Fragments and Dreams - My Madrona Road Challenge Quilt

After many late nights and many, many spools of thread, I have finally finished my quilt! I started out thinking I would do a little bit of doodle quilting to accentuate what was going on, but as time went on I got deeper and deeper into the quilting. I'm not sure this quilt entirely works compositionaly, but it was fun to stretch myself to make it. I was hoping the quilting would balance out the quilt, but I don't think it did. However, I am proud of the work and thought that I put into this quilt, and I think it is a sign of where I am going as a quilter.

Here it is, in all its glory! The concept of this quilt was pulled out of the text fabric, so to understand it, you have to know what the strips of black text fabric say. The top left is "stitch by stitch she pieced her life together", then "the family settled in a little house with a big life on Madrona Road." The center appartment building says, "The country mouse and her prince grew restless in their beuatiful city", while the quote next to the flower says "longed for a steadfast place to call home". The ladder and hand says, "After battling an evil giant she vowed never to climb ladders again", the center star says, "Sweet dreams" and the bottom right quote is "Alas, the winds called her to seek her soul in the desert".

On my Flikr photo I wrote a little artist's statement: This quilt was inspired by the text fabric and the night time colours - I wanted to make a quilt that had the same effect of fragmented, unfinished images drifting over the surface of the quilt. The free motion doodle quilting fills in details and adds texture to the quilt, adding extra images and words (a castle by the giant's hand, wind in the desert, a garden outside the hosue) that expand the images and continue to reflect the text in its  free flowing stream of consciousness style.

I'll walk you around a bit of the quilting, shall I? If you'd rather just look at the pictures, feel free to skip the text all together. But its there in case you're interested in my process and the details.
Here we see the giant's castle and the clouds behind it, as well as the swirl-y quilting I put on the whole bottom left of the quilt. The writing says "Here be giants". Now I wish I had echo-quilted these yellow flowers too, as I did with the ones above and on the right of the quilt. Maybe I'll pick it out and re-do it if I have the time . . . (ha ha).

Since I was playing with the interaction of images vs text, and piecing vs quilting, I was feeling all Postmodern, and decided to layer my own words on top of the words and images that were already in the quilt.
In case you're wondering, free motion writing is easy. If you have some practice and control with your free motion quilting, and you can write cursive, then you can write on your quilt. Around the star there is this same swirl-y quilting, with small stars and hearts added in.

The wind is quilted around the girl, and the yellow flower has echo quilting in it. The flowers are expanded outward into the white space. I quilted "Let the sunshine in" and a sun next to the yellow flower, which reminded me of the sun.

The house has clouds and swirls above it, and a garden below it. There is a path leading from the text about finding a place to find their own. The house has bricks quilted into it, and the is texture in the roof and the curtains.

This flower motif is one of my favorite parts of the quilting. I will definitely use this again on another quilt.

On the other side of the quilt I quilted in the words from the text above, with spools on either side. Above this is the part where I made square spirals. I'm the least happy with that part. My original plan was to do straight line quilting, and I think I should have stuck with it, or made the lines much closer together - more like a 1/4 inch.

Finally, next tot he house, I wrote "Home sweet home". This also shows a nice section of the clouds and swirl-y spirals. The swirls sort of expanded into these spirals as I continued quilting, and I think I like them better. I will probably use them as a quilting motif again, too. The clouds were also fun.

Overall, I had a lot of fun quilting this - it reminded me of the geometric doodling I used to fill pages with in highschool during class. Although the final product is a bit random, the process of making this quilt was great, and I will definitely use some of the things I learned in future quilts.

Swearing Ensued . . .

Oh, it was one of those weekends. The kind where you try to get projects done and nothing works.

I have been trying to finish this Madrona Road quilt, and it has been making me a little crazy. I'm not big on lots of negative space, but I decided to play around with it so I could work with the idea of the blocks being fragmented, like the text in the text print.

In practice, what this means is puzzling lots of different blocks together with lots of solid fabric strips and squares. These were my blocks, all finished and ready to be pieced together on Saturday night, after a day preparing for and then running a birthday party (great timing, I know).

I got all the white strips and squares cut out and placed them on my flannel-backed tablecloth that I had laid out on the floor as a design wall. I started stitching them together, with high hopes I could get them finished that night. At around 12am I was about half way there and thought I might be able to finish by 1am. And then Emma woke up. Then Owen woke up. Then Emma woke up AGAIN. It was now about 1:30, and I knew I wasn't going to get the quilt done. So I picked up the tablecloth to move the quilt pieces out of the middle of my floor, so it didn't get trampled in the morning . . . and they all fell off the tablecloth.

As you can imagine, there was some cursing. I had about 25 white strips and squares of various lengths (unmarked, of course, because I was in a hurry) drifting across the dark floor.

Well, I went to bed. I put the finished parts and the blocks on my design wall in my bedroom so they didn't get wrinkled beyond repair, and left the rest on a pile. I didn't have the heart to put them back together until Sunday night. On Tuesday, I took advantage of the cold snap and the fact that Emma was pretty content after having friends over in the morning and I finally finished the quilt top:

Its small, but its done and right now that's what matters. Now on to some quilting......

If you are a contact over in Flikr, you know already that I'm working on the Modern Quilt Guild Madrona Road Challenge right now. If you finish your quilt by the end of the month, there's a chance it can go to QuiltCon. I think that would be cool if my quilt could go, since I can't, so I've been using my small bits of spare time to work on this challenge. We received 6 or so 1/8th yards of fabric from the blue/yellow colourway of a fabric line called Madrona Road.

Since I'm a wordy type of person, the first thing I did was read the text print. It is made up of fragments of what could be one or many stories told in fairy tale language. I decided that I wanted to do a quilt that did the same thing visually - took some of my favorite images from the text and made them into scenes.

Before I left for the sew-in on Saturday, I had this done:

And when I got back, I had this done:

As you can see, I was very busy in the four hours I was there. I am a pretty chatty, extroverted person, so I needed to talk with everyone and find out what they were doing. It was lots of fun getting to know everyone and watching all the different ways people work through a design. I was once more reminded that I need to learn French, as about half of the conversation went right by me (as is typical in Montreal, it was carried out alternately in English and French - sometimes people switching mid-comment from one language to the other). I do remember some French from highschool, though, so I tried hard to listen close and see what I could pick out.

 The other problem was that I didn't do the house roof the way sarah taught us during sarah and molly's free piecing study, as I didn't have enough blue fabric. Instead I messed around with the sides of the roof for about an hour sewing and un-picking and sewing and un-picking again.

When I came home and put my blocks up on my design wall again, Emma decided that SHE needed some houses too, so we cut up some scraps for her. I suggested we sew them together, but she thought that was a ridiculous idea - how will she play with them if they're sewed together?

Wouldn't you know it - as soon as I got home I decided that the blue fabric was too low contrast and I've ripped it off and started the roof over again. Silly, silly me.

No Longer a Lone Wolf

I am super excited that tomorrow is the first sew-in that I'm going to attend with the Montreal Modern Quilt Guild! I don't think I've ever done anything like this before. In case you're wondering, the white plastic bit in the middle of my photo is the removable front plate / hidden drawer / bobbin cover on my sewing machine. Due to some rough treatment, it no longer stays on my machine, and had to be packed with the presser foot and power bar.

This is my bag before I put in the flannel backed table cloth and rulers, plus my mini ironing board and my sewing machine (recently "decorated" with stickers again. sigh). It was super fun to swap out the diapers and spare pants and underwear (for one baby and one potty training girl) and sketch books and mini dinosoars (for distractions in check outs / line ups / church / meetings) for all my sewing and quilting stuff. I was impressed because all of the things in the above photo including my iron are tucked away in there.

I didn't say I would bring an iron / ironing board, but I'm going to be free piecing, and when I'm free piecing I use my iron about every 5 minutes, so I thought I would bring my own rather than hog the communal iron.

As I said on Flikr, when I'm free piecing its cut, sew, iron, cut, sew, iron, rip apart, repeat.

Hopefully I'll actually remember to do a post-meeting update this time. The last time I went it was great to meet everyone and see all their fantastic creativity, but I had Owen with me and he insisted on talking the whole time, so I was a little embarrassed. It was super fun, none the less. This time I'm going baby free (Dave is valiantly taking on all four kids for a few hours by himself) so I should be a little more relaxed.