Small Art Quilts: Designing a Series
my goals for the day included:
SIMPLIFY - spending more time sewing and less time agonizing... so when the supply list called for 6, I brought only 9 - not 39!
SEW MORE - selected the "4 sided angular shape"as my design element (maxing my design time and maxing my time to sew, by cutting out the extra cutting time!)
HAVE FUN - fun to work at something that you enjoy - I love the handwork!
Color Scheme
I picked colors based on my inspiration fabric - FUN hand painted and hand stamped fabric I made in Lyric Kinard's Playing with Paint class through Quilt University this summer.
Look at what I found in my orphan blocks box... I think it's a sign that the 3 sided Angular Shape wants attention and I should continue to play with this color scheme!
Design
Here it is early in the design process - the top set was nice and clean/simple but the bottom had a complicated flavor -AND for the series to be cohesive, I needed to go one way or another - AND I wanted to be able to go wild with stitching both hand and machine, so I went the simple route!
I think the complicated bottom ones would be good to do on a much larger scale... ideas!
there was something very compelling in the weaving of strips and frames... I had to keep some of that in...
Can you see that this was done on my nephew's 11th birthday? and that I am one of 3 sisters?
Stitchin'
Denying my nonconformist nature, used some embroidery stitches from the class handout... But soon my nature emerged as I stitched the bars on my twin towers piece (bottom right), and stagger longer and shorter bars up the left tower. I felt like some of my machine stitching was weedy looking so added some loopy weed heads...
The top left started to looked like a building, so I added the top level in stitching (both machine and hand). Later I would realize it looked more like a mission church than a home or factory... And a dark night sky over the mission that needed a star or a few...
Added some weaving, squares, stars, bars, y's and french knots (last count was over 70 french knots before adding the alien flowers),
I wanted to do a blanket stitch in navy blue, but didn't have it and didn't want to wait to get some, and had black dmc floss. I like the black edge on the navy background! Lucky I didn't have navy blue!
reordered the quilts so that the weeds are growing up from all of the bottom 3.
Lessons and Confessions
Lesson 1 - free cutting is fun, takes a creative leap of faith, but it's freeing and loose. That overall looseness is a design element in this series...
Confession 1 - NO ROTARY CUTTER OR RULER USED IN THE CREATION OF THIS SERIES... in fact even did free motion sewing - the feeddogs were down for all the machine stitching except the arc across the sky in the Mission Church

Confession 2 - I inked the edge after the blanket stitch with my favorite tools - the humble sharpie - but the fancy "clicky" one in black...
Lesson 3- hand painted fabric has a slight stiffness makes for fantastic raw edge applique if you don't want any pokeys like in the other fabrics - the light green has a very crisp edge.
Confession 3 - I don't have another confession, yet am compelled to have a balance of confessions to lessons (I guess that's my confession!)
Lesson 4 - DON'T FEAR THE REAPER, you need to prune! Sometimes it's what you remove... I saw many times in the designing that removing a part allowed the rest of the piece to breathe.
Confession - Took photos or saved parts removed - those can feed another project. This color scheme, loose style, simplicity is very appealing to me and it might just become a large singular piece... That's my next mission, should I chose to accept it!
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