Are you Buying this Stairway to Heavenly Apartment Pods?

I’m overhauling and expanding my cityscape quilt booklet, and exploring new ideas. Warning: The Internet catacombs of interesting architectural ideas for quilters is freaking infinite. 

The photo below, I would argue, represents rainbow stairs leading to a modern, Brutalist, warm, diversity-welcoming, almost heavenly apartment building made up of hexagonal pods.

 It's mostly my fantasy, but partly influenced by the mind-boggling Guangzou Circle Building in China, designed by Italian architect Joseph di Pasquale. I figured if di Pasquale could make a coin-like circle stand on its edge to serve as a useful building, I could do the same with a coin-like hexagon. The overall hexagon shape is made up of smaller hexagons and half-hexagons - I think the lower, colorful halves look like balconies, and I can imagine putting plants peeping out from their top edge (as in this hypothetical 3-second  drawing). 

I haven’t yet stitched the stairs in position, and probably won’t until I know what will go under the building. In the meantime, I get to play with the components, giving me way too many options! 

- When I turn the building upside down, it takes on an almost heart shape. Perhaps the Hallmark Channel should film movies here. I like the way the colorful hexagon halves become window shades.

- If I place the stairs off-center on the hexagon unit, below, it looks like an artistic apartment building with hexagon "blocks" piled  haphazardly - a formation which could continue to grow asymmetrically, like a coral reef.

- With the apartment unit sideways, below, the hexagons halves become two sides of a pleat that sticks out. (The blue is the cement, the colors are the drapes?)

All of the above also look a bit like trees to me, with the stairs as the trunk.  

But when I flip the stairs upside down, I got a high fiber ice cream cone! 

Just what I wanted! Your thoughts on what these things might be are also welcomed!

How did I make the components? The stairs took me a solid week of wrestling and gnashing my teeth over the rules of perspective, to figure out a non-tedious semi-improvisational approach, which I am trying to codify for my revised book. As for the hexagons, oy, I actually basted each half-hexagon and hexagon piece around freezer paper, and then did traditional y-seam piecing. I don't recommend it; it wasn’t fun; you can’t see the flaws but they are there. If and when I do this again, I am going to do it with English Paper Piecing, much the same way I made my masked hexagon quilt, by sewing two different color rectangles first the traditional way, and then basting that unit around a cardstock hexagon, and sewing hexagons together by hand or with a machine zig zag. 

Stay tuned, more experimental buildings are coming!

Pandemic Porch Quilt Show, Days 54 - 55: Hands for Grandma, Grandma's Hands

On Day 55, I hung two baby-related quilts that date back to the 1990s - and the one on the right was inspired by a quilt 140 years older than that! 

First, a nap quilt I made for my son, when I'd done very little applique, and wanted to dip my toe in the water. The flowers are raw-edge appliqued, with zigzag stitches to contain the fraying. The leaves were straight-stitch machine-appliqued, so their edges are nicely frayed.

Amazingly, the flowers and even their hand-embroidered centers have held up well over the years.  

The second quilt was made from my son's handprint, when he was about 3. It was a gift for his grandparents, who hung this quilt proudly in their home. 

The next photo shows the simple quilting. 

Don't credit me for the striking design - it was inspired by a red-and-white hand-print quilt I saw at a 1997 exhibit at Los Angeles' Gene Autry Museum, called, "Quilts in the Machine Age." That quilt, made in Kansas circa 1878, was an early machine-quilted masterpiece. Find a photo at the Kansas Historical Society archives, HERE. Warning: You will probably want to make your own version! My 2013 blog post with more info about this quilt is HERE.

DAY 55 I didn't make this quilt - it was one of my greatest thrift shop finds! I'm guessing it was made in the 40s. It's been well used-  there are threadbare spots - but it is still charming. 

The fabrics are faded but still fascinating. 

In the next photo, note that the pink/white/orange checkerboard hexagon (with puffy white flowers), just right of center, is made of two pieces of fabric joined! She must have been working from very small scraps!

The back is just as impressive, thanks to the exquisite hand quilting. (By the way, the big light splotches below are sunspots, not necessarily worn spots, though the quilt does have those, too.) 

Next installment: A lot more color! 

Almost Ancient: English Paper Pieced Mosaics with Cheryl Lynch's New Fabric

My newest finished piece!

It's a tabletopper or wallhanging, about 20" across, made up of seven English Paper Pieced (EPP) blocks. The faux mosaic fabric - those little pieces aren't separate, they're printed - are from a fascinating new collection by my friend, quilt designer Cheryl Lynch. 

In recent years, Cheryl's been designing mosaic quilt patterns, made by cutting fabrics into small pieces. But even more recently, she designed fabric with the look of complex mosaics - but you can finish in a fraction of the time. 

Cheryl gifted me with these FQs.

First I cut out a bunch of 3.75" equilateral triangles, and moved them around.

For the next test, I pulled a purple floral print from my stash. 

Etcetera. I liked all the options - Facebook and Instagram polls of my friends resulted in no clear winner - so I put those triangles aside and decided to see what this fabric would look like in the smaller, more complicated stars in my EPP book, "Hexagon Star Quilts".

I started by printing seven patterns from the book onto my newest notion, water-soluble "Hugs'n Kisses Applique Paper," by Helen Stubbings. (No affiliation). In the past, when planning to do EPP by machine, I printed designs onto Decor Bond (by Pellon), a medium-weight fusible interfacing, which remains in the project. But I was eager to see how the applique paper would work. Here's one  page printed onto the applique paper - I cut out Star 5 from this page.  

With EPP, each piece is fused to a slighly larger piece of fabric; the fabric is wrapped around it; then everything is sewn together by hand or machine - I used the latter. Here's more or less what Star #5 looked like finished.

I made six more blocks (all 6" high), including the next one which is the centerpiece. This green fabric isn't one of Cheryl's - it's from my stash, and I stitched the white lines to give it a mosaic look. 

The stars surrounding the center include Star 39, below, with the addition of a gold-brown print from my stash:  

Next, Star 56, with my violet print added: 

Star 65: 

Star 28

And last, Star 15

The results are in the photos on top of this post, and the bottom. How did I like the applique paper? Compared to Decor Bond, it's not quite as stiff, and therefore more challenging to fold small sharp-angled pieces accurately.

But I discovered that when I scored the fabric with a sharp-edged piece of plastic - like a credit card - next to the interfacing, it made accurate folding and basting more achievable. The big advantage of applique paper over Decor Bond is that the former will dissolve in the wash, presumably leaving a softer project than the latter. 

Here's the back after all the pieces were sewn together. 

From a distance:

I laid it on batting, traced around the top (with a water soluble marker), then cut out the batting inside the traced line. This results in a slightly smaller piece of batting than the top. 

Next I placed the top on my backing fabric, and cut out the backing fabric about 3/8" larger than the top all the way around. All the concave angles must be clipped, in order to get them to turn under.

Make a sandwich: Backing fabric on the table,  wrong side up;  batting on top of that; and the pieced top on top, right side up. Pin or clamp the edges every few inches. Do a hand whipstitch, stitching the outer folds on the top piece to new folds you create as you go, on the backing fabric. Finally, I stitched around the edges with a machine straight stitch.  You can't see the hand whipstitches in this photo from the back, but you can see the machine straight stitching. 

The entire back:

And the front, all quilted, this time on a white background. 

Very European, esta bien? And thanks to Cheryl's fabric, it took a lot less time to make than, say, Gaudi's Parc Guell in Barcelona. See more of this fabric, and projects made from it, in this excellent new article. It is now available in quilt shops. More information about my EPP book is here. 

Pandemic Porch Quilt Show Launch!

This idea isn't original to me - hanging a different quilt outside every day to entertain pandemic walkers. A quilter friend in Louisiana did it first - I saw from her posts that she and her neighbors were enjoying it. Then I heard about members of a quilt guild in Northern California, who showed off their quilts at the same time, so folks could follow a map to visit them. 

Even then I might not have bothered, because hanging a quilt is a schlep! But then I needed to bring my hanging rack into our house's front room, for a Zoom presentation. The front room is right next to my front door, so my quilt show was launched! 

Here are the first five quilts I've featured. I'm mostly working backwards in time. 

Day 1: Luncheon Linens
This quilt is composed of vintage linens, with English Paper Pieced hexagon-shaped blocks overlaid on it. We are lucky enough to live in a beautiful old Craftsman house, so this sets the scene. My beautiful assistant, wearing his fanciest pandemic underwear, is on the right. 

A MUCH closer look: 

I think of this quilt as a lunch party. The old textiles represent the grandmas throwing the party. (The giant central square is a tablecloth). The new hexagon blocks are the young visitors, who travelled back in time from the next century. (Directions for making a quilt like this are in my book, "Hexagon Star Quilts, 113 English Paper Pieced Star Patterns to Piece and Applique," here. )

Day 2: Cherry Pie in the Sky with Diamonds 

I absolutely love red and white quilts - who doesn't? So when I was writing the book, I decided to English Paper Piece one. On my porch, I took this off-kilter photo. 

The book's photographer photographed it sideways, too.... 

The next photo was taken while I was constructing the quilt. I persuaded my daughter to hold up the central formation, first from the back. All the cardstock templates are still in position...

...And from the front. Much as I liked it as a freestanding piece...

...I ultimately did stitch it in place to a white backing. 

Closeups:  

Day 3: My Oldest UFO

You may have read about this quilt on my blog in August. It was created from an almost 30-year-old failed attempt at a Mariner's Compass quilt. 

Here's a better view, and you can read more about it in the blog post here. Most of the side blocks are curved English Paper Piecing, which is not always a good idea, as you can read in my blog post here.  

Day 4: Red and White Vintage Linens

This is a completely DIFFERENT red and white quilt from the one on Day 2. It's made of vintage linens, especially aprons,  and spectacularly kitschy embroideries, and a mystery textile on top. I blogged details of this quilt in July, here. 

Without the sunshine: 

Day 5: Hexagon Masquarade

This quilt was made from mask scraps. 

A better view: 

Blogged heavily, here.  

The next installment of my porch show, with days 6-10, is posted here.