Quilt Camp 6!

Can you believe it?  For the 6th year in a row, my friend Elizabeth and I are in New Hampshire for our "quilt camp"!  Actually, she would be here regardless since we are at her family's summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee! They are kind enough to invite me and let me stay as long as I want so we can play with fabric, dye, paint, all kinds of surface design and stitch.  How lucky can a girl get??  We arrived late last night, so today we are just getting started with setting up the garage "studio" and unloading the car. Also, getting settled and taking a nap or two, so today is kind of slow - no real work yet.  But stay tuned for more on our adventures in surface design over the next few weeks!

Here's the house with the garage off to the right.

Work tables set up in the partially cleared out garage.

The car is unloaded but supplies not yet organized.

Lunch break on the deck with the view of the lake.

Barbara's already been here for a week, so she's sewing up a storm!

Basket Weave Strings

 On Day 3 of Celebration I shared some pictures of Bonnie Hunter's Basket Weave Strings class.  Since then, I've worked on making more blocks.

The process for this project is to work with your scrap strips, divided into 2 groups - color, and neutral.  According to Bonnie, neutral is anything the color value of a brown paper bag or lighter.  It can have print and pattern and color, as long as the background is neutral.  Another factor is the value of the fabric you put the neutral next to. The darker the value of the color, the darker the neutral can be, as long as there is enough contrast. 

These are my boxes of colors and neutrals.  The colors are primarily batiks, the neutrals are more of a mixture of batiks and other commercial fabrics.  But you can see there are actually light colors in with the neutrals, not just off-white or tan or beige.

The blocks are pieced on a paper foundation.  I used newsprint; Bonnie likes to use old phone book pages.  Cutting the foundations is the only measuring needed.  After that, pieces are trimmed to be a bit longer than the paper.  If they are too wide, they can be torn into narrower strips.  Its ok if they aren't straight; actually being a little wonky makes the blocks more interesting.

Here I am chain piecing 2 blocks.  You can find Bonnie's directions for making this quilt here.

 I shared this picture before, of the blocks I got done during class.

These are the ones I've done since, I think about at least 20 more, so total I should have 35-40.  It takes 98 squares for the quilt.  However,I think I might do something else with some of them first before I do a quilt, which means even more blocks, but I don't think I'll run out of scraps any time soon - stay tuned to see what I do!