When I was in NC last month I was looking for a magazine to read on the airplane coming home. I had seen this magazine on several blogs but it didn't interest me until I saw this issue about Louisiana. There is a section about Anna Williams. I first saw her quilt tops at the Quilt Surface Design Symposium in Columbus, Ohio around 1992. Her friend Katherine Watts brought the tops and they hung them on the walls of the cafeteria. If you don't know who Anna Williams - quilter is you might want to do a search and see some of her scrap quilts. There was a book published by AQS in 1995 about her life and quilts and I didn't buy it for some reason. It is out of print now and is $100 - $300 on Amazon.
Here are some more of my favorite batik combinations in the neutral 16 patches I am making.
The dark print in the block on the left and the geometric print in the block on the right are batiks from the 1990s. There were so few batiks available in the beginning that I bought almost every one that I saw. There are some that I would never consider buying now but they were so unusual in the early 1990s and I had to have them.
---
Just 3 days left to enroll in my new Online Course COLORWASH 360 with a Bonus: 40 day Virtual Workshop with me. We have students from across the world enrolled and excited to get started on Oct 1.
If you bought a Colorwash kit from me in the past and haven't used it, you're half way there, now you just need the step-by-step assistance from me to get it made. Sign up! If you don't have a kit, no worries we still have kits available for purchase.
I thought I would just show you my favorite block so far in the 16 patches. Actually there are 2 alike. The brown batik is really old, back when batiks were first available in the 1990s.
On these two I just wanted to show how much variation there is in one print, the zebra stripe. It goes from light brown to dark brown, and light gray to dark gray all in one fabric.
I counted the strips that are waiting to be sliced into parts for the 16 patches. There will be 108 more blocks when I get them sliced and 74 blocks are already made. I figured out that I was planning on making a 96" x 112" quilt top with 14 blocks left over....or it could be two 64" x 88" quilt tops. There will be 6 blocks alike in some of the combinations, 4 alike in another group and in the ones sewn there are 2 blocks alike.
I decided to scrap the project I showed yesterday and use the blocks for mug rugs. I can't waste any more time on it. So...I got back to sewing the neutral 16 patches and got 30 sewn last night. I had 20 done previously so I'm at 50 total right now. I think my plan was to make about 130 blocks but I don't know where my notes are right now.
I spent hours outside yesterday. My son mowed the lawn and did all of the trimming around things. I don't have a trimmer so that made a big difference. I pulled crabgrass, cut back lots of plants, cut volunteer trees. I left the Coneflower seed heads for the goldfinches.
The Coral Bell leaves are so pretty with the sun shining through them.
I didn't think I would get a bouquet of hydrangeas to dry this year because the bushes got beaten down early in the summer by heavy rain. Between the 2 bushes I was able to get enough blooms for two small bouquets, small that is compared to what I usually get. This will be sufficient for my two vases. I have them hanging from my mower handle to dry. It usually just takes a couple days.
Registration for my online Colorwash 360 class closes Friday night this week. The info is on my website.
Last Tuesday everyone voted for the fabric on the right as the background around these Kaffe fabric blocks. I finally decided to trim the blocks to have parallel sides and square corners. Now the dilemma.....the fabric on the right is a bunch of jelly beans. If I cut it up to make all of the seams that will be required to get the blocks into 2 columns and then add the 3 vertical strips and top and bottom crosswise strips I will have lots of half jellybeans joining or mismatching with other half jellybeans on a dozen seams. I think that might ruin the looks of the jellybean print and create blobs that will catch the viewer's attention. I could applique all of the blocks onto a solid piece of jellybean background....or...I could border the blocks first with the butterfly print to make them all the same size and then sash it with the jellybean fabric. And this was going to be a quick project..............
My day started out with this luscious piece of red batik arriving in my mail box. The flowers are about 3" and it is prettier than its photo.
Then I started looking for something....I had 3 places that I thought it could be in.....and 4 hours later I had gotten rid of lots of papers, sorted and organized a few things, and found what I was looking for.
I wandered down to the basement and one box of large pieces of Kaffe fabrics and my collection of light Kaffe prints was open and needing to be put away.
But before I could do that I had to try the piece of Philip Jacobs tree fungi with all of them....and I think it looks great with them. Now I need to come up with a pattern that will work well with them.
You might have wondered why I haven't been sewing much lately. The last 5 days I worked a few hours a day cutting 80 yards of my batik colorwash fabrics into squares for stash kits for the Colorwash 360 class. I have to finish assembling and packaging the kits now.
My go-to project isn't colorful....it is another neutral batik 16 patch. I needed to cut strips for a friend so I cut enough for a bed size quilt for me too.
This container has pieces already cut for another bunch of blocks and I have 2 piles of sewn stratas to still slice for more blocks. It keeps the machine humming and me happy to have a no brainer project to work on.
The weather has turned really cool, in the low 60s and it feels great after that hot humid weather. We will still have some more hot days but this is a nice break for about 5 days.
I only did cutting yesterday so no project progress to show. My granddaughter mowed my grass for me. It was still hot and steamy yesterday. Now we are in for a string of some cooler days.
I planted my Canna bulb late this year so it is a little shorter than previous years. The Elephant Ears are in pots in the background. I need to get them planted much earlier next year.
I had a little area to fill in with dirt in the back garden and I noticed the Sedum blooming with a tall Coral Bell flower in front of it. I have many varieties of the Coral Bells and the flowers vary from plant to plant.
