Blogger's Quilt Festival and Project Quilting Road Trip

It's time for the Blogger's Quilt Festival! I'm a bit late to the party, but I wanted to finish my road trip quilt so I could enter it in the festival!

As you all must know by now, I am a contestant in Project Quilting. Our most recent challenge was to make a quilt inspired by a road trip using at least 12 fabrics for the quilt top.

I had a flash of inspiration, and decided to make a quilt that looks like a film strip and rolls up to look like a 35mm film canister.

Here's the quilt rolled up:


And here's the quilt rolled out:


I wrote pretty extensive captions on my Flickr page, but here's an excerpt for what inspired this quilt & why I made it:

I used to live in Hopkinsville, KY which is a really small town in the lower part of the state. My friend Augi & I shared office space, and very frequently on Friday afternoons, we would get a wild hair and decide to leave work at that very moment & drive to the beach (9 hours away.) We'd taken several trips to various beach destinations, and Pensacola was one of our favorites. Augi would always drive, and I would always sleep on the way.

If you want to read more about this, I'll be blogging about each panel shortly... click here to read all the Road Trip posts together!

Happy quilting!

Project Quilting Road Trip - Panel 3

RoadTrip-Panel3
Originally uploaded by LoveBugStudios

This is the 3rd panel of the road trip. Augi always enjoyed taking the scenic route for the trip, and we were driving through a small town neighborhood and spotted this beautiful grove of bushes covered in pink flowers. We thought it was so beautiful that we actually pulled over and got out to take pictures. There are probably about 8 pictures of us under & around this bush, but I picked the one that features the two of us when a kind stranger stopped to snap it for us.

To get this look, I overlaid a portion of a color image over a black & white image, then thread painted the bushes with several colors of thread. You can read more detail about how this came together here.

Project Quilting Road Trip - Panel 1

RoadTrip-Panel1
Originally uploaded by LoveBugStudios

This is the first panel of the Road Trip quilt. It features a map (printed to fabric) of the southeastern US. It is actually a composite of about 7 images since I couldn't find a map that would give me the exact view of the cities I wanted.

I traced the route from Hopkinsville to Pensacola using a black ribbon that reminds me of a highway. The start of the route is marked with a red car button, and the end with a green car button.

The "Welcome to Florida" sign is a reproduction of the welcome sign posted on I-10, the last leg of the trip. It is hand-cut applique made from tracings of a photo of the sign, complete with rivets made from gray rhinestones. I ended up embroidering the smaller letters... they were just too small to cut by hand!

The fabrics used in this panel include: printable fabric, grey, black, white, green, red, blue, and orange solids.

Project Quilting Road Trip - Panel 5

RoadTrip-Panel5
Originally uploaded by LoveBugStudios

This is panel 5 of the road trip quilt. It's finally the two of us at our destination! Sitting on the beach, in our matching beach chairs that we bought specifically for our road trips. I found a cute iron-on of a pair of flip flops (it's glued over my shoes in the photo), and another one of a shell. This is one of my favorite pictures of the two of us together.

The only fabric used in this panel is the printable fabric.

Project Quilting Road Trip - Panel 6

RoadTrip-Panel6
Originally uploaded by LoveBugStudios

The sixth and final panel of my road trip quilt, which is actually the quilt label. I took some leftover pieces of the crab fabric and ribbon road and added those to form a border, then I machine embroidered the information about the quilt. I fudged the date a little as I truly thought I'd be working on this one right up to the very last day of the challenge! It was actually finished on the 27th.

I left space on the label to add information about this particular challenge - how many entries, and what the outcome was. I will print this information to fabric & fuse it to the open space.

The palm tree iron-on rhinestones were something I couldn't resist...

Project Quilting Road Trip - Panel 4

RoadTrip-Panel4
Originally uploaded by LoveBugStudios

This is the fourth panel in the road trip quilt. Augi & I both love seafood, and it was our mission to eat at every Joe's Crab Shack we could find. Sometimes we even based our destinations on whether they had a JCS there. We once drove around Atlanta for 3 hours trying to find the JCS; if you're not familiar with Atlanta, every street is named either Peach Tree or Zion, so it is very easy to get lost and drive for miles on the wrong road.

Anyway... the Joe's sign is a hand-cut scaled reproduction of their famous sign. The letters were cut first, then placed on the next layer to be fused & cut, and so on. The sign is stuck in a large glass of lemonade. The sign uses red, blue, black, and white fabric. This one was a lot of fun to make.

I also found some fun crab & lobster fabric, so I used that as well, and I found a lemon-shaped iron-on to finish off the lobster. Yum!

Road Trip Block Detail - Project Quilting

I finished quilting one of the blocks in my Road Trip quilt, and I was so pleased with the results that I thought I would share with you the process that I used to make this block.

I wanted to do some thread painting for this panel, and I thought it would be more fun than having a straight photograph in this block.

I started with this photograph:



Then, I made a black and white version of it:



In the black & white version, I cleaned up the date printed on the photo (good thing I stopped doing that - it really does ruin the photograph.)

Then, I made a composite image by digitally "cutting" the center of the colored image and placing it over the black & white image:



I then enlarged this to my block size (8.5" x 12.5") and printed this image to cotton fabric.

Once I got the block pieced into the quilt top and layered with the batting, I did my thread painting in a couple of areas:



I decided not to thread paint everywhere, as I really wanted to show that I didn't just thread paint over a picture that was 100% color. I love the way it turned out, but boy is the quilting really dense! It was fun to do free motion quilting in a really small area, where precision was not necessary or desired. :) I did outline the photo of the two of us to give the block more stability since it's not quilted the same everywhere.

Happy quilting!

New Project Quilting Challenge - Road Trip!

The new challenge for Project Quilting was posted today, and it took me about 30 minutes to come up with my concept to go with the theme.

The theme this week is to design a quilt inspired by a road trip, using at least 12 different fabrics on the front of the quilt.

I have come up with a concept that I am truly excited about and can't wait to execute, and I'm lucky this week to be on vacation starting Wednesday so hopefully I'll be able to get a pretty good start (and finish) on it!

I am REALLY excited about what I've come up with, but I'm afraid I can't even venture to tell you the tiniest hint of what it is. Just know that it is out of the box, will be completely unexpected, and although I can't promise to not complain about it as the concept develops, I can promise that it will be really COOL if I execute it well!!!

Happy quilting!

Project Quilting Road Trip - Panel 2

RoadTrip-Panel2
Originally uploaded by LoveBugStudios

This is the second panel of the road trip, and is a fabric interpretation of the beach we would find once we arrived in Pensacola.

There are 9 different fabrics which make up the sand, water, and sky. The panel was embellished with seashell buttons.

Behind the Scenes: Eco-Friendly? for Project Quilting

The most recent challenge for Project Quilting is over, and I just barely made it in on time.  This weekend was pretty busy with the garage sale, and trying to sew in between, plus all the work I'm doing for the pattern venture.  It gets to be a lot!

Ditching the garage sale this morning seems to have been the right call; it rained today anyway, and getting up early and just stitching for 4 hours did the trick.  It's a wonder I don't do hand-stitching very often - it takes forever!

Anyway, I thought I'd give you an idea of what went into my project this week.  It started with a bunch of black & white fabric, plus one accent color.  The challenge this week said that the project must not be rectangular, and could be 3D, which sparked an idea for me.  At first, my accent was going to be red, but then I seem to always pick red for my accent color.  So I decided to go with green and play off of the idea of "green" building practices that Chicago is known for.  I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to do a soft-sculpture of downtown Chicago, but "quickly" for me was still 2 days into the project.

I started with a piece of fabric that I cut 15" wide x 22" long.  I fused it to a Peltex interfacing (which is pretty stiff) backed that with muslin, and decided to use some leftover black & white ribbon from my "Road Trip" quilt to make little roads.  I used Google Maps to get a closer view of the city so I knew where the roads were in relation to the river - I didn't realize that the real close views show you outlines of the buildings, which was exactly what I needed for this project. Score! I free-handed the lines with a chalk pencil. I had to label the streets with stickies so I didn't get lost.  Shoot, even in my own studio I get lost in downtown Chicago!

(for those following along in my pattern venture, you can see a corner of the 1st pattern quilt in the upper left!)

The river had to be quilted in first.  At first, I was going to make it blue, but then I asked a clarifying question to the PQ judge, and it turns out even the thread & all embellishments had to be limited to our chosen color.  It worked out, because the Chicago River is pretty polluted anyway, and what started as just a recreation of a city ended up being a political statement. I used 3 different types of thread for the river and an eyelash yarn to make it stand out, then I went to town thread painting.  I stopped when I got tired.



Next it was time for the roads.  I made the short roads first, then added the east/west roads, then north/south.  Wouldn't you know it... I ran out of road ribbon! I am praying at this point that I can manage to find another spool. 



In the mean time, I tried my hand at stitching up the buildings.  This one I made on my sewing machine, then stuffed it with polyfil, then handstitched the opening to close it.  That took forever (problematic since by this time, it's Thursday) and I couldn't control the shape very well. As I thought about the eventual tiny buildings I would need, making buildings this way was also impractical.  So I decided I needed to basically upholster the buildings.  This required a trip to the fabric store, which I needed to visit anyway for the ribbon.


Ok - ribbon problem solved - but before I can do any more building construction (tee hee) I needed to finish the roads.  No quilting can be done once you've attached buildings!



On the back you can see the river has waves in it - but the front pictures don't tell the story as well. I also couched some yarn around the outside edge to finish it off.

To make the buildings, I picked up some high-density upholstery foam from the fabric store. It just happened to be green (phew) so I thought it would work well for my purposes.

I raided my kitchen for a serrated knife with an offset blade (I seem to be doing that a lot lately, and more & more kitchen utensils are finding their way into my studio!)  to help me cut the foam into reasonably recognizable building shapes, using the map of Chicago as a guide.  I particularly liked the Trump Hotel (it's a 5-sided building) and the House of Blues. HOB was pretty challenging to execute in foam (had the foam been any thinner I would have tried running it through my die cutter) so I chose to stack buttons instead.

Here's a view of the city before upholstery began:


Before I could upholster them, I had to label each building, with its position, and the direction it faced. Each building was hand cut, and sized to fit the spot it was in, and also contrast in size & height with the buildings surrounding it.  So I couldn't just dump them in a bag and start upholstering them.

Here they are, all labeled and playing happily in their little basket!  I grabbed an assortment of black, white, and green fabric scraps, and headed to my living room for a couple of days of meticulous handwork.

The first couple of buildings were turning out so much better than the first one did.  A lot of the future buildings took some fussy turning and fitting - most of my scraps were about 3.5" wide, so some of the larger buildings needed creativity & compromise to use so that I didn't have to cut from new yardage.


You can see in the photo some of the buttons I auditioned, plus the labeled spaces for the buildings.

Unfortunately, I was frantically stitching to finish and didn't get any additional in progress shots, but here are the finished pictures.






The buildings are skewered to the quilt through the road, using pins that match the color of the building, and the whole thing sits on a movable pedestal that allows me to change the shape & height of the sculpture.

Here's an aerial view of the whole thing, but I really like the side views best.


Happy quilting!

Road Trip Fabrics - Project Quilting Challenge

Yes, it is already Tuesday, and I haven't stitched an inch of fabric for this quilt yet. There's a lot of preparation involved!

I made a little shopping trip to the local craft store last night, to pick up some accessories for this quilt. The accessories will remain a secret until the project is revealed, but just know that I visited some non-traditional aisles in the store, including the wood area, the scrapbooking area, the beading aisle, and the paint section!

Since I have to use 12 fabrics on the front of the quilt, I thought I would let you in on what they are:
1. Black solid
2. White solid
3. Red solid
4. Blue solid
5. Green solid
6. Gray solid
7. Yellow solid
8. Navy blue solid
9. Crab fabric
10. Lobster fabric
11. Printable fabric
12. Fabric I made from a stitched scrap (which actually has a lot of different fabrics in it.)

I will also use at least two of these colors for the back. This is a very non-traditional quilt, I assure you! It is also a very ambitious quilt that I am not really sure I will be able to finish in time... this quilt will end up being over 6 feet wide!

Well, I guess I'd better get going! I won't be able to work on it until later this evening, so I have a lot of work ahead of me. Good thing I'm on vacation tomorrow!


Happy quilting!