Quilt Reveal: Red and White Op Art Quilt

 

I present to you my mini quilt of the month. It is based on a class I took from the Dayton Art Institute about Op Art. I decided to translate it to cloth. I took red fabric and cut out the parts I wanted to be white.

I had tried to add blue underneath, and didn't really like the way it looked so I took out the blue. But since I quilted it days after I posted it on the blog, Tanya said she did like the blue.  I thought about it, and remembered that I did like the blue when I first added it, but then I added too much. I didn't want to take too much time thinking about where to add the blue, but when I got to this section, I decided a touch of blue would be good.

Another thing that happened is that I dreamed that I cut a fringe from the unquilted red fabric. While I think about quilting all day long and have daydreams about quilts, I rarely dream at night about quilts. Cutting a fringe wasn't presented as an option - it was something I was actually doing. (That was really all there was to the dream - my dreams are as exciting as my days). So I cut the fringe during the day and then I cut some fringe out so it looks like I made the quilt by weaving.

 

It's a dream come true, y'all.

 

I turned the white border to the back and wanted some more red as an outline so I secured the "binding" using a running stitch with red crochet thread.

 

Here it is again in a different position. It finishes at 14 1/2" x 18".

Quilt Reveal: Cheddar Cheese and Crackers

Once upon a time, on January 13, 2010 to be exact, I started the Cheddar Cheese and Crackers quilt. This is what I had to say at that time:

I know I was going to finish African Circles before starting a new quilt . . . .

I know I said I was going to make circle banner quilts, or finish some UFOs, or at least start on one of the quilts that are already kitted up and not started. . . .

But I also said that I was going to take advantage of little projects when they called to me. And Lori at Humble Quilts is making a doll quilt called Cheddar Cheese and Crackers. It's a doll quilt, how long can it take?

This post had me laughing out loud. Yes, I actually said that. I'm sure I said it tongue in cheek since I did know by then that quilts can take a long time. I'm pretty sure though that I didn't think it would would take six years.

The post also shows that I haven't changed at all, because so many quilts, in various stages of completion and ones that have never been started are still floating around in my head, as you can tell from my last two posts. 

Cheddar Cheese and Crackers is finished now.  Let's give it some love, shall we?

Each of the pieces in the checkerboard are one inch finished.  The light spaces have been hand quilted diagonally in both directions. Some of them have been made to practice making small stitches, others to practice consistent stitches, and the rest of them to just get 'er done.

I gave this reproduction quilt a modern take by using batik prints for the checkerboard.  There are a variety of different batik prints but they look pretty similar in this quilt.  The light background crackers and the cheddar fabrics honor the pattern's roots.

Each of the cheese slices have a different circular design hand quilted on it. My affinity for circles has deep roots.

I used a triangle for a label.  The quilt finishes at 22" x 22" It is a beautiful day outside so I was able to go outside without a coat (in February! It's 60 degrees!) for these photographs.

I called it a doll quilt in 2010, and I was thinking that it was really too big to be a doll quilt, but Amanda says it is just the right size for her. The wind posed this picture.

Linked to:
Let's Bee Social #110 
Wandering Camera February 2016
because I practiced my photography skills finding different places to show off this quilt. Throwback Thursday because this is an old quilt as well as a new quilt at the same time!

Simply Squares

Why are you seeing photos of a quilt that you thought was finished way back in May?  Well, it is a long story.  When I finished the Celebrate quilt, I updated my spreadsheet to mark the finish date, but I also tried to add a column to figure out the average amount of time each quilt takes.  It didn't work out - since there are estimates of dates and ranges in there.  Then, I tried to sort the spreadsheet, but used the wrong range, so the sort was all wrong.  I didn't save the spreadsheet and just quit.  I didn't remember that I hadn't saved the updates.

Anyway, yesterday, I was looking at the spreadsheet to see how I was doing, what I wanted to work on, and I noticed that the Celebrate and Simply Squares quilt did not have finish dates on them.  I looked on the blog for the finish date for Simply Squares, and all I found was a note that I was working on the binding in May.  No quilt reveal!  I know the weather was bad and I wasn't able to get a good picture, but we've had good weather days since then!

I decided to remedy the situation by providing a belated quilt reveal.  I took the quilt along for our daily walk.

Which photo do you like the best? I added a poll in the sidebar for fun.  Please leave a comment to let me know what appealed to you about the photo(s). This will help me take better photos of other quilts.

Optical Illusions Quilt

Are you ready? Do you have your scratch pad and pencils ready? How about your compass and your protractor? And your calculator? And if you work anything like me, your biggest eraser? Got your thinking cap? This quilt is hand pieced and hand appliqued around 1910. This means this person cut out those million trapezoids probably with templates, and sewed them together. By hand. My brain comes up with this idea while hopped up on pain killers. It says "you know, this is just a simple checkerboard. All you have to do is strip piece some checkerboards rows, and rotary cut them at an angle and machine sew them together to make a circle. It's simple, you know like a bargello, only circular." Yep Quilt In a Day, watch out! This quilt is 85 x 85, which is way too big for me. I want a wall quilt. I can imagine my family members asking me to put it away because it is making them dizzy! When I told my friends I was making it, one of them said "you have way too much time on your hands." I am hoping that with this quilt, at least one person will say, "wow, you made that?!" in a good way. If I can have just one person say that, it will all have been worth it. LOL Yep, I'm still loopy! Here are some decisions we have made. There are originally 54 pie slices here. A circle has 360 degrees. 360 is not evenly divisible by 54, and my protractor can't measure fractions, we will pick a number smaller than 54 that is evenly divisible by 360. That's 45. 360 divided by 45 means that each arc is 8 degrees. The rows look like they are proportionately increasing. I thought of starting with 1/4 and adding a 1/4 for every row but that makes way too big a quilt. Then I tried starting with 1/4 and adding 1/8. The size is more manageable, but still kinda big. Since there is no way I am doing anything less than 1/8, I decided to lop off a few rows. So instead of 20 there will be 17. I'm going to skip row 1 so there is a hole in the middle of the quilt for an appliqued circle. I don't want all the seams meeting in the center and causing a big hump. Unless I badly mess up on the tiny pieces at the top, in which case the applique circle will be bigger! I don't know how they did the ring around that center circle. If you have any ideas, please let me know. Right now the plan is to find someone to just draw in those scallops. My math teacher, Steve, drew a pie slice at 8 degrees, with a few of the rows in the sizes I mentioned, so I can use that as a template. I will tape it on my ruler to make sure I am slicing the rows at the right angle. It looks like the rows and columns aren't proportional. So the width is long and narrow and gets shorter as time goes on. He recommended that I duplicate the size of the rows at least at the outside rows. This will also help make the quilt smaller. He gave me some formulas that I could try so that the trapezoids in last row is reasonably proportional length and width-wise. I'm not sure what is giving this optical illusion effect, so I want to try to keep it as much to the original as possible. What do you think? Do you think that the optical illusion will still work if the rows are the same size from time to time? Like maybe two rows are the same size, and then we increase the next two rows. If I can make them the same size, I might be able to add the last three rows back in. If I cover up the last three rows with my fingers, I can still see the optical illusion. Do you think I need the last three rows to show that it is a checkerboard? Or give the eye a little space to rest, although is a small border for that as well. We are working with finished sizes, and I know I need to remember to add in the seam allowance once we are done with all this planning. I think I can just add a quarter inch to each side of the pie he drew and cut that angle from the strip sets I create. I also need to figure out how much fabric to get. I did figure out that since the rows are increasing, I can only make the triangle shapes one way. You know how when you cut equilateral triangles, you turn the ruler and cut the other triangle using the cut edge of the first triangle? I can't do the opposite triangle the other way to save fabric. This means I will have enough triangles to make two quilts. We'll have to see if I am loopy enough to make two quilts when that time comes! The people at work have recommended I choose purple for a color. I like purple, so I will look for a pretty solid(ish) purple. Is there anything else I need to think about?