Thursday, November 6, 2014

Modern Christmas



Yes, Yes! I have started (and almost finished) another quilt.  No, no I haven't finished all the others, but I will. I am calling this newest quilt Modern Christmas. It is modern looking, but in truth it is an old traditional pattern called the Drunkard's Path.  I absolutely love the fabric because it is Christmas in theme but not typical. Right now I think I am going through a kind of quilting rebellion.  I have been moving pretty far away from my usual color choices and patterns.  Bring it on! Of course that means I am branching out, trying new things, starting new techniques, buying more fabric, and just loving all the new style quilts I am producing these days.  
And I am even piecing the backs!  I bought one yard of the Gray Leaf and Red Holly Berry fabric.  I bought one and a half yards of the pine cone, tree, snowflake, music score fabric.  If I was given only one thought to describe what I love most about this holiday season, aside from celebrating the birth of our dear Savior, it would be the sight and smell of snow and pine trees and hearing choirs singing Christmas music.  Well that's two; and adding three, is family together. 


You can stop here or read on for my sewing this quilt story.    

At the Quilt Show last week I purchased the Curve Master presser foot. 
 And on Sunday afternoon I played around with this foot and with this fabric.  
And oh my, I have a lot to learn when it come to cutting out the Drunkard's Path shapes and stitching them with that foot.  But really these pictures exaggerate how bad I did.  I got the hang of it pretty fast.  While sewing I used the internet to hone my skills and found this tutorial and was totally liberated and confident with my new skills.   Gone Aussie Quilting has this FANTASTIC tutorial and look at how she made those clamshells out of the Drunkard's Path.  Now there is another quilt on my list to make.  She said if the ends don't match, cut the block down a size!  Who care's???  My thought exactly.  And from then on I made those patches and cut them all down because maybe only one or two matched on both ends.  And that resulted in all those pretty patches.


And now that I have my Juki sewing machine, it comes with a foot that can basically be used the same way as the Curve Master foot. I made the remaining blocks with the Juki foot and the results are comparable.  
     
 I have been researching machine quilting snowflakes.  I want to quilt snowflakes in each circle. 

I hope you like my quilt....there are literally dozens of ways to twist and turn these patches into all kinds of settings to produce dozens of quilts.  I played around with many of them and decided I was just happy with the circles.  Plus that yard of fabric only went so far and I was not going to buy more.  And also I wanted to keep the quilt smallish and be able to finish it in a day or two because I have gone and bought some more fabric to start ANOTHER quilt! Yippee!
  

Here I go all modern! 

I am linking to Works in Progress Wednesday over at Esther's blog 
and over at Quilt Story Fabric Tuesday and over at Vicki Welsh's Drunkard Path Quilt Along . It is her quilt along that inspired me to give the Drunkard Path a try.  
Linking up to Live a Colorful Life  

 Thanks for stopping by!

3 comments:

  1. Haha! I had to cut down my blocks by 1/4 inch to make them work and I'm the only one that will know when it's done! Yours is nice and it looks like you're learning lots.

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  2. Hey, it looks like your branching out into something new resulted in a good thing! Congrats on trying something new. I haven't found the little curves on my little blocks to be much of a problem. No cutting machine or curve master here! I like your color/fabric choices.

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  3. I really like this line of fabric, subtle and elegant. As far as curved piecing, I have not been able to the master the Curve Master foot. The most helpful tutorial I found was a video from verykerryberry. I think it is worth checking out. It helped me tremendously!

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