Thursday, June 17, 2010

Heritage Park 2010

The Heritage Park Festival of Quilts was held on the weekend of May 29. It was cold and snowing on the Saturday but only cold on the Sunday with a bit of rain. Joan and I went on Sunday. We had a good day in spite of the weather.

The quilts were all indoors this year due to the weather - usually they have most of them outside. Consequently, I didn't take too many pix because most of the rooms were too dark. I decided to show you the five quilts that I put in the show!

One: Africa Jazz.
Two: Happy Sails to Luke
OK - now here is where it gets tricky. There are many buildings at Heritage Park and they are spread out. We had no way of knowing where my quilts were so we just had to go find them. We found three - the pix of third one (Hot Times) didn't turn out. The last two had to be in Gasoline Alley. Now the Park is open to 5:00 pm and Joan and I arrived at Gasoline Alley at 4:40 pm. We had time to hunt down the last two quilts. But when we got to the main quilt room they had locked the doors and were taking the quilts down. I was extremely annoyed. I really wanted to see my quilts on display! Not only that - but people paid $18 to visit the park until 5:00 and we weren't the only ones locked out. I did express my displeasure when I picked my quilts up.
In any event, life goes on so I asked Craig and Rhonwyn to assist in modelling all my Heritage Park quilts on a nice sunny day out on the deck. So here they are.
One: Beetlejuice
Two: Africa Jazz
Three: Red or White? (when I dropped this off at the park, the lady taking the quilt, not seeing any white, asked red or white? I said "wine" and the look of realization on her face was priceless!)
Four: Here is the lovely Rhonwyn with Hot Times
Five: Happy Sails to Luke on the right.
The Good Ship Elliot is on the left.
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Now in excruciating detail, here are some close ups of each quilt for anyone interested in that stuff.
I beaded Africa Jazz. The idea was to have a spray of beads down the front of the quilt. Not sure it shows up here but it flows down from the right to the tip of the bottom point. All the quilting on this one was done by hand.
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Beetlejuice
I found some Hallowe'en themed buttons so added them to the spiderweb quilting, which I did on Harley, my long arm quilting machine.
Spider buttons.

Moons and star buttons.
Bat buttons.
Ghost and skeleton buttons. There are also some pumpkin buttons but I didn't get a close up of those.
This flower thing was one of the many experiments that went into Beetlejuice. It's appliqued
(by machine).
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Here we have the nautical quilts. I just love all this nautical fabric, which is really why I took the closeup shots! Oh - and I quilted "waves" with Harley. I still have a long way to go before I have prize winning quilting, but I am improving. I don't have a computer on my long arm - this is just me freehanding it.

Tall ship block.

Fussy cut tall ship in the corner stars.










I've been wanting to try out this "shadow" block. I've seen it many times and I think it's a cool optical illusion and very easy to make.
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Red or White?
The interesting thing here is the fabric again - I love the colours and was very pleased by how the wine panel merged with the fabric.
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Hot Times
Beaded again. This one was from a pattern, I referenced it in a previous post so won't go digging back for it now.
OH - and buttons on the flip flops.


Saturday, June 5, 2010

The Circus is Coming


Two friends each have two little kids that I want to make quilts for. Jodi has two year old Emily and two month old Alexa and Andrea has two year old Jolene and two or three week old Brett. That's three girls and one boy to be clear (Joe has a niece Brett). I have lots of kids prints but started with the circus prints I used last year for Edua. Above is the first top finished. Below a bit of elaboration about how it got there.

Started with a batik fat quarter and the circus print. Stitched two strips together then using 45 degree angle line, cut half square triangles (above) - using the tube method described (badly) below.
As usual, I was just playing/experimenting with fabric. I stitched a narrow red strip to a wider batik strip (above), then stitched those to a wide circus print strip (below). The circus strip width was equal to the total of the batik and red - taking seam allowance into consideration. The wide circus strip is stitched to both edges of the red/batik to form a tube.
With the 45 degree line lined up on the stitching, slice the triangle. Flip the tube over, slice off another triangle. When they are opened out, they look like the half square triangles above. There are any number of possibilities of strip width combinations for this method - so go crazy!

I made two kinds of blocks using the resulting half square triangles, as per above.


I cut apart the three circus stripe motifs, then put a row of pin wheels between the bottom two and a row of half square triangles between the top two to spread out the "picture" a bit (above). I ran a one inch red zinger around the "picture" and then the block formations to each end. Finally, added a border that was mitered at the corners to keep the stripe effect going around the quilt. Once it's quilted I'll do a red binding.


I'm thinking of making a number of quilts and letting the Moms choose which ones they would like. I'll see how things go in that regard. I tend to get bored doing the same thing too much so I know I will not be able to sustain a push for making only kids quilts for awhile. In fact, I have my next unconventional project in mind that I'm very excited about!