Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Triangles and hexagons

It looks like winter might be on the way out. A few days ago I took this picture of the first snowdrops in the melting snow. I also found out, that the ground is still very wet!!!Years ago I planted some in a protected area, close to the driving shed.And every year they are the first to bloom.


Back to quilting. I have alway admired the quilts made by Kitty Pippen. I have browsed through her book Quilting with Japanese Fabric and decided that it was time to make use of my very limited stash of old oriental fabric. I specifically liked the quilts with equilateral triangles. After a good look I put the book away and started on my own.I made myself 2 rules: the quilt had to be at least 40 by 40 inches and I could only use the fabric I had on hand. The last meant some creative cutting, but I managed. The first step was to find equilateral graph paper, that I could download. I still did not get it, so I cut every piece out of paper and put it on my design wall. Next step was to cut all the pieces and hand baste them on paper, the old English way. The triangles are 71/2, 5 and 21/2 inches and the sides of the hexagonds are also 21/2 inches. The fabric I used are 2 small pieces of kimono silk and a dark blue batik with irisses for the large triangles, 3 small pieces of katazome for the medium ones and a Chinese shibori for the small triangles


The fabric of the hexagons is a plain indigo blue cotton, used for sashiko. I'm using a Dover book :Japanese Design Motifs for the crest designs. Since this book has over 4000 different ones I have no worry about ever running out of designs. The last picture shows you a small piece, that is ready to be whip stitched together, also done by hand.

2 comments:

  1. I really like what you have done here.

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  2. This is beautiful. I would like to do something like this with my Japanese fabrics, but can't do paper piecing. I'll just admire.

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