Art Quilt 'Liberated' Style, design process...

Last night I sewed the outer borders together and decided on black for the corner blocks. After Thanksgiving I'll get the borders and corner blocks sewn on.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, we have so much to be thankful for don't we?

Pam, my blogger friend at Hokkaido Kudasai.blogspot.com , has finished her wonderful, hand pieced and quilted, blue hexi quilt. If you enjoy and appreciate hexi quilts then you must see this one. Pam puts a lot of care and attention to detail in her projects. Congratulations, Pam!

Remember to look in on the continuing projects at Ad Hoc Improv Quilters #3 . 

There's a lot of interesting quilts being made.

See you after the holiday!

Hand Quilting with Embroidery Thread and Four Patch Piecing.

Hand quilting progress on Citrus Rose #2.

Close up...

Piecing four patch blocks

I'm ready to start hand quilting the borders of my art quilt, Citrus Rose #2. The turquoise embroidery thread really works with the whole quilt. Progress is being made.

Four Patch blocks are fun to piece, simple but lots of possibilities. I'm making a variety of blocks for a sampler of 'liberated' blocks as in Gwen Marston's book, Liberated Quiltmaking II . 

Happy Stitching!!

Hand Quilting, Citrus Rose 2, Liberated Log Cabin

Oranges on my orange tree are almost ripe.

Hand quilting Citrus Rose 2 with three strands embroidery thread.

Coffee and black berry coffee cake anyone? Come on over!

Happy Friday! Share a smile!

Celebrating Rain, Green and Beading..

The colors were clear and bright this morning after a couple days of rain.

The mix of greens, yellow greens, reds into oranges is delightful.

See the rain drops? Lovely.

Shrub with berries.

Blue Gum Eucalyptus does its flower thing.

Beading  accomplished here.

It's rained here the last couple of days, it was fairly respectable too. This morning the sun was out

shining and the air was clear and clean. I had to get some photos of the colors to share. So thrilling.

I got some beading done. My needle threader broke, my beading needles are almost impossible to thread without them. I had three more beads to sew down and needed more thread on my needle and the threader wire broke, oh no! So tediously I worked and fiddled and finally got the beading needle threaded by eye and hand. I sure didn't want to run to the store so late just to get a threader!

That's what I've been up to today. I also made dinner and it's on the stove, home made pea soup with lots of veggies and left over roast beef.

Have a great day!

Making more Blocks Arranging Auditioning...

String blocks on a fabulous orange batik.

Remember the four-patch 12" x 12" blocks I took apart? They're rearranged and back together.

They're calling to me....I just have to figure out what they're trying to say.

More hand quilting done in turquoise embroidery thread.

Adventures in color and design and happy Friday! 

Most of the fabric, from the fat quarter bundle I wanted to use up, has gone into 'liberated' blocks and now I'm shuffling the blocks around and auditioning sashing, border fabrics. The orange batik is very bold and eye catching, but it will need a contrasting 'friend' to enable it to play well and not totally over power the other 'players'. There are certain colors like certain personalities that need a handler.

The theme or score with this quilt is that it's a 'liberated' sampler. The liberated blocks take center stage and sashing and borders have to work with the blocks.

More hand quilting has gone into my Citrus Rose quilt. It's got a heavier cotton batting, making hand quilting more work. I've been using Warm and Natural. I'm going to look around for a lighter cotton batting for other quilts.  Mountain Mist makes a light cotton batting. Do any of you have a preference? What is your favorite batting and why?

Rearranging 'Liberated' blocks, sewing strip fabric...

Strip fabric pieced, four square borders etc.....

'Liberated' blocks rearranged. I think I'll use the foursquares as borders.

I began the process of arranging my 'liberated' blocks as in Liberated Quiltmaking II by Gwen Marston, a few days ago. Usually I change my mind several times in the design process and take something out or add a little of this in. Originally I had the foursquare blocks all sewn together in a 12 x 12" square block, that just wasn't working the way I wanted it to. So the foursquares are now separated into borders. I sewed up some strip fabric today and plan on having a little fun using it in borders and or blocks to add to the liberated blocks. 

In keeping with Sherri Lynn Woods ideas in the The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters, about improvising from a score or framework and setting limits, I limited myself to using the 'liberated' blocks I had already made from a set of fat quarter quilting fabric I wanted to use up and adding bright, knock your socks off, batiks just because I can't stay away from them. The black and white got added as neutrals, wow, so much for limits, or shall we say as the infamous Captain Barbosa said, 'They're more like guidelines?'

I'll be sharing more design adventures, see you soon!