The 4 tops are finally quilts!

It took until late on Christmas Eve night, but I got them all finished in time. Here is a link to the previous posts that show the process of designing these. In case this is the first post you’ve read, the fabric for all four tops came in a box from an estate sale. These are the first “real” (as in functional) quilts that I’ve made. They’re lap size, about 4.5' X 6' or so. Without further ado, here is Anna with her new quilt and pillow with the fashionable ladies prancing around on the fabrics.These were a surprise for my nieces and nephew, which was fun. I almost had to give one of them held together with safety pins because time was running short. Below is Deborah with the mostly pink and white one.

That is Sarah with the groovy pink, green, and orange designs. I hear that it has instantly become her close companion for TV watching.

That reminds me, I just read a story in Consumer Reports that the “Snuggie” blankets shed handfuls of fuzz with every wash and end up threadbare. Another advantage of quilts.

Caleb’s quilt has guitars, too, plus musical notes on the backing fabric and keyboards on the binding. (He plays the cello.) This photo turned out a tad blurry, but you can see it better in the next

photo.

My husband Andy somehow took a nap amidst the cacophony of the group simultaneously playing the card game Flux and working a puzzle.

After making these simple designs with big chunks of fabric which still took quite a long time, I can’t imagine how people make the really complex blocks with a bunch of tiny pieces. More power to them, it’s back to small wall hangings for me!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Top #4... last but not least!

These are the fabrics for the last of The 4 Tops. Do you agree with me that this group has a distinctly masculine vibe? The piece in the center left has tiny dots on black... it had too much visual vibration and looked muddy, so that fabric was deleted. Also, it seemed to me that more red and black would be beneficial to add more dark notes.

Fortunately, I had some red and black checked fabric plus some black with gold dots that fit in. (It’s somewhat amazing to me that despite having a ton of fabric, very little of my stash melds with this group.) Below is the first “draft” of the arrangement. Do you see any issues with it so far?

Maybe the black and white photo will make it clearer what bothered me with this design... the various rectangles were merging together too much, especially the lighter tones. I wanted more separation in the values.

Below is what it looks like pieced together. I didn’t have quite enough regular cotton fabric, so had to sneak in a couple of pieces of flannel on the edges. No biggie.

It has been interesting to work with such large pieces of fabric with large motifs, compared to the little scraps with more subdued patterns I usually am assembling. Oops, just noticed a glitch in the final top... the large guitar piece got vertically flipped with the piece below it. Hmmm... do I care enough to rip them out and restitch them?!?!

#3 is designed, I think

I liked the idea of adding more lime green to this (see previous post comments), but couldn’t find the right color/pattern in my stash. A splotchy batik was not going to mesh with these fabrics and every other chunk of fabric was a little off color-wise AND there were not going to be any shopping trips(!) So I added more hot pink, black, and white.

As I’ve mentioned previously, these 4 tops aren’t supposed to be masterpieces. Yet, if something really nags at me, I have to change it. Do you see anything that looks funny in the photo below?

Those two pink and white pieces with the vertical stripes running through them seemed to break up the design in a weird way. Below the stripes are horizontal, which looks much better (to me, anyway.)

Time to sew. I might break down and buy some lime green for the binding, we shall see. One step at a time!

Top #3... needs what?

Here are the fabrics for the third top ironed and tossed up on the design wall just to see how they’re looking. The other related posts in this series are here. I’m thinking it might need some more mostly black fabric, or mostly white, or both to punch it up a bit. Any opinions?

Here is a close-up of the cute retro fashionistas on several of them.

The next step is to start chopping up these chunks into similar widths and making big stripes out of them. Have a nice weekend, everybody!

Top #2 is sewn together

I took out the dreaded purple polka dot fabric (shown here on the design wall.) This definitely looks better. The pink, white, and black certainly is a cheery color scheme. The other related posts are here.

The dots now live on the back of this pillow, which goes with the quilt.

Only two more tops to go!

Top #2 on the design wall

To make it easier to arrange the pieces for this second quilt top from the estate sale fabric, I decided to clear all the “stuff” off of my design wall and actually use it for its intended purpose. Here is a close-up of some of the fabrics in this batch. Love the Eiffel tower prints!

Below is the entire top. I don’t know about you, but it looks to me as if those purple dots aren’t fitting in very well. Can you say “sore thumb?” There is enough fabric to insert something else instead. The other option in this kind of situation is to cut up the purple dots into smaller pieces and have it appear more than once, but I doubt that would work in this case.

This basic arrangement of big chunks is similar to top #1, but using the design wall instead of winging it is definitely making it easier already.

Happy Monday!

1st estate sale fabric top completed!

Do you remember the estate sale fabric I was fortunate enough to to find? It was already cut into medium-sized pieces and I was going to chop it up even smaller. However, since this is for a utilitarian project (a lap quilt) it seemed unnecessary. Besides, the prospect of lil ol‘ me sewing together four sets of fabric into quilts is chancy enough, so why make it that much harder? Below is a close up of some of the diverse fabrics.

Below is the whole top. While I did have to iron and straighten out the various pieces, I didn’t chop them up much at all. Because they‘re big prints, the pieces couldn’t have been much smaller anyway. If you look at the smallest pieces on the right side, they start to look a little muddled. But maybe that’s due to what’s next to them. I did put the prints with the dark brown backgrounds next to lighter pieces, mostly. Hey, whatever, this isn’t trying to be a masterpiece.

Another detail. The next step is to figure out the quilting. I’ll probably stitch in the ditch, then do large geometric shapes like zig-zags, wiggles, and in some areas follow the design.

My only complaint is that someone had the bright idea of spraying some perfumed stuff on the fabrics, which billows up when they’re ironed. Hate that stuff.

Anyway, one top done, on to the next one. By the way, I have never actually made a utilitarian quilt before, only wall hangings(!)

Estate sale fabric... what luck!

My brother Robert has a used bookstore in Orlando, Leedy’s Books, so he’s on the email list of a company that runs estate sales. Actually, in this case the homeowners were just moving to the beach and wanted somebody else to deal with disposing of their extra belongings. They listed a lot of sewing-related items so I checked it out. There were bolts and bolts of fabric, but I really didn’t need 5+ yards of those particular fabrics. Fortunately there was a smallish plastic bin stuffed full of smaller cuts for $20.

Once home, I spent about an hour shuffling the various pieces around to find good combinations. It was amazing how much fabric was in there... most of it was large-scale prints that I wouldn’t normally buy plus some chenille and minkee fabric, but check these out... 

Guitars and polka dots:

Pink and black fashionable ladies with a touch of green:

Three colors of Paris with purple dots:

Red guitars and blue and green dots:

This one isn't really a set, but I like all these fabrics, especially the paisleys.

This is what is leftover in the box. I’ll either use them for quilt backs or donate them. Although the green fluffy stuff has already been claimed by our kitty to cover her luxurious new foam pad.

Such a deal! I suspect the top four groups will come in handy for the holiday gift-giving season... if I can stop sleeping and get some production sewing time in.

By the way, in honor of finally getting new computer after delaying for literally years, AND upgrading to the wonderful world of CS4, I made a new signature for the blog. How do you like it? Maybe it could change colors with the seasons. : )