Anne's Crafts - Quilts

Piano Quilt Is Almost There

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Sun, 25 May 2003 13:37:00 -0400

Right now, the piano quilt is draped over the railings upstairs. All squares have been sewn on. It's waiting for the black keys to be sewn on, and a border attached, a hanging pocket. Then it will be finished and we can get it up on the wall.

Louise's Basket Quilt Finished

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Fri, 31 Jan 2003 13:38:00 -0500

It took time to get the base of the basket right, but eventually Anne was happy with it. Once that was done, the squares were ironed down, then sewn together. Anne attached a deep blue border to the quilt, and it was ready for the final embellishments.

Here's a closeup of the flowers with a bit of the straw basket.

Anne wanted to add to the "basket of flowers" effect, so she attached two little butterflies above the flowers.

The final touch was a ribbon around the base of the basket's handle.

And here's the finished basket quilt, with butterflies and ribbon.

Anne finished the basket quilt early in 2003, and took it back to Australia and gave it to Louise.

Flower Basket Quilt For Louise

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Sun, 15 Sep 2002 14:29:00 -0400

One of the patterns Anne spotted in the hundreds of quilting books she has purchased through eBay, was a basket of flowers. She adapted this pattern and came up with this pretty little quilt. It's a gift for Louise, except Louise doesn't know it yet, and as Louise only gets email and can't do the Web, Louise won't know about till it arrives in a parcel on her doorstep.

Anne had a lot of problems with this quilt, making the background colours match. The background of the flowers and angled bits of basket didn't match well at the start and she had to pull it apart and start over again a few times. As you can see, it's a very light coloured quilt and it was difficult getting that light background to match.

She also had problems getting the base of the basket right. These photos show the incorrect bottom. You can see the correct bottom in the photos of the finished quilt.

Piano Quilt Advances

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Sun, 08 Sep 2002 13:35:00 -0400

All the squares have been ironed down, and the quilt has been pinned back up for final checks. Note that the white squares have been attached for the white piano keys. The black keys will be laid down on top of them next.

The Piano Quilt Nears Completion

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Wed, 21 Aug 2002 13:32:00 -0400

The piano quilt is very close to completion. Anne finally got the fabric squares organised the way she wanted them. It took her years to get the colours and patterns matching. I think that the larger a quilt is, the longer it takes to get everything matched and placed.

Here we see the quilt having the squares ironed on to the backing fabric. This is the last step before sewing them down.

Here's the left hand side of the quilt spread and displayed to check if it's going okay.

Cloth Fragments

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 14:13:00 -0400

Where does Anne get cloth? I get asked that a lot. There are lots of sources - craft shops, dress shops, WalMart, eBay. Heaps of places. It takes time to develop a good range of suppliers.

There's a large group of people who make quilts. They buy chunks of cloth and cut them into the two inch squares they need. To get the variety they need, they would have to buy an awful lot of cloth. So what a lot of them do is swap or sell their excess squares. Anne buys a lot of batches of squares on eBay to get the variety she needs.

Whenever we go to WalMart, I will stop and fondle the electronics and see if there's anything I really want, and Anne will disappear to the back of the store where they keep the cloth. She gets large squares of cloth and takes it home and slices it up into the small squares. She also goes shopping on her own and comes back with large chunks of cloth. She drapes the large squares all over the loft railings till she slices them up, and then the small squares spread all over the floor on aluminium trays, and then get carried all over the rest of the house when they statically stick to the cat's fur.

Flower Riot Quilt for eBay

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Sun, 03 Jun 2001 14:37:00 -0400

Anne made this quilt for sale on eBay. The quilt is a riot of flowers with a dark purple border. That purple border is the bane of our lives. Look at the photo. It looks black. We can't take a decent photo that shows the colour properly. It's a deep rich purple colour in good light. We haven't put it up on eBay yet because we can't get a good enough photo to show that border colour. The quilt is completely finished, even including the rod pocket at the back. Here you can see us using a broom handle to demonstrate the finished product.

This is another attempt to take a photo in natural light to show the purple colour. This is in our bedroom near the big window, and Anne has managed to get a bit of the colour on the right. Note that huge thing underneath the quilt. That's Redrum's tail.

Now this photo manages to catch much more of the purple. It also shows the broom attached to the broom handle holding the quilt up, and shows less of Redrum's tail.

This is a closeup of the quilt corner. The purple looks really black. If Anne used lighter borders, they would photograph better, but the then they probably wouldn't match the quilt as well.

Sunflowers as training aids

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Sun, 15 Apr 2001 14:32:00 -0400

Anne does the occasional bit of demonstrating, showing how to make the quilts. She's made two sunflower quilts in the process. One is half stitched, and one is fully stitched. Anne keeps them in the car and whips them out to show people how it's done.

Sunflowers for eBay

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Sat, 10 Mar 2001 14:42:00 -0500

Anne decided to see if a quilt top would sell on eBay. It wasn't a quilt, just the quilt top. The difference is that a quilt top doesn't have the fluffy layer, or the backing piece, or the rod pocket. It's just the colourful top layer. Anne had a look at what was selling on eBay and saw that sunflowers were still a popular topic, so she made a lovely blue/gold sunflower quilt top. We took this photo and started the auction. Anne got three bids, and it sold. She got the money that she wanted for it. It covered the costs of the material, and she was happy with it. Best of all were the comments emailed to her by other quilt sellers on eBay, who said how beautiful it was, and what a high quality it was. That praise was very well received.

Hearts For Rachael

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Tue, 05 Dec 2000 14:50:00 -0500

Anne made a quilt for Rachael, Bronwyn's new baby. It's a lovely flowery heart on an ivory/yellow background. It looks great. It was originally going to be turned into a real quilt to be laid on top of Rachael, but Rachael grew too big too fast. I think the idea now is that it will be a wall hanging. Here we see the squares arranged, ironed, and then stitched together.

It's got blue borders on it now, and just lacks the final bits to turn it into a wall hanging.

Currently, it's hanging on the railing. That's it in the middle. One day we might see it hanging on a wall.

The Piano Quilt

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Mon, 20 Nov 2000 14:46:00 -0500

The piano quilt is a very ambitious project. It's taken forever so far. It's huge. This one is so big, that when it's finished, it might be able to be used as a real quilt on a single bed. It's so big that it couldn't be mounted on a chair downstairs near the TV. It moved up to the loft.

The basic design is a grand piano. The cloth used for the black piano has black background. The white keys are an ivory cloth, but I don't know she's going to do the black keys yet.

Anne bought a series of aluminium shallow pans to contain the cloth, so she could sort the squares by colour and form something a painter's palette. We soon found that the squares could not be constrained. Squares of cloth want to be free. They started spreading all over the floor.

This shows the full design of the piano quilt. You can see some of the background material near the top, a small test to get the colour right. And you can see the horizontal bar of ivory cloth near the bottom which will form the white keys.

The quilt has started to expand. Anne found that the backing sheet wasn't big enough and she had to expand to the left. So she sliced a few strips and attached them to the board.

The quilt is slowly being filled in. It's a big job and Anne has had to stop several times when she ran out of material and had to go hunt some down. eBay is a good source of squares.

It's getting close. Only a handful of squares to be filled in now. It looks easy, but Anne has already pulled large chunks down and rebuilt them several times. Something about the colours not matching.

Sunflowers For Elizabeth

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Fri, 22 Sep 2000 14:54:00 -0400

This is the quick watercolour quilting method. The other quilts that Anne has done take a lot more time, because effectively, you are painting with colours. These quick watercolour quilts take much less time because the quilts are made from a limited range of colours and cloths. This one is a simple design of sunflowers in a vase.

Anne made this quilt for Elizabeth, a friend back in Australia.

This shows the pattern finished. The squares now need to be ironed and stitched. It's very effective and very pretty.

The backing is attached, the border is added, and it's finished. Anne mailed it away.

The First Quilt (From Start To Finish)

nospam@example.com (Henry) — Thu, 01 Jun 2000 14:58:00 -0400

This is an early stage of the first quilt. A foam board is propped on a chair, and a quilt pattern cloth is folded on top. This pattern cloth simply has 2 inch squares marked all over it. Then Anne starts pinning 2 inch squares of cloth in the right place, according to her design. This isn't like painting-by-numbers. The cloth comes from all over the place. There's a network of quilters on eBay who exchange squares of cloth and buy and sell these squares of cloth, just so they can get enough variety. The squares are chosen and pinned to the board. It's like those new computer images that are created from small dots that are created by reducing other photos. The squares of cloth are not supposed to match exactly. They are supposed to blend and be colour harmonious when viewed at a distance. I think an exact match would spoil the effect.

The design advances. This quilt is suppose to give the effect of looking through a window at a huge flower garden, with the light from the sun bursting through the foliage near the top. The sun effect is created by light shaded squares of cloth in the top centre.

Matching the squares to where they should be is a time consuming task. Anne uses a red coloured device that she peers through. I think it's a red filter and it allows her to match the shades of blue and green, so that she gets pleasing matches between adjoining squares. I've seen her rip down a square foot of squares and rebuild them because one square didn't match another. It takes a long time to arrange all the squares for one of these quilts. This is called "giving visual texture". The effect is achieved by using fabrics with different colours, different colour values, and different lines and designs.

Finally, all the squares are attached where Anne wants them. The longest part of the quilt-making process is over. The rest takes next to nothing compared to the sorting and matching process. Each square is attached to the backing board with a pin at the top, and hangs loosely from the pin.

The quilt is then taken down and all the squares are ironed on to the backing cloth. This sort of fixes them down temporarily. The pins are removed. Then they are all sewn together. This reduces the 2 inch squares of cloth to 1 squares of cloth. At this stage, the quilt is a unified piece of cloth and can be cast aside to pine for finishing.

This quilt has a happy ending. It got finished. It acquired a black edge border, and then acquired a rich blue border, a hanging flap at the top, a hanger and it got hung.

It's one of the first things you see when you enter the house now. It's quite effective and very pretty.