A Prairie Home Quilts

Is it possible that the Floral Winding Ways quilt top snuck off with the Plaid Streak of Lightning quilt top when my back was turned and reproduced?  How else could 2 projects become 7? It defies logic and probably most known laws of the universe.  At least this is the way it happens at my house…

I’m asked to teach a class at the LQS.  I decide to kill two birds with one stone (probably should have left the bird killing out of the equation) and make a class sample that I can give to my mom as a birthday present.  I decide to use floral fabrics.  Florals are nice but not really my thing so I have to buy fabric.  I create this…

Then I have leftover floral scraps to deal with.

I think back to this project and I remember the boo boo I made with the setting triangles for this Plaid Streak of Lightning and think, “Hmm, these floral scraps would look good with the brown setting triangles I cut wrong.  Perhaps with a nice antique-y pink tone-on-tone for the other half of the HST blocks.” Since I have to buy that pink tone-on-tone, I add a few (cough) more floral fabrics to the cart.  [Side note:  If you followed the link to the post about the boo boo, did you notice that I mention that the Plaid Streak of Lightning also morphed into Bold Streak? Yeah.  Projects. Multiplying.  Exponentially.]

The lovely floral scraps and the antique-y pink tone-on-tone became these.   Oh, how hard I have fallen for these floral HST blocks!  I thought I was in love with the Plaid Streak of Lightning. Oh, no.  That was just a passing fancy. It’s a good thing I cut enough floral HST for 2 quilt tops.  Yet I still have enough floral fabric to get a head start on another project. Hmm.

I dream up this in EQ7…

Sixty pretty floral Dresden plates swirling across a 5-step gradient gray background. Lovely. Sixty different floral fabrics ought to be enough variation, right?  Let’s go with 80 just to be sure.  I can always use the extra petals in another project…  Oh, and the scraps! Enough to make at least 2 more Floral Streak of Lightning quilt tops, I’m sure.

I’m not even going to bother explaining what happened with the plaids.  All I did was buy a few plaid shirts at the thrift store.  Really.  It’s worse than the floral fabrics.  I need an intervention.

My Liberated Amish Challenge quilt top is done.  I definitely liberated the colors and the setting.  Hahaha.  Tonya’s challenge was for us to pick a quilt from the book Amish Abstractions or from the photos on the Browns’ website to “liberate.”  We were to add words — done Tonya-style — to the front of the quilt also. After much deliberation, I chose this quilt for inspiration.  As you can see from the photo of the original quilt, there was no matchy-matchy color scheme going on.  What was the original quilter thinking when she put these colors together?  The quilt is crib-sized and the HST blocks must be only about 3″.  Did she just want to use up her smallest scraps?  Did she choose her favorite colors no matter how they looked together?  Maybe it’s us — our culture — our time in history that’s decreed color palettes have to be so matchy-matchy?

So how did I choose the colors for my quilt?  I didn’t have any solids so I had to buy fabric, but I needed to narrow down my choices because I just kept adding more and more fabric to the online cart.  I noticed that the many names of the colors where names of fruits and vegetables so I added all those to my cart.  At first there were too many greens so I took out all the vegetables and left just the fruit.  The names of the fruits were also the inspiration for my words.

The colors are bright and bold.  Something I’m drawn to.  The center setting was a challenge.  Several people commented about the photo of my setting that combined the squares and straight furrows — something that hadn’t even occurred to me — combining them.  So thank you!  That was all the inspiration I needed to truly liberate the setting in the original quilt into something different.  Everything else just seemed somewhat predictable or something…  This is different — original — and I like it.

I do have a difficult time with the “cut without using rulers and doing the whole free-pieced blocks” thing.  My mind screams “precise, straight, precision, neat, orderly” even though I’m really rarely any of those things in real life.  I’m sure this is just a reflection of my rebellious heart trying to let loose over the shouting in my head though.  Maybe with some more practical experience my heart could win my mind over because I do like liberated quilts and would like to try making a few more.

To be truly ruled by my heart rather than my mind…  What would that look like I wonder?

Hmm.  Not quite what I envisioned…

Perhaps a grape intervention?  Or a completely different setting?

Still too wild?

Too dull?

Other possibilities?

Better?

Best?

Time for some chocolate.   And maybe a glass of wine.  Or two…

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1. HST for Blush Bold Streak
2. Flying Geese for Blush Bold Streak
3. HST for Floral Streak of Lightning
4. Chain piecing HST
5. 24 3″ Hexagon Alphabet Fairies for Fancy Hexagons
6. Color of Fruit for Liberated Amish

Also finished but not pictured bindings for Blush Bold Streak and Red, White & Black Bold Streak, recut setting triangles for Plaid Streak of Lightning, and finished sewing HST and piano key border for Liberated Amish.

Be back in a week!

Back in January, Tonya [The Unruly Quilter AKA:  LazyGalQuilting] started on online get together where we were to create a quilt using liberated techniques based on an Amish quilt design of our choice.  Our finished quilts were to include letters somewhere on the front.

I finally settled on this quilt as my inspiration.  I had some solids from the Michael Miller Krystal line but none of the colors that I had seemed suitable to my design.  I was trying to order fabric online and kept adding more and more colors to my cart; ending up with way more fabric than I needed for this project.  I decided I needed to set some parameters for color choices. Many of the color names were foods so first I added all the food named colors to my cart.  There were too many greens so I decided to put just the fabric colors named for fruit.  [Okay, so my mind works in bizarre ways but I say --  whatever works.] I ended up with citron, olive, raspberry, wine, grape, blueberry, plum, papaya, mandarin, mango and pomegranate — olive because I wanted two greens and wine…   well, a glass of wine goes well with anything.  Oh, and black for one border and the stripes in the HST.

This is the EQ6 file that I did for my initial design idea.  It’s not an exact duplicate of the idea I had in mind but helped me see how my color choices were going to look together.  After getting my fabrics with all the fruity names, I decided to call this quilt “Tutti Fruitti.”  My initial idea included putting the quilt name, Liberated Amish 2010, my name, and town/state in the borders.

As I was fondling fabric, my design idea morphed.  I loved the bright colors against the black so decided instead to make one, larger black border instead of using the wine color.  And then there were those fruity names…  just so much more fun than name, rank and serial number, don’t you think?

So there you have it — the color of fruit.  Now bip on over to the Liberated Amish 2010 Get Together to see what everyone else has been up to.  There are quite a few finished projects.  [Yes, I better get a move on!] If you’re inspired to try some strip pieced letters, Tonya has a book coming out in December and Brenda [Scraps and Strings] has a tutorial here.

I, Erin Klein, pledge to talk more about my processes, even when I can’t quite put them in words or be sure I’m being totally clear.   I’m going to put my thinking and my gut feelings out there.

[Trust me, you have no idea how my thought processes link from one thing to the next...  It could be good for a giggle or two.]

Thoughts and inspiration behind the pledge can be found here on r0ssie’s blog.

I leave on Friday to house sit for a week without internet access.  I have a few blog entries scheduled to post.  Hopefully they will.  I have an update on my sewing space redo, portions of my Liberated Amish quilt to share and updates on the four Streak of Lightning quilts that are in process.  [Yes, one has officially morphed into four...]

Now if anyone has any idea of where to find some of those elves that the shoemaker had that came in during the night and finished up his work, I would LOVE to hear about it.  I love the process of creating — I am easily inspired, love to design, collect the fabrics and begin a quilt.   But once I see how it’s going to come together — I’m ready to move on.  If I could find some of those elves to finish up some of my WIPs, I’d be in heaven. I could start a new quilt everyday! Without guilt. Anyone got any leads on where I might find them??

Be back soon.