Iris quilt 3: putting it all together

Okay, so when I left it last time I had all the leaves and sky background sewn together, and the flowers were pieced. It’s time to start putting the whole thing together at last.

Holes in my piecing

One of the most difficult parts of this quilt was getting all of the individually pieced sections put together. There were 5-6 sections that I pieced first, and getting them together and aligning all the seams and flowers was more of an art than a science, definitely.

After I got it all pinned out on the foam, I placed the flowers temporarily to make sure everything was going to work out. It was a bit weird to see the quilt with holes in it where pieces looked like they ought to be.  I discovered during this audit that I needed to add in extra pieces here and there, and I had to rip some more seams since I was having problems with some leaves not lining up between the sections. Plus I discovered two problems where my original pattern had sort of gone awry because I’d colored it wrong and therefore used the wrong fabric – big d’oh! Still, it went together almost like I wanted it to.

I spent two nights fixing problems that appeared so that everything lined up and my flowers would fit. You can see this does-it-fit process below.

But eventually all the problems were fixed, the leaf and sky pieces were all pieced, and the flowers were pieced together. It was time to finish up the pieces prior to getting on with the embroidery.  In order to finish putting it together I had to stabilize the pieces.

Stabilizing & Applique

This quilt when it’s done will be four layers: quilt top, linen, felt, linen. The first thing I did when the piecing was done was to baste the quilt top to a piece of linen with my favorite quilt basting spray (it’s re-positionable and not permanent). This stabilized the top layer so I could applique the flowers, and made it all nice and flat and less slippery.

For the flowers, I turned all the raw edges under to create a narrow seam and hand-basted them (you can see it below – right alongside one of the 400 episodes of The Closer I watched while doing this project!). Then I pressed the seams down so they’d stay put. Then I stuck some small pieces of Steam-A-Seam under the middle of each flower and placed the flowers appropriately on the top of the quilt, covering each hole in the piecing. Then I ironed each of the flowers, thereby permanently fusing the flowers to the linen underneath the quilt top.

After getting it all in place, I appliqued all the flowers on by hand using iiittty biiittty tiny stitches around the edges. Luckily, about the time I finished that my mother was actually around, so I could show it to her!! She thought that they were irises immediately, which was extremely gratifying.

The last stage (which I am currently working on) is using my typical quilting/embroidering process to give the thing proper quilting texture and fuse the four layers properly. I’ve started and nearly done with the leaves and stems, and lastly will quilt/embroider the flowers. Finally after that comes the border! I suppose I have another week or so of work to finish it up.

Whew. I’ll photo up the project when it’s done and post more about it. Hopefully with some decent lighting! Let me know what you think of it so far if you’ve managed to read all the way through all this nattering on!

Iris quilt 2: fabric piecing technique

So in Part 1 I talked about making the pattern, the next step is cutting and sewing the fabric. If the sketching and template took about a week, this took about 2, then another week for the flowers and applique. Finally, it will take about 2 weeks to finish the quilting/embroidery. That’s working a couple hours each night and then putting in about 8 hours over the weekends.

Steam-A-Seam to the Rescue

As you can imagine, cutting tiny irregular pieces was a bit of a trick. It took me a few attempts before I figured out a good technique to get the pattern pieces reliably affixed to the fabric so I could cut it out with seam allowances.  The pattern pieces are so small that you can’t use pins or it just totally distorts the shapes. Plus silk is slippery, so it’s not like friction was going to help me.

Steam-a-Seam to the rescue! This product is essentially re-positionable sheets of tape. It’s sticky on both sides (but not really sticky or sticky enough to damage fabric) and if you apply a hot iron, it will bond permanently to your fabric. But I was only interested in the re-positionable aspect, not the heat-bonding aspect. What I figured out to do was to:

• Place the paper pattern piece onto the sticky paper;
• Cut out the pattern from the sticky paper, adding 1/4″ seam allowances all the way around as you go (see picture below);
• Place the new pattern+seam allowances template on the fabric (using the other sticky side) and cut around it.

BAM! The sticky paper stuff temporarily sticks the pattern pieces to the fabric. This allows the slithery fabric to stable while being cut, and also holds the pattern piece in place while the fabric is being cut. Also, since the sticky paper is translucent, after the fabric is cut out I can see what the piece looks like with and without seam allowances. Below is a line of [cut-out fabric + translucent sticky + pattern pieces] on top. You can see the seam allowances, and you can see that I marked the order in which I needed to sew the pieces together right on the pattern from right to left.

When sewing, I just removed the sticky and paper pattern pieces and pinned the two pieces of fabric together as the pattern pieces indicated. I would stick the two pattern pieces together on the wall next to me (another benefit of sticky paper) so I could see how the seam allowances interacted before I sewed. Since the sticky part was transparent, it made it much easier to see how the seam allowances + pattern interacted and I was able to (mostly) sew everything quite precisely the first time around.

Sewing the Seams

After I finished a section, I’d color it in on my “progress meter” sketch. Below is the bottom right section after I completed it, and to the left is the sketch showing that section completed. I was super pleased it was actually looking like it was supposed to. The seams were small, the pieces were small, and because of that it was impossible to really know before I started what it would turn out like.

I had a lot of trouble sometimes getting everything in its proper place. I was really careful with seam allowances, but I had to rip out seams sometimes. You can only be so careful, I suppose. I sewed the whole thing in five or six sections first, (one section shown above), and then eventually pieced the sections together. Determining the order in which to sew was tricky, but very important given the irregular shapes.

Below is another example of some piecing I did, this time on a flower. Despite my sticky-paper method, I actually had to rip out that seam twice and redo it because I wasn’t satisfied with the placement of the pieces. Talk about your picky details! It was a really hard seam to sew. It would just NOT LIE FLAT.

Next up: what does the thing actually look like?  I’ve shown you a lot of in-progress, so next up I guess it’s time to show how it came together.

Iris quilt: creating the quilt puzzle pt. 1

Last time I talked a little about the iris quilt that I’ve been making for my mom. Since I wasn’t able to talk about it while I was working on it, I thought I’d make a couple of posts walking you through the steps I took in the couple of weeks it took me to do this.

Inspiration

I posted a bit about it last time, but here is the stained glass iris that was the inspiration for this quilt. It hangs in a window on one of my regular walking routes, and I thought it would make a good quilt, just looking at the way that things were broken up into small pieces.

Sketching

This quilt involved a lot of sketching. If you look at what I have now you can see that I took the idea of the stained glass window and interpreted it, and made my own version of the size I preferred. So the final sketch below was about the 20th version, I believe. There were drafts, different sizes, tracings, and  there were many discards. It started out as a rough sketch and evolved into what you see below.

Finally, there was a finished design. I made five duplicates of the final design:  one for a “progress bar,” one for a guide, one to keep, one to cut up into pattern pieces, and one just in case. I colored two of my sketches so that I could check if to see that all of my leaves were contiguous, and that the stems connected to other stems, etc. No point in having a leaf if it randomly disappears into thin air, right? This might be a somewhat abstract take on an iris, but it should have some realism, right? Plus the coloring helped me determine what fabrics I wanted for the various pieces.

The image below indicates what happens to the finished sketch when it’s being prepared to be turned into a template. Each piece got marked with a code indicating which fabric it would be cut out of. I had a stack of fabrics from my silk kimono collection that all corresponded to a “P” or “P2″ or “G3″. There were really only three colors in the quilt, but I used four or five greens, two off-whites, and four or five purples. Plus the good thing about the kimono fabrics is that some are reversible, and so I used that as well to indicate the back/front of leaves.

The template

It took a long time to cut this up into its component pieces. I cut apart small sections at a time and then immediately pinned the pieces back in their correct configuration on a piece of foam. I referred to my guide sketch a lot in order to get everything back in the right order. Once you have fourteen fourteen individual paper strips in front of you, it’s hard to tell what goes where.

But at last it was done. I left the flowers in one piece. My plan was to piece everything together excepting the flowers, and then piece them afterward and applique them to the background. In the meantime I left the flower patterns uncut so that I could test their positioning on the fabric as I sewed it together. Here’s the final pattern (which, incidentally, due to sewing issues, does not entirely match the final quilt!).

OK, I think that’s enough for this time. There was a lot of work to do in drafting this, as you can see, before I ever got to the fabric part of the quilt.