Here are two new quilts I just posted for sale, both are mosaic in design. The PURPLE TEAL MOSAIC ART QUILT is my first effort at creating a mosaic on the diagonal and I really like it! I usually make mosaic quilts with more varied size pieces and rarely am I concerned with the pieces having 90 degree corners for the squares or rectangles. You can see the variation I’m talking about in the second quilt picture below, the multi mosaic art quilt 3. But back to the purple quilt….the focus on the diagonal seemed to be enhanced with true squares and rectangles. Mosaics are such fun because you don’t have to decide on a specific group of fabrics beyond the general colors involved. Out come all the scrap boxes and I get to dig around for pieces of every fabric in those colors, in this case, purples and teals. Inevitably I think I need more so off to the fabric store to buy a few more fabrics! After cutting out a variety of sizes of squares and rectangles in A LOT of different fabrics, I play flannel board on my design wall and place them and re-place them until I get the design and colors right. I’m not a straight line kind of designer so some creative problem solving is needed to sew it all together. I will try to take pictures for a future blog about how I do this. I sew sections of pieces into bigger blocks and then the larger section blocks go together. This is the part of quilting that keeps the problem solving sections of the brain working!! After it is all together and squared up to a finished wall quilt, I machine quilted in a random straight line following the diagonal of the piecing using both purple and teal thread. Selecting the design of the quilt stitching is as important as the design of the quilt for me.
The second new quilt I posted for sale is the MULTI MOSAIC ART QUILT 3, so numbered as it is the third quilt in this design though with slightly different colors than the previous two. You can see in this quilt that the pieces are not necessarily square though they do all have 4 sides. Again I start with a variety of fabrics in the colors I want to include, then piece it on my design wall. I read in a quilt design book that you should always stand back at least 10 feet from your design wall before finalizing a design. I do that and I also take a picture with my ipad. The picture provides a different perspective on how the colors blend, or don’t blend and need re-worked! I will often leave a quilt in its pieced state on my design wall for a day or two, looking and relooking at it before I sew it together. It is important that the colors work just the way I want. It is important that the quilt speaks to me when I walk into the room.