Back to the Pinwheels on Off the Wall Friday

 

So does everyone have that one big project that just seems to go on and on with no real end in sight?  My English paper pieced pinwheels is that project.  It's been going on for ...oh I don't know... 13 years now??  I know I started it in a weak moment.  I had finished the 4,200-piece tumbling blocks quilt and thought "Gee I haven't EPP in a while".  What happened if I did an improv EPP using just one shape but played with value.  At that point I never saw an art quilt improvisationally English paper pieced.  13 years later, I now know why.  It doesn't help that it's been an on-again... off-again kind of project. In fact, looking back over the years in this blog, it's a bit embarrassing how long this project has gone on!  With all this hand work I've been doing though, I've decided it is once again...on again.  

To catch you up, I've been making these little 6-piece pinwheels out of trapezoids in basically values of light-light, light, medium, dark, and dark-dark.  I chose a palette of cool colors plus magenta.  After many false starts on an exact layout, I decided to let it grow organically.  I started piecing the pinwheels together by value in big "clumps".  Then this week, I started arranging some of the bigger clumps together to make the beginning of an actual top.  Let me repeat that...a beginning of an actual top.  (I know I didn't believe it either).   

So this is as far as I've gotten. For the most part, that big island there is all sewn together,   I do have several ziplock bags of pinwheels to sew into clumps, but at least now I can somewhere plan it out...a bit.  Just gettin' the dang thing started was hard!

Making life easier is changing the thread I was using to piece it with.    I've been using Wonderfil's decobob now instead of Aurifil 50 wt cotton.  Wowsy, do the seams go together much smoother and the little stitches disappear.  I did try the Invisifil but I found that the 100 wt was not strong enough and sometimes break with a good tug through the seams.  It's crazy the love affair I've started with these two threads though.  I even got them their own little thread boxes so I can stop hunting around looking for them.

So I got another night or two to work on these before the fourth installment of the Block of the Month comes out.  Wouldn't it be cool to get both quilts done this year?

Under things I Like...

I want to remind everyone that when shopping for your supplies, take a little time and surf the web.  It came up again this week when I was looking for the little thread packs of DecoBob.  Thread has gotten outrageous anymore like everything else.  On the official Wonderfil website, the pack I wanted was $23.10 .  But I found it on Amazon for $19.20.  While on Amazon, I picked out my Dritz thread boxes for $5-$7 each (depending on when you look - pricing on there is so weird right?) AND  a magnetic thread wand for 2 bucks.  Am I the last person to own one of these?  Why in the world did I not buy it sooner.  Wave it and magically it picks up all my pins from the floor...from my table....from my blanket...you get the drift!

Ohhh and even though we did manage to get 3" of snow on Tuesday, my crocuses did come out in full bloom.  With the snow coming and going this year, we've been able to enjoy them a lot longer than normal!

So What Have You Been Up to Creatively?

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Connections on Off the Wall Friday

 

If anything Covid has taught me, is the need for connection.  How many of us have taken our
social time for granted right up to the moment when it wasn't there.  To be fair, since moving to "Working From Home" 5 years ago, I've been looking for a way to connect.  Still there wasn't any kind of sense of urgency. Until...well, ya know....March, 2020.  I don't think I really understood how much our year was going to change until the President closed the airports to Europe.  Of course, the connections in our lives were just  starting to be cut.  My work life didn't change.  Ladies still called, call after call, wanting their clothes but just the idea that I couldn't go anywhere was...well, let's just say it was a wake-up call.

Jump ahead 18 months and I get an email from a reader.  (That still kinda blows my mind.  10 years later, I still can't get used to the idea that anybody actually reads this dribble blog )  She wrote saying she was a reader and had noticed I was in the Erie area.  From there a conversation was struck up and...drum roll...a connection was made.  God truly blessed me since not only was a connection  made, but a connection with a lady that was just as smart and quirky as I am.  Plus she's a talented art quilter who knows what she's doing!  Like I said BLESSED!  

To-Do App On My Phone

  So we decided to stay connected by making a monthly meeting.  At this meeting, we can  Show & Tell finish projects, bring pieces we're stuck on and  review our To-Do lists.  Yes I said it...TO-DO Lists.  I was bold enough to suggest we start monthly lists of projects we wanted to be held accountable to.  Two weeks in, let me tell you, it was one of my better ideas.  Every time I don't feel like working, I think, "I can't report in that I've been a lazy ass slug all month." Plus, go figure the more I sew, the more I want to sew. Who would have thunk?!?!  

Out of the three projects from my list, of course I chose the slowest one to concentrate on.  Little by little though the pinwheels are coming together.  Since work is back to normal, I have enough brain power to sew a couple hours a day (I've been listening to Star Trek Voyager  while doing it - boy is that good!).  I decided to do the pinwheels in hunks of colors and values and then just arrange them up on the  design board.  I first started with hunks of mediums   and now have been adding in the hunks of lights.  You can see how all of a sudden it goes from just an ordinary scrap quilt to the beginnings of something wayyyyyy more interesting.  I always had an idea of what direction  I wanted  these little trapezoids to go in but to see it starting to come together is really exciting!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And it's all because I made a connection.  

This weekend I really need to get back to my sewing machine and work on the rest of the list.  Mind you, I said that last weekend and the pinwheels dragged me back to them...but my studio is lonely and needs me!!

Have you made any connections?  Was it a good or bad experience?

So What Have Been Up to Creatively?

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20 Min Sewing Sprints on Off The Wall Friday

 

So I started to do my twenty min sew sprints on my pinwheel quilt this week.  I have a goal to finish it by next September so I can enter into the fair.   They have a category for all by hand made quilts.  Nothing like a deadline to get things done.   I've decided to do them in bunches and then visually lay out the bunches making the bigger and bigger.   If I need some transitional wheels I can make them up.

It's slow progress but at least its progress.

So What Have You Been Up To Creatively?

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W.I.P. - Off the Wall Friday

Well, anybody who has been paying attention will realize my personal work has stalled a bit the last

couple of years.  I normally would whine and apologized and be racked with some good ole fashion guilty but ya know what???  I've decided to be kind to myself.  In the old days, it wasn't unusual to hear about middle age women having "nervous breakdowns" or empty nest syndrome or their husbands leaving them for a younger woman.  At 54, none of that has happened to me.  I've just had a bit of a creative pause.  Even with that, I still feel creative but I just haven't done anything about it.   I think in 30 yrs of being a quilter, it's okay to take a pause.

But with my studio just begging to be used, it was easy to jump back.  I decided though to finish up the two biggest projects I have going...

2016  Block of the Month Quilt and my Hell Freezes Over Pinwheel Quilt.  So this week I worked on both.  That pinwheels is still giving me fits on what layout it will be but I do know that I need more dark-dark for the layout I thought I wanted.  Now that I look at it......I don't know......I really need to make visual decisions visually and get them up on the board.  It just take FOREVER to lay them out that way....not to mention looking up and down and up  and down makes me sea sick (pathetic inner ear - lol).  But its a great project to listen to a book and work by hand in the air conditioning.

My studio (without air) had me doing the next month on the block of the month quilt.  It's getting bigger and bigger!!

With that, work this week, reminded everyone that we haven't been taking time off enough since most vacations where cancelled....so I'm taking their advice and taking a few long weekends and try to get some of this stuff done.  While doing that I'll keep my eye on my next big project....

So What Have Been Working Creatively?
 

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It's all About Value...Off the Wall Friday

I'm not ashamed that I'm stumped.  I've been diligently working on the pinwheels and it's getting to place where I really do need some kind of loose value sketch on where I want to put the dang things!  I kinda sketched out some ideas but honestly, I didn't like one more than the other.  They all kind of were just ....well....blah.

So I reached to my favorite teacher, Jeannette Meyer to ask if she had any good hints (she always knows what to say to get me moving in the right direction) and she suggested I take two things into consideration...

How do I want the viewer’s eyes to move? 

and 

Where do I want the areas of highest contrast?

Good advice (as always)....but with this piece really I had no set visual path in mind, no focal point to highlight.....well....at least not yet! 


What I thought this needed was some inspiration.  So I thought I would take a look at how other artists handled value in their pieces.  One that instantly came to mind was  Edvard Munch, The Scream.  One of the great things about this painting is how he uses value to direct the eye right to where he wants you to look.  The grayscale version of it really shows how masterful the placement of value is!

I could even look for inspiration in paintings that are more abstract like Gerhard Richter's #9 Abstrakte Bilder Series.  I love this painting mostly because of the mystery it holds. Still, I never thought about how the wonderful colors really disguised how well the underlying value was working.  Its really is an interesting placement of lights, medium, and darks.

But no matter how great these were they still didn't seem right for my piece.  Then I started to look at my old blog posts because not only is it a great place for quilt, fiber artists to meet every Friday but its also acts as my creative journal.  I mean, come on, this isn't the first time I've wrestled with value!  So I popped back to my post here and it gave me the idea to look at my pinterest boards!  Not to mention it reminded me how much I liked LunaPic and how easy it was to use.

And finally.....FINALLY.... a value layout I like!!

So I used this......

To get this.....

I'm thinking this one is a KEEPER!!  Now I just gotta get the pinwheels done!!  This weekend I got about 30 of them done listening to The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone which I'm enjoying quite a bit.  It starts out a bit slow and then you can't stop listening!!

Well, that's one more thing I can check off my THINGS TO DO list!!

What Have You Been Up to Creatively?

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Getting Serious with the Pinwheels on Off the Wall Friday

Okay, enough is enough!  This week I had a come to Jesus talk with my self.  I said, "Self, you have playing around with the pinwheels for too long. At this rate this quilt is NEVER going to get done.  It is too darn pretty for you to do a pinwheel here and a pinwheel there.  Get over your laziness and just work on it regular!"











So that's what I did this week.  I took it out in my studio and started working on the pinwheels like it was a regular project, not just a project I do to keep my fingers busy.  Now you've seen it here and there on this blog but this time I'm serious!  Fabric on my work table, blocks on the wall, Work an hour or two a day serious!

I'm still not quite sure what form they are going to tessellate into but I did realize that I needed some very "Medium" blocks.  I have a lot of darks, a lot of lights but really no mediums and transitional blocks.  So that's what I was making this week.  I also discovered the world of 5" charm packs.  I had no idea that the smart fabric marketers have started selling 5" charm packs of commercial fabric lines.  AND these little charm packs are relatively inexpensive and full of a lot of variety.  Thanks to Amazon Prime, I was able to get some Stonehenge Gradation Chips from Northcott in a jiffy.  I still think that I'll have to do some Red Solo cup dyeing soon in the palette of the quilt to get some good transitional fabrics but we'll see.

Anyways, listening to Laurie R King's A Grave Talent, I happily am plodding along on the quilt.

Now for the sad news ....

This week, the quilt world lost one of the greats to cancer....Gwen Marston.  Over the last 30 years, Gwen has been teaching and lecturing her ideas of "Liberating Quilting".  Although she, like many of us, started with traditional quilting, she took the leap into creating in a more innate abstract  way.  With this new liberation for the structures of  the traditional , she found her passion.  She felt that  “…quilts like these hold my attention longer than their predictable, well-organized, color-coordinated, pattern-based, uptown sisters.”  Now a days, we can all appreciate that sentiment.  But 30 years ago, it was more groundbreaking.

In her quilting life she taught internationally, wrote several books and founded a popular quilting retreat near her home in Beaver Island, Michigan home.    She was a prolific quilter and with a quick google search you can find many examples of her videos, podcasts, and quilts.

She will be missed.

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Back to Upstate - Off The Wall Friday

Well, I'm writing this from my cabin in upstate New York...again.   Helping family is always a worthwhile pursuit even if it is in the middle of no where.  At least they have WiFi ... grin!!  I've been pretty busy here, but  I did take time to lay out all my pinwheel blocks and reevaluate where I'm going with this quilt.

After looking at it, I really do need to do some more Medium values.  I still have a big pile of lights that is not laid out and a big pile of darks that aren't laid out - but no mediums.  I do like where this is going.  I think when I do the final layout I'm going to let it happen organically.  Just let my eye work the gradations between values.

Laid out on my parents rug

Ohhhh speaking of that, I also need to make up some transitional blocks.  So that will mean half and half blocks.

I'm really glad I found this project again after such a long time lost.  Its the perfect thing to fit in while helping my parents.

So What Have Been Up to Creatively?

English Paper Piecing Tutorial - Off the Wall Friday

My parents cabin sits on the bank of a creek

Hi Everyone!!  I want to thank you all for hanging in with me as I had to take a little break from blogging.  I've been up at my parents' cabin in upstate New York helping with the recovery of my father's open heart surgery.  Thank God, he's doing great and is now well on his way to his old self.  Its weird to take a break from your normal life, but I'm thinking, not a bad  thing either. 

Anyways......Here's my story.  So back in 2009, I started another one patch quilt using a trapezoid as my one patch.  The trapezoids were pieced together into tessellating pinwheels.  I thought it was a perfect "take along" project to do by hand using English Paper Piecing.  I worked on it little by little and got it half way done.  Then one day I set it aside and didn't pick it back up.

Wellllll...I would have picked it back up but I lost it!!  I mean when you live in a 14 room Victorian with a ton of storage sometimes things get lost but normally not for very long. This project did though!  Luckily, I recently found it squished way back on the top of my bookcase so I could take it with me to work on here at the cabin.  Its so nice to "find" it again and I've been having fun working on it in my free moments.

This was about as far as I got!  Or Maybe a little farther

So I thought I would do a quick tutorial on how I do English Paper Piecing.  Even though its a labor intensive process, I love the routine of it and its easy enough to do when you might get distracted by what's going on around you. 

Step 1:  Pick your pattern.  Pick your patches.  Figure out what kind/size templates you want to use.  For this quilt, I just drafted the template on my laptop, replicated it into a word document and then I had a master sheet with several of them on it.  The templates needed to be individually cut out.

Step 2:  Cut a patch of fabric (I used scraps for most of this quilt) that is about  1/4" around your template.  You can eye it in - it doesn't  have to be perfect.

Step 3:  Use contrasting thread to fold over that  1/4" seam and sew it to the template - yes - TO THE TEMPLATE.  Remember to fold the corners do they make a nice crisp point.  I do not knot the end when I finish .... I just leave a big long thread.

Step 4:  Take your several one patches to form a "block" or a section.  Figure out the configuration.

Step 5:  Use a running stitch or whip stitch in a matching thread to sew the pieces together.  You need to take tiny tight stitches that go through the fabric but NOT into the paper template.

Step 6:  You can remove the paper now or you can stitch all the blocks together and then remove the paper - which is what I do.

If you look close you can see some of stitches - That's why you use matching thread!!

Doing a whole quilt this way takes a long time, but I find it so satisfying plus its super accurate.  Its a great way to use scraps and when you're done people will say, "Wow!! You made that by hand?!"

Hopefully, I can finish this quilt before losing it again!!  To tell you the truth, I still think that I'm missing some blocks.  Maybe I'll  have to move that bookcase and look behind it!!!

So What Have You Been Up to Creatively?

Creative Connections - Off the Wall Friday

Joyce and I

Don't you like having smart friends?  A couple of months ago my friend Joyce came up with the idea that to help make some new connections she would start a "Creating" group.  The group would meet two Tuesdays a month for a couple hours just to do some creating.  Now she didn't specify what you can create or how.  So some ladies knit, Joyce does jewelry making, some even brought the latest fad in coloring.  I of course brought some handwork.

I have this pinwheel project that has sat ignored on the shelf for the last couple of years.  I'm piecing it together by the English paper piecing method which I find really relaxing.  I had forgotten how much I like this project.

But what I like more is the connection we're making over creating.  The whole group is a brillant way to destress on  a weeknight.    Even better is that its a great way for ladies to build relationships without the uneasy or awkward feeling of always needing to fill the airspace with something to say.

Still I want to say that after explaining the method of making a quilt through English Paper Piecing, I'm surprised nobody said - OMG are you out of your mind??  The quilt is getting to the point where I'm going to have to make some decisions on what direction its going.  One can not just keep piecing trapezoids forever.  I really need to settle on a value scheme so I can start making sure I have the right pinwheels!

So glad there are a lot of Tuesdays left in the year!

So what have been up to creatively?

Visual Decisions on Value

After Monday's post about where my pinwheel quilt was going, it was quite apparent to me, that I needed to go back to the design process.  For me, that always involves my sketch pad or graph paper, my favorite sketch pencils and something to color with.

Earlier this year, I took my AC Moore coupon and bought myself a set of the 150 Crayola Crayon Tower.  I mean who doesn't need 150 of their favorite colors????  With this project, I finally got a chance to break them out and give them a test drive.  Let me just say - LOVE IT.  If you don't have a set yet - go get yourself one - just for you though - nobody under 18 allowed!!

With my favorite tools at hand, a novel playing on my mp3 player, I started to color in the trapezoid graph paper I found in a quilt book.  They had set it up to be colored in by triangles but I made them into pinwheels.  It took a good hour but still I got to try out a value placement - plus look at how many pinwheels I needed.  The final answer 233 Pinwheels!  Which of course means that I'm only about half way there!  sighhhhhhhh

Its does seem like a lot of wheels left to go - especially doing it all by hand, but as I always said, English paper piecing isn't a technique  - its a vocation!

That said, I'm still on the quest to find just the right layout.  The reason that I need to figure it out now, is to come up with an approximation of how many light, medium, dark wheels I need.  Its all fine and good to get the 233 done but if they aren't the right value - well  that means more work!  So I did manage to make a few value drawings. Again - - I'm not really happy with any of them!   I won't bore you with all the options but I did make about half a dozen of them.

Actually, I think the one that I like the best was an arrow of light coming in from the right side and making a point surrounded by dark.  Still, as I learned many years ago, its best to "Make visual decisions, visually."   Which of course means that I'll eventually have to put them all up on the design board and try some of these sketches out.


But with all those blocks needing to be made, I'm sure that won't be anytime soon! 

139 and Counting or When is Enough Enough??

As you may remember from previous posts last year, I started a new English paper piecing project using the simple shape of trapezoids.  After doing the tumbling block quilt I said never - I mean  - never again but nobody ever listens to me - even myself!  So onto the trapezoids I went which make up little pinwheels.  The nice thing about a project like this is that you can take it out and put it away whenever since its all done by hand.  Over the school year, I did manage to get more of it done on and off.  Still its been back in the box for a good six months now.

With Tessa going into a Young Writer's Workshop this week at a local university, I thought it would be nice to take it out and work on it while she was in class.  Well. . . . once I took it out I realized that I had quite a few blocks - 139!  Now is that enough??  Is more always more???  I don't know.  I don't even know what value layout I want yet. I could lay them all out on my design board but it takes forever.  My husband told me to design the quilt by using my EQ4 - but gosh never even reloaded that on my computer. Really the design has always been just a vague notion in my head anyways!  Normally I would just pay Tessa to lay them out on the design board but this week she'll be way to busy with her writing!

So after some thought, I think I'll just keep making trapezoids into pinwheels this week and I - like Scarlett  - will worry about it another day.

The Value of Pinwheels

So over the last month, I've been working diligently on the pinwheels quilt. I take it everywhere I go.  First it was the whole job of basting up the blades.  Then I separated them into  color and values to piece into the wheels themselves.  Little by little it seems that I've been making progress.  

As the pinwheels are done another  couple problems pops up.  How many do I really need??  How am I going to lay them out????  Since this quilt really isn't from a pattern (although I've been influenced from the traditional pinwheel quilts I've seen) I guess I am Queen of My Universe and I can decide how I want.  Its good to be Queen.  (grin)

Now how does one - even a queen - decide on  a layout.  For me, since I'm one of those, as Cynthia Corbin told me,  "Paper Quilters",  I like to draw it out.  Yes I took my pencil set and some scrap graph paper (don't all quilters have scrap graph paper?!?!) and I sat one evening to make value sketches.  Over the last year, Elizabeth Barton's great blog has totally convinced me of the "value" of this step (okay  I'm a better quilter than a pun maker!) So now I routinely make them no matter if its a traditional or an art quilt.

Anyways, I came up with 4 sketches and I was anxious to test at least one of  them out.  I took all the pinwheels I've made so far, the sketch I wanted to test first and a bunch of pins.  It took me an hour but I got them up somewhat in the value they need to be in.  Looking at the layout, pointed out two things to me - 1 - I'm only half way done with this quilt - sighhhhhhhhhhh and 2 - if I use this layout (and that's if ) I would want the scoop of the light colors to go way further into the quilt.  Here they look like an after thought.  

So its back to the pinwheels for me - I still have to stitch up the last of the blades and then the process starts all over.  Since the laid out wheels only measured 45" by 60" , I still have a long ways to go for a full size quilt.  My gosh - do you know how many trapezoids that is?

Trapped by Trapezoids

One of the reasons I started this blog, was to have a record of the creative things I did.  I always wanted to keep track of them.  Plus - this way I could share them with my friends.  One of the by-products of the blog is that it keeps me creating.  If I don't make something - I won't have anything to post.

Now that said, not all the things I create are going to be interesting.  For instance, I just spent the last week basting little trapezoids - 100's of them!  They are the blades for the pinwheels and are all basted onto paper by hand. I'm using the English Paper Piecing method so, of course, all the paper trapezoids had to be cut.  Then the fabric attached and finally sorted into colors for piecing.  Its a major undertaking and a bit addictive.

Anyways I manage to get over 500 of them done in the last week with a big push on Saturday.  I sewed for over 12 hours - one trapezoid at a time.  When I finally stopped my hand was  a bit sore and the gallon size zip lock was full.  I wasn't sick of basting them, but I was sick of all the mindless TV I had been watching.  Maybe, next time, I'll just put one of the books on cd on.  Oh - and yeah - there will be a next time, because I'm sure this still isn't enough for that quilt!

Pinwheels! Pinwheels! Pinwheels!

Contrary to popular belief among my friends, I'm still doing some traditional quilting. After completing my 4200 piece tumbling block quilt, I said I would never do another hand pieced project. Well I lied :)) Last September or so I started a hand pieced pinwheel quilt. I probably should call it my "When Hell freezes Over" quilt.

I like to hand piece using the English paper piecing method. Yes its labor intensive, but its nice and accurate. Plus its very transportable. Its the kind of project you can take anywhere you need to keep your hands busy. Welllllll - almost anywhere - if you take it to church you get all these funny looks. . . . . Go figure.

Anyways - I worked on it through out the school year whenever I had the inclination or the time or both. I would take it to school and it would set off conversations with the students on quilting and tessellating patterns. With the coming of the warm weather and dog days, it got put away.

But this week marks my return to the classroom and therefore, the pinwheels. I spent the afternoon trying to figure out where I had left off. For the first time I put the wheels up on my design board - not in any real pattern - just by value. I do want this to be a value study and I want to do it all in cool colors. From the layout I could tell that I definitely needed more mediums and lights. So off to my newly cleaned stash I went, where it was a breeze to find exactly the scraps I needed. Also from layout I can see that I have a long way to go. When I put it away it seemed like I had gotten so much accomplished. But as I found out with the tumbling block quilt, hand piecing isn't a hobby - its a vocation.