Fabric and color play....

I play with my fabric all of the time,  auditioning various prints and colors to find a combination  that just sings. I use my phone to snap photos of the process to remember what I have tried and pull back and take in the whole work.

This process was perfectly illustrated when I was working on the background of my most recent quilt, the American Foursquare....

Which do you think works better?

    

That lime green strip in the foreground brought everything to life. 

On my design wall....

I have shifted gears from knitting to working on my next quilt.  If you follow me on Instagram you have already seen a few photos of the work in progress.  It is a  commission from a colleague and it is of the historic Stutsman County Courthouse.  I blogged about and shared a few photos from a visit to the building a few years ago on a freezing day in January.
It is a grand glorious building.  Constructed in 1883 it is the oldest surviving courthouse in North Dakota.

I a just thrilled how everything is coming together.  All of the pieces are cut raw edge and fused down with wonder under.  Once all the fabric is placed and fused then I will stitch over all the edges with either a dark or light thread.  The stitching is like a scribble line and does cause frayed edges,  but I just go with it.  I like the softness and bit of messiness that the loose threads create.
The blue you seen here will be mostly cut away and the whole building stitched down to the sky fabric (once I figure out what that is going to be) 

Out to Pasture

 My latest barn quilt is complete......

Out to Pasture

It was in a local quilt show over the weekend and...

won a first place ribbon. 

The Old Barn

The Old Barn

by

Amy Munson

19" x 31"

2014

I think this is my favorite quilt I have created to date,  so many elements came together to blend into a great image.  I am particularly happy with the quilting and the sense of wind that it added to the piece. 

Fiddling

I have been working on this quilt on an off for years and would really love to see it completed. I have been messing around with photoshop to refine the foreground fabric placement and then I will add some fiber embellishment and finish it.

My next church quilt

I enjoyed creating my first prairie church quilt so much I decided it was time to start a second. The church I selected is the Bread of Life Church. Built in 1881 it is the oldest church in Bismarck. Moved in 1965, the building is now located on the State Historic Site of Camp Hancock. It is open to the public through out the summer and host a number of exhibits and events. Best of all, this is where my husband and I were married in 2005.

I am going to use a historic photo of the church for the quilt. First I scanned the photo and printed on to a sheet of paper.

I then traced the major architectural details on to a piece of transparency film and scanned it in to my computer. I will need to make a visit to the church in the next few weeks to make sure I did not leave off too many details. The old photo is a bit fuzzy and is some spots I just had to guess what was there.

And now I am cleaning up the tracing. I use the blue lines to know what I want to keep and what I want to erase. Everything will be changed to black when I am finished.

Once the pattern is cleaned up I will enlarge to size and print.

The Ladbury Church Quilt

It is finished and it really turned out fantastic. The quilt is being donated to Preservation ND yearly silent auction to raise funds for the statewide historic preservation organization.

Sky...take 3

The more I look at this the more I like the latest version of the sky for the Prairie Church. I picked up a few fat quarters thinking I would use just one for the sky. Well a fat quarter is 22"x 18" and I wanted the width of the piece to be more around 25". Whats a girl to do? Get creative. The dark blue frame adds the depth and piecing that I wanted with out being too busy and echos the architecture of the building.



What a difference my good camera makes, the colors are as close to the real thing as I could hope to capture.

Adding the details

For the smaller details on the church I decided to use fusible applique along with a Fabrico marker for the shadows. I decided to use the painted sky, but I will have to create another one as there is an ever so obvious white line on the right side that did not seem to take the dye or paint. I am also considering a few of the Bali prints to the right as the base sky fabric and then adding a bit of my own paint to achieve the sky I have in mind.
I also made a few fabric changes in the building. The foundation was done in a black, but seemed too dark and I changed that to a brown as well as some of the entry steps.


Even though I have settled on the painted sky, I wanted to see what the church looked like on the pieced background. The colors are off because my old digital camera's flash has quit working (good reason to get rid of it and use my new camera) With the pieced sky it is just too much going on...

Project Update

I have been working on the Prairie Church quilt

I created a pieced sky as well as painted a few, not sure which I will go with at this point. the walls are up and I am pleased with my fabric choices. Details such as the windows and doors will be added soon and I think I will use a fusible to create such small details. Which sky do you like?

Using what I had in my stash I attempted to gradate the pieced sky. But it seems busy. Can you believe there is not a bit of stitching on this yet and all of the seams are turned under. Glue stick is wonderful.

I think the painted sky still needs a little work to create that vast and open plains feel of the ND sky. And darn it, I attempted to adjust the color of the photos, but ended up with having both of them a little off. It is the same pieced church building in both photos.

Here is the pattern printed to the size, printed on 6 sheets of letter paper taped together.
I found these gradations of 40, 7" squares by Hoffman fabrics at my local quilt shop for about $9 and think it will solve my problems I had with my first pieced sky looking a little choppy. Liked them so much I picked up the set of greens too.

New project

I am working on a new project and it is a commission from a coworker. It will be donated to Preservation North Dakota's silent auction in May. PND is statewide historic preservation organization that has done significant work in helping rescue the prairie churches of ND. Hence my design is based on one of the churches...


I choose a church that had some nice architectural detail, but not too much and then simplified it into a line drawing.
To capture the line drawing, I used a photocopy of an actual photo of the church and followed all of the significant lines with a sharpie, this created a mirror image on the back of the paper, which I touched up the lines with the sharpie and then scanned it to my computer. With the line image now digital, I flipped the image to the correct orientation and proceeded to clean up all of the lines using MS Paint. I have Adobe Photoshop, but I have not taken the time to learn how to manipulate images quickly, MS Paint is easy and uncomplicated, not too many bells and whistles.
So now with my image cleaned up, I increased the size to about 24" x 22" and printed out on 8 pieced of letter paper. With just a little trimming of the margins, and some tape, I have the pattern ready to go.

Time to start digging through my fabric.

Landscape

I have been working on this landscape on and off for the past few weeks. Not sure if I like the direction it is taking but I am going to continue with it. I added some stitching to the tree leaves, a jagged herringbone stitch. I have also started couching down some different fibers, this is the part I am not too sure if I like, but they are easy enough to remove if I so desire. I have also been working over the grass area of the quilt. the base fabric is great for the sky but the blues in the grass area gave it a watery sandy feel, definitely not what I see out of my office window. (and now looking at the photo I see one more blue area I need to paint) I gave some thought to covering with green fabrics and dug through my stash to find every green fabric I could. But in the end I decided to paint over the blue with green and if that didn't give me the results I desired I would revisit covering the whole area. I am still undecided.

View from my office

I started this piece over a year ago and havent touched it since. I took a digital photo of the view from my window and then used that as the inspiration for the piece. The trees are just bits from my scrap bag and right everything is just tacked into place using a glue stick.

I would like to add a border and I see it with lots of free motion quilting and embroidery.