Gradient in Pixels Quilt

GRADIENT IN PIXELS QUILT

72" x 108"

Designed and made by Jamie

2004

This is the second quilt I ever made. Similar to my first, I was able to raid the fabric stash of a family member. My first quilt was made using my grandma's fabric. This quilt was made using my mom's fabric. I took a bunch of prints and a few solids, all with a country theme and cut as many 6-inch squares as I could. I used the same method of planning my quilt top as I did with my first, which was arranging the squares on the carpet at the bottom of the landing at my parents' house and walked upstairs to view it from a distance. This time I wanted to vary the colors from dark to light in a random, pixelated pattern to create a gradient. Gradients can be monochromatic, or one color, fading from dark to light. They can also be multiple colors. In this quilt, the gradient transitions from dark to light, starting with blues, browns, and reds and transitioning to yellows and whites. Here is a sample of some of the prints closer up.

Once again, I hand tied the quilt. This time I thought it would look better to have the ties blend with the quilt, so I used different colored embroidery floss for each row of the quilt. The embroidery floss followed the gradient from dark to light, as you can see in the next several photos.

I was really proud of the artistry of this quilt and how it turned out. There are still some little changes I would make if I were to redo it. One good thing I improved on from my first quilt was that I purchased fabric for the backing and pieced my backing rather than using an old sheet. However, I still bound the quilt using the method I had intuitively used on my first quilt. I layered the quilt together with the quilt top and backing facing each other, right sides touching, and the batting on top. I sewed around the perimeter, leaving a space, and turned the entire thing right side out, closing up the remaining few inches by hand. Not only is this harder, but it doesn't look quite as good as the quilts that are quilted/tied first and then bound. I learned my lesson by my fourth and fifth quilts when I took a quilt piecing class at my local quilt shop. (More on that later!)

So anyway, as you can see, the binding has a seam running around the perimeter of the quilt, and there were a few puckers along the way because of my method. One other mistake I noticed was that I sewed so close to the edge of my backing fabric, there are areas where the selvage, or finished non-fraying edge of the fabric showed through. See the white strip close to the seam? That's where the printed area of the fabric hadn't begun yet.

This quilt has held up nicely, and I still love it, even though there are a few imperfections here and there. I designed it to be extra long because I'm 5'11" and I wanted a blanket I could lounge on the couch with and it would tuck under my feet and still be able to pull up to my chin.

 My son, Mikey, was helping during the photo shoot. As a side note, you may notice some varying colors in these different photos of the same quilt. My photography skills are somewhat lacking, and I'm using my eight-year-old digital camera for all of these pictures. The gallery pictures of the quilts were a bit skewed from perspective, and I tried to correct them and square them back up in Photoshop, but they look a little crooked too. Forgive the inconsistencies as I try to improve my photography and editing. :)

Finally, I labeled this quilt with some embroidery, which is a good thing because I would have forgotten when I made it. Those are my initials for my maiden name: Jamie Beth Glenn. And if you are very clever, you may have figured out that Liz Glenn is my sister-in-law. She married my younger brother Duncan. And she rocks.

The Grandma Sue Quilt

THE GRANDMA SUE QUILT

74" x 74"

Designed and made by Jamie

1997

The first quilt I ever made came about as a suggestion from this lovely woman, Sue Stimpson. She is my maternal grandmother and I have so many fond memories of creating projects with her, from sewing to art to baking. She is a skilled oil painter too, and I think the artistic genes run in this side of the family.

This is my mother, Shawn Glenn, and me. Family resemblance, much? My mom is also crafty and artsy; she ran an impressive country wood craft pattern business from our home for about 15 years, and was the first person to sit down at a sewing machine with me and show me the ropes. I am so grateful she did!

So, back to my first quilt. On one of my many yearly summer visit to Grandma and Grandpa Stimpson's house in Wapato, WA, my grandma took me aside and told me I could make a quilt if I wanted to, with any of the fabric I could find in her sewing room. I jumped on it! As closely as I can guess, I was about 14 years old. I found a stack of fabrics I liked, pulled them out into another room and began cutting. It was so long ago, I don't even remember how I cut them. Were rotary cutters standard back then? Beats me. The fabrics I had chosen were remnants of varying sizes, so I got a different number of squares from each fabric. With a stack of assorted squares in my suitcase, I returned home to good ol' American Canyon, CA, counted up all my squares and began composing the pattern.

The squares I had the most of formed the border as well as a grid running vertically and horizontally through the center. The rest were arranged inside that grid until I was happy with the pattern. I laid them out on the carpet in my house at the bottom of the landing of our staircase, and would walk upstairs to see it from a distance. I made a lot of trips up and down those stairs during that project! If I remember correctly, I took all the rows and stacked the squares on top of each other from left to right, and carried them to the sewing machine to be sewn into rows. I then had 18 rows of 18 squares which I joined together, from top to bottom.

I had no idea about the quilting industry, the rich history of quilters and quilting, or any time-saving tricks. In fact, at this point in my teenage life, I didn't even know about machine or hand quilting. The only method of quilting I had done was tying, so that's what I used for this quilt. I also didn't know about techniques for binding my quilt. I did things a little backward on my first few attempts, relying solely on my own sewing knowledge up to that point. After piecing the top, I added some strips of my backing around the outside as a border. Next, I cut my batting to the same size, and put my backing material (an old sheet!) on top of the quilt top, right sides together. I sewed the three layers together, which wasn't easy as the batting kept getting caught on the presser foot, leaving an opening on the final edge, and then turned it inside out, like a pillow cover. I trimmed the excess batting in the seam allowance to help turn the corners, and closed the opening with some hand stitching. The border was finished off by stitching in the ditch all the way around the quilt where the border meets the pieced quilt top. And THEN, as the last step, I tied the quilt with some white yarn.

The whole idea behind this blog is to show my evolution as a quilter, so these first few quilts are a look back at my beginnings. I want to not only highlight the work I've done, but the things I would have done differently, or mistakes I made. Hopefully my trial and error can help others avoid some pitfalls as they are learning to quilt.

 Here is my overall assessment of this quilt, now looking back on it:

• PROS: 
• I liked the fabrics I chose, from what I had to work with in my grandma's sewing room.
• The color story works well with cool shades of blues, pinks, and greens
• The corners matched up quite well for my first patchwork attempt
• It served its purpose and the quilt top has held up perfectly over the past 17 years
• CONS:
• There are a few fabrics I included that have a different sheen to them (see previous two pictures) and that is a bit of an eyesore to me now
• I used a 1/2" seam allowance throughout. It was overkill and shrunk the overall dimensions of the quilt significantly compared with a 1/4" seam allowance
• I didn't know whether these were all 100% cotton, or cotton blends, and I think some of the differences in thread count/texture/stretch could have accounted for some mismatched corners in my quilt top
• Using an old sheet as a backing for my quilt was a bad move. I also don't know what type of thread I was sewing with, but I would venture to guess it was polyester thread, since that is mostly what my mom had on hand when I started sewing
• The backing has since ripped because it started off being a bit threadbare
• What started as a small tear in the backing became a gaping hole

The thread was stronger than my backing material, which tore directly along the seam line after a lot of use and several washings. Several of my yarn ties also tore free from the backing material with time and wear. If I were to make this quilt again, I would definitely use a good quality quilting cotton material for the backing, and would have done the binding differently.

All in all, a good first attempt to put in the books!