Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Brown Planet Rising



If you've been to my blog before this may look familiar. I blogged about it about six months ago here. Kathy Loomis, a world class quilter had started this in a Nancy Crow workshop and never finished it. She blogged about it here. To get all the information, please go back to both links and see what happened. To make a long story short, Kathy sent me her quilt to finish. I don't have to follow her plan exactly, but I just have to finish it and then the quilt will be mine and it will be a collaboration. I have been so busy with this and that and traveling, so I am just getting to it now.


This is what Kathy's quilt looked like when I got it, loosely pinned to a sheet and spread out on the floor. Kathy had told me that it was 8 feet wide by 4 feet high, very large by my standards.



This is the picture that Kathy had taken while it was still on the wall at the Nancy Crow workshop.


This is what it looks like now on my planning wall. My original plan was to pin that sheet on which it came to my planning wall. That did not work at all. First of all my planning wall is only 7 1/2 feet wide, not eight, as I had thought. Second, the quilt is larger that 8 feet wide, more like 8 1/2. So I spread the sheet out on my work table and transferred the pieces onto my planning wall. But first I had to cut down the size of the semi-circle to fit on my wall. In making it smaller I had to eliminate a few of the big pieces, rearrange some pieces and cut a few new ones, but I think you will agree that it has the same feeling as the original. All those white spaces in between will be cream colored fabric.

The very top two rows were pieced together by Kathy, as were all the little pieced sections. I have a lot of piecing left to do, all the dark sections of fine piecing in the left side of the planet and all the light colored fine piecing sections in the whole background and the rest of the planet. My latest quilts are almost always made with my hand dyed fabrics and I thought that I could mix them in with the solid cottons, but realized that that wouldn't work. So I sent away for a lot of Kona cottons, trying to match Kathy's colors. I did get a lot of good matches, but have about 8 half yard pieces that won't do.

The fine pieced sections are just randomly placed up so that I can gauge how many more I have to do. I may even make the dark small piecing section a little smaller, I'll decide when I start sewing.

This will take me awhile to complete, especially since I will be away for the month of March in sunny Florida. But I will post periodically as I progress.

I'm already thinking ahead about how to quilt it and I have some good ideas. I'm also thinking that since this is such a big piece, in my eyes, that I may make it into a triptych. But I'm a long way from that.

Please check back now and then to see what I'm doing.





4 comments:

kathy loomis said...

Norma -- I heartily approve! you're making good progress and I'm so glad I sent B.P. to you

Norma Schlager said...

Thank, Kathy. I'm gad that you approve. Although In looking at the photo, I already see some things that need changing. Isn't it funny how things can look so different in a photograph? That orangish brown piece in the lower middle jumps out at me, although it does not in person. I may replace that with a tamer brown.

Martha Ginn said...

I remember seeing this earlier. What an interesting project to pick up midstream and complete! I'll be eager to see how you proceed with it.
Martha Ginn

Linda M said...

I can't wait to see what you do to this. I like the reddish brown addition.