Lisa Call

I finished the quilt top this afternoon. The quilt construction gods were smiling and it came together with few problems and I’m quite pleased with the final results. It ended up 63″ x 47″ and now goes in the pile of tops awaiting quilting.

The colors in this picture are probably the most accurate of the 4. I only did quick photoshop adjustments for these pictures so they are all different depending on the time of day and number of lights on in my studio. House lights definitely throw off the color of my digital images so I have started taking my final photographs outside to avoid such problems.

Structures #46 © 2005 – top completed

I’ve been working on sewing the quilt together. The first step is to sew all of the strips into the background pieces. In the photo this is 90% complete – the wider looking strips are not yet sewn in.

Next the blocks are sewn together. This is tricky because it’s not simple straight line piecing abd it takes a while to work out what order to sew everything together. Sometimes I can’t complete sewing the strips into a block until the section is attached to its neighbors. The lower green square is an example of this where I’ve sewing most of the vertical strips into the piece but I won’t sew in the horizontal strips until later.

In the photo the left hand side is mostly pieced together. The center is the hardest part as it has to fit so the entire top comes together as planned. This is the part that I am most likely to mess up either sewing or cutting and the piece turns out differently than I wanted it to. Which is probably why I’m taking a break to post a picture. Need to stop and ponder how to complete it.

Structures #46 – In Progress

Next step is to add the bars to the background areas – this forms my motif, which is based on a fence and looks very similar to an E. In this quilt I’ve added extra lines to the E shape and it will look a little different in each of the blocks.

After the quilt is sewn together the bars will be narrower as a portion of the fabric is turned under in the seams between fabric. Getting proportions just right is difficult because the finished size of a piece of fabric changes between cutting and sewing. The more I do this the better I get at accounting for the half inch of fabric difference. But it is a skill I’m continually working on.

Structures #46 – In Progress

I haven’t spend much time in the studio the past few months. It was time to get back to work so I began a new quilt today. This picture shows how I start a quilt similar to Structures #32 by blocking out approximate sizes of the background fabrics on my design wall. This quilt will be about 5′ x 4′ when finished.

The start of Structures #46