Friday, January 13, 2017

Phase II

I was flipping through Jeni Baker's book Patchwork Essentials when Triplicate caught my eye. It was a quilt made of big half-square triangles and tons of blank squares. The first thing I thought was, wow! That's a lot of negative space to play with!

Ignoring the little voice that I would eventually have to come up with the quilting design for the negative space, I immediately put it on my make list. I even knew exactly what fabric I wanted to use ... the rest of my Phases of the Moon fabrics from Spoonflower. I already made Phases of the Moon quilt but I still had some left over, so this was a perfect project for it. I had a good time piecing this, it was easy and virtually stress-free. But when I had a finished and basted quilt top, dread suddenly came over me. Oh no ... I realized. I actually have to quilt this now.

Don't get me wrong, I love to machine quilt, but I love to do the quilting, not figure out what to quilt. It's not that coming up with the design isn't fun, but it's very challenging at the same time and I backpedal a lot. In particular, I've never had this much negative space to play with, and the quilt isn't even symmetrical, so it's intimidating. I decided to play with a geometric design in the colored triangles, and use Angela Walter's tiles design in the background space, filling it with my big 3 (swirls / pebbles / paisleys). Once I decided what to quilt, then the fun really begins.

This is my first time using the tiles design, but I loved quilting it so much and it looks so great that it will be a staple from now on. This is also by far the densest I've ever quilted. I've always loved the dense look on Angela Walters's quilts, but I usually quilt at a larger scale just to get it done faster. This quilt was an experiment in dense quilting. It's definitely worth it, but I won't be doing it on every quilt because it is *so* time consuming. I wrote more about it in here.

I had so much fun making this quilt, and now I can throw the rest of the Phases of the Moon fabric in the scrap basket. I got two lovely quilts out of it, and I love them. In fact, I'm not sure which one I love more.

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This post participated in the link-up at Busy Hands Quilts and Crazy Mom Quilts.

5 comments:

  1. Just stunning! And the quiliting! Oh my! Quick questions, are you using a domestic machine, and if so, which one?

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    Replies
    1. Thank you! I'm using a Handi Quilter Sweet 16 which is a sit down longarm machine (or a midarm). But this design is completely doable on the domestic because there isn't a lot of swing to it.

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  2. Both of the Phases of the Moon quilts are wonderful in their own way!!

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  3. Both quilts are just terrific. Your quilting here is amazing.

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  4. Bravo! Beautiful quilt and quilting! I have hesitated to do very dense quilting but I love the texture. Great work!

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