Structure 11

25" H x 41" W

I finished this top a couple of weeks ago, but finally had time to machine quilt it over the weekend. One of my sons took 3 of my smaller quilts to hang in his apartment, including Structure 10. I was thrilled he liked them; it is nice to have them hanging up and having others enjoy them.

Structure 10

This is a smaller quilt: 20" x 36". Sometimes when I am working on a quilt, trying to make it all work,I have a moment when I try something in a moment of desperation. And it works! That is what happened here, with the striped fabric. That is what I find difficult when working in a series: I might only have that ah-ha! moment with the first quilt, then it becomes harder to find that feeling of discovery.

I have one more quilt to do the machine quilting on, but now I am going to start the quilting on a bed quilt I am making as a gift. It is hard working on something so big!

More Structures

I almost forgot I had finished this quilt, but need to put a label on it; this is #8 in the series, and is 36"H x 32" W. The top quilt is #9, and is about the same size. As I was sewing the facing on this morning I was thinking about machine quilting: why do people do it the way they do? When I first went to a workshop I was told I did not do enough quilting. I was shown another quilter's 1/4 inch apart perfect machine quilting as an example of what to do. Since then I have tried many things, but I think it all boils down to what you like to do, and what looks good to you when you are done. For now,I like sewing close together; it flattens the quilt, and does not make your eye focus on each shape. It is not a distraction. But I have not read many thoughts on quilting, and why a person does it a certain way.

Recently I have subscribed to a blog called textures shapes and colors, by Leslie Avon Miller, who does contemporary collage paintings. She has some wonderful abstract paintings on her blog, and recently showed a video about a Philadelphia artist, Mary Nomecos, who described her painting process. She was asked how she selects certain colors in her paintings, and said it was intuitive, and she has several paintings she is working on at the same time. She spends a lot of time looking at them, really seeing them, to decide what will be next. I find too, that it takes a lot of looking: I take pictures as I go along, as another way of seeing what I am doing. I also see a lot more after the quilts are done! It is really hard to "see" what is going on in your work as you are doing it, and often you need to let it sit for awhile, and come back to it.

small works

I recently decided to make some small quilts, and try some different things: here are two of them. One is 24 x 18, the other 24 x 26, so they are a good size for trying different designs and quilting. I would like to do more with machine quilting and doing more minimal lines. I had trouble with the curved lines and the fabric getting more puffy than I would like. But with a small quilt, you can go on to something else, and try again!

Structure 5

I have a few quilts in a pile in different stages of being done. One I have to wait for more thread to be sent so I can finish the quilting, another has the quilting done, but not the facing, another, just the top is done! I have experimented a little with the quilting on some. I really do like sewing close together, which really flattens out the fabric like a canvas. This quilt is 28" x 33" W. I have decided to try a suggestion from another blogger, and write about each quilt after it is done. It helped me see the T-shapes in this quilt-the challenge was in sewing it together after I had it up on my design wall. I like a good sewing challenge!