Muse 4 and printed quilt update

This afternoon I stopped helping my daughter with her patchwork over the phone and got down to work on Muse 4. Yes I did have to 'get down' literally - I laid out the backing fabric and wadding on the living room floor as it is huge!! The fabric top measures 62 by 58 inches!! This will be the largest piece I have ever made - My glasses in the photo give you an idea of scale. As you can see I had just started pinning and then will have to baste the layers before I can start adding the 2 inch squares. It is slow going as I am unable to kneel properly - my knee is still healing. I had to make sure that all my squares are exactly the same size so that the design does not go wonky so I very carefully stacked them. Don't they look lovely... the edges are so furry like chenille. Almost seems a shame to use them. I know there are not enough but will have to dye more as and when I need.

I had another thought about the printed quilt - maybe the background should be pale blue rather than cream or purple/blue what do you think??

Muse 4 - making a start - a question and a giveaway

You remember I have shown you the size of Muse 4 - well it's not quite to scale

- since I have worked out the size of fabric squares I would like to use (see later) it turns out the the coloured piece (23 blocks tall by 21 blocks wide) (the pic bottom right is A4 in size to give you an idea) will measure 46 inches by 42 inches which is larger than the large pieces above !! - the biggest quilt I will have made so far. I will have to add about 5 inches all round on my background fabric to allow for a little tightening when I quilt - (I think, not sure really as I am not a quilt maker!!) Last night I started preparing the squares - these are the fabric pieces (I have shown you before).

I started with just one set of blue (six pieces), cutting them into 2 inch squares and then fraying the edges to a depth of 1/4 inch - measuring this really carefully,

managing to get three squares from each blue piece. So far that's 18 squares - it took 5 hours!!

So it is going to take time to work my way through the rest of the pile of fabrics . I did a quick calculation - there are actually 228 coloured squares in the design and I have 27 more pieces of dyed fabrics so that would make 99 squares (18 + the 81 I am yet to organise). This means that I have quite a few more colours to dye. - oh no more work :-)

Of course - I have kept the trimmings

and the pulled threads -

these will be used for something else (Hmmmm maybe cuffs :-) ? ). Now I need to prepare the back ground fabric, wadding and calico backing and make a start on laying out the squares - I may fuse them as I go being careful of overheating the wadding (I only have a polyester wadding to use up)

Question - do I start laying out the design from the centre or from the bottom?

Oh - nearly forgot the giveaway - this is my 700th post so I think it needs a giveaway! Therefore please answer the following questions: a) do I start laying Muse 4 from the middle or the bottom, b) fuse all pieces or just as I go along and c) for the 'printed' quilt (see blog here) do I apply the pieces to a cream or purple/blue (same as the squares) background.

If I get 20 responses (I need readers :-) and help with my questions) I will pick out a name at random and the winner will get one of my thread cuffs (see post here).

Getting there, another project idea and waste not

The 16 squares are all stitched now using this thread - I think it's Victory Royal - its purple, blue and turquoise - perfect match to my pieces. The next step is to decide on cream or matching strip fillings and then how to quilt it all together. In the meantime - you now I hate waste - so the off cut strips from tidying up the squares were bonded on to a black strip of fabric, stitched, trimmed and edged - a button was added and Voilà.... another cuff..... The other day when I had been looking for threads I came across yet another old piece of fabric- this was a piece that had been stencilled with markel oil pastels as part of my City and Guilds Course on Fabric decoration with Val Campbell Harding back in 2000!! It was not my fav piece of fabric but today I thought there is enough of this fabric to make 8 simple table mats. It just needs cutting into 8 pieces and then quilting simply following the lines of the print and then binding. What do you think??

Next step

The next step... I made a paper border for the black squares so that I could lay out the printed squares once they were cut - had to check the gap size.. Then it was time to cut the 16 squares and lay them out. I did not realise that it would be so hard to come up with 16 different ways to cut a square into 4 pieces. I wanted each one to be different and decided no curves.It took ages (with no pre-planning) but I think the end result is OK :-). Then whilst sorting out some other fabrics - I had an idea for yet another project and wanted to see if I had the fabrics I want, I found a dyed background fabric that is very similar in colour to my squares - OK so I like the colour combination and probably dyed lots of this colour combination in the past!! Perhaps once I have stitched the squares onto the black I should then have a coloured border? The squares do also look good on the cream of my carpet. What do you think?? Coloured border or not? Let me know your thoughts - for the moment I need to make a small sample to test out thread colours!

Slow Start

Today - slow start - began with cleaning the bathrooms, cooking dry roast spicy chickpeas as a snack and taking my first 'proper' walk since my knee op, that was a little exhausting but then it was time to procrastinate by sorting out one box of my threads (I was looking for particular colours but never found the ones I wanted!) At least one box which started out looking like this then became... There are still several more boxes that should really be sorted but I am too tired to try. Then there was a little progress on the 'printed' quilt - there are now two piles of squares - one pile of over printed fabric and the other pile a heap of bonded black squares. The latest idea is to cut up the printed pieces, apply them to the black and then see what happens next ! The other 'practice' is a set of better practice ideas for Muse 4 - here I have cut some spare squares and will machine around them (zig zag) on one layer of cotton - the next set of samples shows squares which were frayed a little and stitched directly onto a quilt sandwich (top white, wadding and calico backing), the stitching is 1/4 in in from the edge and the final sample is also stitched straight onto the same quilt sandwich but this time the squares are frayed more and the stitching is right at the edge of the fray. So far I like this last sample but need thinking time, to see the zig zag sample and then to do some size calculating and how to apply the squares.

Making a Start

I scanned the Three Kings card, then traced it and printed it out cut into 16. This is the resulting size (the original card is lying bottom right) - it will be square rather than rectangular.I have cut the printed fabric into 16 squares and will now print on a couple of them that look a little plain. Then I think the next step will be to cut each of the 16 squares into 4 pieces - some straight cuts and some curved. However I am going to try drawing out some cuts first.

A small kick up the butt

My office expected me back to work on Monday 16th but I have been signed off for the week as having had a bad stomach the doctor feels that my knee exercise/recovery has not been going quite as well as we would have liked by this stage.

What I have realised is that when I go back on 23rd Jan I will have been off work for a WHOLE month (except for one day) AND DONE VIRTUALLY NOTHING !! - you see I started my Christmas holiday by finishing work on 22nd Dec and then I went in for the one day back 4th Jan before my operation. If an 'artist' had a WHOLE month with a studio available would they work? YES.

The kick up the butt?? - A week off to do more regular knee exercises, get the stomach back right up to health AND DO SOME ART WORK!! I can take it steady and do art work!! So what am I going to do - well I have some ongoing projects - I need to write myself a TO DO LIST but for now I want to start more projects. So it will actually be a Started project/to finish and to do list combined.

I found this terrible piece of fabric (years old) which I had tried to stamp in the style of Sherrill Kahn (click HERE for her website)

- I thought it rubbish at the time, put it away and now it's time to a) cut it up, b) do some more stamping, c) apply the pieces to black cotton

and d) turn it into a quilt - in the rough style of Mickey Depre (click HERE for her website). There will be no real planning but just getting on with it. To start I will cut it into 16 squares and then cut the squares up into more pieces inspired by Mickey's article in the free ebook from Quilting Arts Magazine (available if you click HERE and register). Whilst working on this I am going to start work on a quilt for next Christmas - YES NEXT CHRISTMAS!!

I received this beautiful Christmas card this year from Jane Lemon

and want to translate it into a quilt.... I have started sourcing some lush silk scrap pieces

but will take my time as I need to a) decide on size, b) enlarge the design, c) source more silk - dye some in the graded colours.

My final colour scheme may not be exactly the same as the card - I am not too sure about the pink on the left - may need to change that to purple (ie swap the two colours over) but I will think it through.