muse monday: inspired by a song

Posted on August 31, 2009 by laura west kong

For a little quilt-y inspiration this week, why not choose a song? Pick a favorite song to play in your studio or sewing room and see what images and ideas pop into your head.

You don’t have to write or embroider the actual song lyrics onto your quilt, in fact it’s better if you don’t. Then you won’t have to worry about copyright. Song writers have rights regarding their lyrics just as quilt designers and other visual artists do with their designs and images. Just listen to the song with a pencil and sketch pad in hand or choose a palette of colors and a traditional quilt block to go with the melody you hear.

In the end the connection to the actual song may not even be apparent to viewers unless you explain it to them, and that’s OK. Just use the song as a starting point. Let the end be a pleasant surprise.

My 2007 quilt, “It’s not easy being green” (above) was inspired by the song of that same title sung by Kermit the Frog. I went from Muppet frog to red-eyed tree frog. Although the red-eyed tree frog is not actually an endangered species, its rain forest home is shrinking at an alarming rate (National Geographic). Although it may not always be easy, there are a lot of things each one of us can do to be “green”. Check out National Geographic’s Green Guide for green ideas for everyday living.

Click here for more about my quilt, “It’s not easy being green”

muse monday: inspired by laundry

Posted on August 24, 2009 by laura west kong

Quilts inspired by laundry … why not? You’ve got to do your laundry anyway. Might as well get a little inspiration out of it while you’re at it.

Here is an original block I designed called “Mismatched Socks”. My daughter was in kindergarten and one sock from each of her favorite pairs was missing in the laundry, a white pair that I crocheted a beaded trim to and a purple pair with butterflies. I think she may have worn this mismatched pair one day if my memory serves me correctly. Here are her mismatched socks, memorialized in a quilt block. This block would make a fun quilt. It could be a matching game to find where all the different pairs are.
The traditional “T” block offers a lot of fun laundry-inspired possibilities as well.
Click here to find out more about Dear Diary 2006, the quilt these blocks came from.

muse monday: snow day!

Posted on August 17, 2009 by laura west kong

What the middle of August needs is a snow day! Just one icy cold day with the neighborhood blanketed in white. We could take the day off from work or school, have a (friendly) snowball fight in the morning and settle down in the afternoon with a steaming cup of hot cocoa and a cozy quilting project.

Of course, unless you happen to live in the mountains of Australia or New Zealand (or Reno, Nevada last weekend!) you’re not likely to enjoy a snow day for at least a few more months.

Instead you could pull out an icy palette of fabrics inspired by a snowy day and sew up a cool quilt top. Just the sight of these colors is as refreshing as a winter’s breeze. A chocolate milkshake might go well with that.

muse monday: inspiration in your stash

Posted on August 10, 2009 by laura west kong

I’ve been reorganizing my stash this summer (translation: take all the fabric down from the shelves, throw it in a big heap and then fold them nicely one by one and put them back all neatly organized.) So I was somewhat surprised when out of a pile somewhat like this …
… came this yummy mixed berry palette. (They really did land in that pile together from that boysenberry purple all the way to the blue raspberry blue. I wasn’t trying to pick fabrics for a new quilt, I was trying to put them away.)
OK, well blue raspberry isn’t really be a true berry (shhh … don’t tell my DD!) but oooh, those fabrics would make a delicious quilt.
Have you ever mixed up your fabrics just to see what would happen? It might be just the way to discover a fab new color combination, after all, your stash is personally handpicked by you. Some of those fabrics you never would put side-by-side are bound to look great together.
By the way, here’s a peek at how the rearranging is going so far … if I can just keep my mind on folding and stacking I can finish up the rest that are still piled on the floor!

muse monday: quilting in the garden

Posted on August 3, 2009 by laura west kong

Let’s take a stroll through the garden to see what quilting inspirations we might find there.

Look closely and you can imagine these marigolds in a Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt.
Here’s a Half-Square Triangle square in pink and yellow tulips.
Can you see the New York Beauty?
Imagine that, a Log Cabin in Prague!
Maybe you’d prefer a quick and easy Strippy quilt.
Or perhaps you’d rather stitch up a House block complete with flowerbed sashing.
Pick a bouquet of blossom-colored fabrics (don’t forget a bunch of green for the leaves) and whatever flowers and blocks you choose for your garden-inspired quilt are sure to brighten your day!

muse monday: sari yarn

Posted on July 27, 2009 by laura west kong

Today’s inspiration is hand spun recycled silk sari yarn. Oh, the yummy colors, textures and possibilities!

I bought these from Kiputa Trading at the Long Beach Quilt Festival. All of the yarns (except the chartreuse skein on the right) are made from recycled sari yarn. You can see on the left, strips of sari silk are sewn end to end to create a continuous length of fabric yarn. With varying amounts of spinning, you get thicker or thinner yarn out of the fabric. The more you spin the fabric, the thinner and softer it becomes. My photo really does not do it justice. Click here for an amazing close-up from Kiputa Trading.

The chartreuse yarn on the right is not sari silk at all, but is made from banana tree fibers. It is shiny and soft and just as irresistible as the sari yarn.

I’m going to have to think awhile to decide what to do with these yarns. I could knit a pencil scarf. Silk wouldn’t be hot and uncomfortable to knit with in the middle of summer like wool would be. I’d probably finish just in time to wear it this fall.

Another option would be to make kumihimo-style cords for necklaces and embellishing art quilts. A fringe would make a great embellishment too.

Speaking of art quilts, I could couch the spun yarn onto a quilt top or edge. Perhaps I could even piece together the unspun sari yarn into a fantastic background or ruche it to make a gathered trim or a flower for embellishing. I’m especially fond of appliqué. If I sew the unspun fabric yarn into a pieced square I might be able to cut out shapes and appliqué them down.

Oh, the possibilities! Maybe I should try them all. Any suggestions? What would you do with hand spun recycled silk sari yarn?

tip tuesday: free-motion machine quilting

Posted on July 21, 2009 by laura west kong

Today’s tip is for free-motion machine quilting and it comes from The Quilting Arts Book: Techniques and Inspiration for Creating One-of-a-Kind Quilts, by Patricia Bolton, a great book full of ideas, projects and tips for making artistic quilts. From principles of design to sketching to quilting and embellishment techniques to gorgeous quilts, The Quilting Arts Book is full of art quilt inspiration.

In it Robbi Joy Eklow, Quilting Arts Magazine’s Goddess of the Last Minute shares her free-motion machine quilting technique and tells how to make 16 fun free-motion quilting designs. She gives many tips as well. My favorite is, “This is not billiards, in which you have to say what you plan to do before you try to do it. If you are striving for a motif and it morphs into another shape, go with it.”

happy quilting (whatever shape it may turn out to be)! =(^_^)=

muse monday: inspired by a favorite book

Posted on July 20, 2009 by laura west kong

Why not choose a line from a favorite book to inspire your next quilt? Here’s my quilt, Goodnight Moon, from the book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, inspired by the line, “In the great green room there was a telephone” I’m sure many of you, like me, could recite most if not all of that book from memory if it was one of the bedtime stories you read to your children each night. Children’s books are particularly full of inspiring word pictures (and they have fantastic illustrations as well in case you need a little extra boost of eye candy to feed your muse.)

I love Clement Hurd’s charming illustrations, especially that stylish old phone, the kind with the real dial for dialing (no buttons or voice recognition!) and that wonderful curly cord. As you turn the pages it really does get darker and darker in that quaint little house. Here’s my fabric interpretation of that phone.

I also like the line, “Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush.” That always made me smile. Hmmm … I wonder what a quilt about mush would look like?

And here’s the back of my quilt. You can really see the quilting. (except nobody’s getting ANY sleep with this noisy phone!) Click here for more great book challenge quilts from my fellow quilters at Fast Friday Fabric Challenge. And browse through your bookshelf or local library for a little quilty inspiration.

muse monday: surf’s up!

Posted on July 13, 2009 by laura west kong

Color is one of the things I am most inspired by, so today I am sharing some summer color inspiration with you. And summertime is beach time!
I just love Miami colors, so bright and happy. This view of a beach in Miami would make a great art quilt, and its color palette would also make a wonderful traditional quilt in any pattern you choose.
So, even if you can’t get out to the beach, you can still bring a little of the beach to your sewing machine.

happy quilting! =(^_^)=

muse monday: got scraps?

Posted on July 6, 2009 by laura west kong

I’m sure we all have some of these. Every once in awhile it’s fun to get the fabric scraps out and just play! As a bonus, if you use them up every so often, you are less likely to drown in them.

Here’s what I like to do with my fabric scraps. Using the sew-and-flip method, I piece them together crazy quilt style. I try not to think too much about which pieces go next to each other. I grab two pieces and stitch them together. But if the occasional combo really bothers me, I don’t use them next to each other, after all this is supposed to be fun.

Next I flip the pieces open, finger press and grab another piece to sew to that unit … sew and flip, sew and flip, and so on.

Once I get a bunch of them pieced together, I sub-cut them further into little shapes: squares, circles, rectangles etc. On the wall hanging below, I cut them into inchies (1″ square fiber art pieces) and appliquéd them onto a black wool felt background. I love how the black really makes the colors pop!

If you look carefully, you’ll see that my “squares” are not really square. That’s because I simply laid them onto the felt and stitched around them with a zig zag stitch: no basting, no pinning, no fusibles web. I let the sewing machine gently stretch them out of shape into these lively dancing shapes.

If you prefer your shapes not stretched out of shape, just iron some fusible web onto the back of your pieced scraps before you sub-cut them into smaller shapes. Then you can fuse them to your background.

Have fun with the design. Try geometric as well as freeform layouts before you commit to sewing or fusing them down. Or better yet, make two wall hangings: a geometric AND a freeform.

While you relax and play with your fabric scraps, your mind will have a chance to wander. By the time you finish you may very well have several new ideas to choose from, and you’ll be ready for your next big project.