Tuesday, February 2, 2010

I'm ALMOST ready to begin

Kim posted a comment on my blog, Sophie Junction,  asking that I post a photo of this quilt here:

Johnny inspects the completed top
 
It's the project I had just started before Tonya posted this irresistable challenge ... and so, while I have been rushing to finish it, I've been thinking of what it means to abstract design ideas from a traditional quilt to a "liberated" one and how this quilt, based on Gwen Marston's pattern, Liberated Wedding Ring, is a great example of abstracting a traditional Wedding Ring quilt.

Now that this top is completed, I'm almost ready to focus my attention on our challenge.

11 comments:

Kim said...

Oh thank you! I just love this quilt.....it may be my inspiration for my challenge quilt, but I will wait for my book to come before I decide.
But this is just lovely!
The red is really inviting...have you decide how you will quilt it?

Happy sewing

Anonymous said...

Love the red!

Jewel said...

I wish my husband would let me put a red quilt on the bed. That is amazing.

Sharon said...

Wow, this is stunning with that red! I see you did your piecing a little differently than Gwen M. How did you do it?

And I agree, I think this is a good example of an abstraction of a traditional design. It's boiled down to the essence of the traditional Wedding Ring, and that's a good point to ponder! Thanks for sharing!

Kathy said...

I love the red....and the cat looks good against the red too!

sophie said...

Kim, my plans are to quilt it in a very traditional way. That was one of the things I liked about Gwen Marston's Liberated Wedding Ring quilt. I'm thinking feather wreaths in the alternate blocks and feathers in the border and probably something a little wonky in the rings themselves.

sophie said...

Sharon, since I had some string-pieced "yardage"–which you can see here. I started with that and rotary cut rectangles, then used a triangle template taped to my ruler to cut the shapes at each end (as a result, I now have a baggie-full of those left-over triangles cut from string "fabric). As it turned out, I had exactly enough string fabric to cut pieces for 14 blocks. I ended up making more because I decided I needed to have a bigger quilt. Since I now knew that I'd be using a red background, my new string "yardage" had far fewer red fabrics in it and I ended up with fewer muddled blocks that blend with the background.

Gwen Marston's pattern uses a template and has directions for string piecing pieces stack-n-slash style,using diagonal slashes, so there's more strings that go from thick to thin in her rings.

Tonya Ricucci said...

Wonderful quilt. love that red, the scrappiness AND the kitty. this IS a great example of how to interpret a classic pattern - thanks for posting it.

YankeeQuilter said...

I love that expression "string piece yardarge!" The red works so wonderful herding all the other fabrics...

sophie said...

Thanks for the nice compliments, everyone.

The "yardage" I had made some time ago seemed perfect for this quilt when I measured it (26" long, 49" wide) and did the math. It turned out that the 26"length was exactly what I needed to make one block. The 49" width was also perfectly divisible by the 3.5" strips I needed. It fated to be used in this quilt. When I had to make more string fabric, since I knew what I was going to do with it, I made small pieces, each big enough for 2 or 3 blocks.

Marit said...

Great quilt top, love the pattern and how the blocks are "floating" on the pretty red background!