Getting back into the studio: A crayon quilt

I'm easing myself back into the studio, playing with scraps of color for a baby quilt.  I'm working from this pattern from American Patchwork & Quilting.  Who wouldn't like a reminder of the pleasure of a new box of crayons?






American Patchwork & Quilting, Supplement to an issue sometime in the last year--sorry, no date given on the pages



The pattern calls for piecing together 2.5" strips of assorted fabrics, but I wanted to use the variety in my scraps, some of which weren't that wide.  I think the results look fine.  I kept the crayons the size in the pattern (cut at 5" x 40", plus the crayon tip cut at 5"), but made just six and turned them vertical, to make a smaller quilt.  I haven't sewn the crayons together yet.  Here they are in rainbow order:










 Not sure I like the red and orange next to each other.  Here I've moved the red over to the right side:








But I think I like it even better this way:  primaries (red/yellow/blue) on the left and secondaries (orange, green, purple) on the right: 










When I put the photo of the pattern at the top of this post, I realized it has the crayons arranged with half the points up and half down:










Not sure which I like better.  With all the points up, it reminds me more of a box of crayons, but I also like the balance of the alternating forms.  Comments on color order and point arrangements welcome!





I don't often make a quilt totally from scraps.  It was a pleasure to handle scores of different fabrics, remembering favorite projects, or wondering how I happened to have a particular fabric at all.  Also very nice to not have to buy or dye any fabric, but just dive in.  

Comments

  1. BrendaOctober 31, 2015 at 7:00 PM

    What a fun design! With the slimline, portrait orientation, I like primary/secondaries all facing the same direction :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

3 works in progress

Image
I'm working on three different projects at the moment, and thought I'd give you a look at each one, over a few posts.  This first one was the last begun but the first finished. I was thinking I would intersperse working on it with the others, but it created such a mess that it took over the studio, so I just kept at it until it was done. This is from a pattern by Rachel Hauser of Stitched in Color , "Confetti." For a background fabric, I dyed some Nature's Way muslin in a pale gray that I like very much. (The color shows a little better in the detail shots below.) I have made two "confetti" quilts long before I saw this pattern, with both of mine done improvisationally. The first was a wedding quilt made for a friend , and the second used the same idea to make "If Only," a wedding quilt for Jeremy . In contrast, Rachel Hauser's pattern utilizes paperpiecing, which pre-determines the position of scraps. I don't think I'd ever do this...
Read more

Project #2: Homage to Ellsworth Kelly, II

Image
Back in 2013, I made a small quilt,  "Homage to Ellsworth Kelly," working from his paintings of colorful squares. You can see an example of one of Kelly's such paintings in the top row of the stamps put out not long ago by USPS--wish I had purchased more! After studying a number of Kelly's  paintings of squares , I decided to use multiple bright colors, along with both white and black, and to place the squares so that value contrasts dominate, but to also have some places where two adjacent squares are close in value. Here's the quilt I made, 36"x36." For quite a while, I've had a photocopied image of another piece by Kelly on my bulletin board, "Brushstrokes Cut into Forty-Nine Squares and Arranged by Chance."  Recently it occurred to me that I had on hand some fabric that might work well for a quilt based on this idea. I had dyed a couple of yards of cotton/linen blend in dark charcoal, but it came out less mottled than I wanted it, so ha...
Read more

Spliced Lines Sewn into Eighty-Eight Squares: Homage to Ellsworth Kelly II

Image
Work on this quilt has been going slowly, but I have been making progress. The photo below shows the quilt top, batting and backing layered on and pinned into the carpeted floor in our large guest room. This is where I'm basting the layers together in preparation for quilting. The silvery line at the bottom of the photo is the piece of straight metal I bought some years ago to help me mark quilting lines. This time I used it to help me get the inner black border pinned down in straight lines. Below you can see the basting stitches I've been putting in. These big red stitches will hold the layers in place as I do the machine quilting, and then will be pulled out. (I would usually baste with safety pins when doing machine quilting, but I didn't want to add further weight and bulk to this large quilt.) In a method learned from Suzanne Marshall, I sit on the floor and put in the lines of stitching. I only do about an hour a day, listening to music. I've been at it for a cou...
Read more