Falling Mountain

After Becky's Herringbone Quilt, I finally had a quilt which had been actually designed before I
began sewing and which used bought fabrics.  It was another milestone in my quilting career.  While I was making her quilt, I was busy thinking about what to do next.  I'm always several projects behind because I'm constantly jotting ideas in my notebook.


I suppose it would be good to mention my notebook.  I highly recommend that you buy some kind of book to document your creations as well as your ideas.  I also write down specific machine settings that might come in handy later.  My book is both a functional notebook and also a show-off book.  I can use it to easily show someone photos of things that I've made.  I also use it when I go fabric shopping.  I can show the concept to someone at the LQS so that they understand what I'm trying to accomplish as they help me choose fabric.  It's the hub of all my quilting information.  Give it some thought, you might like having it on hand.  Now that I think about it, it's sort of like a blog on paper.  I'm an old guy; I like paper.

An Example from My Notebook

Notes on the Virgin Quilt

The Diagram of William's Quilt

I both draw in my notebook and glue things into it.  Thanks again Mr. Elmer.  These three photos show the kinds of things that I put in my book.

But, I digress...

Becky is my youngest child; she is also the prettiest.  The other two are boys.  Not pretty at all.  Handsome, though: they take after me.

My middle child is Caleb.

Naturally, I thought that I should make a quilt for him and for my eldest child: John.  I chose to think about Caleb's quilt first, though.

John would take more thought.

I asked Caleb what kind of a quilt he would like, but he wouldn't look at online pics of quilts to help me out.  I just couldn't understand why a fellow living at a dorm in college couldn't find time to do quilt research.  I suspect that he was under the influence most of the time.  Turns out that I was right.  Her name is Kaci.

O.K. I'll spot him that one.  What boy wouldn't be infatuated with such a prize as Kaci.  They got married this past weekend.  After the service, she called me "Dad."  So, I guess him being busier with her than he was with quilt research wasn't so bad after all.



Caleb & Kaci Graduate



Caleb & Kaci Marry

So, after lots of cajoling, I finally got some guidance.  He said that he liked orange.  That was my starting point.  Orange.

I don't even like orange.

For the college football illiterate, I'll now inform you that Tennessee and Texas both have orange as their colors.  I'm not kidding.  Of all the colors in the world, they choose orange.  I would think that that bit of information is really about all we need to know about those two schools.

So there I was.  My offspring, the fruit of my loin, requested that I use orange in a quilt.  What a putz.

Then, I had a different thought: what if I took the challenge to make something orange look good?  Now THAT would be an accomplishment!  Everyone would then say, "Wow, that guy is amazing!  He can even make orange look good!"

Ha!  Now I was in the right frame of mind.  I'd show him... nay... I'd show the world my particular genius.

About this time, I learned about bargello quilts.  I was infatuated and began to think about what I could do with a orange-based bargello design, but I couldn't come up with a satisfactory design.

As you may be gleaning, I design my own quilts.  It still surprises me that so many people like to replicate the designs of someone else.  I'm not being critical, it's just not something that I understand.  There are lots of things that I don't understand.  Hillary's popularity, for instance.

"So fine, and yet so terrible, to stand in front of a blank canvass."

Paul Cezanne

As one of the great artists of all time, ol' Paul was onto something.  I don't know how he solved the problem.  As for me, a somewhat lesser artist, I solve it by making a mark and going from there.  I find that, if I don't start, I never finish.  Perhaps my approach is simplistic, and it's certain that I'll never be famous, but, it's also true that my country-boy system works.


I think that, in the interest of fairness, I should admit that I can't draw.  You don't need to be able to draw to design a quilt.  If that were true, I couldn't design anything at all.

If you don't design your own quilts, I feel like I want to recommend that you try it.  I think that you'll have fun.  It's not hard to do, actually.

I think that one misconception about design is that the full design is apparent to the designer all at once.  Although this has happened to me once, it usually doesn't go that way at all.  Usually, it's a process.

Maybe it would be an interesting idea to walk through how I came up with the Falling Mountain design.  I was just kidding above: it's not genius at all.  It's just playing.

One night I was watching television and saw a Target commercial.  That's where the design began.  I drew it in my notebook right then.

Initial Inspiration

The Diamond Concept

The Third  Color

This was on a lampshade on a Target commercial.  If it's not exact, forgive me, but it was at least something like this.

I liked the idea that this looked interwoven and I began to think about perhaps creating something that looked woven.

Then I thought about changing the shape from a square to a diamond.

Next, I was inspired to see what adding another color to this design might do.

I didn't really care for any of these.  Although, you can see in the second two that I was thinking about how to make the design a hillside with it's "rocks" falling off of it.  I wish that idea was my own, but I actually found it when looking at quilt porn online.

Falling Hillside Inspiration

Then, it all came to me in a rush.  I noticed that the diamond was the shape of one side of a tumbling block, and I realized that I could make the things falling off of the mountain be either whole blocks or pieces of blocks.

I found some isometric paper online, printed it, bought some coloring pencils, and started drawing.  You can find isometric paper here or here.

Honestly, I just started drawing to see what would come out.  The colors were chosen with the aid of a color wheel.  It was my firm conviction that nothing would really match orange, so I looked at a color wheel, and, what do ya know, blue is opposite orange.  The wheel said that colors opposite to each other matched.  I went with that, and, now, I had my second color.

The Final Version of The Falling Mountain

So, you see, although it did take some time to work through the process, it certainly isn't genius.  You, too, can design your own quilt.

The next step is choosing fabrics.  How to choose fabrics is beyond the scope of this post.  Also, I'm average, at best, at choosing fabrics, so you don't really want a primer from me on this subject.  That's not to say that I don't have opinions about it.  I have lots of opinions about fabric, but one must consider the source of an opinion.  I am doing the considering for you in this case and telling you that I'm not the expert.  I found my expert at my LQS, A Nimble Thimble.  Go find your own.

You can see from this notebook page which fabrics I chose.  You can also see how I begin my planning for size.  To make it come out the right size, I had to decide how big to make the blocks.  It's just a bit of math.

Then I had to decide how to make the blocks.  There are, at least as far as I know, two main methods to make blocks: whole blocks or strip blocks.  I chose the strip method.

I read up on how to make strip tumbling blocks and watched a number of YouTube videos.  I made notes in my book so that I'd know how to make the strips the correct size for any size block that I might want in the future.  Also, I made some test blocks out of paper so I could see the real-life size of a block.

These are some pages from my notebook.  See how handy having a book is?

Now that I had worked out the technique that I was going to use and the size of the blocks, I had to begin cutting fabric.  Ugh.  Not my favorite part of sewing.  It's important to get right, though, so, if you're not very good at cutting, look it up on YouTube and practice, practice, practice.  Rotary cutters and mats are the way to go.

There are a lot of seams in this quilt, so it's slow going for a while.  There are no free lunches though.  Anything worthwhile isn't free.  Put the work into your creation.  Never be afraid of a technical challenge, just figure it out.  The information is out there, to that I can attest.  Otherwise, how else would I have figured it out?

I used a design wall to track my progress and keep up with all the strips.  See the little paper tags at the bottom of each row?  I pinned the number of each row at the bottom to keep track of it all.  Again, it's not exactly genius to know that it would get confusing without numbering everything.

If you look closely at the bottom right hand of the mountain, you'll see that there are some pieces of blocks stacked at the bottom.  Here's the picture from my notebook zoomed in to that section:

I now had the challenge of how to make this turn out like I wanted.  I wanted each piece of a block to be the correct size, and I still wanted to keep the strip construction intact for continuity.  I had been watching some videos about paper piecing, so I made the paper piecing templates (or whatever they're called) and paper pieced the sections of the strips that had the stacked pieces in them.  Then it was a simple matter to sew these into the strips and then sew the strips together.

 

Here is that section of the quilt once I got it all put together.  It took some time, but, it is what it is.  Besides that, I learned a new technique that I'll be able to apply to another design when the need arises.

I made another border with a stripe.  I'm getting to like the stripe.  In this case, I think it adds a lot to the piece because all of the open space at the top right benefits from the definition that the stripe provides.

Again, I quilted this on my Bernina 830.
 
Quit wasting time reading blogs already and go build a quilt yourself.

Read all of mine though.

In fact, leave your email address at the top or bottom of this page so you can follow along with me.  You can be notified of each new post.  Won't that be exciting?  That's rhetorical... Of course, it will.

Besides, my knucklehead moved away to Colorado.  A fellow can't have too many friends.  Follow me for the greater good of mankind.


TheCurmudgeon