Commentary about works in progress, design & creativity
Finally! A finish! It has been so long since I finished a quilt completely that I forgot how great it was.
Yes, I have finished a lot of tops and some smaller projects, but quilts are different. They feel more real.
Really, I still have to put the sleeve on, but I couldn’t wait to put up a Finish post.
Enjoy!
The top and back are done. The binding is made and I took the quilt to the quilter on Friday.
You will have to click on the photo to see the border I put on. It is relatively small – 3″ or 4″, I forget- and mostly it is there to stabilize the edges of the piece. I think it gives the diamonds some breathing room.
When I look at this piece, I see a lot of movement. I first thought the rows and columns weren’t lined up, but the variety of fabric makes the piece look like it is moving rather than misaligned. At the moment, the top is 61″x61″ approximately.
I decided to use most of the rest of the diamonds on the back. I still have a few left, but they will end up in some other project another time – perhaps in a pencil roll or gift bag. Hhhmmm….
Again, I decided to try not to make myself crazy. I used a large piece of purple Moda Marble for the sides of back. Around the diamond is some random solid I had and I had to throw in a few other pieces to make the back large enough.
I felt bad having so little to show at BAMQG, but next month, or in June, hopefully, I will will have a lot. I do like those finishes.
I have decided to give it to my aunt as a gift. She is doing something really nice for me for which I can never thank her.
After cutting what seemed like a zillion diamonds last week, the picture(left) is what resulted. There are a lot of diamonds. As I mentioned, about 158. It would be nice if that left corner was filled with diamonds as well. I know I can’t have everything, though, and I am not about to sew another Jelly Roll Race top!
DH figured out how many I will need to make a quilt top as well as the layout. YAY! So glad I married someone who can do math. I was thinking of putting the question (whether there is a formula for laying out diamond quilts) to The Young Man’s Geometry teacher, but haven’t yet.
The only scrap of any size at the end, aside from shards, was the weird wonky shape I show on my cutting mat.
I was ready to move forward and just toss the scraps when it occurred to me that I could piece together the scraps, mosaic quilting style, and make a few more diamonds. I might need them. I might not need them. You never know. The scraps might just be fun to sew together or I could make some cool do Donation blocks. A little too wild? Look for more on that.
Saturday, I flailed around. DH and I went around a few times about the number of rows and columns. His first calculations rendered a verdict of 10 rows by 9 columns (remember that the second and every other row would have 9 rows and 8 columns), which left me with a really long skinny piece, though I wasn’t sure HOW long or HOW skinny, because I hadn’t put sashing on yet. I was also sick (yes, again!) and tried to take it easy. I don’t feel like I really accomplished much on Saturday, but it was required for the process, I think.
Sunday went much better. I didn’t have a headache, which was a bonus. The corner is the hardest part to figure out and the fact that I was adding sashing added to the trickiness. I bought a 1.5″ strip cutting die for my Go! cutter and cut 1.5″ strips from the Pure Elements linen I had. Good thing, because I have a lot of it and used up about 1.5 yards so far. Julie of Intrepid Thread will be getting some business from me to replace that fabric. I need it for the A-B-C Challenge.
The photo, left, shows sections of the quilt sewn together. It is going much more smoothly after getting the weird shapes on the right hand side mostly finished. I was sorely tempted just to sew the thing together in long rows across the piece from right to left, but know I would be hating myself midway through, thus the chunks.
And for those of you who are curious about the sashing, I put it on to many diamonds at once. Cutting the strips with the Go! Cutter really made my life easier. I cut 5 strips at a time and then sewed as many diamonds as I could to each strip. It isn’t that I can’t cut strips; of course I can. The Go! Cutter just made my life a lot easier.
Once I had strips of sashing, I lined up the first diamond, folding back the sashing to make sure I had placed the diamond low enough on the strip so that the sashing would fill the entire angle.Then I sewed, one after another as close together as possible so I would waste as little background fabric as possible.
[BTW, that is my hideous ironing board cover. If any of you have a store nearby that carries Polder ironing board covers with a grid pattern, leave a comment or let me know. This one I got off Amazon and it is too thick aside from being not my color. I will be your new best friend if we can work out some sort of arrangement for you to get me one.]
As usual, I wanted to get a lot farther along. I am past the flailing point; I am past the figuring point and now I am just matching seams and rearranging diamonds. I’d like to be done with this project. I will finish it, but I am so ready to move on. No more Jelly Roll Races for me!
I have been hard at work figuring out what to do with the Jelly Roll Race background. I tried the Ta Dot Grey as someone suggested.
I love that fabric, but think it fights with the fabrics in the actual diamonds. Not a good fit.
I don’t have enough of any one pale grey solid to make the sashing and I don’t want to go out and buy more fabric. (really, I just don’t want to go out) Also, grey is very hip and chic right now and I don’t want this quilt to be easily identifiable as being made in 2012. Kind of like 1980s hair. I want to avoid that look.
SherriD, the ever helpful did some Photoshop magic to show the contrast between chocolate, black and white backgrounds. This is a good example of another way to “make visual decisions visually.” The darker colors do make the diamonds glow a bit. When I saw this rendition, I thought about the black. I pulled out some black from Pat Bravo’s Art Gallery/Pure Elements solids and laid out some diamonds on that to get a better view.
I wasn’t that excited when I saw the effect.It isn’t horrible or anything, but not the look I am going for.
I decided on white. I am using the Pat Bravo Pure Elements Linen. If you haven’t tried Pat Bravo’s solids, they have a gorgeous hand to them. They feel very silky, but with the stability of cotton. Lovely fabrics.
I cut some 1.5″ strips and worked a bit on sewing them together on Friday. Check back for more details on that process.