Hitting the Blocks

I’m all a-quiver right about now. I sold my first quilt pattern this past week, and tonight got it nicely wrapped up to send out (hopefully it’ll beat lil’ Miss Hanna Almost-a-Hurricane out of the state). Of course I’ve got the shipping jitters, the “Did I get everything perfect? Did I forget anything?” nervous twitches.

The pattern that sold is Cup O’ Joe to Sew, available here.

The funny thing is, I am almost done a new version of this quilt (as in the top is pieced, it’s mostly quilted, and one of the sides is bound). I call it the same thing, Cup O’ Joe to Sew.

I’m hoping to have time to finish it this weekend. Maybe not if the power goes out…

I have now joined the same club as Scarlett O’Hara and Maria von Trapp and made some lovely outfits from curtains.

Well, just one curtain to be exact. My mother was auditioning this beautiful brown fabric with the embroidered vines for her new bedroom, and I decided it was just too pretty to leave in the bedroom.

There really wasn’t enough to make a full skirt, but I found the darker brown fabric on sale at Jo-Ann’s and between the two was able to make matching skirts for me and my daughter (she’s still at the age where matching Mommy is a cool thing Not sure I’d use that kind of fabric again–it shreds like crazy (thank goodness for my serger), and every needle prick made the tiniest of runs in the fabric.

And here’s my final product. I had a blast making it (yes, even all those little flowers), despite the time crunch at the end (that was my fault for not starting it until after recital, which was June 22nd.)

And now back to my previously scheduled life…

The saga continues–

After getting the underlying blocks pieced (the actual quilting came later), but before I put on the backing, I did some major applique.

The vase is the most important part, since it is the challenge fabric in all its glory. It has layers of batting underneath it to simulate the curve of a vase. I had to put the brown piping around the edges to make it stand out from the busy background.

I didn’t want much quilting in this section, since vases have nice smooth sides, but again, to diminish puckering fabrics, I ended up quilting the blue feathers and a bit of the branches on the right-hand side. And I gave the peacock a nice black eye too

After that came the cherry blossoms. The branches are appliqued over thin cords of piping. The flowers are made with a Clover Yo-Yo Flower Maker in two different sizes and were sewn on at the very end (after everything else had been quilted and bound and whatnot. Those little seed beads are ones I had left over from a cross-stitch project I started eons ago, and they just happened to be the right colors. Love it! I also couldn’t find fabric I liked, so I turned the fabric I had inside out and used the back side instead.

I decided the window sill needed something else, so I wrote a little poem about the scene. I wanted to do a haiku, to keep with the Asian feel of the quilt, but it was a bit too limited to get across everything I wanted to get across. So I used a tanka, which is the same idea as haiku, but instead 5-7-5 format, it is 5-7-5-7-7. That also became the name of this quilt–”Tanka.”

Outside my window
Pale blossoms dance, wild and free
On sea-scented winds.
Do my captive blossoms yearn
For such perilous freedom?

See the finished quilt in my next post!

Phew! After over 75 different designs and almost 200 hours of hand-stitching, my quilt is in the mail (please, please USPS, do not be late!!!).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Hoffman Challenge, here is the company’s own definition:

“Every year, a team from Hoffman Fabrics chooses an upcoming fabric design and then issues a challenge to quilt, clothing, doll and accessory makers to create an original item using the fabric…Judging emphasizes originality and creativity, creative use of the challenge fabric as it realtes to other fabrics, visual impact, and workmanship.”

My original idea involved a geisha wearing a challenge fabric kimono. Much to my chagrin, I discovered (after several dozen design tries) that one of the challenge winners from a few years ago had the same idea. Sigh. So, I pitched that and tried again. What I finally came up with was a giant urn with cherry blossoms in it, sitting on a window sill. By the time I was finished, I’d done hand-piecing, hand-quilting (tear-away stabilizer is my new best friend), 3-D applique, homemade piping, yo-yo flowers, and beadwork. Oh, and poetry writing too. Mixed media indeed!

Here’s the underlying design made using EQ6 (oh, marvelous, marvelous EQ!). I settled on using the traditional Storm at Sea block, mainly because I love the movement it creates. The cream-colored blocks are where I appliqued a huge vase.

The pieced and quilted block. Those little triangles were way too tiny for me to do on the machine (well, I could have, but hand-piecing was actually much easier). The “ribbons” created with the cream and brown fabrics are outlined with quilting. That was originally all that I was going to do, but then I did the flowers and leaves and finally the diamonds.

Each of the brown and cream diamonds is quilted with a spiral design in variegated browns. Okay, I confess–I had to quilt them because they were puckering funny. Mainly that cream with the brown veining. Serves me right for using a substandard fabric in with all the nice designer stuff.

The center square is fussy cut from the challenge fabric and quilted with a cherry blossom in variegated pinks.

I also quilted pale green leaves in the two leaf fabric squares.

Only after I finished the quilt and wrote a tanka for it did it occur to me that the spirals were like storm winds blowing the leaves and blossoms about.

Continues in next post