Processing my Ice Road Quilt

After 10 months of thinking about it, my Ice Road quilt finally happened. There was a show deadline looming, so I decided to get a move on and finally create a quilt to commemorate my amazing teaching trip to Canada's arctic town of Inuvik last March.  If you check that post, you'll see the pillow top that I created over that weekend to illustrate another design option for my Improv Under the Influence piecing technique.  That pillow top was the spark for this quilt.

Last year I purchased a FQ box of DS Modern Solids. I've been savouring that box on my shelf but decided to go ahead and create my quilt entirely from those gorgeous fabrics.  I initially thought that I would make 9 blocks similar to that X pillow top, sew them together with skinny white sashing and border the whole works with a 10" or 12" border of white.

As I created the triangle units other ideas popped into my head, so I held off on piecing them together until I could play on my design wall a bit. These are average night time cell phone photos, but you get the idea.

Working the the idea of "road", I tried a linear layout.  This wasn't dynamic enough. All of the joining seams are vertical so there's a lack of movement and interest. I wasn't happy with the lack of oomph (highly technical quilting term, aka "visual dynamics").

What about diagonal? I like the fun angles created at the mitred (45 degree) corners of these improv-pieced units. I played with this in my Light of May quilt.  Unfortunately B and I agreed this had a rocket-ship appearance that wasn't what I was going for.

I returned to the vertical layout, but starting filling in space with solid coloured triangles. Now we're getting somewhere, but for my eye, things were still a little haphazard.

I spent quite some time over a few days daydreaming about what I like and where my work tends to go. I think I can safely say that I enjoy the improv construction a great deal. I also seem to enjoy taming the wonkiness of improv and fitting pieces into structural layouts. Perhaps this comes from my scientific background, or my traditional quilting beginning? I don't really know, but I can say that I'm very pleased with the final outcome. Not to mention, happy that all of those triangles fit together without any math works! They were all cut from chunks of pieced border units using my giant 20 1/2" square ruler on point.

Getting closer!

I know some people thrive on the haphazard (and I thoroughly enjoy so many of those quilts!). Perhaps I am slowly working my way there, but in the mean time, this is my process and this is my quilt.

Ice Road, 2016

I quilted it on my new Juki 2010. Some of it was done with the walking foot, but when the noise got to be too much, I took it off and went with the regular sewing foot. I cannot really tell the difference in quilting quality - there was some pulling and puckering with both feet (spray and pin basted!). I stabilized the straight white sashings first with stitch in the ditch and I purposely did not cross the sashing with any quilting in order to maintain as straight lines as possible and avoid any pulling.  All of the quilting is unmarked, improv straight lines. I follow seams and make turns where I feel like it!

There are more close ups of the quilting, if you click on any of the photos you'll end up on my Flickr stream where you can see more.

I'll let you know if it makes it into the show!

Valentine Fabric Love - a giveaway

A recent IG conversation went something like this:

Aussie friend of mine: Hey Krista, does Canada celebrate Valentines Day like they do in the U.S.?
Poppyprint: Yes, but to most husbands it is a bit of a non-issue {note: THIS IS A GENERAL OBSERVATION WITH NO PARTICULAR HUSBAND IN MIND}
Aussie friend: Lolololololol, same!
Other Aussie friend: funny about that. Same here (crying emoji)
Poppyprint: It's a global crisis
Other Aussie friend: maybe we should just go out and buy our own diamonds. I think they would learn pretty quickly then.

Well, I don't know about you, but I just want more fabric. I hardly ever bother putting my diamonds on.

With this in mind, my lovely blog partner Fabric Please! has generously offered to gift one lucky reader a sweet Valentine of $40 Cdn to spend on anything in their shop!

Might I suggest this lovely Kate Spain Aria charm pack:

Or perhaps Jan Avellana's Nod to Mod text print?

Or RJR Fabrics Chalk Letter in red:

These Free Spirit Fowl Play dots are super fun (and on sale!)

This is a blog follower's giveaway because I love you guys for sticking with me.  Leave one comment here (maybe you'd like to share a sweet Valentine story with us?) to enter the giveaway. I'll choose a random winner on Friday, February 12. Just in time to buy yourself something special for the big day. Good luck!

**YOUR EMAIL MUST BE LINKED TO YOUR COMMENT, OR YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS APPEAR IN YOUR COMMENT IN ORDER TO WIN** 

I don't use the email address for any reason other than alerting giveaway winners that they've won. Sorry, but if I cannot contact you, you cannot win. (ETA - comments are now closed).

In the meantime, you may be interested in knowing that Fabric Please! is celebrating one full year in business with a month long sale running now until Feb.26th, 2016. With code ANNIVERSARY you'll receive 30% off all regularly priced yardage. This is a great sale!

Here's another of my homemade, hand-stitched valentines. This one was for my daughter, D (former circus athlete, current energizer bunny).

My "Monthly Sparks" bundle!

I will freely admit my excitement when Daryl invited me to select a bundle of 12 fat quarters for her February subscribers in the Monthly Sparks program. Each month, lucky customers (it's a sold out program, but there's a wait list) receive a sweet surprise in the mail; a beautifully curated bundle from quilt bloggers who love fabric just as much as they do!

I spent a very enjoyable afternoon perusing virtual shelves of Fabric Spark, cutting and pasting thumbnail photos into a Word document so that I could see all of the fabrics side by side.  This shop website has a very easy and unique catalogue system for fabrics that makes it so easy to find colours, themes, designers, collections or manufacturers you are looking for. It wasn't really my plan to create a completely coordinating bundle; instead I was trying to find special prints that would round out the corners of a stash, but still work in a project together.  I think it is super fun to receive fabric this way...unexpected prints that you might not otherwise choose and that don't all come from one designer's fabric line.  I even went out on a limb (for me) and included a bit of gold metallics!  This bundle was waiting for me when I arrived home from a 10 day trip last night and I just love it all - I don't have any of these prints in my stash already, so it was exciting to see them all in person for the first time.

There's a pillow or mini quilt project that I have in mind for these. I hope to be able to carve out some time this week to make a start before the arrival of a Super Quilting VIP from Down Under (more on that excitement later!).

As I mentioned above, this subscription club is sold out, however Daryl told me on the QT that there might just be an extra bundle or two listed in the coming days. There are still spots in Fabricspark's Rainbow bundle or Free Spirit Fabric monthly subscriptions that you may want to check out. Honestly, the fabric selection in this shop is second to none.

An example of the Free Spirit bundle

I was so lucky on a recent visit to Toronto to spend a very enjoyable morning with Daryl and other quilters at Berene's Quilting for Refugees event, which happily coincided with my last-minute trip. I love talking fabric with Daryl - you can read all about her love of it in her fantastic newsletter called Fabric News for Fabric Lovers (and she may have said some very kind things about me in the last on *blush*). Sign up at the bottom of the shop homepage so that you don't miss any of her stunning new arrivals of quilting cotton, apparel and home-dec weight prints and many hard-to-find imports. 

U.S. quilters - remember that you instantly save close to 30% on everything that you buy from Canadian retailers due to an extraordinarily generous exchange rate!