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.

While I was sitting at my desk, I looked up at my inspiration board with family pictures and was inspired to do another four letter word block for Tonya.  I decided it would be good to do another block for more practice, and because I wanted to do a word that no one else had done.  [Something about the need to be original? Unique? Who knows.] After I finished the block, all I can say is that I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to do wonky letters and I’m sure it’s all the fault of my elementary school teachers.

Yes, it’ll definitely take several years of therapy for my brain to do wonky. You see, in elementary school every year I received the dreaded “N” for penmanship.  “N” as in needs improvement, not satisfactory, not up to par, not normal, nasty and a whole slew of other negative “N” words.  Once in sixth grade, my teacher held up my paper in front of the whole class as a messy example of what a paper should not look like.  I was mortified… wanted to die… felt like I was standing in front of the whole class in my underwear.  [Mr. Gross if you're out there, you should be paying for my therapy!]

So where am I going with this you ask?  Well, because I was traumatized and humiliated for my penmanship [hey, it's not like I wasn't trying to do my best!] I decided to show up those negative Nellies and Neds. In Junior High [Middle School for those of you under 50], I worked really hard at improving my handwriting. I filled notebooks with my handwriting practice. I spent many hours writing 10, 20 & 30 page letters every week to my BFF. I even spent several years graffiti-ing everything in sight with block letters. Block letters with stripes, polka dots, and drop shadows.  Lots of L-O-V-E in the shape of a heart.  [The school custodians must have loved washing my artwork off the desks everyday.]

Yup, I practiced so hard that now my penmanship is too neat and as a result, I’m having a hard time doing wonky. That’s got to be the reason. It’s certainly not because I have an organized, neat freak personality. [No offense to any organized neat freaks who might be reading this.  Really.  I have two children who are organized neat freaks and I love them anyway.]  So Tonya, here is my second, four letter, unwonky word block for you.

A nice, neat [big, fat?] KISS.

As you can see, I still like going all the way to the edge with my letters.  I’m not sure what that says about me, but I’m sure it says something.

Oh, wait.  These are supposed to be Halloween noises. I guess it should be shrieking in fear. Here is my “shriek” block for Tonya’s Slither Eek Boo quilt.

Tee hee.

Okay.  It’s really Ludo sleeping on my “shriek” block.  All fabric is fair game for him as a prime sleeping spot.  My plan for “shriek” was to make it with long, pointy-type letters.  I sketched out my original idea on a piece of scrap paper shown at the bottom of the picture below.  Then I drew the letters out a little larger and gave some thought as to what part of the letter to form first, second & third because most of the letters had three parts.

You’ll notice in my drawing that I forgot the “r” so youngest DS drew an “r” for me at the bottom of the paper.  I made a note for myself about remembering to allow for the seam allowance at the end of all my points because I didn’t want them getting chopped off.

Here are my letters in the order that I stitched them together.  The “e” was the most difficult.  Actually, not difficult but fiddly.  It didn’t quite turn out as I had planned in my drawing but I didn’t want to keep messing with it.  It’s an “e” and it’s got pointy parts.  You can see from the “r” that I started with straight pieces of fabric.  I sewed the background fabric bits on at an angle to make the points.

Here is “shriek.”  It’s pretty large — about 9″ x 24″.  Another important thing to point out is how much more background fabric it takes when you are being fiddly with the letters. It took more of the purple background fabric than I thought it would to make the block.  More seams equals more fabric used.  I really like how the block turned out though, and I only chopped off a very tiny tip at the bottom of the “r.”

Tonya, this was a lot of fun to do and to see what everyone else came up with!  [You can see more blocks here and here.] I have more word quilts planned in the future.  Thanks for letting me play.

Here is my “home” block for Tonya’s four letter word quilt.  You can see some of the wonky words she’s received for the quilt so far here.  As you can tell by looking at my block I was still having difficulty doing wonky after the unwonkiness of “pray.”  [Yes, I'm making up words now.] The letters are still quite uniform and pretty much the same size across the block.   It was a bit harder to put these letters together because Tonya wanted all the blocks to be fairly uniform in size so she gave a block measurement to use as a guideline.  I do like going all the way to the top and bottom of the block with the letters for some reason. I probably wouldn’t  have put the strip on the bottom if it weren’t for the block needing to be 6 1/2″ tall.  It is much easier to make the letters and let the word be the size it ends up.

And using wonky letters to make wonky words.  While I was house sitting, this was the perfect diversion from all my hand pieced projects.  Well, that and looking through quilting magazines and books that lined the shelves of the quilters’ houses where I was house sitting. . .  Not only did I take more projects than I could complete in the time I was away, but I came back home with even more projects floating around in my head.  And, thanks to Tonya of Lazy Gal Quilting, several of the new project ideas are for word quilts. I had TOO MUCH fun making wonky words!

I volunteered to do the word “shriek” for Tonya’s Slither Eek Boo Halloween Noises quilt but never having done words before, I thought maybe I should practice a bit first.  Tonya was also looking for 4 letter words for another quilt project.  The first 4 letter word that popped into mind was “pray.”  It looked like no one had signed up to do the word “home” either so I thought I’d do both “pray” [for myself] and “home” [for Tonya].  [Tonya has since received a couple of blocks with "home" but I didn't know that because I don't have computer access while I'm house sitting.]

I started out by printing the words in block letters on plain paper as a visual clue for piecing. That was really helpful for me when I was piecing. I can’t find the piece of paper at the moment.  I wish I had it to show you the difference between my original word layout and what I ended up with. In the original my “r” was a bit longer and my “a” was slightly under the “r”.  One lesson I learned was to pay attention to where the 1/4″ seam allowance should be before whacking off  bits from the letters. This was important because I planned to do “shriek” in long, pointy letters and I didn’t want my points getting chopped off.  You can see where the top edge of my “r” got whacked off.  I decided from the start I was not going to get hung up on perfection though and work with my letters however they emerged from the scraps of fabric.  So I just kept on going.

Another thing I learned was how hard it is for me to vary the position of my letters. I tend to want to make them all even across the top and bottom.  Something to work on in the future. . . House sitting for these 2 quilters is a lot of fun because basically I get to sit and quilt  all day for days on end and no one cares that that’s all I’m doing because I’m the only one there [except the dogs]. It’s BLISS. At one of the houses I get to play with all her quilting gadgets and comb through her pile of scraps that’s been accumulating for 6+ years.  I even have permission to take some of the scraps home and I did — for my Apple Core Charm Quilt.

I thought that since I was making wonky letters into wonky words I should experiment with hand quilting Tonya’s Fantabulous Freehand Fans also.  The only problem was I couldn’t remember if she quilted right over the letters or not.  I decided not to but wish I had. I like the way the fans came out and for the most part was able to hand quilt without getting hung up on my stitches being perfectly uniform.

So the third thing I learned is to go ahead and quilt the freehand fans all over. I ended up doing a bit of quilting about 1/8″ inside the letters.  Not a perfect solution but suitable.  I do like my block though and, hey, it’s DONE!