Category Archives: Minimal Art

30 days of Quilting – Week 3

I totally missed a week when writing my blog posts for my 30 days of quilting. It happens to be one of my favorite projects I finished. The week I finished this quilt marked the one year of being in lockdown/quarantine for COVID-19. So it seemed appropriate that “Inside looking out” is my remembrance of this year.

The quilt is the view of my window in my studio looking outside. It is a minimal design in mostly white, off-white and grays. The pops of orange were used to show where light streamed through the window and played on the window frame or wall.

For the quilting I decided to use Jacquie Gering’s Arrow design (from Walk 2.0) for the window, thinking that a diamond or triangle design would reflect the refraction and play glass can have with light.

I also decided that the light that played on the wall would be represented like a light beam and quilted vertically. This would make an interesting play in contrast to the 1/2″ horizontal lines the rest of the background (wall) had.

To pick up the orange colors in the quilt top I used the same color in the binding. The white corner in the binding continues the light beam in the quilting through the binding.

Details

Name : Inside Looking Out
Design: Original Design
Fabric: Kona Cotton (White, Snow, Silver, Torch)
Backing: Kona White
Binding: Carolyn Friedlander, Friedlander
Dimensions: 26 x 24 in.
Quilted: Straight lines walking foot quilting
Start date: 17 October 2015
Finish date: 22 March 2021

Other Blog posts for #30daysofquilting
Week 1
Week 2
Week 4-5

One of these things {a finish}

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Idea

I have trouble expressing my feelings and thoughts into words and talking about it. This quilt represents my wish that human nature can embrace difference. Different is beautiful, wonderful, inspiring and makes life and things around us interesting. It saddens me that often being different is used to divide us, introduce fear, hate or violence. We need to do better.

Design

The design and name of this quilt was inspired by the Sesame Street Song “One of these things“. It teaches that things are different and says “one of these things doesn’t belong” so are we teaching children that those that are different don’t belong??? I hope we can teach children and people to accept people who are different from themselves and listen, learn and understand each other.

I designed this being 4 panels, 3 being the same and one being different. I choose simple shapes, squares being on the three panels and a circle (quarter of a circle) in the different panel.

The color choices came of the squares and circles being used and reminded me of the childhood toy – Tupperware’s Shape-O Toy. I used blue as the background and yellow as the shape on the 3 square panels and reversed these for the circle panel. The red was added as the border to tie the 4 panels together and used to frame them.

Create

Most of this quilt was simple measurement and piecing. The most complex piece was how to get the large curve (5″ radius in the middle with 15″ on the outer circles. Luckily, I purchased a wood working compass for my husband a couple of years ago. I used this to mark and cut my circles (maximum radius for the compass was 15.5″).

The other big step for creating was matching the binding which I do often. I really like the effect. I matched some of the quilt while adding the red to a blue area. The best tutorial out there for block matching binding is from A Quilters Table.

Quilt

So for each panel I did decide to quilt them exactly the same way.

Outside of the shape – horizontal 1/2″ straight lines
Inside of the shape – vertical 1/2″ straight lines
Shape itself – 1 x 2″ grid lines

There was a bit of effort to bury threads so that you get a neat look where lines stop in the middle of the quilt. See previous post for some pictures.