Improv Under the Influence - Blogger's Quilt Festival

Welcome to Poppyprint! I'm so glad you've stopped by for the annual fall festival.

I've been saving this little quilt for the festival, although pictures were posted on Instagram when I pieced it initially. It is made entirely out of Michael Miller Cotton Couture solids - in fact I used almost every last thread of the 7 small cuts of fabric handed out at our Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild meeting.  We are participating in a challenge to make a quilted item out of these fabrics (any other solids could be added) and there will be a big reveal of all our members' quilts at our November meeting.

As soon as I opened my package, I went straight to work on this quilt. I'd been playing with a new method of improv piecing that occurred to me one day last summer and I was itching to try it out using solids.  The name "Improv Under the Influence" has a double meaning for me. The first influence was a vintage quilt that inspired this modified courthouse steps layout - the quilt hung in "American Quilts - the Democratic Art" exhibit that I was lucky enough to see last year in Bellingham, WA. Photographs were not allowed in the exhibit, the quiltmaker was unknown and the quilt does not appear in the coffee table book I purchased, so I can only describe it to you from memory. The quilt had a very Gees Bend vibe, but did not originate from Alabama as I recall. Like my version, the steps were defined by colour. The horizontal steps were pieced from suiting scraps and solids in neutral shades of black, brown, cream and white. The vertical steps included a lot of red, brighter calico scraps and white. I couldn't take my eyes off that quilt.

The straight-line quilting was entirely improvised on the go, using the piecing as a guide. I used lime and hot pink Aurifil 30 wt thread.

The second influence is that of traditional piecing methods. I often hear at my traditional guild that quilters want to explore the idea of improv, but they don't know where to start. The thought of randomly cutting strips of fabric with scissors seems wasteful and intimidating when they are used to precise rotary methods and a set plan.  The way that I constructed this quilt from pre-cuts allows you to maintain a 1/4" seam allowance, use your rotary equipment and have a lot of fun!  Using this method, no two people would ever end up with the same quilt because there is a lot of freedom to improvise and play.  I look forward to teaching the method at guild next month and can't wait to see how people use it in their quilt-making.

The backing fabric of this little 28" square hanging came from a clothing shop in Sarlat-la-Caneda, a beautiful town that we visited in the Dordogne region of France in 2012. The colours were just so happy and unique that I bought a yard for my stash.  I could not believe my luck when I saw how well it coordinated with the challenge fabrics!  I chose to forego a traditional binding and instead let the piecing run all the way to the edge of the quilt by attaching a facing (the solid green frame you see around the backing edge). I followed this excellent tutorial by fellow VMQG member Terry Aske.

An adapted, larger version of Improv Under the Influence will release as a pattern in 2014!

Enjoy the Blogger's Quilt Festival! 

Support the quilt makers by voting for your favourites in tons of great categories - I've entered my quilt in the wall-hanging category.

Blogger's Quilt Festival Spring 2013

Hello! Welcome to Poppyprint and the Blogger's Quilt Festival sponsored by Amy's Creative side twice a year to coincide with Fall and Spring Quilt Markets.

There haven't been many quilt finishes here since the last festival - I seem to have become a bag lady and have enjoyed making smaller projects that I can finish in an afternoon or two. I do have many quilts on the go in my brain, many sets of bee blocks awaiting assembly, two Scrap Vomit quilts (one basted for quilting, one a set of blocks) and a strong desire to start new projects. I know many of you are with me on this!

For the festival I'd like to share a small quilt with a rather big story. Three of my good blogging friends were a part of it's making and finishing, in addition to my small piecing effort.  The whole story is here for you to peruse if you feel like knowing more, but since there are hundreds of quilts to see in the festival, I'll keep it brief(er) here.

Cosmic Lipari

The fabrics are all luminescent Oakshott Lipari cottons sent to me from Michael Oakshott via Lynne . The pattern is an incredibly complicated-looking but easy to piece huge star block designed by Tracey (pattern and acrylic templates available on her blog! There isn't one single Y-seam, I promise) and finally, the completely mind-blowing quilting was done in trade by my local VMQG friend Janet. She's so talented and does this detailed work on her domestic machine. I knew the Lipari's deserved special treatment and she nailed it!

You've gotta see the back to really appreciate all of Janet's work!

I love the luxury, sheen and rich colours of the Lipari cotton so much (it's coloured thread shot with black thread) but man, it's really hard to do it justice in photos.

Just look at those perfectly plump feathers!

Check out the rest of the amazing festival, nominate your favs and then head back later this week to vote!

Bloggers Quilt Festival Fall 2012

Once again Amy has organized a whopper of an online quilt festival for us all! My one big quilt finish of the year was complete in time for Spring Festival, so I'm going back in the archives a bit to show you one of my favourite little swap items that I sent away. Swapping was such a wonderful way to find new friends when I first started blogging and sharing on flickr. I pushed myself to design original work; sometimes that was really hard. Usually, I relied on my photographs for inspiration, as I did here for this row of birdhouses on fence posts.

This is a tiny little art quilt measuring less than 8" x 10", I think.  It is made from felted wool appliqued onto a canvas basecloth. The wool is secured with machine and hand embroidery and there a few wee buttons and french knot Queen Anne's Lace for extra embellishment. You can read more details about the construction here.  This mini was sent off to Nanette but we also shared it's image with all of our family and friends because we used the photo as our Christmas card in 2010!

Here is the inspiration photo for the little quilt, taken not far from my parent's cottage on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, Canada.

Near Stokes Bay, Ontario

This is quite different work than many of you are used to seeing here on Poppyprint - I hope to do some more work with wool over the winter months.  Be sure to check out what I'm sure will be the hundreds of other amazing quilts in the Bloggers Quilt Festival. You can nominate your favourites in one of many different categories and in a couple of weeks, cast your votes!  Click on this button to get there:

Sewin' for the SIL

My SIL had a birthday a couple of months ago while we were busy living the good life over in France.  I promised to make her a new bag so that she can take it along when she heads to France herself soon.  I enjoyed making this one for D, so decided to revisit Erin's great pattern and make another.

I still had some fabulous decor-weight Outside Oslo left over from making myself this bag and once I got the two thumbs up (not literally, she's not a thumb's-upper) from SIL it was all systems go.  Although I needed the occasional reminder...take note of a comment left right here shortly after we returned home from our trip:

They are lovely. Where is the guest napkin for your SIL that lives down the street and arrives at your house at 5:30 p.m. "Dinner you say...that would be delightful."

I am glad they only take an afternoon to make because you have a Birthday purse to make. You asked me to remind you but maybe not so publicly. 

Thanks to Berene, I now know that I can buy slider hardware locally at Fabricana!

My volunteer cup overfloweth of late (that's a nice way of saying I'm stressed out to the max with no one to blame but myself and my right hand that can never seem to stay in my pocket when the call goes out for help). I am happy this bag is complete, not only because it's a long overdue gift, but also it frees me up to get busy with tons of other stuff (non-sewing) that I have to do. 

The lining is perfect for a traveler's bag: I managed to find a few more yards of it online recently and snapped it up pronto.

A big huge hug of thanks to all of you for the sweet, sweet comments on Blackbird Fly. You really gave that quilt a lotta love!! Amy is now taking nominations and votes for favs at the Bloggers' Quilt Festival (I think you need to have a quilt entered to be eligible to vote for your festival fav, but anyone can nominate a quilt in the many prize categories that will be voted on later).  It really is tough to choose - there are over 500 quilts entered! I encourage you to check out as many as you can. It's super inspiring to see what people all over the world are creating with fabric.

Bloggers' Quilt Festival - Spring 2012

Hello! Welcome to Poppyprint and my entry to the Bloggers' Quilt Festival. I am so happy to share this quilt with you. It's been over a year in the making, with cutting freezer paper templates, piecing scrappy letters on retreats and finally straight-line quilting slowly, slowly over the past couple of weeks. Binding went on in the last 2 days, so this one is a fresh finish!

Here it is:

'Blackbird Fly' - 86" square, which means the quilt can lie on the bed with the text 

horizontal, or vertical.

Word quilts are usually very evocative and they always impress me. We can express so much with words in cloth.  Blackbird has been one of my favourite songs for over 30 years - I originally learned the song in a youth choir and my love for it was cemented during a 9th grade Beatles obsession. The simple melody and meaningful lyrics get me all misty, no matter if it's sung by the Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, or Chris Colfer of Glee (all three versions are on my iPod playlist).  I wasn't keen on improv piecing so many letters, so I turned to Denyse Schmidt's Proverb quilt templates for this project.

Originally I chose a grouping of fabrics intended for a dresden plate quilt. Then I realized I might be pushing my luck with so much pink AND Dresden plates on a quilt for our bedroom. I'm sure my husband B has a breaking point, no matter how badly he'd like a quilt on our bed (if for no other reason than something to show for this obsession of mine.  Like most quilters, I do give away almost everything I make).  Once I'd switched gears from plates to lyrics, I chose Essex linen in putty as the main background, supplemented by a linen-look French General cotton from Moda.  More yellows, greens and *gasp* even browns were added to offset all the pink and yellow. I wanted the letters and background to blend a little - so that the words wouldn't jump out, but rather require a bit of effort to read.  The top and bottom framing strips are Kona bone.

Instead of cutting plastic templates for each letter as the pattern suggests, I used a freezer paper method which eliminates the need to trace onto fabric (I will share a tutorial soon).  Either way you cut it, piecing all of those letters takes heaps of time. It was a slow and mindful project that I thoroughly enjoyed, especially because it was all pieced on my Singer Featherweight. Some things are just worth the time.

Quilted with 40wt Superior Threads King Tut on top and 40wt Aurifil in the bobbin

Over the course of the year, I pondered different quilting ideas. I considered spacing the lines of lyrics with sashing, as in the original pattern, and handquilting in the musical notes of the song with perle cotton.  I also thought about writing out the entire lyric with free motion quilted script in the sashing.  In the end, you can see that I decided to piece the words close together, as they are intended, instead of separating them with 6" sashing.  The words are so beautiful together, I figured keeping the quilting simple was the best bet, so I went with straight lines about 1" to 1.5" apart. I used the sashing seams as a guide, as well as strips of 3/4" painters tape across the quilt but the lines are still quite organic and definitely not precise.

The back was the perfect place to have bit of fun in a filler strip between hunks of yardage.

Thanks for visiting. I hope you enjoyed seeing "Blackbird Fly" and I encourage you to visit the other blogs participating in the Blogger's Quilt Festival and nominate your favourite quilts. Amy has lots of fun categories for you to keep in mind as you peruse the beautiful quilts!

Bloggers Quilt Festival Fall 2011

Hi there! Welcome to Poppyprint if you are clicking your way through the Bloggers Quilt Festival listings. Here is my favourite autumn quilt, which is hanging on my office door for the season.

I first saw a photo in Quilter's World Magazine of this wallhanging by Ellen Stuckey (I believe she's from Indiana, but I can't find a blog or website for her). I hung on to a colour photocopy of it for several years and finally found the perfect fabric. All of it was hand dyed by my friend Kathy, except for a few of the lighter fabrics, which are batik.

This entire quilt is free cut with scissors, no rulers or rotary blades. I pieced it on my annual November retreat a few years ago and made a massive mess of my work table and the floor around me! Free-piecing can be pretty wasteful, but all of the scraps were so beautiful I saved them for other, tiny projects. The quilt is not bound in the traditional way, but with a facing instead. I really liked the way Ellen had defined the two panels with an asymmetric top and bottom edge -it's a unique quilt finish.

I had a lot of fun with the quilting; using different thread colours, some free motion in the leaves themselves, but mostly straight line quilting with a walking foot on. In some cases, I used the quilting to define more leaves, like the one pictured below.

If you are not a regular Poppyprint reader, you may be interested in my recent free-cut project that I just made earlier this week in a workshop with the Quilters of Gee's Bend, Alabama. You can read about it here!

Thank you so much for stopping by. Be sure to visit Amy's Creative Side for a complete listing of participating blogs and check out all of the other amazing quilts in this Festival by clicking on the button below!

Bloggers Quilt Festival Spring 2011

Welcome to Poppyprint!

This is my third Bloggers Quilt Festival and while I'm a bit late for this one, I am still very excited to share this tiny quilt with you. It is one of my most favourite things I've ever made (1) because it was inspired by one of my own photographs, and (2) it is made entirely from wool which was a new experience for me, and (3) it ended up being our 2010 Christmas card!

The inspiration photo for my little art quilt, taken in rural Ontario near my parent's cottage

I don't actually have this quilt. I made it for a mini-quilt swap on Flickr. I was very sad to see it go, but I had faith that it's new owner would love it as much as I do. The theme was "houses" and my partner is a major bird lover and well-known on Flickr for bird motifs in her work.

This is how our Christmas card looked after I'd framed the photo in a museum mat and increased the colour contrast in Picnik

Now, while this may not be the kind of thing you expect to see in a quilt festival, I can tell you it does have three layers, all joined together with some stitching, and it is bound as well. I created it without using any templates, just a sketch, some wool, sharp scissors, steam-a-seam lite, embroidery floss and my machine. The large background wool areas were butted up to each other on a canvas foundation and top stitched together with a zigzag stitch.

I free motion thread painted the grass over top of some spikey wool cuttings that I had fused on. The Queen Ann's Lace are french knots and the fence wire is embroidery floss couched on with some stitches where the 'wires' cross.

I think my favourite parts are the round bales of hay, though. Here is a picture of the whole mini complete with it's thicker-than-usual binding.

Thank you for stopping by to visit Poppyprint in the festival (and thank you Amy for giving us the chance to meet so many new quilting friends through sharing our work!!) - I hope you'll come again soon!

If your coffee/tea cup is empty, head for a refill and come on back to enjoy the rest of the festival right here. There are over 300 quilts entered already!!!

Mystic Star for the Bloggers Quilt Festival

WELCOME TO POPPYPRINT!

For all the online chitchat about batiks not cutting the mustard for modern quilts, I present Mystic Star. There are some projects for which batiks provide the necessary depth and colour saturation required for a design to really shine. I believe Annette Ornelas' Mexican Star pattern is one of them. This quilt was completed four years ago just in time for my guild's bi-annual quilt show. It is my one and only award-winning quilt!

Several members of the guild took this course from local teacher Brenda Brayfield. It was my first introduction to folding back bias edges to simulate curved piecing. I have seen this pattern made up in several different colourways, and varying techniques for holding the curves back. Lots of quilters choose to sew a line 1/8" inside the curve on their machine, but I really didn't trust my skills to create a smooth line. Instead, I knew I wanted to stitch the curves down by hand. By complete fluke, I came across the perfect vial of glass seed beads to embellish each curve. The beading was done prior to sandwiching the quilt.

The trick with pre-sandwich embellishing is then trying to quilt around it! I figured out my quilting plan for each design area of the quilt using a large sheet of clear vinyl laid on top of the quilt. Using a wipe-away fine tip marker, I doodled various quilting ideas onto the vinyl until finding one I liked enough to commit to thread.

Not happy with the yellow quilting lines that crossed in the intersections, I simply covered them up with a little pile of beads! In addition to free motion quilting in the large background areas, I added random seed stitches and blanket stitched the binding on for a little extra somethin'-somethin' since the binding was done in the same fabric as the background.

For a show quilt, I think it's nice to create a special label.

This is the only quilt that permanently hangs on display in our home (outside of my sewing room, that is) and I never tire of looking at it. It's a beautiful pattern and I don't think it would be nearly as effective in any fabric other than batiks, really.

If you are stopping in via Amy's Bloggers Quilt Festival, thanks for taking a peek! Have fun touring all of the beautiful quilts, head back to Amy's for a complete list of participants.

Blogger's Quilt Festival 2010

Hey festival-goers, WELCOME TO POPPYPRINT!

Allow me to introduce MuuMuu Bijoux to you. This is MuuMuu:

She's frolicking in the Hawaiian sun with her groovy gal pals in search of sea life...can you spot a lobster, a starfish, a scallop shell and a sea horse? They're all right there, hiding in the sand. This quilt should be new to most of you, unless you've gone way back in the archives to my first ever post. It was done in 2004 and it is by far the most favourite-ist thing I've ever made. For many reasons....here are a few (most of them representing quilting 'firsts' for me):

Free cut and pieced curves

Improvisational flying geese

A yo-yo sun (paper pieced then appliqued on)

This quilt represents the first time I made something inspired by a real person, my late mother-in-law. Almost every year, B's family would vacation in Maui. His mom would purchase Hilo Hatie (Hawaiian fabric), bring it home and make a muumuu for herself for loungin'. The 'bijoux' in the title refers to the jewel tones of the dress fabrics on all the beach girls. I wanted to celebrate the vast range of body sizes and colours you see on a vacation beach.

I learned to make the 'paper dolls' at a class taught locally by Barb Mortell, an inspiring Vancouver quilt artist. I believe this will remain my all-time favourite quilt for many years to come. I could stare at it for hours as I love all of the colours and am very proud of the quilting. I'm not sure I've quilted anything quite as well since!

Thanks for visiting....enjoy the rest of the quilts in the festival and by all means, come back again soon!

and now for the big WINNAH.....

No, so far, that's not me. And I musta entered, like, two hundred giveaways this week. Pout.

Someone (other than me, obviously) is gonna be a winner soon, though! Right here on Poppyprint. Oh yes, Random Generator, do your thang honey.....

By my count (and that means disregarding 1 'removed by author' and 1 double commentor), the lucky winner of my sweet little selvage mini with it's very own hanger is Mossy Oak Lane! This will be in the mail just as soon as I get your address!

And now the backing. I only had one small chunk of this fabric off a sample card but it was the perfect size for this little mini. It really cracks me up.

Especially this one....

The part in the green box....about her machine "serving her smoothly, quickly and happily!". I think my machine may have missed that memo. Either that, or I got the wrong instruction manual with it!

Congratulations to all the Sew Mama Sew giveaway winners and a HUGE thanks to Beth and Kristin for all the work they do to bring us sewists together in this amazing online community!

I'll be back soon with my entry for the Bloggers Quilt Festival!

Wreath of Mine

This my entry into Park City Girl's online Quilt Festival! This is the first quilt I made for myself (I had made MANY others before this one, but gave them all away!!). This was made using all Moda fabric for a Moda challenge years ago...maybe 6?...amongst the gals I worked with here. Actually, I learned a tres cool method of making the tesselating blocks from a wonderful teacher I've already told you about here. I arranged the lights, mediums and darks so that an abstract sort-of-wreath would appear when they were all pieced back together. At the time I was rather besotted with all things burgundy. I really love this quilt - I should pull it out of the cedar chest and have a wee admiration session.

Click through on the Quilt Festival button in my sidebar so you can have a HUGE admiration session - best prepare a large mug o' your favourite bevvie and get comfy!