I am definitely not the boss around here

Well, this is a new experience for me.  I've had quilts tell me what to do before, many, many times.  But I've never been bossed about by a shirt, before I even started turning it into a quilt.  That is what has happened this week.  

I wanted to start working to a colour scheme inspired by a photo, the latest AHIQ challenge.  I had an initial pull from my shirt bag, which looked like this:

and also wanted to dig out the scraps of this green, from my last top.

It all seemed pretty straightforward, until I found this shirt on ebay.

It's lovely.  Just the right shade of green, and with brown and a soft pink running through it.  I was a little smug.  Ha! Did this shirt want to play ball and work with my other greens?  It did not.  It sat on top of the pile glaring at me and absolutely refusing to play nicely.  

I am, maybe, a little wiser than I used to be, so instead of insisting it did what I wanted and forcing the issue, I have given in.  This shirt is not going to be paired with lots of other greens.  Instead I will be pairing it with browns, 

with pinks and with a creamy yellow shirt with fine pink and deeper yellow, and blue-green stripes.

This pile consists of 6 shirts, one half-metre of quilting cotton and a dress made of a beautiful Monaluna quilting cotton that my daughter wore when she was five.  Let's see where it takes me.

Sneaking past the finish line

This top has sneaked its way to a finish without much by way of a progress record, I'm afraid.  I lost heart trying to take pictures in a tiny space - most of them showed too much of the surrounding mess and the piecing itself got lost in the mix.  However, it is a completed top, which is the point of things after all, so I'm not beating myself up too much. 

Here are the couple of progress shots I managed.

It turned out to be somewhere between a log cabin and a medallion, in terms of the construction.  Seems to be a spot I'm quite comfortable sitting in.  There were lots of things I wanted as I was piecing, but this was definitely one of those quilts with its own ideas.  So, I wanted more of the green and tried adding green triangles into hourglass blocks and as flying geese, neither of which was any good.  I wanted to use tumbler blocks again, but the quilt wanted those hourglasses.  As usual, the quilt was right.

My favourite bit of the whole thing turns out to be the plaid which has worked well both in strips but also mixed into the hourglasses and as inserts in longer strips.  I think it helps to keep everything coherent but also to move the eye around nicely.

This is the second orange quilt I've made recently.  I am currently collecting shirts for a green project for AHIQ but I'm not sure I've got quite enough yet.  If not, I will have to come up with something else for the time being, so I'm off to dig around in my shirt stash and see what I can find.  

 

Time spent quilting is never wasted

And just to prove it, while my house was in chaos I did at least manage to quilt my way to the first finish of the year.  This top was only made last year and in the normal course of things would be nowhere near the front of the queue.  However, just before the builders came I made a few backs as a precaution.  Of course making more than one was an act of pure optimism but I was on a roll.  Then I tucked them all ways in a drawer, rolled up with their respective tops, thinking they would be easy to grab as and when I needed them.  This was the first one my hand lit on, so it is the one that made it into the hoop.

What to say about it?  Well, it's the first quilt I've ever made entirely from shirts.  This wasn't a deliberate policy and I think there were pieces of quilting cotton in my initial pull, but none of them quite worked in the end, so it was shirts all the way.  

I haven't done it for a while, but I used quite a lot of button plackets 

just because it felt like this was a quilt that could take it without descending into tweeness.  I also used most of the fabrics used to line the yokes, which is often different from but complementary to the main body of the shirt.  

The picture bottom right shows a lovely shirt, with a slight sheen.  I used the front and the back of the fabric, pretty much without thinking about which way it landed in any given moment.

I had enough fabric to keep going (final size is about 67" square-ish) but it seemed to be done so I stopped.  Pleasingly, this meant I had enough left to do the back too.

This was started on 27th May 2021.  Piecing was finished on 1st July.  I put it in the hoop during the first week in January 2022 and it was finished on 15th March.  The wadding is organic cotton, the threads were what I had, but all perle cotton and mostly no.8.  The binding is this lovely wobbly stripe from very old stash.  I think maybe it's a Janet Clare fabric?

One of the nice things about shirt quilts is that people seem more comfortable with them - they already feel not-quite-new,  I suppose.  Either that, or my guys have become so used to piles of quilts that they just don't stand on ceremony any more.  Either way, within a day of finishing it, I came in to find it had already been put to use and then left, draped rather fetchingly, across a chair.  Hooray.

Filling in the centre

As someone who is emphatically never going to do quilt maths, it might not have been the brightest move to start this quilt by building a frame and only then thinking about what went inside.  I got to a solution I was happy with eventually, but as you can see it took a bit of figuring out.

In addition to the question of sizing, it took me a while to find a fabric combination that worked.  In the end the low tech method of just plonking pieces down until something worked got me where I needed to go.  It took a while, as the orange fabric in my checkerboard has a strong presence and wasn't all that inclined to play nice.  I tried prints and plains and lots of combinations but mostly it was instantly clear that they were off the mark.  I also considered a centre with more piecing.  The reason I went with this simple little line of geese was that it seemed to balance some of the busier fabrics nicely.  It also let me introduce several new fabrics into the mix in a painless way. 

This is where I got too.  

This is already big for my tiny space, so I have to move it for photos.  While I am working on it I fold it in half, either vertically or horizontally, and just work on one edge.  It's a strange way of going about things, but so far, so good.

Still here, after a fashion, and sewing

 I have still not reclaimed my sewing space - in fact I have pretty much had to vacate the house the past couple of weeks, but am feeling generally positive about the changes I can see taking place.  In the meantime I have borrowed a tiny (and I mean tiny) corner in which to try and push on with a bit of quilting.  It looks like this

I spent quite a while before I started sewing looking at the piles of fabric I shared in the last post.  They went back into the bag and came out again, with various changes.  I reached a point where I knew some of the fabrics I thought were definitely in but still couldn't quite get started.  Maybe it was the change in my sewing situation, but maybe it was just that things needed time to simmer quietly.  In any case, eventually, when I wasn't even thinking about quilting at all, a picture popped into my head.  It looked like this:

so I went ahead and made it.  The orange-y fabric had been messing with my head rather, as it is both a strong colour and quite a busy pattern, but pairing it with the dark blues has balanced it out nicely.  The squares are cut freehand but are about 4-4.5 inches, so this feels like the middle of a quilt rather than the outside edges, so I still have to figure out what goes inside and how to build out.  I've never started with the middle before, so this should be an interesting process.

Time, no space

 I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, but currently have nowhere it is easy to piece (floors back to concrete, walls back to plaster, dust and mud all over the place).  I had thought I would just ride it out, but there's still a way to go.  Maybe I can come up with a project that I can manage in a tiny space.  All I've done so far is shuffle a lot of shirts around and come up with a couple of piles I quite like.

This one would be good to go.  I like the oranges and range of prints I have in this, and know there are other things I have that would fit if I need them.

This one probably needs a couple of additions before there's enough fabric there to be feasible, but I really like the stripy shirt second from the left and the fabrics on either end which both, by change, have cranes on them.

That stripe, which doesn't photograph well, has deep pink and green stripes in it as well as the creams and yellows, so there is plenty of room to expand the colour scheme if I need to.  

Of course I need to figure out what sort of starting point I feel like, which may well inform my decision over which pile to go with.  I may also see if I can track down something to add to the second pile and I guess that might make a difference too. 

Incidentally, I know this approach doesn't fit with the challenge I set for AHIQ this time around, but there's still time for that one.

One last finish for the year

Finished with a whole two days in hand!  The builders have left things nice and tidy over the Christmas break but the inside of the house is not what you would call picturesque so once again I braved the drizzle to stick this on the line.  It's a challenging business, since everything is kind of cock-eyed, as you can see from this unedited photo.

There is no slope in the garden - just in the washing line.  Just out of shot is a long length of drainpipe, with two pegs stuck on the top edge, which is serving as a prop for the line.  

At least things look a bit better once I crop out the wonky background!

Working up close on the quilting I had lost track of the big picture with this one, but now that it is done and I can stand back a bit, I am really happy with how it has turned out.  I can absolutely see how it relates to my starting point of maps of the back-to-backs in the centre of Birmingham in the 19th century.  

This was started at the beginning of August 2018 in response to an AHIQ challenge and I finished the piecing on December 5th.  I think maybe other quilts jumped the queue, because that seems quite a long time ago.  Anyway, I got it into a hoop in August this year and finished it first thing this morning.  In fact, I got up early specifically to stitch the last foot or so of binding.  That seems like a long time, I know, but because I mostly have two quilts on the go at the moment and both of them are now done, I think it still works out at somewhere between two and three months per quilt, which feels pretty fast to me.  

This was made out of a lot of shirts (the very darkest blue here is one of the nicest shirts I have ever used, I think) with bits from stash and a few very old Oakshott cottons in the mix.  Wadding is organic cotton and I used perle thread from stash.  I am used to cutting it fine with my fabric but in this case I nearly ran out of suitable thread.  There is one corner where everything is quilted in either white or a dark green, because that is all I had left.    

I am particularly pleased with the back for this.  The centre is made from an old tablecloth which depicts historic buildings of Tasmania.  I was experimenting with using things that I wouldn't want to cut up for a front and tablecloths have rather taken my fancy.  Not big enough to save me much piecing, but somehow pleasing nonetheless.

Finished size is about 65" wide by 80" long.

No better way to see out a year than with a last minute finish. 

Wishing you all a very happy and healthy 2022.