Quilted autumn leaves

quilted autumn leaves
Originally uploaded by Mellicious

It's fall - even here on the Gulf, the nighttime temps have dropped quite a lot - and I just happened to notice this picture of my beloved fall leaf quilt, which apparently made Flickr's 'interesting' page briefly back when I first posted it. (Here is the finished version: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mellicious/140829643)

I had been planning on making a fall-themed quilt for several years, and I had quite a stash of fall fabrics. But I went absolutely crazy with the 3" paper-pieced leaves, and I ended up begging bits of fabric at the retreat I was at while I was working on these blocks. I know my mother and my aunt both contributed, and I think I few other people too. It's still not anything resembling a charm quilt - there are definitely repeats, but it does have a nice variety of fabrics.

Now I need to go find this quilt and get it out for the season.

Paints and color schemes

When I posted about the circles and rub-ons thing I made, I meant to write down exactly how I mixed these colors, because I knew I would forget, and I wanted to write it down for my own reference. And of course I did not actually do that, and now I want to know.

We are now on week 8 of 12 in Claudine's class, which is starting to sound like we're getting toward the end, although really there's quite a lot to go, still. This week's assignment is another thing on an 8x8" canvas, and I'm wavering between doing an entirely different color scheme, or making it match the first one. Or I guess since I want it to go in my living room, which is basically dark green, I could come up with a somewhat different color scheme that also matches the green. So similar without being all matchy with the first one.

(If you listen to me when I'm making quilts, in particular, you will find that "matchy" is my idea of a bad word. I'm a scrap quilter to the core, I am bored when people just take fabrics from one line of quilt fabrics and make a quilt out of them. Or when they are too too careful about matching things exactly. I find that things tend to look better when they don't quite match perfectly. I'll put the picture of my "monochromatic" all-green quilt at the bottom so you can see what I mean about not matching too carefully.)

Now one thing I was intending to say was that I just love Claudine's paints. If they have a bad side, it's that they're a little on the expensive side compared to craft paints. And as I understand it, the reason for that is that they're not really craft paint, they're art paints (acrylics) adapted a little for a craft market. They're very high-quality paints, in other words, which is why they're more expensive. And I've been using craft paints a good bit this year so I can see the difference immediately. Claudine's paints have a much nicer texture to them - they seem smoother, and boy oh boy can you tell the difference when you try to mix them. The page I linked above (this one) has a little video about mixing paints, and also a link to a pdf with simple color-mixing recipes. I find this pdf tremendously helpful.

I'm looking at the colors on the circles of the other thing I made. One is sort of a teal, and I think it is just Claudine's Classic Teal lightened up a little bit with Blank Canvas, which is the white(ish) color (it may be slightly off-white, is why I'm hedging there). That's this row:

(Ignore the big swirly parts, that's the rub-ons. It's the paint in the circles that I'm concerned with here.) -- Then there's another green that I think I made by mixing Yellow Pastel and Sky Blue. It just looks like a fairly normal pale green.

And there are two purplish rows that I'm fairly sure are variations on the same mixture - Purple Palette plus Painterly Pink. One row leans more toward purple and the other one toward pink.

I'm pretty sure I just remixed those two using the same two colors, it's just the proportions.

So now I'm off to look at Claudine's mixing pdf for ideas!

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Here's my "monochromatic" quilt that I mentioned above:

Basically I used anything I had that could remotely count as green, and just mixed it all together. So there's blue-greens and yellow-greens, and pale greens printed on white and tan and maybe even yellow - as long as it "read" as green I used it. (I did end up throwing out some prints that too obviously had a lot of other colors in them; they were distracting, it turned out.)

I really have to finish this quilt someday. I finished the top, as you can see, and I even got the fabrics together to do the back of it, but I never quilted it. I even have the thread!

Back on the other topic... hmm, I could do an all-green version of the 8x8" grid thing.... this has possibilities.

Happy belated 4th of July!

I read somewhere that doilies are coming back into fashion, and that reminded of me of this little quilt of my mom's:

I think she got the pattern at the International Quilt Festival some years back. I always thought it was a very clever idea.

(I have a whole collection of pictures of my mom's quilts on Flickr, if you're interested - here.)

Wired and wirework

I just took a test for my class (medical coding) and I'm too wired to sleep yet, so I'll write for a while. I made a 92 on the test, so I'm happy. This is not an easy class.

Let's see, I was productive on my schoolwork but I didn't get any jewelry-making (or photographing, which I also need to do) done today. I had what I thought was a really good idea about what to do with some pretty aqua-colored beads I have - only then I got sidetracked and never tried it out. I am a major procrastinator so that's not unusual, but on the other hand, I find that if I go and just do something right when I have an idea, that often has a better outcome!

I didn't mention earlier that I did work for a long time Sunday night on a wrapped pendant - it looks pretty good but of course (as mentioned above) I don't have pictures yet. I do have one of the piece before I really got started with the wirework:

I really love that teardrop-shaped piece of onyx, and I'm happy with how the bezel was going, although I think I made a mistake with the wirework late in the process. It's yet to be determined if that's fixable - it was late by the time I got to that point and I decided to put it down since I was tired. I figured my judgment was a bit suspect. (I know with quilting I used to think that if I worked too late at night I started making mistakes, so I figure jewelry is probably the same.)

And that reminds me that I was putting out a few fall decorations (they always go up when the Halloween stuff comes down) and one thing that I put up was a little quilt of my mom's:

It was hanging on her door when I took this picture; she had a double door - a wooden one behind a glass one - that was perfect for showing off little quilts like this one. I could have brought the quilt hanger you see here home with me when we were cleaning out her house, but it was rusted and I decided to throw it away, since I didn't really have a place to use it anyway. (I really ought to get another hanger setup, though, and find a place inside the house to hang these.) But since I didn't have anything set up to hang it with, I draped this little quilt across the back of a recliner that we don't usually sit in, and it looks very nice.