I Need Your Opinion...............

and New Ideas are Welcome.

This is my mosaic quilt for a king size bed. The pictures are only 1/4 of the quilt but I hope enough to give visual of the finished product which will be 7 x 6 blocks.

 But which layout should I use. I think the quilting will be an all over design, probably with a variegated thread.

View 1. All the small blocks are vertical.

View  2. Alternate vertical/horizontal

View 3. Vertical but the blocks are off set.

  

Thanks for your help.

Shapes are not Lines.

After my frustration with my performance in the Nancy Crow class I just had a "light bulb moment".  In class we did a black and white exercise with lines (less than 1 inch) and shapes, everything larger. I had a problem with lines that were too fat. This makes for a boring composition. Well , I am a slow learner and after making 30 blocks for a new quilt, and spending the afternoon redoing them,  I now understand the difference.

This is the start of  a quilt for my son and daughter-in-law's new house. 16 inch blocks of earth tone mosaics. The bottom blocks are what happens when the lines are the size of the color shapes. Boring and no color impact. The upper blocks are what they look like when neutrals are "lines". Still some of the lines could be smaller, but this is what I got by partially taking apart  and remaking the old blocks. New blocks will definitely have skinny lines. Also need some more variation in the size of the shapes.

Product vs Process

I love the process of design, fabric selection, challenge of putting it together. Even the process of ripping out and redoing.

But then I also like to have a finished product. For my art work this means I finish pieces that should not be finished. I will take an idea gone bad and keep working to make a charity quilt. Not great art but still a comfy quilt.

Here are some of my latest finished products.  The best is the Robot Quilt for a special grandson. Then there is Spider Man for the same grandson. He has a birthday in March so this will be his present.  

(Grandson #2 is getting left out here, but there is a Dr Seuss panel to be put together soon.)

Hello Kitty for the special granddaughter. No finished pictures, but here is the pile of fabric. I need to get better on the finished pictures

For son and daughter-in-law who just moved into a new house there is a work in progress. Making a king sized bed quilt is a lot of work. This is a set of 42, 16"  blocks, each with a specific monochromatic color scheme which will be assembled into the new bed quilt. In this picture there is too much of the neutral background. More recent blocks have larger color strips.

So this looks like a lot of product and not much in the process of creating that great quilt composition. But from the large king quilt there are a lot of finished scrap pieces that I can't wait to play with for a wall quilt.  But first I have about 14 more of the blocks to finish!

Thanks for reading this, Irene

What is Good Composition?

Never mind that I haven't written anything since last summer. I started this blog as a way to document my quilting and knitting and hopefully get some feedback along the way. But I have to write something first. So here goes....

I recently took a class from a true quilt artist, Nancy Crow, titled Lines, Curves, Circles & Figure-Ground Composition. The class was intense, and I have to admit that I did not preform to my greatest potential. This was the 4th class I have taken so it was not that I didn't know what to expect. It just didn't seem to work out. A class with Nancy is hard work!  5 days of 8-10 hours of designing and sewing is really hard!  She gives an assignment, and a time to complete it. There are usually detailed exercises which are to be assembled into a composition. And here is where I get stuck. It's hard, and probably takes practice, to walk into a room and turn on your creativity 100%. I just did not have the practice and experiences to do this effectively. But I did learn a lot and will redo my notes and probably try and redo the exercises.

But my greatest question is " What is good Composition?" I know about line, shape, curves, positive/negative space, warm/cool colors, color hue, tint and value. But what exactly is a good composition? What is a bad composition? and Why?  My biggest criticism of a Nancy Crow class is that composition is   never clearly demonstrated. Maybe this is the scientist in me,  but at this point it is not intuitive, so I really need the "evidence" to understand the concepts. The classes are taught in a "student exploration" style and if you go down the wrong tunnel, you can get frustrated really fast. When I got home I spent a long time on the Internet searching for examples and there are really none. Just more on space, color, shape, etc. Maybe I can find a class at our local community college that will get me going down the "right tunnel".

Here are the pieces I worked on, and some of the class evaluation comments.

 Exercise 1. Lines in black and white. . First my lines are too fat. They are supposed to be less than 3/4" . Composition eval - "Don't bother to finish". Not much excitement.

 Exercise 2.  Shapes - Bright colors on a pastel ground. The top left corner is not finished. Shapes just placed so they don't get lost. This got a good review and I was encouraged to finish it. Looks very rough in the picture, but I like it and I will definitely finish it.



Exercise 3. BIG and BOLD. Each of the circles are about 40" across. This composition challenge was to work BIG.  At this point I was pretty tired. I just could not find the energy to come up with a good composition for all 4 circles. I had about 5 sketches in my notebook but none of them excited me enough to work on the entire piece. So I just did 2 of the ideas. I like the first one, but not sure how to integrate into the 4 circles. The second one was a "confetti" look. I like it as a single circle, but again not sure how to integrate into a large composition. I like this idea and will continue to collect ideas for the large work.

   


So still exploring the original question - What is good Composition? 

It's been a long time...............

..........since I posted any knitting content. I have been knitting but not much finishing.

So far, a wool cotton long sleeved sweater that I hope I have enough yarn for (no picture yet) . A Noro cotton summer sweater, back almost done (again, no picture), a dress  (Oriental Lilly) for my granddaughter that I hope is long enough but it can be lengthened, and a shawl. This my first knitted shawl (aranami-shawl) and it was supposed to be a "knit in public" project because it doesn't require a lot of thinking, but it has consumed my knitting at home time. 

I have been working on a quilt project, almost every day when it is too hot to be outside.  This is a color challenge project from the 15 Minutes of Play blog.

A scrap basket to replace the cardboard box I had been using and few other quilting projects in the "what if" stage that I should be able to post pictures of next time.

  

And I just finished this tote bag using selvage edges. Used about 1/2 of my collection so I imagine I'll make another one and use it for a yet to be determined recipient gift.

Thanks for sticking with this random collection of projects to the end. Hopefully I will be a little more organized next time.

Collaborative Color Project

 A while back I started on a color challenge from the 15 Minutes of Play collaborative blog. Every Wednesday Victoria presents a new color that we are to use as the focus for a new block. Most of the others are doing more traditional blocks, but I wanted to have a more monochromatic, improvisational loo. And I really don't do traditional precision pieced blocks well.

So  using just what I had in my stash I  made large pieces of fabric. Then I inserted narrow strips, using just the challenge colors.

  

Colors so far --

bright yellow

mauve

peach

dusty blue

avocado

ochre

bright - hurt your eyes - orange

This is really turning out to be a really fun project. The colors have been challenging to find in my stash. I really don't want to buy new fabric but I may have to. Ochre, a color I thought I would have very little of, because I don't do brown was not a problem. There were lots of hand dyed experiments in the stash from mixing too many colors together. When you do this you get brown.  Dusty blue on the other hand will require a trip to the quilt store. Although I have a lot of blues most are in the periwinkle or turquoise family. But I did get one block done.

Right now the pieces range from 8-15 inches. We will have a total of 15 colors when finished. At some point I will need to make duplicates but I think I will wait to see what the other colors are before I do the narrow inserts.

 This is turning out to be something I really like and I expect it will be a queen sized quilt when finished. It will be fun to put the puzzle together and I am looking forward to figuring out the filler pieces which will be surprises.

Finally back in the Sewing/Knitting Seat!

It's been a long time. Still not 100%. The arm break was the easy part. Associated tendon and nerve damage is taking a lot longer. But the good news is that sewing and knitting are on the approved physical therapy list. Working on the computer is also good therapy. Just need to take breaks for hot/cold pack rests.

When I last posted I was working on a vintage challenge. I almost got it done and this is where it is ready for quilting. No rush on this so it's on the back burner for now.



Vintage fabric



Mid design



Final





Before final quilting and cropping.
Picture on right, Composition on left



A current deadline project is another collaborative project from Tommy where we all get a segment of an enlarged photograph to interpret. This one is larger than the one we did last year - a good thing..  I got all the piecing done and now I'm working on the quilting. Not all that hard sewing wise but takes time to figure out and practice to get the right free motion quilting technique. But I will only be a week or two late on the deadline and she is OK with that. Thank you Tommy for your patience.

**Update I got it done and ready to address the envelope!!!

Since I finished my collaborative project I am ready for something fun and relaxing and found it on the 15 Minutes of Play color challenge. Each Wednesday Victoria picks a new color and our challenge is to make a block with this focus color. So far the colors have been mauve, ochre, avocado, peach and "screaming" yellow. I have but together a collection of each color (ochre is a really problem because I don't do brown) but my bigger challenge is to figure out a block that I can use all these colors in. It's a little tricky to pick a background fabric that will highlight the focus color block, but not compete with it. I think I need to pick a light background. Not necessarily all the same fabric but a monochromatic pallet. Maybe a light beige, yellow or peach. Warm colors seem to be where I'm leaning right now. Just need to do some stash diving. 

My color collection so far.