Conunrum

I have just uploaded the last quilt photos from my camera to my computer, and then I started sorting. Sounds strange. But I did not document or even label most of my quilts, so now I am trying to remember when I made each quilt because I want to present them as best I can in chronological order.

But that presents another problem. Do I go by when I selected the fabrics, or when I started cutting/sewing, or when the quilt top is finished, or when the quilt is finished? From start to done-done finished (with binding and label), some of my quilts have taken more than 10 years to be done-done finished!

To make things a bit easier to identify age-wise, I sorted my photos into specific time periods (marked by major events or by where I lived). Then within each category, I have tried to remember the sequence of which quilt came before or after other quilts.

That's the best I can do, and I'm not going to worry about it any longer.

Now that *that's* done, on to another quilt...

I know one of my earliest quilts was a baby quilt I made for the first daughter of my youngest brother. That means I made it about 21-22 years ago. Here it is:



While this quilt looks like it has blocks in it, it doesn't. It was assembled in strips. The individual strips were pieced and then they were sewn together before the final, plain border was attached. Talk about fussy piecing. I really needed a design wall, but I didn't know such a thing existed. Maybe at that time it didn't. Who knows. I have thought about that quilt a few times in the past and considered making myself a larger one. But now that I remember how it has to be put together, well, I think I have more than enough other projects that require my attention that I probably won't do a large version.

Now, please pay attention to this announcement as you won't hear it very often: I did the machine quilting on this quilt! Very simple straight-line stitching, but I'm the one who did it. All the blame, all the credit comes right here.

Kathy

And the quilting habit takes off!

After finishing the quilt from the first quilting class that I had taken, my interest in making quilts increased. I went to Quilt in a Day and found a pattern that I liked. Well, what I *really* liked was the quilt on the cover of the book. And *that* was the quilt I wanted to make - white with red floral and blue floral fabrics. I really tried to duplicate that quilt. I'm sure I spent more than an hour looking for fabric that would result in a quilt that looked similar to the quilt on the cover. I finally realized it wasn't going to happen. So I spent nearly as much time trying to find 5 other fabrics to use in that pattern. I think this is the quilt that gave me the most problems in finding fabrics. Maybe it was because I was still a beginner. Maybe it was that the shop did not have the fabric selections that *I* needed (and still need - the more fabric in the shop, the happier I am). Eventually, I went with "close enough". Here's the quilt:



And here's what you cannot see from the photo: The lightest peach/coral fabric is a multi-color print that contains green. But it is an olive-y green. And the other "green" fabrics are really blue-ish green. If you put the multi-color light peach next to either of the greens, they just do NOT play well together - at least if you look at them closely. However, when I look at the entire quilt (not the individual parts), my eye doesn't see those clashing greens. It sees the peachy color. And the darker coral color plays up the blending colors from the lighter fabric. So the end result is still pleasing.

So the lesson from this quilt is that colors don't need to match perfectly. It's the totality of the effect, how the major colors play with each other, and the light/medium/dark contrasts that are important.

Oh, I still sometimes try to get too matchy-matchy with my fabrics. One of my more recent quilts (one of my favorites and I do love it) was made from at least 25-30 different print fabrics, yet somehow the quilt kinda looks like it was made from only 2 fabrics, a light and a dark. I'll get to that one later in my quilting chronicles.

But, before I end this post, I'm going to show you another quilt made from the same pattern...



My niece wanted a pink and purple quilt (she was about 8 or 9 at the time). I had lots of pink, but I didn't have purple. (Or it was more that I wasn't sure I could work on pink & purple in the same quilt.) As I had lots of blue, I substituted. Some years later, I kind of regretted not using pink/purple since that was what she asked for, but by then it was too late. Anyway, I really liked how her quilt was turning out and decided I wanted one like it. But as I measured how much fabric I had left, I didn't have quite enough to make an identical quilt. But, as it turned out, by changing color placement I could still make a similar quilt. The one you see in the photo above is mine. My niece's quilt has the exact same fabrics used in the same way, but where mine is blue hers is pink and where mine is pink hers is blue.

I mentioned that this was the same pattern as the earlier photo. It is. It's just that pieces of the block are colored differently from the earlier quilt (and not just the change from green/coral to pink/blue). In the coral/green quilt, there are roundish areas of white. These are really white squares with 2 coral corners and 2 green corners. But in the pink/blue quilt, the white squares have 4 light blue corners. The 9-patches in the pink/blue quilt have white centers, while the 9-patches in the coral/green quilt have 9 colored squares. What an amazing difference color placement can make.

Kathy