Tag: Louisa Enright’s scrappy quilting project

Turkey Tracks: Streak of Lightening Quilt

February 20, 2015

Fun Fiber Projects in February

How’s that for alliteration?

And. oops, this one published before I wanted it to.  It was meant for tomorrow…

I finished Bonnie Hunter’s 2014  Mystery Quilt, “Grand Illusions,” and will show that on a separate blog post.  It’s a spectacular, exciting quilt and was so much fun to make.

Look at this big red border!  This scrappy streak of lightening quilt top is done.  It will go on the long arm later today.  Remember that this quilt top has come entirely out of my stash and from the leftovers of two other scrappy quilts that I am using in my downstairs tv/sitting room.

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I’m working on another hand-sewing quilt:  octagons.

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I am playing around with the opposites on the color wheel.  This one is blue and orange.  Remember the Lucy Boston quilt I did was two more opposites:  red and green.

Here it is again:

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Purple and yellow may be hexies…

Who knows?

This year, American Patchwork and Quilting magazine has issued a challenge to make quilts with 4-patch blocks.  Bonnie Hunter is one of the quilters–and you can go to the magazine’s web page and get the complete list.  The current magazine has all sorts of gorgeous pictures as part of this challenge.  Remember last year that their challenge involved low-contrast quilts–or, “tone it down” is how I remember them phrasing the challenge.

Anyway, Bonnie is doing something mysterious with this kind of block, put on-point, and which starts with 2-inch squares.  Here are two I have made, and I love them!

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Look at my 2-inch square box.  It definitely needs to be cleared out…

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So I will be making 4-patches of light and dark, regardless of what I do with them all.  Four-patches are endlessly useable.  So this will be a new leader/ender project.

I am also playing around with blocks for a low contrast quilt–in more of the Kaffe Fasset mold–color drenched, I hope.

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I didn’t want that central set of blocks to have any order to move your eye around…  Or to line it up–in the way alternating light/dark squares would do.

It’s a work in progress, and I am having fun playing.

You can see the backing for the streak of lightening quilt on the long arm…

 

 

Turkey Tracks: Green Camden Hills Beauty: Thanks Bonnie Hunter

Turkey Tracks:  July 13, 2013

Green Camden Hills Beauty:  Thanks Bonnie Hunter

Look at this beauty!

I think it’s one of the prettiest quilts I’ve ever made and its ALL from my green stash.

I saw Bonnie Hunter’s “Blue Ridge Beauty” in her ADVENTURES WITH LEADERS AND ENDERS and started piecing four-patch light and dark green patches as a “leader and ender” project fed into the machine when I needed to remove blocks from another project I was working on–that way, you never break your sewing thread and are working on two projects at once.  (You can read more about this method on Bonnie’s web page, www.quiltville.com.  You can get to her blog from the main site if you want to–and I have to say I love getting her posts.)

Green Camden Hills Beauty, 2

Of course, I had to piece some of the half-square triangles just to see how the block looked.  And then I had to see how multiple blocks were going to look.  Soon, I was piecing this quilt and NOT working on my original project.  I became, quickly, obsessed with this quilt.  And of course, I needed to sprinkle in some blocks that had green, yes, but also had some orange, some pink, and some blue.  They effect is very pleasing, as if there are polka dots scattered across the top.

It’s a BIG quilt–easily king size–and I didn’t make it quite as long as Bonnie did.  She took the pattern down one more row for the length.  I could make the quilt this wide since son Bryan helped me put four more feet into my long-arm–so now I have the full 12 feet.

Green Camden Hills Beauty

Here’s a close-up for you.  I quilted it with “Deb’s Swirls” in the big version.  (I smiled when I saw that Bonnie Hunter was also using this pantograph on her “Dancing Nines” project.)  I’ve later also gotten the medium version for smaller quilts.  It’s a very nice all-over swirling pattern.  I used a dark teal thread, which is pleasing to the eye I think.  We have such dark greens in our forests and on the hillsides in the spring–all mixed up with every shade of green imaginable.

Green Camden Hills Beauty blocks

Here’s a close-up of the border and a corner–that greenish stone-looking fabric has been hanging around my stash for years.  It’s PERFECT in this spot–echoing all our granite and rocky ledges on the Camden Hills–which are very old  mountains.

Green Camden Hills Borders

The back is all taken from my stash–which used up yards and yards of, again, green fabrics hanging around without a purpose.  I mixed in some orphan blocks that were going nowhere–and it all works really well for a scrappy quilts.  That saved me probably $80.  Or, used $80 that I’d already spent–however you want to think about it.  This backing works well for this scrappy quilt.

Green Camden Hills Beauty back

I pieced a line of the three-inch half-square triangle blocks to see what they might look like in a bar quilt.  They’re nice–and I might have gone that direction a year ago.  But after finding Bonnie Hunter’s work, I know there is a more complicated, complex way to use those blocks.  I’m piecing more of them as a leader ender project now…

Green Camden Hills Beauty back detail

This project has been so much fun for me!  And I really love this quilt.

Turkey Tracks: Ann’s Blue and White Chocolate Feather

Turkey Tracks:  December 8, 2012

Ann’s Blue and White Chocolate Feather

Ann O’Callaghan is my husband John Enright’s first cousin.  She and her sister Margaret Nealon live a few blocks from each other in the Boston area.  Their children have all grown up together, and it is the greatest pleasure to John and me that our sons have kept close ties with both of these families and all their children.  Now, John, Ann, and Margaret are grandparents many times over as many of their children now have children of their own.

Ann and Margaret have always been more sisters than cousins to John.  Their mother died very early, so Ann left Ireland as a teenager to come to Boston to live with one of her mother’s sisters.  (John’s father was her uncle.)  Margaret, who had lived with another of her mother’s sisters, followed Ann to America some years later.  All of these families are outliers from their mother country–Ireland–where the bulk of all their families live.

When we moved to Maine from northern Virginia, we began to see more of Ann and her family.  Every time Ann would come to visit, she admired whatever quilts I was working on at the time.  Always she would tease and say how much she would love a quilt.  And, I would always ask “what colors do you like.”  The answer was consistent.  Blues.  So, this winter, as part of my scrappy project, I made Ann a quilt.  John’s sister, Maryann Enright delivered it to Ann a few weeks ago, so now I can put it on the blog.

Here’s Ann’s Blue and White Chocolate Feather:

Ann's blue and white chocolate feather

The pattern is from “American Patchwork and Quilting” (August 2010).  It’s called “Outside the Box” and was designed by Karen Montgomery of The Quilt Company.  It uses 3 1/2 inch squares–which I took from the box where I store pre-cut leftover fabric from other quilts and from my stash.  I purchased the white fabric.  What’s cool about this concept is that the block is made like a log-cabin, in that it has a light and a dark side made from 16 blocks–six white and 10 blues.  So, the block combines in the same way that a log cabin block does–into all kinds of log-cabin patterns.

The quilting is from the Chocolate Feather pantograph, thus the name.  And it came out beautifully–it’s a functional quilt meant to be used and loved.

Ann's blue and white quilted

Here’s a view of the center:

Ann's blue and white, center

I like the varigated blue thread on this quilt a lot.

Ann's blue and white quilted

Ann's blue and white backing, binding, top, 2

Somehow, I’ve made a lot of blue and white quilts over the past year.  My blue and white stash has been reduced considerably–which is the goal.  I’m working on another right now, actually.  It, too, has a white background, though the pattern is different.  What I’m wondering about now is how a low contrast Kaffe Fasset kind of treatment, where the white becomes a blue print and the blue blocks are made into squares that float around in the print…

Perhaps I’ll find out this winter as I have enough 3 1/2-inch blue squares to make another quilt…