TyQuilts Designs

To me memorial day is the start of summer, but around

here, it finally feels like spring.

We spent a beautiful sunny afternoon at the local arboretum, hence the beautiful flower pictures. I would love to have taken credit for them as I love flowers, but I am not a gardener by any stretch of the imagination. Usually, I just settle for using floral fabrics or floral motifs in my quilts. At this time of the year, I try to make it out to the arboretum to get my lilac and tulip fix. Tulips are so colorful and cheery, and nothing beats the scent of lilac in the air.

I would love to recreate this spot in my yard at home. What a wonderful place it would be to sit and dream, or sit and quilt.

I am working on a post card sized piece based on the photo I took of the lilacs. Here is the preliminary idea that I will be working from

My husband and I went to our first Renaissance Faire about 5-6 years ago and were hooked. They are great fun– People watching, shopping, fun and frivolity. He got into the idea of wearing costumes right away, while I was like “Are you nuts?? You will never get me out in public in a costume. “. Well, I have had to eat those words. I started out slowly, wearing a peasant skirt and lace up tunic, purchased in a regular clothing store, then last year wearing a bodice and skirt and this year I decided to make a new dress, found a pattern, picked out fabric. The only problem was it was 4 days before we were leaving to go to the Janesville WI Renaissance Faire, I worked at my job all week and I wanted it done by the time we left! Am I nuts?? Did I also mention that I never make clothing any more?….

Four days of late nights, blood, sweat, tears and mild cursing ensued. First attempt at the bodice didn’t work. No time to buy more fabric, so a call to my husband to stop on his way home from work to pick up more (This was definitely above and beyond the call of husbandly duty– But he was a terrific sport) With a little cell phone guidance while he was in the store, he managed to get what I needed, and I continued on. Pretty much everything that could go wrong, did, but I finished up the machine sewing at 1:30 am Thursday night, and spent all day Friday in the car on the way to Janesville stitching miles of hem and adding trim to the waistline. I got it finished and was pleased with the way it turned out. No plans to quit my day job and stitch Renaissance costumes though.

We had a great time at the Faire. It was a community faire, just one weekend, but enough going on to insure a good time. Of course the highlight of the day for us were the performances by Bounding Main, our favorite group of Shanty singers and performers.

I was running a little behind on this one. It was interesting to work on. Started with the blacks and the jags of red and orange and yellow to symbolize the way change was feeling in my life right then. It was a work related change so not life or death, not relationship changing, but stressful still the same. As the months of April and May progressed, some of the negative aspects of change were starting to be replaced by the positive, a change felt both emotionally and physically. The image of the butterfly to symbolize hope, and and positive outcome is a bit trite, but it is the image that I kept coming back to so finally I gave in to it, and put it there. The piece still needs to be quilted, but other than that I am done with it.

For the May TIF, I am going to illustrate the evolution of one of my designs, a wall hanging called Joyful. (My first thoughts on this months challenge can be found here.) For this particular design, I started with the concept and then chose fabrics at the end. I will also frequently design around a specific set of fabrics that I want to use.

When planning this design I knew that I wanted to do something that could be paper pieced, something easy that didn’t have a lot of matching of points involved. I wanted to use bright colors so I decided to design a paper pieced stained glass look.

I started with a diagonal line bisecting the block unevenly in half and then just randomly started adding angled lines. My only criteria for placement was to make sure they wouldn’t line up with an adjacent block and need matching

I then colored in the block with the bright colors I planned to use and started to play with rotation of the block. This was option #1.

I continued to play with block placement within the quilt and came up with these designs, but they still weren’t really speaking to me yet.

At this point I thought maybe I should add additional lines so I divided one of the sections of block and then played with color.

This was nice, but too busy for me, so I went back to the original block and continued to play with rotating the blocks until I came up with this design. I liked this one a lot, so went shopping for fabric and the design was done.

Joyful

For her May take it further challenge, Sharon posts the question of how do we describe our work and ourselves in relation to that work. I am a little late starting on the challenge this month, but I imagine this is going to be a hot button for some so I wanted to write this post before exploring what others were saying on the topic.

Artist- While I do consider many quilts art, I don’t describe myself as an artist. I feel that I don’t have the vision of an artist, that extra spark that would cause my designs to go beyond…

Craftsman- To me a craftsman