While I waited for the dew to dry off the grass yesterday morning I went to the basement to put away the squares and rectangles on trays left over from the class. I decided to design one more colorwash while doing that. This is just squares on the design wall. I have it mostly sewn now.
As I was going through things for a garage sale I came across this pattern from 1957. I made these aprons for my mother. Look at the size of the waistlines on the ladies. I think they would have needed ribs removed to be that small.
Last night I sewed together the little colorwash piece that I used for a demonstration at the class on Tuesday. It is about 24" square.
I mowed the grass in 2 sessions. Even though the humidity dropped a lot it was hot. There was a nice breeze when I got to the shady backyard.
Tuesday there were no red tomatoes. Mid morning yesterday I saw something red from my studio window and went out to check. I found 2 red tomatoes. Later in the afternoon I went out for a walk around the house and 3 more had started turning. I bring them in to finish ripening so the squirrels won't just take one bite and leave them. They are a nice medium size tomato. Some are the Early Girl and some the Cluster tomatoes.
The cool front came through yesterday afternoon so the tropical humidity is gone. Maybe I can mow the grass today.
Below are the pieces designed by my 5 students the last 2 days. I am so proud of them. I think they might have thought I was exaggerating when I told them how long it takes to tweak it to perfection but they are believers now. The pieces are all beautiful and unique.
I hope to get a better photo of this last one. It is really prettier than this photo shows. It happened to be on the wall that has the worst lighting near it.
The first day of the colorwash class went very well. All 5 students made good progress. Today will be filling in the empty spaces, possibly adding a couple rows, and then the tweaking....which sometimes takes hours. We were all beat at the end of 7 hours yesterday.
This is the same one I showed yesterday with 2 rows on the red side removed and then a lot of tweaking. It isn't perfect but not too bad.
I started sewing it together leaving the last 4 rows so I can use it for a demo today or tomorrow at the colorwash class. I will see how far everyone gets on their piece or if they need a break to walk away from their design wall.
I spent a lot of time in the basement yesterday sorting scraps and getting them all into one location. It looks a lot neater now. I found a group of 100 batik squares and decided to try making a colorwash with them. It is a good example of a not so great colorwash. This is what happens when you don't have enough variety of values to choose from. It looks like an ancient computer picture with obvious pixels.
After I do a lot of cutting I have neat stacks of the leftovers. I have this die for a finished 1.5" x 3" rectangle and it looks like most of the scraps are the right size to use with it. I will have to wait until next week to cut the pieces.
Yesterday I ran errands, pulled weeds and mowed the grass. It is supposed to get hotter each day from now until Sunday so I needed to get as much done as I could while it was comfortable.
Last night I looked for more spare parts to possibly work into this quilt.
Here are a few more parts that may get worked into it too. There will be some plain strips between some of the blocks too. I will continue to gather parts and then it needs to come off the wall to prepare for my class. I need to use a lint roller on all of the design walls to clean off all of the stray threads.
I searched for some spare parts from other quilts to add to these blocks. I found some little triangles in the box of leftovers from my Bear Paw quilt. I had made 3 sizes of blocks so I have more than one size of triangles to work with. I can see this will be a slow process.
My first colorwash class in my home is next week so I spent time rounding up all of the quilts and photos that relate to colorwash. I thought I knew where everything was but some of it was hiding really well. I need to make a small colorwash too so I will have one ready to demonstrate sewing it all together.
I had a fun day with my art quilter friends yesterday. After they left I pulled out this stack of blocks from years past. I looked back in my photos and it was Feb. 2010 when I first showed them. I tried a few fabrics for sashing but didn't come to any conclusion. Actually I was just too tired to look any more so I left the blocks on the wall. Maybe I'll get an idea for them today.
I can't ever get a photo of a Coneflower bloom before the bugs start eating the petals.
I did the final cleaning off of tables, did a little cutting with my Studio die cutter and baked 2 batches of cookies. It cooled off a little last night, lower humidity too. It looks like Tuesday will be the beginning of some beautiful days this week. I really didn't like Miami humidity and heat for 2 days over the weekend.
While putting things away in the basement I found some more light triangles that will work for my flying geese blocks. I got 39 of them sewn after I took this photo.
I took this photo from my dining room window. This is the Blackberry Lily again with Coneflowers and the blue bell flowers. The lilies have darker red accents than it shows here.
I mixed two batches of cookie dough and vacuumed the basement yesterday. Then I started cleaning off tables and I need to work more on that today. Here are my three colors of Rose of Sharon, photos I took a couple days ago. Yesterday was hot and steamy and probably would have fogged my camera lens.
It's clean up time in the basement because the art quilters are coming Monday. As I came across many piles of scraps I had to take a detour to the sewing machine and have some "relax and play" time. I love doing crazy piecing.
The above photo is before trimming and this is after trimming. This isn't a project, just playtime at this point.
I noticed my tiger lilies are starting to bloom. They look so pretty against the periwinkle of the balloon flowers.
This is my view from the dining room window to my jungle flower bed. I have one more area with some tall weeds to take care of. I made a lot of headway on it earlier this week. If you click and enlarge the photo you can see all of the coneflowers blooming.
The colorwash is sewn together and stay-stitched around the edges. The camera wants to focus on the light area so the corners look darker in a photo than in real life. This is the largest colorwash I have ever done and it was a challenge to design it sideways on the double design wall. Now comes the job of basting it and ditch quilting it in the vertical seams.
My blackberry lilies are blooming. I have them in 2 places and neither is ideal. I don't really have a place to move them to though.
The lemon lily is also blooming. I mowed the lawn last night at 7 when it was cooling off. The humidity was still low yesterday but is going back up with the heat wave coming this weekend.
I only sewed 4 rows yesterday but I joined the first two sections of 6 rows with the 4 row section so there are 16 sewn, 2 rows laying over by my machine and the 5 rows at the top waiting to be sewn.
I started out the day in long pants and a long sleeve shirt, sprayed my clothes with mosquito repellant and went out to clear some of the jungle that my back garden had become.
Even though I dug up and shared a lot of coneflowers last year, I have plenty all across the back garden this year.
I only have the pink, or as they call it, Purple Coneflower. I bought a red one and the next year it was white. It also died a couple years later. These are a native variety from a friend many years ago.
The blooms on this hosta are trying to be so tall. My one gardening friend told me that everything will try to grow as tall as its tallest neighbor because that is the only way it can get the sunlight. This plant had some tall weeds around it that I cleared out yesterday.
I thought I would get more rows sewn together yesterday but I took a little break instead. I did get 6 rows sewn, the same as I did on Sunday. I will press them before I sew the 2 sections together. After I took this photo I took the next 6 rows off the wall ready to sew today.
I also took a break from answering comments yesterday. Thank you so much for your supportive comments. I hope I will be able to get a photo of this at its destination to put on my blog some day.
The very pale pink Balloon Flowers are in bloom now along with the periwinkle. They used to be short plants, no taller than about a foot. They are easily 18-20" tall this year.
In the same garden the Rudbekia is starting to bloom.
Last but not least are some happy Coleus plants. Who needs flowers when you can have such pretty leaves.
On the trays on the left are the size rectangles I'm usually working with on my colorwash pieces. The ones on the right are for the new project.
Here are the 2 sizes side by side. It all started when a friend mentioned she could visualize one of my colorwash wallhangings on the large empty wall at her church. When she mentioned how large she thought it should be I really didn't think I wanted to make it. The second time she called I told her I was thinking I just needed to use larger rectangles and then it wouldn't be any more pieces than I use on my other colorwash wallhangings.
I started it Saturday afternoon thinking I would just get the center up and do a little more on it each day. Six hours later I had about 3/4 of it designed. It is almost covering 2 design walls (96" wide, 84" tall). Yesterday I spent an additional 5 hours filling in the last pieces which meant more cutting for the colors and values I was missing in my initial 3 days of cutting. The tweaking took about 3 hours. By 9 p.m. I was ready to sew and got the bottom 6 rows sewn (not shown here). The bottom here is the left side of the wallhanging. My personal challenge was to get the cutting and designing done and have the rows safely off the wall in stacks ready to sew by the 20th when my art quilters will be coming. Now I hope I will have it all sewn together by then. It will shrink in 11" in width and 7" in length when sewn. It is projected to be 69" x 90" when the top is finished.
I need larger rectangles for another project so I have been cutting for 3 days. I still need to cut reds and oranges. I'll know what else I need as I proceed with the project.
I cut the grass yesterday while it was still cool. It is going to get really hot this weekend. Then I did a lot of cutting with my die cutter for a new project and I still have more to do.
This selection is some of the fun my 2 friends and I had while they were here on Tuesday. We started with the Kaffe Dream fabric. It is the one just below the light green and to the left of the purple and orange dotted fabric. I have the dies chosen to cut with but I can't start on this one for a couple weeks.
A "no-reply" asked about the fabric for the One Block Wonder that I showed the last 2 days. Here is the info on the selvage.
I hope to get a better photo of this last one. It is really prettier than this photo shows. It happened to be on the wall that has the worst lighting near it.
