Crooked Rail Fence

I started this quilt several years ago in a class at a quilting retreat. The class was about learning to make scrappy quilts (i.e. quilts using a large variety of fabrics, placed randomly throughout the quilt design). We didn’t have a set project, but the teacher had some suggestions and one of them was a rail fence quilt. For those who aren’t familiar with this, it’s a traditional quilt design that looks just like parquet hardwood floors – simple blocks made of strips, placed in an alternating pattern of vertical and horizontal.

I thought that this would be a good project for me to start with. But through discussion with the teacher, we thought I could spice it up a bit by having the strips go on a slight angle, instead of being parallel with the edges of the blocks. And so the Crooked Rail Fence was born.

I decided on a 6 inch square finished size block with 6 strips per block. For a traditional rail fence would have meant cutting 6 strips per block, each one measuring 1 1/2 inches wide by 6 1/2 inches long. But to get the extra size I needed to be able to trim the block on an angle, I decided on the following: the 4 inner strips are cut at 1 1/2 inches wide by 7 1/2 inches long, and the two outer strips are cut at 2 inches wide by 7 1/2 inches long. When stitched together, I get a block that is 7 1/2 inches square. I can then use a 6 1/2 inch square ruler held at a slight angle to trim the blocks down to size.

For the scrappy look I used a large number of fat quarters. To keep some sort of cohesion, I kept to fabrics that were tone-on-tone prints in small scale floral or leafy patterns. I also chose fabrics that were similar in colour tones (sort of muted, rather than brights or jewel tones, etc.). And I tried to get more blues than other colours. I also tried for an even split in values between lights, mediums and darks.

During sewing, my goal was to be as random as possible. There were far too many strips to literally pull them out of a paper bag, so I did the best I could to mix them up, and then stack them in a bin in random order. My only exception to being strictly random was that I didn’t put more than one strip of any specific fabric in a single block. Other than that, I just stitched what was next on the pile.

I got quite a few blocks done in the initial class, using the fabrics I’d brought with me. Since then I’ve cut a lot more fabric, so when I went to my quilting retreat earlier this month I was ready for some power sewing.

It doesn’t take long to sew a bunch of blocks together. I don’t have to think much about what fabrics go where, or be too careful about my seam allowance since I am trimming them down later.

Once I’d sewn a bunch of blocks, I trimmed them down to size. When trimming, I can tilt my 6 1/2” square ruler to either the right or the left. Here I am trimming with the ruler tilted to the left.

And here I’m trimming a block with the ruler tilted to the right.

Here are the two trimmed blocks, so you can see the difference between left and right tilts of the ruler. The block on the left had the ruler tilted to the left, and the block on the right had the ruler tilted right. I cut an equal number of each version.

Once I had a stack of blocks, I played around a bit with layouts on the design wall.

The most simple layout is this one, where all of the horizontal blocks tilt the same way, and all of the vertical blocks tilt in the same way. This is a pretty simple layout, with some movement in it.

Next I tried shifting some of the blocks around. In this layout, the vertical blocks alternate between right and left shifted blocks, and so do the horizontal. Every alternate row is alike. This arrangement has a bit more movement in it than the first one.

The third variation is even more complex. In this one, not only do the vertical and horizontal blocks alternate in tilt, the rows alternate as well. It takes a group of 4 rows by 4 columns before you get the pattern repeating. This layout has the most movement of the three, and it’s the one I like the best.

Here it is again, this time using all of the blocks that I had trimmed up to this point.

I like how it looks so far, both in the design and layout, and in the random placement of the fabrics. Now I just need to keep on sewing. And trimming. My goal is to make two lap quilts from these blocks, so I have a long way to go.

Ooo, Shiny

Yes, this was supposed to be a post about my Crooked Rail Fence quilt. But I got distracted. It all started out innocently enough, when I thought I’d tidy up my sewing room a little bit. I put away some fabric and thread, dusted a bit and tossed some papers and other such things. Then I remembered that I had cleared off a small shelf on my computer desk with the idea of setting out some pretty beads on it, so I could enjoy looking at them even if I wasn’t using them for anything at the moment.

So, I pulled out the plastic bin full to bursting with beads and beading stuff and opened it up. And was confronted with a mess of bags and packets and kits and storage bins and tools and heaven knows what else. Once upon a time, I had carefully sorted and labelled all of the beads I had into stacking plastic containers. They all fit nicely into the bin, along with my little kit of tools. And then, well, I sort of stopped. Two trips to the International Quilt Festival in Houston, and a few visits to bead shops, an Oasis Bead Show, and the Creativ Festival later, and what I now had was a big, cluttered bin whose lid no longer closed.

I hope you will believe that my failure to take “before” pictures of this mess was forgetfulness and not shame. In my rush of rediscovery, I just dumped everything out on the ironing board and dived right in.

Here is a picture of what was left of the mess after most of it was sorted. Just imagine this, only about twenty times worse, and you come close to what it was when I started.

Now, look at this:

All the pretty beads (almost), put into bins and looking pretty and sparkly on my shelf. Doesn’t that look better?

Allow me to show you a sample of the abundance that sits up there:

There are seed beads, Delicas, and bugle beads in many sizes and colours. Most of these were bought to use for embellishing quilts, and for some bead weaving. These are just some of them, there are actually a few more stacks of containers on the shelf. My main source for these was That Bead Lady in Newmarket, and also NLM Glass Arts.

There are crystals – including some from Swarovski.

And some pearls (I think they are all Swarovski, too, with crystal centres).

Czech glass beads in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. Most of these were purchased at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, most of them from Raven’s Journey.

Some gemstones: rose quartz (the pale pink), rhodonite (the dark pink) and garnet. Most of these ones came from the Manhattan Bead Company.

These are clay beads from Colombia, from Colombian Craft Connection, that I bought at the International Quilt Festival in 2007.

I have an assortment of beads made from wood, and coco shell. The beads in the lower right container are acid-etched fossilized Palm wood from Burma, from Hands of the Hills (also from the IQF in Houston). Most of the coco beads were bought at the local Wal-Mart (yeah, really).

I even have a few painted glass beads, and lampwork beads. The bottom two varieties are borosilicate glass lampwork beads from Unicorne Beads.

And finally, there is a small assortment of larger stone beads. These would be beautiful as centre features in a necklace, don’t you think?

Of course, it would be hard to do much with all of these beads without some materials for stringing, bead weaving or wirework. And I have a bunch of those things, too. And not pictured are a small assortment of findings and jump rings in various metals and sizes.

I have actually taken a few classes in bead embroidery, beading, wirework and chain maille, but it’s been a while. I think it’s something that I should get back to. Now that I’ve been enjoying all of this eye candy, I feel a desire to put some of it to use.

So, you see what I mean? Ooo, shiny:

Quilting Retreat

Last weekend I went on a quilting retreat. This was through my quilting guild, and was the sort of retreat in which everyone works on their own projects (as opposed to group projects, or taking classes). It was a lot of fun, and also quite productive.

We stayed in three chalets in Blue Mountain, near Collingwood, Ontario. Each chalet held 8 of us (although they would sleep more, we could really only fit 8 of us, with sewing machines, around the large dining table).

This is the chalet that my group stayed in. It’s on three levels, with bedrooms and bathrooms on the main and basement levels, and a large, open living room, kitchen and dining room upstairs.

Here is a view of the Blue Mountain ski slopes, taken from our second-level deck. We had a lovely view.

We set up our machines on the dining table. Here are (from l-r) Anne, Elaine and Trish already at work.

The set-up from another angle – Anne and Marjorie are at work in this one. My spot is just to the right of Anne, with the little machine with the plastic bin sitting just behind it. I worked on a long-standing UFO, an off-kilter take on a scrappy rail fence quilt. I’ll write about it in a separate post.

Here you can see some of the other work areas we had set up. The ironing station, a table for cutting, and Elaine’s very cool portable design wall. In this picture it is showing off Marjorie’s quilt top, but it did lots of other work over the weekend.

Of course, it was not all work and no play. We had a lot of fun, ate a lot of food, and drank a little wine. Here Paulette and Marjorie are setting up some lunch for us on Saturday – we barely made a dent in it!

Eating lunch around the big coffee table are (from l-r) Elaine, Trish, Anne, Karen and Audrey. Do we look like we are having fun? Well, we sure were.

We had a relaxed drive up, stopping in Cookstown for lunch and a stop at the Country Concessions Quilt Shop there. We arrived at the chalets early Friday afternoon and spent Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday morning working on our projects. On Saturday morning, some of the group took off for a visit to a local quilt shop. At various other times, people went for walks, or visited the rest of our group in the other two chalets. In addition to working on my quilt, I also managed to get some knitting and spindle spinning done. It was a very successful weekend get-away!

Edited to add: link to the Crooked Rail Fence post.