Works in Progress

When I blogged three days ago I was stuck. The pillow tops had come out so good that I was afraid to use my beginner quilting skills on them. So I decided to try some improvisational piecing on two new pillows. The 20-somethings and 30-somethings are calling this Modern Quilting, which as a former art student I find rather funny. Modern, as an art term, is in the past. They call today's stuff Post-Modern, and I've seen both Improvisational and Post-Modern used as terms in the new book I just got.

Here are the two new pillow tops just after I'd finished with them. Basically I looked at what was going on in Web blogs and tried to do likewise.

On the Craftsy Blog of the Month class, which is a free class on that teaching site, one of the January blocks looked something like this. The teacher's block had two cuts in both directions so she ended up with a Hash Mark (#) looking block instead of a cross. I would never have even thought of slashing into the material in this way if I wasn't taking that course. That was where I got the directions for the Five Sided Wonky Log Cabin block I have also made

For the triangle block I saw something like this on one of the blogs I read and I can't remember which one. I slashed the block and sewed the triangle I'd put together from scraps and then cut into a triangle shape into the two pieces of fabric.

Both pillows ended up a weird shape and a strange size and I had to cut the blocks down to 18 1/2 so I could make pillows out of them.

This is what the cross block looks like with half of its quilting done. I wanted to experiment with some straight line close in quilting. So I used a walking foot with the feed dogs up to do this. Turns out that although I love the look of this kind of thing, it bores me silly when I'm stitching it.

When I just couldn't do another straight line I decided to experiment with squares and rectangles. Much more interesting. I then started the second section with the same kind of close in quilting, but even with the much smaller size of the section, I was getting bored. What I ended up doing was a squared off spiral instead.


Here is the detail of the top section.









And here is the detail of the bottom section.

I wasn't sure the photos would come out right, but they did.

Next step is to try some squared off patterns using the feed dogs down and a free motion foot. That will be a lot harder than what I've been doing, but as I discovered as I worked the quilting on the Five Sided Wonky Log Cabin, free motion quilting is a lot more fun than using a walking foot.

Take care all