Exciting news today! I’d like to invite you to the Stash Bandit Mountain Quilt Retreat in Buena Vista, Colorado from March 14 to 17, 2019. We’ll be at The Lodge at Buena Vista, where the views are amazing and the food is spectacular!
I’ve come up with what I think will be the best of both worlds:
I’m not the least bit Scandinavian, so when cute little creatures called “tomten” started appearing in my Instagram feed last year, I had to Google.
It turns out they’re a little bit like gnomes. From Wikipedia:
A…tomte…is a mythological creature from Nordic folklore…typically associated with the winter solstice and the Christmas season.
Every year it seems like I have time to sew during November, December and January. Other people are busy shopping, cooking and decorating. But my life is the opposite, and that’s kind of a good thing.
Thanksgiving was quiet with just five guests (two bigs and three littles). The meal was easy and the company departed around 3:30. I sewed for four or five hours after that. We ate leftovers and quickie meals the rest of the weekend, so there were many more hours in the studio.
I posted an image of my recent modern Christmas wreath quilt on Instagram, and a follower named Karen saw “urban-industrial style Christmas.” What a great description!
Oh, Christmas Wreath by Diane Harris; quilted by Julie Lechner @beenquiltin
Her thoughts moved me to play around with this design and purposely go for an industrial look. So I moved away from Christmas entirely, to these possibilities.
A little bit different, but it still feels like the same quilt. Sashing is wider and all of the background and the border is one color.
Here I moved to a darker background color. I kind of like this idea. In terms of fabric, I’d use a lot of variety in the Bow Ties. (Ha, they don’t even look like Bow Ties now!)
More playing around. I’m not sure how effective this really is. But you never know until you try, so I don’t rule anything out when I’m experimenting, especially if it’s just in EQ. Even in fabric, play is the name of the game.
Whoa. This happened by accident! The background is the same color as one of the Bow Ties, so that piecing disappears and they look like weird C’s. Now we’re getting somewhere. In reality you wouldn’t actually piece the C’s, you could just use a solid patch in the same fabric as the background. I love this one, and surprisingly, it looks Christmas-y to me once more.
I had one more thought. I changed the gray to another green.
Like I said, you never know until you mess around!
A note about Electric Quilt design software: I resisted upgrading to EQ8 from EQ7 because I thought I didn’t have time to learn a new program. But when I did upgrade, I was blown away by how easy and intuitive it is. I spent almost zero time learning EQ8 because everything felt natural and logical. I love it. If you’re interested in designing quilts, you should get it. Well worth the investment!
Today, I wish you the courage, the curiosity and the commitment to play.
My exceptional longarm quilter said to me recently, “I think everything you do is modern.” I’d commented that I didn’t think of myself as a “modern” quilter, and her response gave me pause. I’ve been (very happily) fielding inquiries from modern quilt guilds, and the truth is that some things I design and make lean toward the modern aesthetic, some are traditional, and some are hard to put into a category.
Oh, Christmas Wreath by Diane Harris; quilted by Julie Lechner @beenquiltin
Today I’m introducing Oh, Christmas Wreath! This design is decidedly modern: solid fabrics, negative space, clean and fresh. Oh, Christmas Wreath appears in the Nov/Dec issue of Quilty, on newsstands now. I hope you’ll grab it when you see it or order it online in paper or digital format.
The Nov/Dec issue of Quilty magazine is on newsstands now, and I’m very excited to have two new quilt designs inside.
Ever since I started building the Jingle Bells Trunk Show to share with quilt guilds, I’ve been obsessed with making Christmas quilts. I’m constantly working on new ideas, and these two were a fit for Quilty. You may know that magazines work months in advance, so I actually pieced these in April and May for an early June deadline.
I haven’t often had the opportunity to travel, but when your daughter and her family move to the other side of the world, you do it. I’m visiting Holly, her husband Dustin, and my only grandchildren—two precious little boys aged 2 and 6.
It feels like there is quilt inspiration around every corner. In the airport, I spotted this cover on Wired magazine. I see a quilt, don’t you?!
Bonnie Hunter of Quiltville fame visited three guilds in Nebraska last week, and it was such fun to reconnect with her. Bonnie has had a long-term working relationship with Quiltmaker, where I worked for 11 years, and that’s how we first met. I hadn’t seen her since we both taught at a Quiltmaker event about 10 years ago. She’s as warm and outgoing and funny as ever.
Bonnie’s quilts always look great in photos, but when you see them in person they’re even better. Such energy! This is the original Wild and Goosey that took the quilting internet by storm, and it’s a gobsmacker. You have to see it to believe it.
Last week I co-hosted a quilt retreat with Wagner’s Quilts & Conversation in Arapahoe, Nebraska. Eighteen quilters joined us for three days of fun. The food was great and the company was amiable!
The owners of Wagner’s Quilts are Ruth and Gretchen, a mother-daughter team. They’re good at making an event feel special.
We worked on Petit Patchwork, shown above, a small quilt I designed just for this event with the idea of teaching several new skills as we progressed. We covered partial seaming, mitering, Dresden Plate, stitch-and-flip, Flying Geese, raw-edge fusible applique, and increasing your accuracy for small piecing projects. I also showed them how to create scalloped borders for this quilt or any future projects. It was a lot to cover, and I know that sometimes they felt as if they were drinking from a fire hose.
On the first afternoon, we made some 5-1/2″ Dresden Plates. The color choices for the kits were 1930s, brights and Civil War reproductions. We also spent time tweaking our seam allowances so the patchwork would come out to the correct size.
We spent a considerable amount of time on the little 4″ x 6″ bird blocks. They’re not really difficult but there are a lot of pieces to manage, and you must sew accurately so the parts all fit together nicely.
This is a block that gets easier with practice. Some of the quilters will probably make their birds again, and I’m sure it will go more smoothly the second time around.
This 4″ Spinwheel block turned out really cute! There’s something about small patchwork projects that is just so appealing.
We made a lot of progress over the course of three days. There were messes everywhere—always a good sign.
Some of the blocks had dark fabrics for the backgrounds, which gives the quilt dimension and keeps it from being too predictable.
The meals were catered locally, and they were delicious. Breakfast and lunch was included, and then we found dinner in the evenings on our own. It worked out really well. Wagner’s Quilts provided gift bags for everyone and a nice coupon to use at the shop, about three blocks from the community center where we sewed.
Everyone had plenty of space and the lighting was good. We didn’t trip a single breaker.
I enjoyed getting to know them better. More than half were returnees from last year’s retreat in the same community.
They put on a stellar show-and-tell on Friday afternoon. I’ll show you those quilts in the next post. I hope you can join me for a quilting retreat some time! Soon I’ll have details for the Stash Bandit Mountain Retreat in Colorado in March of 2019. Maybe you can come?!
For the past several years, I’ve signed up for the Teal Mini Swap. It’s a fundraiser hosted by my friend Beth Helfter of EvaPaige Quilt Designs to benefit the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund. Today’s little quilt was made by Lorrie Langdon from Greenville, Mississippi. Lorrie was my swap partner, so the quilt came to be mine. I just love it!
The hexagon sides are 2-1/2″, and it’s about 4-1/2″ from point to point. The quilt is 18″ x 18″. She used a nice variety of teals, navy blues and light fabrics.
The thing to notice is how much the fabrics differ. When the piecing is repetitive, the fabric needs to do the work of holding a viewer’s interest. There are small geometrics, larger graphic prints, florals and solids. They all harmonize beautifully.
Lorrie also used value to her advantage. There are very dark hexagons and very light hexagons, and quite a few in between. She’s letting the fabric do the work, and it’s working.
The quilting adds another level of interest to this piece. Lorrie took her cues from the patchwork, but she changed direction enough to keep things lively. The lines of quilting are about 1/4″ apart, which takes a while even on a small project.
The quilting is an element that helps bring the bigger picture together.
These shapes look complex, but they don’t have to be. Above I’ve drawn lines around each unit so you can see how it can be pieced. A 60º triangle is added to two opposite sides of a hexagon to make the unit. Then the units are joined into rows, and the rows are sewn together. You can create diagonal rows, above.
Or you can create horizontal rows as I outlined here. Pretty nifty.
Lori added a 1/2″ white border and a solid teal binding to finish things off. This is a very successful little quilt!
One Hundred Small Quilts is a trunk show available to quilt groups. I bring about 120 small quilts that I’ve made and collected over more than 30 years. We go through them in about an hour, and there is so much to see! I’d love to share them with your group. Get in touch today and Let’s Talk Quilts!