Polaroid Quilt

Awhile back I posted some photos of the Polaroids I'd made for my Monday Night Modern quilt group (ok we're still arguing about our name but I think it's some sort of variation on that theme!). We put all of them in a pile and then sorted them out by colour and all took a pile home to turn into a quilt for the NICU unit at Starship. I hadn't managed to get the binding on for the last meeting, but it went in on Thursday when I had my second crochet lesson! But that's another post ;)



I got lucky with the red blocks, and they went beautifully with this blue. Making them really wonky wasn't hard, but it made quilting it a real pain because all the bias along the edges caused a lot of stretching in places. It's ok, and I'm sure with a good wash it'll all crinkle up and not be so obvious but it buts me none-the-less! The spotty binding is very cute, and if it weren't destined for a very deserving tiny baby then I'd totally keep it for myself!

Polaroids

I have three words for you - So. Much. Fun. I'm doing these for my Monday Night quilt group and the aim is to combine all our Polaroids into a quilt and do something altruistic with it. I'm so making some for me though! I think the proportions we decided on are a bit off though, the top and sides need to be thinner, but that's easily remedied if I can convince the others!

Polaroids WIP, originally uploaded by Hazelnutgirl.

It's a fairly random assortment of fabrics, and there are definitely more than the required one animal in my lot; but I discovered that when thinking about photo-like blocks I tend to choose fabrics with figures or objects in them, and not surprisingly, those turn out to include a fair number of animals! I've seen some lovely polaroids done with just geometric prints, like more regular quilting designs, and I'd like to try that way too.

Brown Hexagons

I mentioned awhile back that I'd done a 'block you don't like in a colour you don't like' challenge for my Monday night modern quilt group. I decided to do hexagons because I really haven't felt the love for them at all, popular as they are; and I chose brown because although I don't mind it as a colour, I really don't like it in quilts. Brown hexagons. Blech. This is what I ended up with



Although it wasn't explicitly stated, I think part of the reason we chose this challenge was to see if we could come to like something we might be prejudiced against for whatever reason. Now, I'm not entirely sure why I don't like hexagons much to be honest, I just don't. Someone suggested they might be too geometric, or precise and I think that's probably it in some deep subconscious way.

Brown, well I don't like brown in textiles much because I grew up in the 70s. Add some orange to that and you've got every childhood trauma right there. So of course I had to add in some orange. It didn't matter that it was Heather Ross orange either, because oh my I do not like this colour combination! Mat suggested after it was too late that green would have been a good background, and then I thought perhaps a paleish blue might have been good too, but it was too late and I'd already done all the quilting so wasn't going to change it. But I think perhaps it would soften the starkness of the brown against the white. I really need to stop using so much white as backgrounds.

So what do I like? Well I really like how I put the hexagons on (barring a few layout issues I can see now) with the negative space. And I really like how I quilted it.



Basically I quilted on the hexagon shapes first, then appliqued the hexagons on. I left parts of the top unquilted, so both the quilting and the actual hexagons have a lot of empty spaces. In fact, I could happily take off the hexagons and just have the quilting! I also really enjoyed making the hexagons, it was satisfying and good for keeping hands busy while watching tv.

Verdict: I still don't like brown much, but I think it's possible that, used judiciously, I could come around the hexagons. Just not brown ones.

Group challenges

Well hello there! I didn't mean to take a break but somehow I did. I blame it on a slightly dismal end to KCWC (more on that later) and getting stuck in to painting the kitchen. But along with that I was slowly working away on a couple of challenges we set ourselves at our last modern quilt group meeting at The Little Craft Store (highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't been, 7-9pm first Monday of the month at the shop in Pt. Chev). The first one was to make a 'mug rug' in solids (what's wrong with saying coaster, does it have to have a ridiculous name just to make it sound less nana or something?), up to an A4 size. The second, which I'll blog when I've finished the binding, was to do a block you didn't particularly like in colours you don't particularly like. What do you think mine was?

I've been wanting to try half-square triangles for awhile now, so I thought I'd give those a go, but of course this being my first time I had to do them quite small. Not that they're really difficult or anything but I like to make things hard on myself and burn my fingers with the iron while pressing them. I wanted to do a gradation from one colour to another and I had this idea in my head. I didn't have quite the right solids but they weren't too bad. The yellow is a bit out of place, but I didn't have an inbetween orange and yellow colour. They grade from a medium red (they all look much darker in this photo) to a peachy pink, to salmon, to orange and then to lightish yellow.




After I laid them all out I wasn't that thrilled with the sheer regularity of it all, it was too...clinical or sterile or something. I tried rotating a few squares around and in a way I liked it better but in the end I just left the one to break things up a bit. This is what my plan looks like next to the result



I made a mistake colouring in in one strip, which still shows as faint pink. After awhile I began to wish that I'd done something like that instead of just using white, maybe having a very pale set of colours grading from one to another instead of the white. But I didn't have fabrics like that, and I wasn't actually going to do it all over again! Verdict: Ok, but I think I like things that are slightly less bitsy and repetitive. I do like solids though.

I had a few squares left over so I made a coaster.




That's right - I called it a coaster. Am I kicked out of crafty blogging now?

Stringing it out

How many posts can you get out of two pillows that you didn't photograph comprehensively before you took them off for a challenge? Three! Here are the two together.



I find it amazing how they have essentially the same fabrics (the spotty one has a couple extra) but completely different techniques and backing fabrics almost completely removes that similarity to the point where I don't know they go particularly well together. I don't mean that in a negative way or anything, I love them individually but not together so much. I think it's the very formal style of the Cathedral window with the freestyle look of the circles.

The modern quilting thing is funny isn't it - often I see it defined through fabric choices and negative space, as well as old patterns reinterpreted in the light of the first two criteria. So the Cathedral window pillow certainly qualifies for all three of those points - but what about the circle pillow? I think another side of the movement is heavily influenced by the use of linen and 'natural' fabrics, and a sort of Japanese/zakka aesthetic as personified by Rashida Coleman-Hales' work over at I Love Linen and my circle pillow definitely falls within that zone of influence. Are there any other genres of the Modern Quilting movement that you can think of?

Second AMQG pillow

For this pillow I really wanted to use linen and circles. I decided to applique the circles on and then quilt/embroider them both to hold them down and to look pretty! To be honest this pillow took me a lot longer than the Cathedral Window pillow, which was all done by machine. Luckily I had an old needlepoint frame to use with the quilting, but the size determined the height of the pillow - it's essentially a regular bed pillow but narrower top to bottom and slightly longer so it didn't look so...beddy.



I forgot to take closeups of the embroidery after I put the pillow together but I put teaser photos up on Instagram a few days ago






The worst part of putting it together was putting in piping and then an invisible zip along one edge. What a freaking nightmare! I had to resew things So. Many. Times. I thought I was going to go mental. The invisible zip foot wouldn't work on the piped side and my regular zipper foot sucks at the best of times, but with top and bottom being quilt sandwiches, plus the piping fabric and the general bulk of it all, it really didn't want to get close in to any edges! But hey, if you sew around something about 20 times eventually you get pretty close by small increments even if you die a little inside each time you have to resew a section or rip something out. :P

The back is plain with different-sized circles quilted all over it - why on earth did I not take photos of it? It looks great - I've noticed I often like the backs of my cushions as much as the fronts, I guess that's a good thing!

First AMQG challenge pillow

Well phew, I can blog about this at long last! I suppose technically I should wait until the 13th when we can all see each other's pillows, but I honestly think I'll bust if I can't blog about something. I've been spending all my time on these two pillows and other than having Instagram photos to put up I haven't had much to discuss*. So. This is the first one and not surprisingly it's a Cathedral Window pillow - I'm quite sure I wasn't fooling anyone with that thing of acting like the grey version was a random choice unrelated to the challenge.



While I love the grey version a lot, I think the colour placement was better on this one, and I know technically it's superior.



Not all the points are as perfect as these by a long shot - I discovered that the points formed at the joins between blocks are lovely, while the ones formed by the centre of each block look slightly mitered. I tried so so so hard to not have that happen but it did anyways, so I suspect it's an artifact of the method (I used the tutorial and A La Mode). I don't think I'll do another one but if I did I'd try one of the methods where you sew the blocks initially instead of ironing them and see if that made a difference. As I mentioned with the previous cushion, I tried sewing the turn-overs in circles and it was much more successful than sewing around four sides of each colour. The points are reinforced and much smoother with no back-tacking. I also paid more attention to how much I was folding back so my circles are more circular! The other thing I figured out after the fact was that if you want a directional print to run straight up and down on the finished item, you need to cut it on the diagonal initially - my prints were cut on the grain and as you can are all on the diagonal when sewn up. Not sure what that would mean for keeping the fabrics straight while sewing though, you might get too much distortion to make it worthwhile.

I've just realised I forgot to take proper photos of the backs of both pillows, but I did have an Instagram one from when I had just put the invisible zip in and was super-duper proud of myself. Can you spot it? The back is quilted with widely-spaced straight lines, and the row of blocks about a 1/3 of the way across. The rule of thirds is my life!




Second pillow tomorrow!

*Well I could have blogged about how depressed I am at the NZ election results and the fact this lovely country seems to be moving away from an inclusive and caring community to the "f**k you I'm in this for myself" attitude so prevalent these days. I hate the meanness of spirit and mind that seems to be such an integral part of the right, and I hate that the world that Hazel is going to inherit is all about the individual, what they can get out of life and what it owes them, rather than the individual as part of the community and humanity as a whole. I'm more than pleased that the Greens did so well, but in practical terms I guess I question how effective that will be when Labour is at such a low point. Sigh. I need to go and cuddle a cat or a child I think.

AMQG Challenge

AMQG pillow challenge fabric, originally uploaded by Hazelnutgirl.

The first challenge for the Auckland Modern Quilt Guild members has been set - a cushion - and I'm really excited! It's my first challenge so I don't know exactly how open to be about what I'm thinking of doing or not - are people all secret-squirrel about their intentions or generally open? I'd love to share how I'm going (I almost typed journey there but that would have been more than a little pretentious, I can't believe the word even entered my mind! And that I'm sharing it with you!), but I'm competitive enough not to want to get pipped at the post because I shared too much. Not that I really think that would happen to be perfectly honest, maybe I'd just like for it to be a surprise?

Anyways, this is the fabric we have, I don't know who the designer is or anything, it's not on my bit of selvedge. We have a fat eighth and we have to use at least half of it, so can enter two pillows if we like. I have some of my fabrics already and at least one pattern in mind - and it's not due until the 1st December, so I have heaps of time. Perhaps I won't even leave it till the last minute!

It's going to be so interesting to see what people come up with, there is such a diversity of people in our group; we vary widely in age, experience and taste. I know at least one person who was focusing on many of the same FQ as I was when I grabbed some after our meeting, but I bet even that doesn't mean our cushions will be at all alike!