Bobs Craft Projects: Color Wheel Quilt

9/12/2013

I saw a quilt at a local quilt store..it looked interesting, I took a pic of it..and then forgot about it for a while until my brain stewed out what I wanted to do. Late last year, when I ordered the fabric for the backings for the granddaughter quilts, a mixup happened with the fabric store..and I ended up with getting a good deal on future fabric. Last February, I ordered a few 10 inch square charm packs and some 5 inch charm packs..think they have different names...but we will go with that...;-)..

The design calls for topstitching a five inch square in the middle of a ten inch square, then cuttting the 10 inch square into four five inch squares. Rearrange the squares and sew them all back together in a pleasing pattern.

A freiend of mine has a fabric cutting machine that is awesome to play with. He brought it over and for the next few weeks, I cut all of my stash of extra fabric into ten inch blocks and five inch blocks.

I decided that I am going to make a king size quilt for our bed. It will require 144 blocks of the ten inch variety..but with blocking them down, etc, they will be 9 inch blocks. Since I had so many colors, I stewed over the combinations and have decided to work with the color wheel. I am including sections that each primary and secondary color will have a focus on the blanket and that I will use black in the center.

As I finish more sections, I will include pics...but for now..I will show pics of the inspiration..and the pamphlet that gives basic instructions.

The inspiration:

The Pattern Basics

The color palette I am working with:

Left side: Purple, Yellow, Green Right side: Blue, Red, Orange

I decided that whatever the main color of the ten inch block, I would try and put the opposite color on the color wheel as the five inch block. I also decided that the thread to topstitch with would be the color of the five inch block. ie: the green blocks have red as the center block sewn with red thread. I also decided to do the topstitch in a blanket stitch.

I then had to decide how I wanted to mix and match.

Here is the Master Plan:

I divided the colors into patterns and then began matching up colors to form a ten inch block. In the pic above, the first box in the upper left corner will have black, red, yellow, blue in the block. I will be putting together 7 blocks with that color combination.

The following are samples of how I have combined colors and just an idea for putting them together.

I like the pattern I see in the various blocks as I sew them...but will not sew them into a larger block until I have laid them all out to see the overall affect.

9/15/2013

Ok..today, I finished Sections 6 and 7.

Section 6 had three blocks of colors, Orange, Purple, Purple, Green

Section 7 had two blocks of colors, Blue, Orange, Orange, Green

I removed the pics I had here because I have totally rearranged the colors and am sewing them into blocks.

10/7/2013

Was able to work on the blocks again tonight...

I got quite a bit done tonight. I was looking at my pattern layout that I want to do and realized it won't work. So as I was watching tv, I began drawing in my book again. Think I have a couple to pick from for the final choice.

10/11/2013

I finally finished all of the smaller blocks last night. I spent the evening arranging the blocks to see how I liked them. In playing with them, I saw that putting them into color patterns would give me the most bang for my dollar, so to speak. I started out with 6 main colors for the center and black as an accent. Using the central block color as the pattern, I separated the blocks into the colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.

I finished up blocks red and yellow today.

The blocks are as follows:

Red 1

Red 2

Red 3

Red 4

Red 5

Red 6

Yellow 1

Yellow 2

Yellow 3

Yellow 4

Yellow 5

Yellow 6

10/12/2013

Long day of sewing and ironing and pinning and etc..

Orange..

Green....

Blue....

Purple..

10/14/2013

Ok..laid it out on the bed..and have a plan for sewing the panels.

11/3/2013

Tomorrow, I send off the quilt top to be quilted.

Here is the top.

This will be the backing and the binding.

11/9/2013

I get nervous sending my quilts to Terri to do; not because of her, but because of the transportation to and from her. Last time I used UPS. I learned a valuable lesson of truly checking to verify the clerk has the right address on the box. It was incorrect, and luckily Terei went to the UPS office at her end after the first wrong address delivery and picked it up. This time, I used the mail system. She received it within two days. When she sent it back, it went from Vancouver to Portland, and then just disappeared. Four days later, it was checked in in San Francisco. It took about a day to get to South Seattle and less than a day to be hand delivered to my door. I was going to ask if someone put it in their car and just drove it up here, but I have it and feel wonderful to have it.

I need to trim the edges and sew the binding on to finish it up. This will be the first quilt I have completed and plan on keeping for myself.

11/22/2013

I finally sewed the last thread on the king size quilt I have been making for our bed for the past year. I learned a few things in the process.

1. I had Terri, the long-arm quilter leave the excess fabric on the blanket. Then, per something I read on line, I trimmed the outer edge down to one inch from the fabric edge. I sewed the binding on, putting raw edge to the line Terri sewed around the perimeter of the finished quilt. I measured out ⅜ inch from the line I sewed and trimmed the edge back to that.

2. Using water soluble glue, I glued the binding down on the back side, ironing it to set the glue. Glueing it down meant that I did not have to deal with pins as I tried to sew the binding in place. The first time the quilt is washed will remove the glue from the quilt.