Zag and Weave

The idea was to make a few quilt tops for charity from the vintage fabric I brought home in March.  It took forever to get this project off the ground.  Then suddenly, I have two completed tops!

The first is this zig-zag diamond quilt (which is what I'm calling it, since I can't find a name for the image I copied).  I ended up using black for the setting triangles.  I wishy-washed so many times over the blocks and the color and the design and the setting triangles.  Now that it's done?  Love it.

I picked a strip pattern because the fabric had a few discolored spots - it was either in sunlight or had gotten wet while in storage.  So cutting it in strips seemed the best way to cut around the bad spots and hide the variegation in the solid colors.  The blocks went together really easily and all the points lined up without much work!


The quilt is difficult to photograph.  The pastels wash out, especially with the black - which is not how it looks in person.  Plus I couldn't hang it off the deck like most of my quilts, so finding a good place to shoot was tough.  The first picture is with indoor light.  The second is back-lit, which shows the colors better (plus the stained glass effect looks cool).

The second quilt came about from strips I had cut at one point when trying out different patterns for the first quilt.  I had all of these white strips along with a few extra pastels.  I had been eyeballing a woven pattern for a while, and decided to go for it.


Again, it doesn't photograph well.  Plus, I have to admit, the color pallet is a little odd.  That shocking pink is a little more shocking than I anticipated, even sewn in as narrow strips.  The white fabric has little bits of blue and pink in it, which tie in with all the strips.  The back-lit version shows the colors the best.

The blue woven pattern was supposed to be one more row down than it is... but I got the rows mixed up the last time I spread them out before sewing it all together.  I usually take pictures of my layouts to use as a guide when I do the final piecing.  Oh, well.  It still looks good - only I will know it's not the original design!


There's a sewing group that meet up on Monday afternoons at Ryco.  They makes charity quilts.  I can't join them unless I take a day off (I may do that someday).  But when I inquired about donating quilts, I discovered they will take flimsies, then back it and quilt it on the long arm machine.  I was thrilled they'd do that - less time and effort on my part, and I'm sure they can whip them out.  I offered to take these two back after quilting to do binding.  I plan to bind the first one in black.  There's still lots of periwinkle left, so I'll bind the second one in that.

I may have one more charity quilt in the works.  Rob has several shirts that are worn out and have ripped sleeves that were repaired more than once.  The backs of them are in great shape; it seems a shame to toss them into the rag-bag.  I love the feel of the fabric (a few are worn flannel).  I think they'd make a lovely masculine quilt, with simple squares.


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