Monthly Archives: December 2011

French Braid Trifecta

December 7th, 2011 in Inspiration
By Lisa Fulmer

"Lava Lamp" from French Braid Quilts

We recently interviewed our author, Jane Hardy Miller, to learn more about the story behind her fabulous French Braid quilts that have been featured in her three bestselling books—French Braid Quilts (with Arlene Netten), French Braid Obsession, and French Braid Transformation.

How did French Braids come to be your specialty, and what is it that you love about them the most?

I sort of started with the French Braids by accident. I had been quilting for over 30 years and I just didn’t seem to have the passion that I’d once felt. I’d made every kind of quilt that interested me and I was considering giving up quilting—for what, I don’t know. I had seen an ad for Arlene Netten’s pattern, but by the time I wanted to try it, I couldn’t remember the name of either the pattern or the designer, nor was I able to find it again. So I decided to make up my own technique, realizing in the process that they could easily be strip-pieced. There were some leftover fabric kits in the shop where I worked and since they were made up of ten quarter-yard pieces, I decided that 8 1/2″ would be a good size to cut the strips for the braid run. Two inches seemed to be a good proportion with the 8″, so I picked that for the width. And of course, that also allowed me to cut each braid run fabric from one fabric width.

That kit turned out pretty well—it was fast and I learned a lot about keeping the braids flat. Since we still had other kits left from the same class, I tried another, this time adding separators and 2 fabrics to the original 10. After that I was hooked! I had never been someone who would remake the same pattern—once or twice was plenty—but these quilts were so fast that I could easily try all the variations that I could imagine. Once I started teaching the quilt in classes, I realized how forgiving the pattern was, and there was the added bonus of being able to use a lot of different fabrics.

I think that the best thing about French Braids is their versatility. Two quilters can start out with the same 10 or 12 fabrics for the braid run and by using different fabrics for the various other components—accents, separators, borders—each can finish with 2 quilts, each beautiful, but looking nothing like each other. Continue Reading…

Giveaway—Transparency Quilts

December 5th, 2011 in Contests
By Lisa Fulmer

Mastering the illusion of transparency…when I look through the pages of Transparency Quilts by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr, I do indeed feel the magic! Certain areas of each quilt seem to be floating above the rest, and my eyes rest quite happily on the smooth lines, calm patterns, and perfect color combinations.

Here’s some of what Weeks and Bill have to say about their newest book…

We love color, but we love the visual relationships among colors even more…our hope is that with this collection of quilts, you will begin to see color in a new way and grow in your understanding and appreciation of color in the process.

We have always had a different method of designing. We focus less on the individual blocks than on the relationships among all the pieces of the quilt. You’ll notice that some of the quilts in the book use block construction and others don’t. Going back and forth between design, color theory, and construction is endlessly fascinating to us. It was through this interest that we began creating designs with pieces that, when viewed as a whole, give the illusion that one color is overlaid on another. We refer to these quilts collectively as transparency quilts.

In architecture, interior design, and product design in the past half century, there has been a focus on making materials seem lighter and more airy. Houses that used to be constructed from stone and wood can now be built as glass boxes that appear to float on the landscape. Televisions that used to be massive pieces of furniture are now thin enough to hold in the palm of your hand.

Similarly, the color options for quilting textiles were extremely limited until the mid-twentieth century. Advances in printing technology and textile production have given twenty-first-century quilters color choices unimaginable to previous generations of quiltmakers. Without such wide varieties of fabric available, we would never have been able to conceive of transparency quilts.

We hope this book will help you refine your understanding of color theory and give you a new perspective on how some of your favorite fabrics might be used in a new way. We also hope that you might rethink some of your assumptions about fabrics that may appear to lack potential, but in fact can play an essential role in achieving the effect of transparency.

Visit our Flickr gallery to see more lovely images from this book!

So here we go…one lucky person will win a copy of Transparency Quilts.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post telling us something about your own success or challenges with color.

Deadline to enter is 6:00 pm PST on Sunday, December 11, 2011. One comment will be drawn at random to win…the winner will be contacted via email and posted here on the blog next week.

Increase your chances to win! Enter an extra comment for each of the actions you take below. Tell us what you did and thanks in advance for spreading the word!

Sign in to your Amazon account and hit the “like” button for this book
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Congrats to Hannele, whose name was drawn at random from the comments on last week’s post. She won a package of Visi-GRID Quilter’s Template Sheets.

Free project—Graph paper notebook

December 2nd, 2011 in Free Projects, Papercrafts
By Sue Astroth

Here is a fast and functional notebook that is easy to make and so helpful to have handy for jotting down ideas, inspirations and the ever-necessary grocery lists…

I used our new Visi-GRID™ Quilter’s Tempate Sheets, Harriet Hargrave’s Quilter’s Graph Paper, and 3 binding rings.

I cut the template sheet in half (the plastic was very easy to cut with my rotary cutter) and rounded two corners with my Corner Chomper.

binding rings I cut the graph paper a bit smaller than the covers to keep the pages protected. Using a gridded cutting mat as a placement guide and my japanese screw punch, I drilled holes in the covers, then the papers.

Next, I put the book together with the binding rings. I did add a pen tied on with string so I would have something to write with when inspiration struck.

Now if you’ve been following the projects I make for this blog, you know I really couldn’t just leave the project completely plain and simple. With the help of my handy dandy stash of scrapbook embellishments, die-cut machines, and card stock…I was able to add just a few things to make this into a 2012 organizer.