Bars Quilt With "Ick"

The winner of my giveaway of Printed Treasures from JHittleSewing is Dar at DarsPatchworkGarden.blogspot.com Yay, Dar!

Thank you, everyone who commented! I really enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts and methods about making quilt labels. Many of you had good suggestions and information to share.

Today I have a finish. It's my Bars Quilt started during a February workshop with Tara Faughnan at QuiltCon. The half-day class was "Playing With Solids," and certainly satisfied my current interest in making quilts with solid colors. This is an area of quiltmaking I haven't yet explored in my 30-plus years of quilting! I'm discovering that I really like working with solids, and with so many brands and colors of solids available, making solids my focus during 2017 is really enjoyable.

What I learned as the workshop progressed is that I didn't have a good color assortment. Though I'd prepped 34 different colors of 5"-wide strips for the workshop, it soon became apparent that my color palette is heavy on bright colors like orange, yellow, aqua, lime. I needed to broaden my color palette to include dark blues, dark greens, dark reds, and - at Tara's suggestion - ochre! The latter is a color I wouldn't have thought to ever include in a quilt, but I was able to find all these missing colors while at QuiltCon. I bought Painter's Palette solids which was one of the few solids available from a QuiltCon vendor as yardage.

The addition of navy, burgundy, and forest, and ochre helps make my quilt successful.

By the way, that Painter's Palette fabric is nice stuff! The hand is great. I won't hesitate to buy it again.

I also have to tell you that toward the end of the workshop, I realized I hadn't chosen to include brown in any of the color pairs I'd selected. When another student asked Tara if it was okay to not include a color because "I don't like it," she said, "Yes, it's okay to have an 'ick' color." Good to know.

I quilted Bars on my Janome 1600P. Batting is Quilter's Dream Pink (the batting with a percentage of sales going to support breast cancer research). Extra fun was getting to try out Sew Steady Ruler Foot Echo Guides. Slip a guide onto a ruler foot to echo a certain distance from previous quilting lines. For only $10, you get three widths of these disks: 1/2", 3/4", and 1".

 

My echo guides came from RedThreadStudio at QuiltCon, but they aren't listed on the website. 😕

Quilting patterns are varied. I just made sure that each row of quilting was different than the row above or below it, alternating between curvy and straight-ish quilting. All threads used in the piecing and quilting are Aurifil 50-weight.

For binding, I couldn't settle on one color, so I used four! With my No-Tails Binding: Mitered Corners By Machine method, I could easily sew a different color to each of the four sides. There's that now-obligatory ochre again!

I love where I live!

Bars Quilt - 61" X 76"

And how did I back my quilt? When I was trying to decide if I had a piece of fabric large enough for backing, Tara's comment came back to me: "It's okay to have an 'ick' color." I thought, why not use my icky brown stash on the quilt back? And I decided that stating how much I dislike brown in my quilts - at least on the front of my quilts - would be even better.

I can't tell you how pleased I am with this quilt back! It literally says it all. I pieced the word using "Word Play Quilts" by Tonya Ricucci. It's one of the dozen or so quilting books I kept when we moved to Florida. I've used it several times since living here, so it's a book I won't soon part with.

If you're in the area, you might like to know that I'll be sharing and talking about this quilt at our Monday evening (April 10) Central Florida MQG meeting as I give a little talk called, "What I Learned About Color at QuiltCon." Please come! A visitor may attend one chapter meeting at no charge. Linda