Category Archives: Quilt Therapy Lesson

Fabric Color Can Make All the Difference in a Quilt Design

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As I sat designing quilts in EQ7 the other day, I was amazed at how just a simple color change could make a quilt design look completely different – but also that it could change the depth of a quilt.  Depth?  Definitely.  Perhaps the closest example I can come up with is that a color change can take a one dimensional quilt and make it appear to be a two dimensional quilt.

If you’ve ever gone to a quilt show, you may see some folks looking at a quilt just as a person would look at a piece of art at a gallery.  Some quilts are worthy of our time to just look at them, absorb their beauty and craftsmanship…and those that truly draw our attention are usually those that appear to be two dimensional.  You turn your head one way, then another…you go off and look at other quilts…but always return to the one that strikes you as amazing.  And you stand there and wonder how it was made or how the designer and quilter were able to take a one dimensional quilt and make it appear to be a two dimensional quilt.

Let’s try a few simple designs and I’ll attempt to show you what I mean:

D1

This is a very one dimensional-appearing design.

D2

This design appears to be more two dimensional – with the blue nine-patch centers “popping” out of the quilt.

D3

Again, a two dimensional-appearing design with the nine-patch centers fading into the background and the ‘frames’ of the centers standing out.

I hope you can see the difference between the fabrics that make a quilt appear to be one dimensional or two dimensional.  Many times, it’s just one fabric that can do this for a quilt and sometimes it takes more than one fabric.  The goal, as is often suggested, is to buy your fabrics in the light, medium and dark fabrics.  They do NOT have to be all matchy-matchy…but, they do all need at least a single color that coordinates with another fabric.  Find a focus fabric you want to use and then choose the remaining quilt colors that will pull the color from the focus fabric – that’s the best way to create a two dimensional-appearing quilt, with the lights, mediums and darks coordinating with the focus fabric.

Play with this, see if you get the same results!

Fabric Stashbusting

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With six promised quilts or quilt projects accepted to an online quilt magazine, I had to do some stashbusting this weekend.  And I truly saw what type of quilt fabric color I had become over the years.  🙂

I needed some red and blue fabrics for one scrappy project – but do you think I could find ANY of those in my stash?  Oh noooooooooo, it couldn’t be THAT easy!

But the stashbusting was good for at least one good thing:  It showed me that I have a lot of fabrics in colors I would normally not quilt with, and very little of the fabrics that I use all the time!  Although my second daughter and I organized all of my stash in little baskets, what we didn’t do was to organize them by color (because we ran out of baskets!).  I purchased six new baskets and so perhaps I can find her in another bored moment and have her help me organize by color and not just by the size of the fabrics in my baskets.

As this epiphany hit me, I dug a little deeper for scrappy fabrics in my stash for a quilted project and finally settled on using these fabrics:

IMG_0421

Now that I have them, I can get busy piecing my project.  I also need to get my stash fabrics color-coordinated so that when I need red and blue, I can make a note of it and head to my fabric supplier to fill in the blanks of my stash!

Do you have your stash color-coordinated?  If so, what method of storing your stash suits your quilting style and purpose?

Quilt Tip for Beginners #595: Binding Preparedness

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If you are a beginning quilter, or even a long-time quilter, I am sure you have been learning some tricks from the quilt masters.  Unfortunately, as a quilter becomes more well known, they seem to quit sharing their tips that brought them where they are today.  I don’t understand this philosophy because most of the tips folks learn as they grow in their quilting is not theirs in the first place – it was shared with them by someone a bit more experienced at whatever time in the quilter’s quest to grow in quilting.  And after they are advertised or promoted as professionals, they write books and want paid for their expertise – much of which came from free tips they’ve learned over the years!

Since I write all the time, ya’ll already know that I freely share the tips that I have learned over the years.  It’s the right thing to do, in my mind!

One of the absolute BEST tips I have received over the years is about binding.  I will admit, though, that I do not always follow this advice but when I do, I just get giddy with anticipation and pat myself on the back a bit.

Once you finish a quilt, you either quilt it yourself or you send it to a quilter.  Next comes the binding.  For some, binding a quilt is a challenge – for others it’s quite easy and not a chore at all.

My tip is to get your binding ready the minute you complete a quilt top.

Sounds simple but it’s not an easy tip to remember…especially if you have made a rather large quilt and you just want it out of your site for a while before you jump back in the quilt ring with it again.  But, if you have your binding ready, it should allow you some breathing room (for the time it takes to quilt the quilt) and you’ll have everything you need to bind the quilt when it’s ready.  It makes a quilt you’re tired of completed quickly…and it makes a quilt you love ready for you to finish it quickly.

I recently made a baby quilt.  When it was complete and sent off to my quilter, I was cleaning off my cutting table.  When I reached the pile of leftover fabric from the baby quilt, I realized I’d better make sure I had enough scraps to bind the quilt.  Thankfully, I had one fabric that was just the right size for the binding so I cut the binding out and decided not to wait to make the binding because I would either forget where I put the fabric or would use that nice piece of fabric for some other project – and then smack myself in the head because I didn’t use the fabric for the binding (has happened many times for this quilter!).

Here are some photos to show the process:

IMG_0343 (299x450)

If you are using directional fabric, with due diligence, take the time to make sure that all of the fabric goes in the same direction.  In this photo (above), I am creating my 45 degree angle to make one long strip of binding.

IMG_0344 (299x450)

Here’s my binding, all pinned and ready to sew.

IMG_0345 (299x450)

Time to sew the strips together!  Then cut off the excess fabric at the quilt junctures.

IMG_0346 (450x191)

I now have this long piece of binding cut and ready to bind the quilt, once it gets back from my quilter!

By being patient and taking the time to pre-cut and piece your binding, you save tons of time later on.

Quilt on!

Photographing Quilts and Quilting

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While I never profess to being anything more than an amateur photographer, I do enjoy photography, and photographing my quilts has become a necessary part of my personal quilting process.  People with MS usually have issues with short- and long-term memory…and I’m one of the lucky ones who definitely have issues with my memory!  You can tell me something and five minutes later, I will ask the same question because I have lost the memory of asking it the first time.  Hence with photos of my quilt projects, I can attach a name to the file image so I can remember what quilt I made and gifted to someone or sold to someone!

You should also know, if you’ve forgotten or are new to by blog, that my kids call me the “Quilt Designing Computer Geek”.  Quilting is my passion and I have enjoyed it since I was 19-years-old.  The Internet has been my bread and butter work for nearly 15 years.  Because of that geek part, I have a number of image programs on my computers that I can use to manipulate photographs that I take and that need a few adjustments.

I was recently asked to create a long-arm quilting website for a dear friend.  She sent me some photos of her quilts.  Just by looking at the photos, you cannot see the quilted stitches very well.  But, if you are using even a very basic program (Windows Live Photo Gallery), you can zoom in on a photo of a quilt to get a new photo that shows off the quilting!

Here’s an example:

PeytynPyleQuilt2 (450x450)
This is the original quilt photograph.  Although you can see the quilt stitches, they are not completely visible.

PeytynPyleQuilt2 (440x450)

This is the same quilt that has been cropped – see the quilt stitches better?

Without all of my geeky programs, I am able to take an image, zoom in on it (if necessary) and am able to truly show off the quilt stitches – which is my goal!

Choosing Fabric from an Online Quilt Shop

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For some of us, the only way to get fabric is to purchase it online from a reputable online quilt shop.  There are times when we will choose fabrics for a quilt project from a single quilt fabric designer’s colorway….but, there are also times when I feel the need to mix and match the fabrics I want to use from more than one designer’s collection.

(queue the theme music from the Twilight Zone)

What I am sure many folks don’t think about is that there are probably no two computer monitors that have the exact same settings – unless they never changed them from the factory defaults and someone else has the same exact computer that you do.  And the quilt shops are (usually) relying on the fabric manufacturer’s images – which adds another layer of issues.

Let’s use a recent example to sort this problem out – I want four fabrics for a quilt.  I begin shopping online for what I’d like to use in the quilt.  Remember, four fabrics.  I find a couple of fabrics I like out of a collection but the others just aren’t doing anything for me, so I click around on the quilt shop’s website, looking for fabrics that match and also catch my eye.  If I am able to save the fabrics to my computer, I can compare them to each other in an image program to make sure they truly match (though I know most consumers aren’t as geeky as I am and don’t have the luxury of image programs for comparison).  It ‘appears’ that they do, so I order them.  When I get the fabrics, I notice that one of them is not going to work – too bright for the quilt design I have in mind.  Then I have to go to my stash and see if I have a fabric that will work better.

Here’s the four fabrics I chose, direct from the website’s images of them:

DinoFabrics

If your eye is as good as mine, these four fabrics should go very well together – the companion fabric colors are all found in the focus fabric design.  Unfortunately, when I laid them out on my cutting table (to look at, to pet and to make sure they’ll work with my pattern design), I realized one of the four was just too bright for the muted colors of the other three.  Can you guess which one just by looking at these images?

If you guessed the green tonal polka dot one, you would be correct.  Luckily, I had a yard of a muted yellow that worked perfectly with the other three fabrics so I put the tonal green in my stash for use on a future quilt or quilted project.

But, this leads us back to my original problem – how can we safeguard ourselves against purchasing fabric online when the image colors don’t exactly meet our expectations when the fabric shows up?

  • One solution could be to go to a local quilt shop and find the fabrics you want, write them down and then go purchase from your favorite online shop.
  • If you do not have a local quilt shop within an easy driving range, try ordering a fifth fabric instead of JUST the four you need.  This way, you will have the option of using one or the other if one does not meet your expectations.
  • Try going to a different computer, if you can.  See if the images are the same or different in appearance on different computers.
  • If all else fails, call the quilt shop and ask them if the four fabrics you chose go together, most online quilt shops would be happy to help you with your fabric choices.

I’ll reveal the final quilt top once I have completed it – but at this point, I love three of the fabrics and with the fourth one from my stash, the quilt is coming out EXACTLY as I’d envisioned in my head!