Showing posts with label Triangle Paper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Triangle Paper. Show all posts

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Hang it up!

We have a split level home and the wall in the entry of the "split" stair area is a large blank canvas that is the perfect place to hang something large such as a quilt.  Rotating different quilts makes the space interesting but that means having lots of interesting quilts to hang there.  Not all quilts pass muster due to size and the location.  For instance, I made this particular quilt to hang in this location but failed to measure how long the wall was.  Oops!  The quilt was too long.....so it didn't make it up on "the wall". The last quilt hung there for over two years.  So, the wall has been bare for a few months because frankly I got tired of looking at the quilt that was there.

This weekend my husband recommended I get something back up on "the wall" and so I did a bit of rotating in the house and decided to put up a quilt that I made in 2008 at a mystery class.  The pattern is
Bear Tracks by Glad Creations and is 61" x 79". (Part of what you see at the top of the quilt is a ceiling fan blade and two cords hanging down.)


I thought I would show you how we have this hung up on the wall.  We used these hooks from IKEA...they are the  2 3/4" Blecka hooks.  Then we used 1/2" x 10ft galvanized conduit pipe from a home remodeling/hardware store.  (Yes, we have a popcorn ceiling.  We will probably hang onto it until it becomes in vogue again!)



We used three of the hooks. My husband shortened the middle hook that the bar rests on so that it doesn't push into the back of the quilt and cause a "bump" to show in the front when a quilt is hanging.  When I attach my sleeves on the back of the quilt I put on two instead of one leaving space in the middle; that way the hook in the middle doesn't interfere with the sleeve.


Initially we discussed painting the pipe and hooks the color of the wall; however, this is the narrowest quilt I have ever hung up there.  Usually very little of the pipe shows and it is rarely noticeable.  What does show doesn't bother us.


If I remember correctly the pattern for this quilt called for  24 different fabrics and I used 48 because I wanted it to be scrappier looking.  Also, I wanted the background fabric to be very low contrast.  I wanted the quilt to look somewhat vintage. 

Thanks for reading!

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Has it really been that long?

I know I am doing this on Tuesday - but I am still going to link up with the design wall at Judy L's Patchwork Times.  So after you are done reading this please go to her site and see what other people have on their design walls.  It is always very inspirational!

While all of you have been faithfully checking in with me everyday (Thank you!) I have been busy sewing together all my HST and the other portion of my Jubilee quilt.  I have now finished all 56 blocks.



The red and yellow fabrics I sewed together and cut out using 1" finished Triangle Paper since I needed over 700 of them. It works really slick! ( It is the same paper I used in this little project that I tried last month.  By the way, for those of you who have been following along, I did end up mixing in about one third of those blocks with the 19 blocks that I needed to finish this quilt.)

Here are all the red/yellow HST with the paper taken off and waiting to be pressed. I think this is about 730 of them.

These pictures show my strips of squares waiting to be sewn to the quilt blocks.  This is after I had taken apart and resewn ALL the strips that go across the top of the blocks because I had the triangles oriented the wrong way. To look at this quilt it looks like you can just flip the strips and the triangles will be going the correct way, but noooooo, someone had to make this tricky!!!  :)




And here is a portion of the blocks on my design floor (I don't have a design wall!).  I hope to sew them together today and add the border soon after.


And here is a portion of the antique quilt that I am replicating:


Hopefully I will have the borders on by next week and can show you more.  Stay tuned. :)

My husband is home this week on vacation and he just commented to me about how long it was taking me to write this post, "What are you doing writing 'War and Peace'?  I'm going to have to start calling you Tolstoy, I guess." Hardy, har, har.  Mr. Smartypants. ;)

Here is his website if you would like to see what he does with his free time.  He is in the Top 100 Ukulele Websites. Click here to go to his website  - he goes by Ukester Brown.  

Have a wonderful day!

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

It seams to me

I had a request to post pictures of the hst blocks (from my last post) with the seams in them and I thought that was a good idea. For some reason it is too early in the morning for me to get a decent picture - so this one will have to do!


I hope you can see well enough when you enlarge it.
Left column: Dark has seams
Middle column: Both sections have seams
Right column: Light section has seams

Out of the 70 blocks 32 had seams in them and about five will not be useable because the seams are too close to the seam allowance.

I don't mind the seams in the blocks because it gives it that old fashioned scrappy look.  Fun!

Have a good day!

Judy

Sunday, February 19, 2012

I just had to try it!

Remember I posted a picture similar to this the other day?


I am using hundreds of 2" squares to make half-squares triangle blocks that I am then trimming down to 1 1/2" squares - one at a time. I want my Jubilee quilt to be scrappy, very, very, scrappy with hardly any blocks alike and so this is the best way I know how to do it.

Well, after reading this wonderful post at Collector With A Needle about the mass production of half-square triangles I decided I had to give it a whirl.  Only I took it up a notch.  My pictures and descriptions below will make more sense if you go and look at the her post above first. She uses two busy fabrics on each side....which gave some wonderful results.

Pictured below are the steps I followed and at the end of this post I will tell you what I learned.

I decided to use three light fabrics and four darks.  You'll notice the lights are vertical and the darks are horizontal.  I measured to be sure all of their seams will fall within the blocks to look even scrappier. I used 4" wide strips and just cut them a little longer than needed for the paper.

Now you can see I have the right sides together, lights vertical, darks horizontal and the paper on top.
The paper product that I am using is called Triangle Paper and is the 1" finished size.

Here is the Triangle Paper sewn through all three layers.  At this point you rotary cut on the solid lines - then remove the paper.

This shows the variety of squares that I ended up with...using three light and four dark strips.

What I learned:
  • it would be better to vary the colors of the fabrics even more - I tried to keep the lights similar and the darks similar just so they were "busy" but I ended up with very similar blocks throughout
  • try for fabrics with splotches of color and geometrics - the green floral is a good one, and the two middle darks because they change colors and shapes throughout the blocks.  The yellow geometric is OK too.
  • overall what is missing in these blocks is just the variety of colors
Will I use these in the current Jubilee project I am doing?  Probably some....but not all.  I don't want that many repeats.  There are 70 blocks here that look too much alike to me.  But I won't throw them away.  They will go in my "1 1/2" box" where I keep all my other half square triangle blocks for future projects.

I think I may try this again with more color variety and if I get something much better I will post my results.  I will definitely try it again in the future when I want  to speed up the mass production of scrappy.  This was a great idea. Many thanks to Collector with a Needle for initially sharing this!

If you try this - please share it and let me know how it comes out for you.

Scrappy and happy-

Judy

P.S.  I am going to tag this on here on Monday....check out what others are doing on their design walls at Patchwork Times Monday link up.