New Work

Wendy and I have been leading a strip-piecing study at NTAQ for several months.  I love to work with strip-pieced units, and last month I made several pieces using the method.

We've been talking a lot about making "figures" on a background.  Figures are things that connect together to make a design.  Like colors or like values can cause them to interact.  In this quilt, I decided to try to layer figures.  Let me try to explain -- I wanted to have a primary figure (the light yellow bits) on top of a secondary figure (the gold) on top of a tertiary figure (the dark red on the red background).  I think it gives it a bit of depth.

Untitled, 23"w x 27"h

The red and light yellow fabrics were my own hand-dyes.  The golds were at least in part a pack I bought during the Dallas Quilt Show from Liberty Homestead.  They were a lovely range of gold to greenish gold.

The challenge quilt for April was a Mark Rothko Painting.  Being in strip-piecing mode, I decided to intersperse very busy sections of gold, red and yellow with solid reds.  In fact, I pieced this quilt before the first one and the "leftovers" were the start of the quilt above.  It is 22" x 30".  I can't quite decide on the orientation of this piece.  Which would you vote for?  Landscape orientation?

Or portrait orientation?

I have had it hanging both ways on my design wall, and I keep waffling back and forth.  I'd appreciate your help!

This last piece was constructed last week.  After each quilt is finished, I sort leftover fabric chunks by color.  Since I teach a color class, I love to take bags of red pieces, blue pieces, yellow pieces, etc. for my students to use in their class project.  The sewn  together bits, both extra pieced sections that didn't end up in the final piece and the trimmed-off bits, go into another bin.  When I went to stick the pieces from the two quilts above into the bin, I realized it was overflowing.  So I decided to make a quilt using only, and I mean only, left over bits from other quilts.

It's probably a good thing I've been on such a red kick recently.  As I've mentioned before, I dyed 24 yards of various reds last fall and I've been using them a lot.  There are also chunks in there from the retreat on Denman Island last fall, from several long-ago quilt retreats on Lake Texoma, from some quilts I made for a solo show several years ago, from several NTAQ challenges, and from a class I took with Nancy Crow years ago.  I spent a lot of time arranging the bits into something somewhat cohesive.

The Kitchen Sink, 33"w x 27"h

It was a lot of fun to put together, and I think the result is rather exuberant.  I am very pleased with it.

So this week I am quilting.  I'll show pictures when the quilts are finished.