Kite Quilt

My hubby resurrected one of our older computers so that we'd have a working one at home. All drives from our old machine have been saved, so we didn't lose anything. Whew. 

My 2-year old and I have had a rotten cold. We are both on the mend, so hopefully I'm back on a weekly posting schedule. 

free-pieced kites

I've been working on a "scrap" kite quilt. I use the word gently. I'm tend to prefer more contemporary quilts with less of a scrappy look. However, I've been cutting my scraps into fixed sizes, so finally had enough to do something. I'm not sure why, but I decided to do a kite quilt. This will live in our living room and will be one of the only quilts, to date, that I've made explicitly for us. 



After perusing photos online, I free-pieced a bunch of kites. These are on my informal design door (a unused curtain tucked over the top of my door). There are a few more. These range from totally free pieced and then cut to size (like the trapezoid in the bottom left) to log-cabin style kites (two in the upper right). I also experimented with other shapes . This was a lot of fun and totally doable while my son and husband were in the same room watching truck videos (my son's current obsession). 

background for kite quilt on design wall

After making a bunch of these, trying to vary the sizes, I had to decide on a background. I thought straight lines would be busy and too boring with this approach. So, I went with large blocks of curved fabrics in tonals that range from medium to light in the "sky" of the quilt. Here is the background on my larger design wall. This is just a piece of white flannel hanging from a set of Elfa shelves. I have a plan to make a better one, but this is fine for now. There is still a gap between the blue sky and the green ground. Since I will be directly piecing these curves, rather than applique, I wanted to get the bulk of the background sewn before I fill in that last curved area. Not sure if it will be sky or ground yet.  

I learned the basic method of curve sewing from Alicia Merrett's videos on YouTube entitled "Contemporary Art Quilt Demonstration (3 parts). Her videos are amazingly clear and her work is stunning. Here is the first of her three videos. 

I've used this method on a number of projects. Batiks are a bit more resistant to ease the curves, but it is still totally achievable. It just takes a bit of patience. I'd recommend starting on non-batiks.

Take a look at Sew What You Love a great sewing book of fun projects. Author is Tanya Whelan of Grand Revival Design. Great photos and instructions. Lots of bags and little kid clothes.