Thursday evening. A fire is not been ruled out for this evening, time will tell.
Here is the next in the line up of show quilts we are showing again.
GOLDEN ISLES, designed by me, pieced and quilted by Carol. This received a red ribbon at Maine Quilts.
It is a quilt I designed on EQ6. It is from 2009 and taught me a lesson using EQ to design a quilt. For anyone not familiar with the EQ series, EQ6 was what I believe I started on and now much later it is EQ8. They are design programs for designing a quilt on a computer. What I learned for a very important lesson is that it is very easy to design something that is almost impossible to piece together. This proved to be one of those designs. The main difficulty was the Y seams that were required. I found I sucked at them, so Carol ended up piecing those. We called it Golden Isles because it was a project taken to Jekyll Island when we used to go down there for vacation. Carol was not impressed. I think it came out rather well, much better than I was doing.
From Carol ~ I definitely was not impressed with this one and why I agreed to piece those pesky Y seams is still a mystery. I never ripped out as many seams as I did on this one, ended up with many pieces in the trash. I quilted with feathers, straight lines and arcs in the stars.
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| Golden Isles ~ back |
Judges comments ~ Striking quilt, quilting fills space and enhances the design, truly a golden treasure of a quilt, parallel lines in quilting need to be evenly spaced.
SHATTERED 9-PATCH SQUARED ~ Designed and pieced by me, quilted by Carol. It received a yellow ribbon and Viewer's Choice award at Maine Quilts, an Honorable Mention at A Quilter's Gathering, third place at MQX and was also shown at Images at the Lowell Quilt Festival.
I started making this quilt because we were reaching the end of the 30’s reproduction fabrics in the shop. When we had received the line I had taken a piece of most of the line along with a white and made 9-patch blocks. We then took those and made baby quilts, table runners etc. as samples to sell the fabric line.
I took the balance of the 9-patch blocks and the many parts and pieces I had leftover and tried different ideas to put them together. This is what I came up with. I first tried the disappearing 9-Patch concept of cutting the blocks into quarters and tried various different ideas with that concept. What I found was I was using a lot of the white, which was limited in supply, and not much of the 30’s fabric. I then went to my shattered idea which came from first making 9-patch blocks and then cutting them on the diagonal corner to corner.
This is the assembly process I used on the front of the quilt. It is made up of the “shattered 9-patch” combined with cut down parts from 9-patch blocks.
The center of the back is what I created while I was trying to arrive at the final method of using up the 30’s fabric. In few of the blocks on the left side on the back shows the method I used to make the front side.
From Carol ~ not much I could do for the quilting besides an all over feather. There were a lot of thick seams I had to maneuver around.
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| 9 Patch Squared Back |
Judges comments ~ Quilt back is as delightful as the front, piecing could be more accurate, awesome collection of reproduction fabrics are well distributed, scale of machine quilting is a perfect choice.
On a more recent level, currently in the studio I have completed #30 and #31 for 2025. In #30 I used five orphan blocks and after getting four of them to 12” and the center one grown to 24” I made a bunch of four patches to use up a pile of 4” squares. These became 6” four patch units. I then used these to fill-in around the 5 orphans blocks.
I made a four unit wonky star using 3” V-blocks and these paired well with the 6” four patches. I brought both dimensions of the center to multiples of 6 using 2” and 4” four patch units. I alternated the 2 different blocks until I reached the last rows needed then left out the stars and just used the nine patch. It came out ok and used up the Hunter Star blocks. Who ever said Hunter Star blocks don’t play well with others. Another benefit is these two quilts used a lot of the 4” squares from the 4” bin.
Today was a fantastic day, not real cold and not real windy. Let’s hope it stays that way through the weekend. Time will tell, stay safe until next time.
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