Tipus & Treetops

Several years ago I sewed up a kit from orange and gray fabrics, artwork of Lotta Jansdotter, a US-based Swedish designer. I really liked the fresh modern look of Windham's Bella Collection. I almost bought a second kit from the Fat Quarter Shop in its other colorway, teal and gray, but I felt silly and guilty to do so. Instead I bought some fabrics from the Bella collection in the teal options, reasoning I could alway buy supplementary grays at a later time. Of course I bought more teal fabric than necessary, also from the Bella collection, just to be sure. 

The four fabrics had identifying numbers but the corresponding names I could find only on the selvages. All dated from a 2012 copyright. Lind is for the trees perhaps, maybe Linden trees. Ruta is Swedish for box. Tipu is a word for a little chick still with yellow down. I have no idea what cal means; it looks like leaves and balls typical of a Linden tree, but I think I like to imagine them as stylized tulips.

The kit came with a hard copy of the free pattern Bella's Bird from Windham fabrics. I made it up in 2016 and "very creatively" titled it Orange and Grey (8/10/2016 post) misspelling grey. (I have since learned that grey with an "e" is the English version and gray with an "a" is the American spelling.) The teal fabrics sat in my stash for years. Here is the pattern on which I based the second quilt, substituting gray fabrics and enlarging the size slightly. Determined that my second Jansdotter quilt would have a more interesting name, I am considering naming it Tipus & Treetops, though I might squeeze Tulips, somewhere in the title, also, even though tulips are a stretch of my imagination.

The blocks are simple with a design interest interjected by the fact that the centers are either a wide landscape orientation or tall portrait orientation and the center rectangles undulate up and down as well as alternating orientation. Piecing is easy, four rectangles in sequence B, C, D, E surround the center A. Fussy cutting the pieces to be right side up and center some of the larger graphics was a challenge. 

At the October/November 2022 Houston Quilt Festival I shopped for grays. These are the five selections I chose to pair with the graphic teal prints. I could not pass up the sunflowers (top left) and woodland creatures (top right), both of which came from local shops in San Antonio and not the show. I included stripes, circles, and triangles in my geometric selections. The following images show some block fabric combinations and fussy cutting.

The pattern called for twenty blocks but I had so much fun I wanted to continue; I had enough fabric to do so. Should I add a row on the top or bottom or add another column to the right? I asked my husband and he said a row so it would be more the dimensions for on a bed. My daughter agreed with her dad that a rectangular quilt is more useful than a square one. I responded, "If you want useful, buy a blanket. This is art!" I am in the process of adding a column and the quilt will be square. That way I can also put in more blocks with striped perimeter since I want more stripes. The upper right and lower left corners will remain one of a kind odd ball blocks. Stay tuned for a progress report and the creation of a backing.

I am not so sure if not buying the kit in the teal colorway was a wise decision, at least not financially. Even though I'd brought a fabric sample with me to match grays, I bought several gray options that I ultimately rejected. From left to right: too plain, too plain, too beige, too purplish, too silver, too silver, too silver, too similar to teal prints with balls. I truly loved the fourth one with the kite tails but it was amazing how off the gray was, almost a brown-puce-purple. Oh well, I had fun shopping and maybe I can use these to piece a backing. Besides, gray is a neutral I can use anywhere. Whoops! Oh, wait. Maybe not!

Third Saturday of September 2020

For "Hang Your Quilt Day" this month, the theme was fall. I chose to display three quilts in orange or straw colored hues.

The straw color in the largest quilt made me think of hay bales, hay rides, and corn mazes typical of fall. Fifty Shades of Taupe caught my eye as a kit from McCall's Quilting magazines, the Spring 2013 edition of America Makes Fast Quilts. I renamed it. It was published as Odds and Ends. My 6/29/2020 post is my last of five posts on the making of this quilt. It measures 60½" by 79½".

The trees in the medium sized quilt titled Orange and Grey have very sparse leaves which are not green; hence this quilt speaks fall to me with a modern twist.  Orange and Grey measures 40" x 50" and is made with fabrics by Lotta Jansdotter. My 8/10/2016 post describes its completion.

The pumpkin wall hanging, because of the subject and the orange colors, says autumn to me. It measures 31" x 39". The pumpkin blocks were contributions from guild members; I won them as part of a Block of the Month activity. My 10/31/2017 post  describes this pumpkin wall hanging's completion and quilting.

Beginning April 2020, my quilt guild members began a tradition of hanging quilts in the front of their homes on the third Saturday of the month as a source of enjoyment for the community and as a thank you for the essential workers during the pandemic. My initial post about this practice is dated 4/22/20.

Hang Your Quilt Day

Saturday, April 18th, my quilt guild, Amador Valley Quilters, encouraged its members to hang a sample of their quilts outdoors for the neighborhood to enjoy. I likened this practice to other diversions during times of "shelter in place" and "social distancing" due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some people put teddy bears in the windows of their homes for parents and their children to seek out and find while "going on a bear hunt" during walks. The Italian population gather at their windows every evening to cheer and give thanks to the medical workers who are tirelessly risking their lives. I think of putting these out for both reasons – to have something to view and enjoy and as a show of thanks to our essential workers. These are the quilts I've made that I chose to display. After each photo are the names of the quilts and a link to a post that tells more about each.

From left to right

• Sanity Quilt 6/20/2012
• Grinch 7/2/2014
• Simple Gifts 6/10/2015
• Out of the Blue 8/16/17
• Sunny Spring Frost 7/24/2013

From left to right

• Orange and Grey 8/10/2016
• Train 7/24/2018
• Overlapping Squares 6/8/2016
• Flag on bench - no blog post reference since it predates me blogging (pre 2011)

From top to bottom

• Traveling Mandala (6/7/2015)
• Leftovers - no blog post reference since it predates me blogging (pre 2011)
• First Quilt - no blog post reference since it predates me blogging (pre 2011)
• Painted Barn "Quilt" 2/11/2020

Orange and Grey Completion

When I left off in my previous post I was trying to decide the FMQ pattern for my charcoal dotted fabric, orange weave fabric, and grey large scale floral fabric. I wanted the charcoal dotted fabric to receded into the background when used as a block frame. The dominant opinion of other quilters was to do pebbles on the charcoal fabric. Two suggestions were to play with the size of the pebbles or perhaps experiment with the thread color.

I tentatively agreed but knew I was terrible at pebbling, even more wary of doing it in a contrasting thread. I practiced pebbles of different sizes and came to the conclusion that circles a bit smaller than the size of the ½" hopper foot would be a good scale. I auditioned a charcoal grey thread, a variegated grey thread, and white thread. White was what I had used throughout the rest of the top. My charcoal grey was too steely blue. The white would look like scribbles. The variegated had a decent chance of being tolerable and hiding flaws. This viewpoint was not a convincing one to entice me to do pebbles.

I slept on it and then I had an inspiration. Why was I trying to repeat of pattern of the dots if I wanted them to recede? Maybe I should echo the flowing form of tree branches. I liked that idea. I did not practice and went ahead and did it before I changed my mind. When it is right you just feel it. I very often overanalyze, but this time I went with my gut. Besides I had been itching to use that new ruler I'd bought. I stayed with white thread. I would have had to test that grey variegated one and I wanted to just charge ahead. Frankly, I was sick of thinking about it.

I used the shallow waveform side of a Handiquilter Ruler Wave C.  I purposely did not center the waveform on the block side in order to get that swirl sensation and I shifted the ruler at right angles to the curve to get parallel curves about ¼" apart. The ruler is 8" long and my blocks are 10" square. I stopped it at each seam. That way, only on the longest of the four sides, did I need to shift the ruler along the curve to extend the stitching line to 10". I also learned from my struggles with the birdie mini print border. This time I consistently held the ruler horizontal and stitched above it. Since I always started at the inner edge of the block frame and worked toward the outer edge, it made sense. I maintained the ruler in the same orientation relative to my hopper foot.  When I did a different side, I rotated the quilt 90°. I did not try to use the ruler sideways or upside down without rotating the quilt.

The same wavy framing enhances a landscape format tree as well as a portrait format tree. It echoes the undulating branches and ignores the spots. I think it gives the effect of sweeping winds in a snowstorm.

The wavy lines do show up as texture on the back as well.

For the large grey floral print, I experimented to see what I would get with outline quilting. I echoed each flower, then echoed it again, and again, and again until I had these interesting little pond-like ripples of FMQ with flowers puffing up as islands among them. If the flowers were the large ones, I spiral stitched in their white center. If the flowers were small, I left the centers unstitched so the flower would free to puff up without restraint. On the outer orange weave framing, I looped back and forth like a ribbon stitch at about 1/4" or less spacing. It barely shows but the texture is great. It really feels like a basket.

That basket weave  FMQ shows up more than just texture on the back where it is against the orange polka dot. This frame is around one of the tulip and ball centered blocks. 

There were four blocks remaining and these had the birdie border and just a big blob of that blender type orange weave in the center – not a great focal point like the trees or flowers or beads or tulips or balls. Someone suggested I FMQ in a contrasting grey thread. I really liked that idea and left a local HQ16 club meeting thinking that is what I would do. A friend suggested stitching a flower shape like was in the large floral print. I liked that idea too and searched through my brain for how I would copy it and mark it on the quilt top. Then I had second thoughts. Would grey thread look weird since everywhere else was white? Would it be a big effort and then not show up? 

Aha! I had a light bulb moment. I had some scraps. I would appliqué one of those flowers or perhaps some of those grey beads or balls on the orange weave centers. But would appliqué be in keeping with the modern clean lines of this quilt? Probably yes if I kept it simple. I told my husband my plan. He said bluntly, "But you hate appliqué!" And he is absolutely right. I love the look, but dread doing it, and so I generally keep it to a minimum. I was fast approaching the point where I was ready to have the quilt finished and hardly wanted to take on a technique that ranked pretty low on my fondness level. 

So I decided to adapt a texturing FMQ technique I had seen in the 2015 opportunity quilt  of the Diablo Valley Quilters' guild. By densely quilting alternate squares, a checkerboard-like image emerges in the background.

I did the same thing in my central woven blocks. I divided the rectangle into three by four smaller areas and then densely ribbon stitched in alternate ones. I aligned the stitch direction with the longer length of the rectangular center. The following photo shows a block that has been already quilted. The stitching lines are barely visible I hinted where they are with the blue lines on three of the six quilted squares. Use your imagination or zoom in on your computer to see the other three.

But the overall effect is like one of those pin image relief games or displays in a museum.

Can you see the bulges in these orange weave blocks where there is no quilting? The flower puffs are also visible in blocks where that fabric is a frame.

Throughout the FMQ on this quilt I have been a bit disappointed that the quilting has not shown up. Several friends with good ideas had suggestions. I like using bamboo batting because of its drape. Perhaps using a double layer of batting would give it more loft? It is too late now, but perhaps using a second layer of batting, only in the inner rectangles kind of like trapunto, would have given me more of the effect I wanted. Then we discussed thread. I typically use Essential Thread by Connecting Threads, a relatively inexpensive but very serviceable cotton thread. I have been very happy with it. It does not cause excess lint in my HQ16 and it does not break readily. When I started this quilt I was out of white thread. Yes. I know. How can a quilter be out of white thread? I found a spool of white thread by Aurofil amongst samples I had acquired from various shows, shops, etc. I had heard the brand name and that it is pricey but supposed to be very good. There was nothing wrong with this thread but I failed to notice – rather let's be frank –  I failed to look at the thread weight. It was  Aurofil's 50 weight 2 ply thread. The manufacture on its website described the best machine quilting use for this thread as follows:

Use for very detailed machine quilting with a lot of back tracking such as feathers and heavy background quilting. Perfect for quilting that creates texture when you don’t necessarily want to see the quilting lines. Use the same thread in the bobbin and a Sharp/Microtex, quilting or even denim needles 80/12.

The thread had performed exactly as advertised. I had just identified another major area to grow and learn in my quilting experience. Beside batting, thread selection is another set of data to record for my quilts. I need to record the thread so I can learn what to use to get the effect I want. I did not remember until I was looking for thread to attach my binding that I remembered I had been out of white and had substituted for my normal Essential Thread, a 50 weight 3-ply cotton thread. It is double mercerized which gives it a satin lustrous finish. Could that third ply or satin-like finish have made the difference in visibility? Hmmm... that is another factor for me to consider in the future.

All that was left to do was labels and binding. I made my traditional grosgrain ribbon labels, one with the quilt name and one with my name and year and placed one on each lower corner of the back. I do wish I had thought up a more clever name for this quilt. But I didn't. So here it is. Orange and Grey. Ho-hum but concise.

The entire back of the quilt looks like its name – orange and grey.

I'd bound the quilt with ⅜" binding in the charcoal grey dot fabric. Here is the completed quilt from the front. It measures 40" x 50".  It has not been washed yet but after understanding a bit more about the characteristics of the thread I used, I do not hold out much hope that it will puff up. Oh, well. Live and learn.

A closeup of the center six blocks does reveal some three-dimensionality. I am not sure quite why, but I have a special fondness for the frames on the blocks bordered with the tiny bird print - maybe because they have texture and its pattern does show up. The orange weave and the charcoal dots you have to feel to appreciate. They are tactiley pleasing but did not turn out like "flexible cardboard", a description coined by my daughter. I think my favorite blocks though, are the trees. If I get inspired I can always go back and FMQ densely behind the tulips, balls, and leaves, with more of the 50 weight 2 ply Aurofil cotton. I could fill in the white of the stripes so they stand our more, also. But for now I am counting this as a completion!

I've listed the past posts that document the creation of this quilt.

November 4, 2015         Caving In and Starting Something New
November 11, 2015       Easy Sewing but Challenging Cutting
July 27, 2016                 Resurrection of the Orange and Grey
August 3, 2016              FMQ-ing the Orange and Grey
August 10, 2016            Orange and Grey Completion (this post)

Now I will join up to Let's Bee Social #137 and revel in my finish.

FMQ-ing the Orange and Grey

In my previous post for July 27, I'd begun to plan the FMQ on my Orange and Grey quilt. I pretty much stuck with as much of the plan as I had settled on. I outline quilted the central portions of each block echoing the large scale patterns of trees, leaves and spheres. For those blocks with a striped frame, I paralleled the line direction outward.

I was undecided on how to do blocks framed with the birdie fabric. I chose parallel lines alternately spaced either ¼" or ¾" apart. Sounds simple enough but on four out of five of these blocks I managed to mess up the spacing on at least one side. Look at the top right band. The spacing is ¼", ½", ¼".

Here is the framing corrected to ¼", ¾", ¼". Since overall texture is the goal, the difference does stand out from a distance even if up close the measurements look similar. The ¾" is pretty much the birdie height and so complements the print. I am pretty sure those few residual perforation marks from the picked out stitches will steam out.

Why did I keep messing up? I finally figured it out – I think. The ruler has alternating solid and dashed lines. Since I was using white thread and my stitch length was about the size of the dashes, I kept mistaking a stitching line with a ruler guideline. Once I recognized this confusion and knew to watch for it, I did better. Also another help was that I gave myself permission to turn the quilt instead of trying to sew up-down and also left-right.  I could then stitch on a consistent side of the ruler, working my way from the inner seam edge of the frame to the outer perimeter. My poor brain could not handle sewing above or below or to the left or the right of the ruler, along with deciding the correct guideline to align.

For comparison, the incorrectly sewn frame is on the left, and the correctly spaced one is on the right.

Here is completed block done consistently and "correctly".  Having alternating channel widths lends textural interest. I reminds me of a flat fell seam on jeans  – without the seam and without the jeans.

It is hard to see the quilting lines in the next photo, even though I tried to take it at a steep light angle. My husband wonders why I fuss so much on what he says you cannot see. He has learned my lingo though. "Maybe it will puff up after it is washed," he concedes to please me. I learned that if I concentrated on going just outside the line I am following, by maybe an ⅛" or so, slight wobbles and glitches are not as visible and there is more room for the colored portion to pop out from the white background. And, yes, thank goodness my quilting is better than my drawing.

Next up I have to pick a quilting pattern for the orange mega-weave print and the charcoal dots. I have auditioned quite a few options but have yet to downselect. I think the quilting on those fabrics should have a closer stitch density since they are not very interesting just on their own. I want them to recede around the central rectangle. I did try out a feather on the dots and it really does not show up. Here are some other choices. A meander, show on the top and right side, just might do the trick, but the loops on the bottom side I think fall short of the effect I want.

It is relatively simple but I like these ribbon lines. I just wonder if it is too much like the other frames with stripes.

I do think this gentle wavy line with sporadic leaves is appealing. I suspect though, like the feather I tried, it just won't show up. Anything is visible with that bold red marker, but with a fine line of white thread...? That is another story.

I am leaning toward the meander amongst the dots, dense enough to cause the frame to recede. Aah, more decisions. That is indeed a difficult part of FMQ for me. I will now visit Let's Bee Social #136 and see if others have their two cents to add.

Resurrection of the Orange and the Grey

I started this quilt from a Fat Quarter Shop kit back in November 2015. Fabrics and pattern are by Lotta Jansdotter. Then I stalled trying to decide the backing. The history of this quilt's construction is captured in my two posts
November 4, 2015 caving-in-and-starting-something-new.html and
November 11, 2015 easy-sewing-but-challenging-cutting.html

This quilt was small enough, 40" x 50", that I could use one continuous length of fabric and would not have to piece the backing. I dislike piecing quilt backs and usually buy one continuous length of fabric to avoid seaming it. Each potential color for a one-piece backing had its drawbacks – a grey (too dull and boring), an orange (very bright), or a white (pretty impractical). I found no prints for the back in my stash nor on the shelves of the shops matching the crispness of the graphics on the top that also combined two or three of these colors. Shades of grey I could blend, but that tangerine-ish orange was a unique shade. Here I am, eight months later, finally decided on the backing for this quilt. The best solution was to piece it. Aargh!

The following fabric choices I rejected as being too strong an orange or not having enough yardage. The greys were too cold and steely, not warm and soft-toned. The oranges were just wrong.

I dug into my Pezzy collection of half-yard cuts from American Jane. Sandy Klop's pattern and fabric designs are nostalgic and playful, but I would not categorize them of the modern bent. Her orange and grey were perfect but I had limited yardage of each. I placed them central on the backing. I added an orange and a charcoal irregular polka dot at the top and bottom. Since these two dots were weightier, having less white, I used less than one half-yard of each and placed them at each end. Shown in the next photo is a quarter-width of the seamed backing and a half-width of the quilt top. I am bemused that classic, modern, and funk fabrics can all play together nicely.

I had planned to spray baste my quilt sandwich and have some FMQ done for this post. But the slowest part of my quilt making is my decision making. Instead of FMQ, I am going to share my thought process for FMQ deciding. Here is my spray basted quilt sandwich on my sewing room floor and ready to be quilted. Note how even though the blocks seem to follow a diagonal placement in fabric combinations, the alternation between portrait and landscape orientation and off-center format keeps it fresh. I really do like the simplistic surprise of this pattern.

I knew I want to outline-quilt the bold graphic in the center of those blocks that have them – such as the tulips with beads, the tree with leaves, and the grey large floral. The plain cross hatched and diagonal bead centers would need another treatment.  Just what to do with the sashing around each of those blocks? I once had advice from a machine-quilting teacher to not have too many competing patterns on your quilt top – unless it is a sampler, I guess. I could do the sashings all the same but the centers are offset which somewhat complicates the path for a repetitive linear pattern. Here are some of my musings. I sure hope my quilt path is smoother than my drawing path.

On the tree center block I would outline the tree and leaves (BLUE in photo).  In the outer sashing I think I like stitching lines aligning with the stripes (RED in photo). On the top and right I took a castle path - down across, up across. On the bottom and left I took the piano key approach – up, down, over. This is faster and definitely preferred especially if you use a ruler. The ruler really helps stitching back over the same line.

For the blocks with central tulips and beads (my terminology) I would outline those (BLUE in photo). In the surrounding sashing, I tried both straight lines between the strings of beads (RED on the left) and scallops that follow the beads contour (RED on the right). I think I prefer the scallops. Yes, it is another quilt form but I think it is enough related to the previous striped sashing that it is will not be too distracting.

For the floral centered block I would outline the flowers and perhaps echo once around them. In the loose weave patterned sashing I am undecided between following the softly undulating lines (BLUE) as on the top and right or using a ruler to put a more controlled wave pattern (BLUE) as on the left and bottom. Frankly I am not thrilled with either and since the orange mesh lines are a smaller scale print I may not need to distinguish direction as I needed to do with the stripes and beading sashing. I will at least get started on half of the blocks as I wait for inspiration to strike on the remainder.

The other two sashing prints I have not considered are the charcoal dots and the tipu birds. Since they and the orange mesh are small scale mini-prints, I may treat them all alike. I can minimize the busyness of too many FMQ styles and cut down on my decision making in one fell swoop. In case you have not seen one of my earlier posts, check out my July 25, 2016 post  to see my husband's candid shots of me "thinking" about FMQ.

I have been traveling and had house guests so it is now time for me to get engaged with the quilt community again and participate in Let's Be Social #135.