One Block Wonder

My one block wonder obsession continues.  My design wall was busy when I started this one, so I laid it out on the floor.

This was the original panel. I had about 3/4 of a panel leftover, so I placed the blocks around it. <

Up on the wall, with all of the hexagons around it, the panel seemed to get lost. And the more hexagons I added, the less I liked the end result.

So back to basics. I pulled off all of the hexagons and started over. I used about 1/2 of them, before the design started to lose the look I was going for.

A little border creativity, and I have a quilt I really like. My math got away from me at one point, as I was working without a design wall, so the quilt is about 6.wider than I had planned. But overall, I'm very happy with it.

Thread Painting

I took a thread painting workshop in the spring, to learn something new. I've never done it before, but the concept always interested me, so when the opportunity came up through one of my guilds, I jumped at the chance.

We spent an afternoon with Bridget O'Flaherty, doing a little "thread painting by numbers" as she called it. I had some extra time, so I played with some additional shading in mind. I hope to put some of this into practice with a quilt that is gelling in my mind.

Oriental quilt

This fabric has been sitting in my stash for at least 5 years. I fell in love with the gold flecks fabrics when they first came out, and bought a yard of each for a future project. Oriental fabrics seem to jump into my cart randomly, so I finally put them all together at a recent retreat.

The sashing is 1/2" finished, which allowed me to split the panel in a couple of places without distorting it. The piano key borders were made from all the leftover bits I had in the end.

This was my own design, put together on the fly, so there are no repeating blocks in the design, although I did manage to make it in 3 horizontal sections to simplify assembly.

Quilting is a new pattern I picked up for a customer project.  I liked the soft swirls, and picked a gold thread to blend with the gold in the fabrics.

Catching up

I've been AOWL for a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been quilting. Keeping up with a longarm business has left me with very little energy for blogging, but I hope to find a balance between the two (or 3, if I count actually making my own quilts).

So, looking back earlier this year, these two quilts were a mystery from one of my guilds. It was supposed to be one quilt, but I decided to split the blocks up and make two donation tops instead.

These are actually quilted and ready to donate so I'll try to dig up a photo of the finished product for a later post.