Over the edge

The binding is on - it's finished! Side 1 is where it all started -

and side 2 is the dragon side - you can't see him very clearly, but he's there -
I'm not going to point out a single one of the quilt's subtle faults. There are design things I would have done differently, and technique things I would have done more carefully, but I've done enough ripping out of seams during construction ... it's together now.

It's been a challenge to do it in the time available and with the materials on hand, and a joy to be able to spend so much time sewing - and it's been a labour of love.

Next ... something small ... or some escapist reading ...

At the edge

The final borders are on - it all needs trimming - where better than on the floor -
To my surprise, I really enjoyed working with these muted colours. Some more quilting here would be nice, but time is running out and this will have to do for now -
Next: the binding. Estimated time, 3 hours, even though it's already pieced and cut. Time remaining before leaving the house with suitcase: 7 hours. Packing: done.

Manna from heaven

Thinking about what to use to bind the dragon quilt, I remembered a bag (from a bring&buy) with some crumpled navy lawn, too fine to use among the heavier cottons, but perfect for a doubled narrow binding. Would there be enough? When I got it out to iron before cutting strips, I found it was already cut, and pieced -into 10 metres of bias binding! That saves a lot of time - thank you, unknown person who did all the preparation!

Final border (almost)

While rummaging around for more fabric for the border to go around the "men" fabric, this emerged - from the Bob Adams workshop at FOQ in 2007 - I was worried there wouldn't be enough with the fabrics already assembled - the strip needed was 308" x 8". I cut as many 8" high lengths as possible, and pieces what was left into 8" high strips. Then it was a matter of sewing a smaller piece onto either end of a bigger piece, then cutting that into several narrow pieces 8" high. Repeat until big pieces are small strips. Here they are laid out on the floor, in no particular order -
and some go back to the cutting board for disassembly -
It's looking livelier -
After about 5 hours all the fabric was in one long strip - definitely enough.

Inching toward the edge

It was good to get away from the dragon quilt for a couple of days. I was really getting bogged down in problems and possibilities, not necessarily in that order.

While at the weekend studio I was able to go through the contents of every shelf and every box, and pull out fabrics that might be useful. The big breakthrough was finding a huge length of african fabric, bought at least 5 years ago and squirrelled away as being "too good to use" (as you do). OK it's african rather than japanese, but the colours and the "feel" is right - and anyway, the quilt already has australian, indonesian, and other non-japanese fabrics -- international fusion.

So there's less pressure, in the long crawl towards the eventual binding, to piece tiny scraps together to eke out the remaining fabric . Finding that fabric gave me a great sense of release and optimism -- it was a metaphorical moment -- how often in your life do you come across some small thing that changes your perspective in that way....

So, in the slow march to the edges, we now have further side panels -and a possible plan for the bit that will go over the pillows -
But as always, I'm playing around with sequences and combinations till it "feels" right.

After quilting the side panels, the next task is to piece the stripey border for the other side.

Another thing that's working quite well is having a computer-based task to get on with - a couple of hours on one, a couple of hours on the other, and the day passes very pleasantly indeed. Must remember to leave the house sometime soon - it can get toooo cosy at home -- and a person can get toooo obsessed with a project.

One week to go...

With the big room available for spreading out the dragon quilt for only another week, work on the dragon quilt is going distressingly slowly. I got two rounds onto the dragon side in the past two days, after putting applique patches on "the men" to integrate that fabric with the pieced area on the other side. You can see their stitching lines near the blue area - that stitching is all the quilting there will be.

One question at this point is - what goes next around "the men"? This area will all be hanging down the sides of the bed. One possibility is 4" of the red used as applique, with leftover bits of "the men" at intervals, and an occasional slash of the other red fabric used in "the men" border -Or - and I think I'll go with this option - blue with swathes of stripey and checked fabric (like in men's traditional clothing). Nearly 400" of this border is needed.
To get back to the dragon side - here are the new blue border and "ladies" border, and at the bottom is a pieced strip I made at the outset of the project - but what will go in between?
First round - 1" wide when it's finished - will be red -292" of it are needed -
The mostly-blue fabrics will go down the sides on the dragon side of the quilt. My stock of japanese fabrics is definitely dwindling. One of the objectives of this quilt is to use them up!
Part of the fun of this project is the ingenuity needed, and the many possibilities and surprises along the way. On the downside, so much thinking and planning is required (have I said this before?) that progress is slow - and with a deadline looming, and a couple of other big (work-related) projects on the go, anxiety is replacing pleasure....

I suspect this will be my last large quilt - much as I like the continuity of the project, and the struggle to reach the goal, and the impromptu method ... the logistics (and long, long seams) (with more to come!) are daunting.

Another border on "the dragon quilt"

To get an idea for the bit that goes over the pillow on the pieced side, I looked in the big fat Quilt National book - the diagonal lines in this quilt set off a train of thought. (Of course I had to look through the whole book, such a pleasure, and mused on how my favourites have changed over the years - and how fresh and original some of the old ones - 1995, 1997 - still look.)Once the big blocks of a busy print had strips of red print inserted at an angle, the next question was, how to make them into a "panel" - I decided to use chunks of various blue fabrics, rather than using the same fabric for each. But before that could be sewn, the bits in between had to be decided. This quilt is a matter of planning several steps ahead - different plans for different contingencies - and then doing something slightly different and having to replan all the next steps. Which is quite fun, but prolongs the process.

Red and grey for the "uprights" didn't look right (what was I thinking, so much solid colour?) -More blue looked better -
But what about using the extra stripey pieced strip as uprights, rather than as an extra bit of border -
The little problem is that the bit of border was going to be used to buffer the "noh actors" fabric that will form the sides -
Does it look so bad without it, though? (Yes, it does...)
Seeing the photos all together and away from the quilt is helpful. I'll sleep on it and decide what to do in the morning.

Flip side

For the past couple of days I've been spending hours and hours on the dragon quilt. Progress is very slow, but I love being able to listen to the radio all day while sewing.

The double-sided nature of the beast means taking care at every step. One seam I had to re-do yesterday, down one side, took an hour - rip and pin and check and repin; sew and check and rip again... Even so the fabric on the other side needed some adjustment, and basting together before it could be machine quilted.

Mostly the borders go on in "sew and flip" style, making a line of quilting on the other side. It's especially complicated as I'm changing The Grand Plan all the time, after seeing the results when the border is actually on.

At the end of the week, the wide borders on the pieced side are on, and the border before that has been quilted -The fabric with the Noh actors is quite different from the pieced top - it might need some integration with a bit of applique - which will take a while to plan and execute, before borders on the other side go on, supplying quilting for this border -
There wasn't enough "men" fabric for a top border, so I'll be using these in combination - and in big pieces -
The stripey strip below them was left over from the previous piecing, and might go on after the red&blue fabrics, rather than before - I'll decide once the red&blue have been pieced.

A closer look at the quilting over the stripey border on the pieced side -
Really it fits into the borders on the dragon side. As for the quilting line on the pale border, which is how the "men" fabric is attached on the other side - I'm not bothered about the inconsistent width on different borders; it's much more important that the line is straight within each strip. That took a lot of pinning and checking!
From the amount of batting that's visible, you can imagine how many rounds of strips will be going on this side.

Some progress on the japanese quilt

It would be nice to stop at this point, leave it as a lap quilt - fold over the border from the back, add a bit more quilting, and move on to another project.... On the other hand, I have a heap of japanese fabric that needs using, AND this is meant to be a double-bed size quilt. So, on we go, adding more borders...After a leisurely day doing little but sewing, it has two new borders - the red one, and squares of dragon fabric around the big dragon - and I've also sewn more wadding around the four sides, to the desired finished size.
On the other side, a plethora of piecing. It's quilt-as-you-go, virtually invisible on this side -
After another plain round - or two - "the ladies" will go down the sides and across the bottom -
One blue strip, or two...? Or, a paler fabric near the dragon squares ...?
Decisions, decisions! But that's the fun of it, making it grow, building on what's there.

I'm enjoying sitting on the floor to sew, but using the stop-go button rather than the foot pedal definitely feels a bit scary!

Yesterday in the studio

A parcel was due to be delivered - this book, which I ordered from the US just over a week ago, after blogging about Hedi Kyle's blizzard book. I found out about the Festschrift from one of the websites encountered while researching the link to her work - and when it came I thumbed through from middle to end and beginning to middle. What an interesting mix of ideas it contains -
The little red book was a little black, cheap, convenient academic year diary that cried out for a cheerier cover. While clearing up the studio (CUTS) and waiting for the post, I found a bag of leather scraps and crudely glued a red chunk over the black plastic cover. It's hardly fine binding, but when it gets tatty I can simply re-cover it.

CUTS also turned up these strokable pieces from Karina Thompson's workshop at the CQ summer school last year - if time permits (or the mood strikes me), I'll add some fabric (wool?) round the edges and make them into cushion covers ... yet another project... -
Also seeing the light of day was "Searchlights", a small piece made for a regional day challenge, way back when. It's hand pieced over papers (one piece of paper cut up, carefully labelled to help with the putting back together) and is about 18" tall. I still like the idea but can quite understand that people might find it "enigmatic" or even "baffling". Maybe one day it will become a book cover? -
What to do with my headless Korean costumes - they use my first-ever microwave dyes, which Ann D showed me how to do - many subtle colours due to overdyeing. I also made some with tall collars that look (slightly) less odd. Perhaps they can be pincushions, or would that be too voodoo?
CUTS included much sorting through papers - like these leaflets left after a visit to Barcelona several years ago - I can recommend the maritime museum, Palau Musica, Miro Foundation, Pedralbes monastery with part of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, romanesque art at the Catalan art museum, the Picasso museum - lots to see. Also the science museum, way up Tibidabo hill, is excellent, as is the aquarium.
How easy it is to get sidetracked...

While the studio is being rejuvenated, I've set up a sewing machine and laid out the project in the front bedroom -
It's the japanese quilt, and in between bouts of CUTS for a change of pace I'll be working japanese style - pretty close to the floor, or maybe even on the floor.

Next project

This was started about five years ago and was meant to be ready for my son's 30th birthday.

How time flies....

It currently measures 74" x 51" and hopes to get to double bed size, in a sort of quilt-as-you-go fashion. We decided to put oblong blocks of various dragon fabrics as the next round. On the back of the central area is a painted dragon, which is already quilted; around it will go some plain fabric and then oblong blocks of the "ladies", then more plain fabric. On the front, after the dragons, the subsequent round will be more of the stripey border, and then some wave-pattern fabric, which I hope to find at FOQ. It would be marvellous, nay miraculous, if the quilt was that far along, a month from now!