October on my mind

Posted by Corinne Sovey

So you know how much I love fall. The only thing that keeps me from getting sad after Halloween is over is knowing Christmas is around the corner, otherwise I’d be totally bummed out, winter just isn’t my thing (one of the top reasons I now live in Austin.) I do miss the East Coast’s autumn though. I have many fond memories of driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains to and from college, going to Halloween houses with my sisters, and pumpkin picking with my family as a child. My dad turns our house into a haunted haven each Halloween, and kids are always met with large bags of candy. No scare tactics, just spooky fun. I hope to one day carry on the tradition, but living in an apartment doesn’t afford that opportunity just yet.

I have almost completed piecing my Not So Modern Maples quilt top, just need to add 4 inch squares around the entire top as a semi-border! This photo is terrible, the sun is going down earlier now and I just don’t get home early enough during the week to take sun-filled shots. Maybe I’ll remember to get one this weekend! In the meantime, here is my progress.

Last fall I fell in love with all the wonderful wreaths you find on pinterest. I came across this tutorial and wanted a similar product. I ended up using a wire wreath frame and sewing instead of gluing. If glue is your thing, that is cool, I just find it weighs things down too much, and it takes just as much time as sewing large stitches, so why bother. I made the black and white wreath below last year and it has been hanging out on a shelf in my laundry room flower-less all year. I busted it out this weekend and finally whipped up some lovely flowers to make it festive. I made a ton of these flowers in red last year for my Christmas tree, and thought they would look awesome on this wreath in orange. Again, I didn’t use glue, I sewed the petals on. The glue weighed the Christmas flowers down and took way too much time to dry. The only perk of glue is you get to peel it off your messy fingers when you’re done, but that doesn’t outweigh the cons in my opinion. 🙂

This wreath is hanging on my wall above my computer at work so that I can enjoy it. It took a year to finish, but I like how it turned out.

WWIP – Winding Ways In Progress

Posted by Corinne Sovey

Going to keep this short today. Almost done putting my Not So Modern Maples top together, hope to take pictures and post soon. Now that my autumn themed quilt is almost ready for quilting, I am again working on something beachy. I cut out a million and half pieces of the Winding Ways quilt a while back on an Accu-quilt, and did 4 or 5 practice blocks (not the ones posted below, they came after lots of practice). I have to admit, I was ready to give up. I’d cut it out though, so it is going to happen! I think I’ve found my groove, it involves A LOT of pins. I only have four decent blocks done, but I have a big pile of various parts pieced together. I also realized I didn’t cut out enough pieces from four of my fabrics. Going to have to figure that out, I’m not cutting these out without an Accu-quilt!

Linking up to Freshly Pieced WIP.

Lessons Learned – Experimental Color Play

Posted by Corinne Sovey

People who know me know I love the water. Beach, lake, river, pond, pool, take your pick. I find it impossible to resist fabric with nautical themes, and in a perfect world I would live at the beach. Alas, I cannot afford that lifestyle so I make do by obsessing over anything beachy.

I have only been quilting for about two years (one of which was spent making just one quilt, so I don’t know if that counts), and I have found that while I love modern quilting, so far I’ve definitely leaned towards traditional quilts with modern fabrics. My most recent quilting goal is to turn some of my modern quilting ideas into reality. I came across this gorgeous quilt a while back on pinterest. The colors are right up my alley, and I thought the design really modernized what I believe is the rail fence pattern. To be entirely honest, I wanted to copy the quilt exactly, the coral orange would be perfect for my bedroom. Ultimately I decided to try something different and quickly picked yellow and grey as my two main colors. I went to work sewing the strips of a light yellow and light grey together, and in a matter of days had enough blocks to make a lap size quilt. I threw the blocks onto my design wall and sadness washed over me. It looked washed-out and I just didn’t like it. I couldn’t put my finger on it until my mom remarked that the colors were both too light, and there wasn’t enough contrast. I have a hard time completing quilts I don’t like, so I put the blocks away to be used another time and set out to come up with another plan.

I played around again in Illustrator and thought it might be neat to use different shades of blue and I arranged them in a way that reminded me of the depth of water, or ocean waves. I choose my pallette, keeping contrast in mind considering my failure with this pattern when I tried my beloved yellow/grey combo. I had so many lovely Kona blues to choose from, and my initial pallette didn’t contrast enough, and I feared the quilt would again look washed out, with the pattern getting lost. I settled on the colors above, worked up a strip-piecing plan, and got to work piecing the blocks.

Overall I think the concept is more successful than the grey/yellow scheme (which I can’t even bear to show you!) but I think the concept would have been conveyed better if there were LESS contrast this time. I can’t win! I still have a ton of Kona blues that I want to use to piece a similar quilt, with less contrast, so that the flow of the “wave” is more gradual. The quilt top works up VERY quickly, thanks to strip piecing, so hopefully within the next couple of weeks I’ll have another version to share. I want to quilt the version above with a water type pattern on one of our local quilt shops’ long-arms. The quilt is slightly smaller than a twin right now, the perfect size to drape over my couch.