Artful Homemade Quilts Have A Way

[freedombecki]

Just 2 more. These little puppies take 2 hours apiece, cutting, sewing long strips, cutting strips into 8 sections, and using one section as the 3 piece smaller quadrant of these 9" unfinished squares (sorry they lap off the coputer but whatcha gonna do?

Last scans of the day: 2 blocks, and a roman stripe in blues I found online the other day.

 

[freedombecki]

Seven hours of beautiful turquoise blue yesterday morning, and another couple of hours of blue in the afternoon and after retiring. This work is so simple, but its color is far better than its maker. I woke up thinking "How beautiful is blue," and thought of this song that was played like any other popular song in the 60s, it was ubiquitous, it was played not only on FM Stations that never played advertisements - even being played on pop culture stations sandwiched between "My Boyfriend's Back" and "Light My Fire." This is my all-time favorite to get through the day--how love for everybody in your heart can light your path even when bringing you a little pain at the same time, how God weeps for us when we don't get along with our neighbors, and when the sun sets, how beautiful are the spheres, even when you're playing solitaire. Love has to be turquoise blue. It hugs and soothes you at the same time. Some of my recent favorite blue scans below..

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6cPXvTqasg]Paul Mauriat - "Love Is Blue" (1968) - YouTube[/ame]
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[freedombecki]

Since yesterday, 60 units of Roman Stripes are now in a 6x10 piece (measuring about 28x45.5" (inches). Two more squares of 4 Roman Stripes apiece have been sewn today. This is a time consuming work, and there's no other way to describe it. *sigh*

Scan 1 leftest side

Scan 2 rightest side

 

[freedombecki]

Good progress early this morning on the Turquoise Roman Stripe Charity quilt with 2 more blocks of 4 Roman stripe sections each. One more group like that, it's a complete row.

 

[freedombecki]

Finally. A whole 4th row after 2 days more. This is starting to be like the 99 bottles of beer song (again)...

But I love the textures of the old and new fabrics on this quilt. I'm noticing on fabric that came from a shop bolt purchased the first year I was in business. It is a fine-grilled turquoise-and-white small floral from the RJR Fabric company in Los Angeles, California back when. I'm not in touch with the day-to-day stuff anymore at my shop, but they celebrated our 25th year anniversary on May 4. It's still too cold to go up there in May as I recollect from years past, and my fibromyalgia goes into orbit in cold weather. At least here, it's over in a couple of months, and the critical pain goes away.

I've so loved the turquoise blues in this quilt. My mother loved blues. If she were here today, she'd love this one, too. Some mothers are just so wonderful, their memory is always with you, like a little number you can call to hear someone tell you they love you. *sigh*

Here's the last square, sewn into the row. There are 80 small Roman stripe units so far. The size is good, but I'd like it to be a little longer.

 

[freedombecki]

Finally. A whole 4th row after 2 days more. This is starting to be like the 99 bottles of beer song (again)...

But I love the textures of the old and new fabrics on this quilt. I'm noticing on fabric that came from a shop bolt purchased the first year I was in business. It is a fine-grilled turquoise-and-white small floral from the RJR Fabric company in Los Angeles, California back when. I'm not in touch with the day-to-day stuff anymore at my shop, but they celebrated our 25th year anniversary on May 4. It's still too cold to go up there in May as I recollect from years past, and my fibromyalgia goes into orbit in cold weather. At least here, it's over in a couple of months, and the critical pain goes away.

I've so loved the turquoise blues in this quilt. My mother loved blues. If she were here today, she'd love this one, too. Some mothers are just so wonderful, their memory is always with you, like a little number you can call to hear someone tell you they love you. *sigh*

Here's the last square, sewn into the row. There are 80 small Roman stripe units so far. The size is good, but I'd like it to be a little longer.

 

[freedombecki]

Another day, 40 more pieces of turquoise fabrics, another row. There are 20 3-stripe units in this Roman Stripe quilt, and each piece has a little or a lot of turquoise in it. It's a charm scrap quilt, although in its accepted form as having 2 alike pieces of the same fabric in each individual unit, they are not repeated anywhere else on my quilt. That causes the "charm" designation, and not the beauty of working with turquoise blue colors and loving every little second of it.

Scrap quilts usually repeat the fabric over and over until the maker runs out of it. That can get pretty weird, and if it is not an artistic effect, I don't know what is, as I believe in a measure of consistency with what little I can remember from art class days so many years ago is that art is an everyday experience. And our mothers who made scrappy quilts to keep their families covered in winter were resourceful souls who made do with what resources fell their way in good times and in bad.

The 40 fabrics of 20 units were sewn into a row, Row 5, and it took 4 scans to get all the squares in, hopefully the pictures are turned so that it flows into the next piece, since I don't take pictures with a camera. The last scan will have to be in the next post.

Scan 1, 2, and 3 from left to right:

 

[freedombecki]

The 4th scan: the rightest edge of row 5.

Now, I have to run and listen to debate summaries.

 

[freedombecki]

Cut and sewed 10 strips for Roman Stripes found another cache of turquoise fabrics from long ago, plus a bag of leftover strips that were too small from a couple of turquoise log cabin quilts back in my shop days. I sewed until I was good and tired of it, then came here. 10 more strips, it will be a row. Will publish scans when they're done. Made some sketches of butterflies onto graph paper at our usual restaurant. Someday, I'm gonna finish one and take it to Daisy's diner for them to show on the wall. It has to be really nice. They're great cooks and make a living from it in a small Texas town a few miles up a farm to market road, then onto a state highway.

It's been a beautiful day. I got to work with some really pretty turquoise fabrics and it just sets my soul on fire.

10.24.2012 Edit note: just adding a picture of one of the scans to save a post. There were 4 scans instead of the 3 that fit in when we add thumbnails. Speaking of thumbnails, to see the beautiful fabric surface textures, just click on the thumbnail. Pardon my clippings. This quilt will have a total of 120 Roman stripe units, and I try to remove as many as possible before the quilting process starts. I forget to as showing the scans takes a lot of time, and my habit is to remove strings and thread after it's done. That way, if it has to be postponed, the quilt top can be placed in a plastic bag. This is a lot more time than usually spent on a charity quilt, but in the process, I made strips and cut roman stripes 5" square for 6 or 7 more quilts, or a mountain of frames for other quilts. Turquoise blue is so like glacier blue, which I fell in love with in the Canadian rockies in 2006 on the last Orient Express trip by Luxor Lines of America, in coordination with the Canadian government railroads. It stimulated me to collect that glacier blue glass, and I have a big collection of it now, including several coffee cups that are glacier blue glass. They're not as pretty with coffee in them since the facets on the cups reflect brown.

Here's scan 29:.

 

[freedombecki]

Turquoise Roman Stripe Quilt

Click on the thumbnail to make it large to see the fabric surface textures. Some of the ones in this quilt are simply out of this world to people who love the color of glaciers, summer skies, and Caribbean waters. This color rocks when you are sewing it. It's not even like work at all, although this quilt has taken a long time due to sewing 45" strips of 3, cutting them into 8 parts, and setting aside 7 for future quilting projects--pillows, aprons, pockets, more quilts, quilt borders, sashes and the like. You can even make a piano key border around the quilt with other 5" strips of lights between two triad roman stripe squares going the same direction. Or just alternate them 90 degrees. It's all good. I pinned each individual color of 7 leftovers together. This quilt could be replicated in a lot less than 2 weeks! It seems I've been sewing forever at this point, but I could go for another 20 sets of 3, which would take 40 more fabrics. I have about 20 left, and the fun part of quilting is often shopping for the last pieces to make the quilt or a zinger border, for that matter.

 

[freedombecki]

The quilt now has 5 x 6 rows of 4 blocks and is roughly, give or take an inch, 46x55." I seem to have enough to make another row of the Roman stripes. There are now about 120 4.5" squares and there will be 140 if 5 x 7 is its final size. I'm estimating it will be 46x64 by then. I measured earlier, and can't remember anything except the approximates. I have to go get some more light aqua blue thread now. Hope everyone has a wonderful day.

 

[Dabs]

Getting so inspired by internet pretty Roman Stripe ideas...

Scan 1 Traditional Amish Roman Stripe on Diagonal

Scan 2 Roman Stripe in Teals

Scan 3 Roman Stripe arranged to look like Staircase, someone's first quilt, too. It's an easy and beautiful effort!

I absolutely adore the one on the far left!!!
The colors are awesome.......man, you stay super busy I bet!!
It's fun to look at others' crafts....get new ideas *smiles*

 

[freedombecki]

You're right. That one's a beaut. And yep, I almost finished another row when I came to dinner and stayed in front of the computer. lol! I would love to get back to the machine and crank out that last row, get busy on the border and finish it before midnight. I dropped in the quilt shop today, oh, my goodness the pretty fabric and stuff, some of which I dragged back to the truck & headed home with wondering "Why are you doing this!!!!" lol! I guess i'll have to make 100 more quilts next year. I swear I could make 50 teal/turquoise/jade quilts without leaving my house if I had to.

So glad you dropped by and cheeered the place up with your sunshine lipstick and cute butterfly eyes avie, Dabs.

11:06 pm.
Well, row 7 didn't get sewn on, but it did get sewn together for a first-thing-in-the-morning fix.

Some scans of Row 6:

 

[freedombecki]

It was so much fun to see fabrics I'd never seen before today get sewn into this marathon quilt.

 

[freedombecki]

There were 11 strips unused left over. The small strip border had the right side sewn on. Who could waste all that work? So it was cut, set, figure they looked best along the top, add a piece for the side and sew it as perfectly as a hit-and-miss artist could, and add the half-row. The quilt is now 10x15 Roman Stripe squares that are close to 4.5x4.5 inches apiece. The other 3 strips were added, and the total size of it is 48.5 x 70.5 inches. The colors just make my heart sing.

Here's the added top row:

 

[freedombecki]

The added strip has been saved for probably 15-20 years. It is probably the most beautiful turquoise print ever and was designed by Jinny Beyer and sold by the RJR Fabric Company since the early 1990s. At one time, my shop in Wyoming had every single piece of her basic collection, which I figured was the best thing I could offer Wyoming quilters, living in the central part of a state where there weren't a lot of quilt stores that lasted more than 3 or 4 years in the state. I left it open and in the care of 2 very devout Christian women and told them when I left, "Please use the business to serve God." They have a charity quilt group that meets there frequently, and from what I hear, they put out a lot of quilts for those who need blankets. In that part of the world, warmth in winter is critical.

It's been an arduous couple of weeks work on this quilt and trips to 3 different fabric stores, one of them twice. I love to visit our local store the best. She has threads compatible with the sewing machine's likes, which is lint-free cotton. Even so, it creates a little lint, so it's frequent cleanings!

I need a long nap. It's going to be 45 degrees here tonight, our first visitation of cold weather, and the sky is marbled with clouds.

Here's the last part of that top row added just a half hour ago, and dragged in her to scan le finale!

Finishing a top makes me feel like the scene from Home Alone with Macauley Culkin waving his arms in the air and running around saying, "I'm free!!!!"

 

[freedombecki]

In the quilt completed yesterday, there were 7 squares left in the row cut and placed into a big box, but it grew heavy and is now overflowing. Since it's just a cardboard mailer that was still in pretty good condition after receiving some yardage from ebay in it, it fit 2 rows 5-inch squares by two rows. The pieces of 7 were pinned together in the same color lots and saved for future quilts. There are probably 150 different pinnings with only a handful having fewer than 7 leftovers from when I first started, using fabrics that were sewn together in some instances, the cut in 2" strips, and just using whatever showed up and wondering what happened to the bigger pieces of six inch strips to half yard pieces of everything. Well, the box turned up the last day the blocks were made. hahahaha. There must be 40 or 50 pieces of fabrics from 1987 on in the found box, although I couldn't remember exactly, having made two beautiful teal quilts and having strips left over in or around the year 2003, which unfortunately were too small to even attempt to substitute for 2 inch strips.

That said, early this morning the box was opened, and pieces were separated into piles of chromatic (for a later quilt using warm sashing) and monochromatic, for the quilt below that is sashed in a glacier blue fabric found among souvenir fabrics found the last day after most all the Roman stripe strips were cut and sewn. Finding unique quilts online to show here online to augment the fractured picture presented by scans has had an upside--finding a wealth of new and innovative way people have used to make quilts totally in a different-than-traditionally-steeped methods that are so fun just by the variety of fun the nontraditionals bring to the world of quilting.

So, since there are 8 blocks only to show this morning, I'd like to show the quilt that inspired the Glacier-sashed quilt presently in the works, that could be finished by tonight unless my better half needs a weekend outing.

Frame 1 - A sashed Roman Stripe quilt, the likes of which I'd never seen before looking for other people's 3-strip Roman Stripes to show.
2 - Top row of this morning's Glacier-sashed monochromatic turquoise Roman Stripes quilt effort, scan 1
3 - Second scan of Glacier-slashed Roman Stripe.

 

[freedombecki]

Yet more of what was sewn together this morning from that heavy, heavy box of roman stripe squares made in the past 3 weeks for the first quilt (above)

 

[freedombecki]

That's all the sewing that came out of my sewing room from 4 am to 7:30 am this morning.

This is so much faster than the first sans having to sew strips together. That takes time just in changing the bobbins 4 times per sitting.

 

[freedombecki]

Spent the evening hours completing the quilt. The first turquoise quilt was a starter quilt in a series of Roman Stripe usage quilts. It was plain roman stripes done in a way where two outside pieces were the same around a center one. In this quilt, I am considering blue-green planet colors as a family because as beautiful a color as turquoise is, when you go to a quilt store to search out aquas and turquoise, you won't find as many hot turquoises unless you're in the shop of someone who worships turquoise and has money to burn on something that may be a long time in selling. (25 years of quilt shop ownership taught me that). So in my shop, when I was doing the picking, there were a myriad of turquoises, goofed up a little by the fact that when you're picking from fabrics, a turquoise material placed by a lime green fabric may obfuscate the fact that it's really a sprightly brightly royal blue and not that color midway between jade (blue-green) and royal blue, and not 2 degrees this side of royal like what you're observing in a setting most likely to make you buy the fabric that may have been cheaper to print in a different color than THAT peerless color that by itself can set the soul on fire.

That said, if you look at the quilt, it sorta falls short of ideal turquoises, due to the nature of my collection that spans 3 decades and 8 if you count thirties reproductions as prints of 80 years ago. The dead giveaway of today's reproduction materials, however is their hand. There's no stiffening (called sizing back when) of sheer material that shrinks as oddly as someone who marches to his own drumbeat which seems out of step with others yet is in the charming character of a 1-of-a-kind person. Today's fabrics are soft, thick, and pleasant to the touch if you shop where excellence in quilting fabric is offered to the public.

There's no sense in showing every one of the 63 blocks, but the final scan is below, showing the tag at the uppre right corner and has a size of 46x60", nearly a perfect crib size and works well until the child is about 4 feet tall. Twelve inches added would make this a couch potato cover, and any larger than that should consider adding more pieces around the outer border and then an additional outer border. Just sayin'.