt using the fabrics from the Stonehenge Medici collection building a central motif from scratch?

Northcott Stonhenge Medici Panel

Northcott Stonehenge Medici Fabrics

At the moment the fabrics are sitting on the cutting table as I think about how to proceed. For example, I could do something like the medallion quilt below by Borderline Quilter:

Medallion Quilt by Borderline Quilter

The problem is I’m sure my boredom threshold would quickly be reached attempting all the beautiful but finicky piecing that Kay Bell has done. I can see me building squares within squares, flying geese, half-square triangles, etc. but not tiny ones. What I particularly like about the quilt above are the blocks which create the illusion of the on-point border as background. My fabrics already have an element for a wide outer border (which I used in a previous quilt):

Garden Trellis with Wide Print Border

and will use again here. For now, I will probably go to Melanie McNeil’s Medallion Quilt Lessons to help me think about what I might do with my fabrics.

Foggy Morning – Completed

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Done!

Just finished the hidden binding (with a sleeve for a rod to hang the art piece. I darkened the uprights on the fence a bit with permanent marker after I’d put on the dark piping – now the two are more balanced. The border fabric has the texture of old barnboard which brings out the colours in the scene in a way I’m happy with. That fabric was a lucky find yesterday – a fabric by Moda: grunge! And the distant fog obscures the trees and buildings in the distance but when you look more closely you can just make them out (as you would with fog).

Foggy Morning – Completed

That’s it for now. That gives me eight wall art pieces to take to Parrsboro beginning of September.

Foggy Morning – II

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Here is the piece after working on it for a large part of the day.

First, I placed the fabrics for the distant background and middle ground, covered them with silk organza (which I fused to the fabrics below – I didn’t want to stitch over the organza (which would have destroyed the “fog” effect I was trying to achieve), instead, I did quite a bit of stitching to suggest the texture of the fields in the distance before fusing the organza in place.

Next, I laid in the foreground, including the fence (which I had very carefully cut out using very sharp scissors from the photograph printed on fabric – did that weeks ago). Then, I began edge stitching all those elements. I have maybe about 1/3 of the edge stitching done – some on the brush in the foreground and on the fence to hold them in place. I was beginning to feel the strain in my back so I stopped working to discover I’d just put in close to 5 hours on the project! Time slips away when I’m working on something like this – “I’ll just to this one more bit…” and before I know it, the day has disappeared.

Foggy Morning – In Progress I

Here is the original photo for comparison – it’s getting there. The colours are somewhat different, but when the thread work is done it should be closer to the photo – that’s what I’m aiming for, anyway!

Foggy Morning – Photo

Foggy Morning – I

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I was on a photo-taking adventure near Canning NS, on a foggy October morning in 2006, with David Lacey, a NS landscape artist. Near the beginning of our backroad trip we spotted an old fence at the edge of a field. The sun was still low and the ground fog hadn’t yet completely burned off. Standing where I was, the sunlight on the fence created a sharp contrast to the morning fog hovering over the farm buildings in the distance.

Foggy Morning – Photo

This was one of the photos I’d set aside as a possible subject for a textile art piece. The challenge is creating the “fog” – it seemed to me I could capture the faded texture of the foggy distance with a layer of silk organza over an underlying image  of the farm buildings and trees printed on fabric.

First, I enlarged and printed the top half of the photo on fabric and added a fusible backing. Next I’ve added layers of printed fabric to the middle ground which is still somewhat obscured by the fog. I will do quite a bit of thread painting in this middle ground to increase the detail although it will be covered with organza.

The foreground, consists of pieces cut from the photo printed on fabric which will be thread painted to bring out the detail. The shadow of the ditch is created using an underlay of black batik. Now that I compare the photo and my pieces of fabric (not yet fused in place, thank goodness) I can see I’ve missed the cow path which is integral to the image. So I will have to go back to my fabric stash to find a dark grey something to set that up….

Foggy Morning – In Progress I

Here is the fence, the focal point of the piece, tentatively in place –  I can see I will need to do a lot of thread work where the fabric meets the organza in order to marry the foreground and the middle ground better.

Foggy Morning – In Progress II

However, I’m happy with the start – I’m beginning to see how to construct this piece.