eo-7 Which Way - Final Quilt

The most interesting part about this quilt for me was the quilting process. I ended up trying to quilt along the diagonal for a few of the arrows - with the lines extending across the quilt. The result is a pretty nice pattern on the back of the quilt, and the top also seems to be more coherent.

The best news about this quilt is that I have successfully completed seven quilts in this series! The next post will show all seven. I need to find a clothesline!

eo-7 Which Way - Top Assembly

I think I wanted to just hustle through this quilt making process. I do not have many photos of the assembly.

In the end, I created a series of arrows heading toward one another. A white strips is sewn between arrow halves and between each arrow. In addition, the arrows have different lengths.

The quilt has the red fabric backing, but tan binding.

eo-7 Which Way

The final quilt in this series is motivated by a desire to get better at working with diagonals. I wanted to make a series of arrows - much like the Feathers quilt seen here.

Instead of buying the pattern, I wanted to see if I could work out how to design and lay-out the quilt with the fabric I had on hand. This would mean that the dimensions of the arrows would need to vary.

I wanted to be organized about this and layout each color and plan the design, but really - I did not have enough fabric to do this efficiently. So, instead, I picked the angle for the arrows and tried to work out how to sew together 'strips' of  arrows with the correct offset to minimize fabric waste.

My hope was to use the same taupe color as the background for the entire quilt top. However, I did not have enough fabric for this, so I ended up adding white strips between the arrows.

eo-6 Crop Circles - Final Quilt

The Crop Circle quilt has the same red fabric for backing and binding as the earlier quilts in this series.

For the quilting, I used a red thread for the back and an off-white thread to trace each circle.

eo-6 Crop Circles - Top Assembly

The top assembly process was just one of deciding on what colors go where.

Not sure about how to quilt this, though.

eo-6 Full Circle

Once the quarter circle blocks were assembled, I made half and the full-circles. It might have been possible to go for assembling rows or columns, but I wanted to try to achieve a series of light and dark circles. This required me to layout the full top and it was more convenient to assemble the circle blocks first.

You can see that the block alignment is not perfect, but I am still more interested in the colors than the perfection of the seams. 

eo-6 Cutting and Block Assembly

The pieces for the quarter-circle blocks were cut using acrylic templates that my husband was willing to make for me.

To begin with, I cut 4" squares, and then marked the profile of each template on the squares. This approach seemed to speed up the cutting process.

I then assembled the blocks by just ensuring that the two pieces were different colors. One of the most helpful tools to have handy when sewing curves is a pair of blunt tweezers to help pull the final bit of the fabric around the bend as it approaches the feed dogs on the sewing machine.

eo-6 Crop Circles

The sixth quilt in the Eastern Oregon quilt series is essentially a sky-view of crop circles. It turns out people grow things in the high desert. Irrigation is key.

The design will be a simple 12 x 16 of 3.5" quarter circle blocks.

The starting point of the actual doing of this quilt was a fabric audit. I wanted to see what was remaining of the fabric in terms of color and yardage.

The photo above shows all of the remaining fabric. I tried to arrange everything by tone. Two of the original colors were fairly depleted, but I had more than enough fabric remaining for two final quilts.

eo-5 Willow Quilt Complete

The fifth quilt in this series took me quite a while to work on and finish. Because this was not a traditional design, I really struggled with the worry about not making something that needed to be thrown on the burn pile immediately. The turning point was really when I just decided to treat this quilt like the others: a learning experience. Instead of just learning about a sewing technique, this time I had to stretch half a step further and come up with my own way to try to convey the beauty of the riparian area along the John Day River.

The trick to all of this is really to remind myself that, while I could do this much better now and that others could do even better, I am just learning and trying.