A Prairie Home Quilts

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…

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 didn’t do this week’s Inklingo Sampler block and chose instead to do the bonus block that is posted twice a month.  I have Inklingo Collection #3 which is what is needed for the 6 pointed Star Hexagon.

Because I wanted this block to play nice with my others, I added the bits around the Star Hexagon so the block would measure 6″ square when finished.

These are the fabric bits for my first challenge block that I’m adding to my Inklingo Sampler Quilt.

I chose to make an Aunt Sukey’s Choice block because it had flying geese units and I wanted to try them with Inklingo. I used the instructions that Linda provides in her Triangle Tips PDF to make 8 flying geese units.  Yeah, I know I sound like a walking ad [or broken record] for Inklingo but I really do love using it.

This is the block laid out for sewing after the flying geese units are made.

Next I made the 4 patches and sewed the flying geese units together.  [Man, are my photos blurry.]

The finished block.  [It looks a little wonky.  I need to do a better job with my photos or my pressing.]

I did make myself a little crazy unsewing a seam or two several times trying to be sure my seams lined up.  I seriously won’t be doing that any more if I want to get a good number of challenge blocks completed for my quilt.  I realized I’ve been spoiled by the precise seams I can get when I’m hand piecing.  I’ve never been able to sew by machine and get precise seams which I’m attributing to the way I pin because I’m a leftie.  [Any excuse will do, right?]

This Ohio Star block is the 31 July 2009 Inklingo Sampler block posted by Tilde.  Ohio Star is one of my favorite blocks.

The Quilt Index has a nice selection of Ohio Star quilts pictured in their index.  There is one that has both LeMoyne Stars & Ohio Stars with applique in the border.

Both blocks are among my favorites and I love applique in the borders. I’m not in love with the original colorway, but I’d like to duplicate it in another colorway. Isn’t it great? I think my design idea list has just grown.  No, I can’t go there. . .

This block is Shoofly.  Instructions for this block were posted on 24 July 2009 on the Inklingo Sampler blog.

This week’s block is made with the same bits as last week’s Friendship Star block.  They’re just arranged differently.