Cosmic Corridors Quilt
I posted this photo a while back, and it's on my Flickr account. It's the middle of one of my first quilts, made about ten years ago.
A few people have asked to see a photo of the whole quilt so here it. I find that it doesn't photograph all that well as a whole quilt, the colours and contrast never seem right, this is the best of a heap of photos I took this morning.
It's approximately 1.2 metres square. In the centre section are log cabin blocks that I drew up on thin muslin and then sewed directly onto that in the foundation piecing method. I like the way these log cabin blocks start from the corner as opposed to the centre which is the normal method. There are twenty four 4 1/2 inch log cabin blocks - lots and lots of stitch and flip in that lot, each strip is just over 1/4 inch finished width! Because they are turned on point, I had to trim off half of each of the edge blocks - that was agony! I've still got the 12 scrap triangles from around the edge tucked away in a drawer, I couldn't bear to part with them!
That was going to be the end of things, just binding and finished, but I was a bit miffed that something that had been such a lot of work ended up so darn small. It has to be bigger and more magnificent!! :-) So, first off a small dark border. Then I figured on trying the 'square in the square' approach. I'd just learned how to hand dye fabric and I had a batch of indigo blue fabric just waiting to be used for something nice. I thought it matched pretty well colour-wise, and I hunted through the random patterning of the hand dyes to find the lightest parts for the inner square, and the darker sections for the outer square. Finally a black outer border.
Then I machine quilted it. I quilted straight lines across the joins of the log cabin strips, to make them look more 3D. Then I quilted rays from the tips of the inner square back towards the central section. Then finally I stipple quilted the other square section. The black border is not quilted at all, the only stitching in the black is where I appliqued down the ends of the points of the inner square. Now I look back, that was quite an adventurous move for a beginner patchworker!
I love the colours in this quilt, and I called it Cosmic Corridors as it seems to me to be, well, sort of cosmic. :-) It hangs on my loungeroom wall.
Right, well that's three huge blogposts for today, can you tell it's my day off?
5 comments:
Umm, so you also did the quilting which shows up in the first picture of the Midnight blue post? The random squiggly line which looks so nice?
How much work was that? I currently think that quilters must be the most patient people in the world! :)
Yep, it's called stipple quilting. It's a free motion (by dropping the feed dogs on the sewing machine) stitch. Playing loud music always helps cos you need to get a sort of rhythm thing going to keep the stitching flowing. My favourite kind of quilting, I'm not good at straight lines. :-)
Heh, you're not good at straight lines? Then there's still some hope for me. :D
Wow that is a fantastic quilt. It looks 3d but that was the purpose of it isnt it? Hehehe
The choice of colours is just great - it looks like I could go down into your quilt. Fantastic
Post a Comment