Full of Soup

At long last, the Bounce top is finished!

I decided to take some pictures with some New York City architecture that echos the circle motif.

St. Vincent’s Hospital.

The Maritime Hotel.

The Cabana bar outside of the hotel.

Hotel’s porthole windows.

I can finally report a somewhat successful evening of quilting! Full Disclosure: I went to a full day workshop with my mom’s quilting teacher, Margaret, who has been teaching quilting for 30 years. She spent a full hour holding my hand and wiping my tears and teaching me how to do this.

Step 1: Find a lot of things that are circles!

Take a piece of fabric and a piece of fusible web and put the “right” sides together. The right side of the fusible web is more course and has all those spots of glue. Pro tip: When someone gives you a bunch of free fusible web so you can go home and start right away without forgetting how to do this, don’t lose that fusible web then go to an overpriced quilt shop and pay top dollar for Designer’s Lite Luxury Apparel Fusibles.

Trace a circle on the fusible web side of things and pin it all together.

Quilt exactly on the line. EXACTLY, I SAID.

Cut about a 1/4 inch away from the line you just showed. Don’t ask questions about why my demo includes three different pieces of fabric. We will stick to this fabric for the rest of the demo.

Cut a slice through the fusible web. Do not cut the fabric.

Turn it inside out. Now you have the glue side on the back and the fabric side on the front. You can cut more of the fusible web off if you are worried that it will affect how your finished quilt will feel as long as you leave about an inch around the edges.

I started adding the boarders.

I haven’t appliqued the circles on the center panel yet, but I placed a couple to get an idea of how the quilt will look.

The lighting in my apartment is terrible, but not terrible enough to hide a mistake this big.

See the lower right hand corner of the screen. In the lower left hand corner, you can see Indy’s head shaking.

The center “rectangle” is not a rectangle at all but a trapazoid, so my corners aren’t meeting up. I haven’t sewn on the bottom paned (which is why you can see all the sticky tabs reminding me how I wanted the panel oriented), but I have a feeling that the 4 inches is not going to just disappear.

I don’t even know how to begin to fix this. I think putting it in a drawer might help solve things, right?

I tried to take all the advice from the Kaffe Fassett workshop very literally and so when Liza said not to count the blocks as we make them, but just to keep on sewing and sewing, I did just that. For months.

Before the retreat, I was feeling smug that I had made most of my snowballs and I would be well on my way to a completed top after the weekend, but after making all my piles and pinning and counting and writing numbers on sticky notes I realized I was only about halfway there and I would have to cut more fabric to finish the top.

I think most normal people would be able to just move on and cut more fabric, but for me this was tragic. I work very methodically and finish each step completely before I move onto the next. Having to take a step backwards threw me to a screeching halt.

Okay, so this next part is really airing my dirty laundry. I am admittedly air-headed, but when I went to the quilting retreat, I looked at the pattern again and realized that I was just shy of making double the amount of blocks that I needed. DOUBLE. As in, I should’ve been done with this quilt in half the time. Also, since I like to work so methodically, I completed each color one at a time, and there were entire colors I didn’t even get to add to my quilt. I had been saving my favorite colors for the end so I had something to look forward to and now I had way too many blocks and none of my favorite colors.

THE DRAMA. I just kept sewing. I figured I’d make two quilts. Or whatever. My life is ruined I might as well just sew snowballs forever.

When I got home, I realized not only was my original count correct and I needed all these snowballs, I had to CUT MORE FABRIC and make more.

Liza was right. I shouldn’t have counted. As of two weeks ago, I have made exactly the number of snowballs I need. Not a one extra.

On the bright side, the top is spinning together pretty quick.

And Indy has found a use for the ugly Dresden Plate I started a couple weeks ago.

Notice how jealous Aesop is of the collar look.

I went to the Kaffe Fassett workshop on Tuesday at the City Quilter. Many of the quilts from his latest book, Simple Shapes Spectacular Quilts were hanging throughout the shop.

I know I’ve never been able to take a picture of my own quilts that do them justice, but I always wondered if Kaffe’s quilts were enhanced by the professional photographs in exotic locations I’ve seen in his books. But I have to say, in person, even under florescent lights, his quilts are even more spectacular than they appear in a stylized photo shoot.

Bounce, in particular, is spectacular in person. I saw this quilt in his book and I wasn’t drawn to it at all. I admit I was disappointed to when I found out this was the quilt we were going to workshop.

However, once I got to the store and got to see this quilt, I was so excited about the workshop. In this workshop, we didn’t sew a stitch. We simply cut out our fabrics and put them up on design walls and edited our designs with the help of Kaffe.

I loved getting to watch everyone else progress and their stacks of fabric turn into neat little squares on their design walls.

The woman on the left gesturing is Liza Prior Lucy, and I believe she is the one who turns Kaffe’s designs into actual quilting patterns. She is the co-author of his latest book.

I like bright colors and I picked out a wide range of polka dots for border of the quilt, but I was hoping to get some input on which fabric would be a nice center to pull it all together. Kaffe took me shopping in the store and picked out this tennis ball fabric. I am not a huge fan of novelty fabrics and I really had a hard time getting over the tennis ball theme. I put it up on the wall to get an idea  of how it would look. Also, see Kaffe on the right in front of his version of this quilt.

I told Kaffe I didn’t think I could do the tennis balls, and he suggested these strawberries instead. I loved them, but I was hoping to NOT make a pink quilt for once. He asked me why one would ever NOT make a pink quilt. I admit, I agree.

After a break, some women in the class decided not to go with the design Kaffe suggested. He gave us a pep talk about how they could always go with their own designs, but for this workshop, to try his designs. “Listen to me and your quilt will be beautiful.” After that, I decided to brave it with the tennis balls. I also kept in mind that we were not sewing the pieces together, so I always had the option to change things.

I do love that bright, neon green color and I thought it would bring together my other prints better than the pink. In this shot I’ve divided up what I believe are my light fabrics (at the top) and my dark fabrics (at the bottom) so I could begin an alternating checkerboard border.

I have never worked with a design wall, so it was really interesting to be able to throw all the fabrics up there at once and really play around with them. I am so hooked on this process.

I added in some of the corners just to get an idea of what the snowballs might look like. I felt really happy with the design at this point.

The best part was getting to see how many different interpretations we all made of the same quilt and how they EACH were so beautiful and inspiring.

This woman chose Japanese prints. I really love the fabric she chose as her background. I think it ties together all the shapes in the quilt so well.

This woman shocked the class at first. How can you design a black and white quit at a Kaffe Fassett workshop? In the end, her quilt was SO much about color. It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz.

Each and every fabric in this quilt is beautiful. I love the color combinations.

The two designs on the left were made by sisters and used mostly Kaffe prints. I think their checkerboards were so successful. We started our designs with just the center pieces, and I was amazed how much the checkerboards changed the whole look of the thing.

This quilt started out as a tremendous pile of scraps and I really could not envision how they would all come together, but lo, they are beautiful.

At the end of the class, we all gathered around and looked at each person’s design and Kaffe offered feedback about what worked and what didn’t work. The quilt on the left will be a wall hanging and is smaller than the ones the rest of the class was designing.

This class was so incredibly inspiring. Picking up a Kaffe Fassett book was one of the reasons I really became excited about being a quilter in the first place. I knew my taste was loud, so I was not prepared to have that loud taste stretched even further by choosing a tennis ball print, but I am so happy that happened. I feel such a new sense of freedom in picking out fabrics now. I can’t wait to get this quilt to size.