Thursday 1 July 2010

Convergence Experience

Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadian Quilters!

At the last quilt guild meeting, one of the ladies showed a small convergence quilt she made. I had leafed through a pattern book about convergence quilts recently and seeing this quilt brought the quilting style to the forefront of my mind again.

So I checked and tadaa! the guild library had the exact pattern book, so I borrowed it and got down to business.


I'm starting with a very simple practice piece - if I like it a lot, I'll turn it into a bigger quilt, because enough with the wall hangings already! - I'm just not the wall hanging type!

I picked four pieces of tie-died fabric, about 14" square, laid them out according to the instructions, sewed the right seams together, then cut them into the 1", 1.5", 2" etc strips starting in the middle and working out.

Then there's the shuffling of the strips.


And the sewing together of the strips.


All was well, until I became convinced that I accidentally laid one of the fabric squares wrong face up. It's so hard to tell with these. I got nit-picky and started ripping out seams and re-doing them properly. After about 1/3 of the piece fixed, I started wondering if anyone would ever have noticed and if it really was enough of an eyesore to justify the extra time - but too late, now I had started - I'll know for next time! (well, actually, I stopped swapping the strips after I replaced two of them - it really was too much work).



Now a turn, cut it all up again:

... mix the strips together again and you get...


Yeah, okay, I'm not convinced... Maybe I need different batiks. It's not as much of an "umpf" quilt as the one in the book... I'll see what I end up using this thing for :) Maybe it'll grown on me, too! Let's hope so. For now, I'll call it Sunset on Water, at least it definitely inspires a title in me, haha!

7 comments:

Katie B said...

Sunset on Water is the perfect name! I think it's a really cool effect.

Unknown said...

Fabulous Christine, just great photos to inspire too!
Happy Canada Day from the cool, very cool cottage country here!
We are expecting summer tomorrow!

Quilting Queen said...

Turn it so the gold is up in the left top corner and it makes a beautiful sunset...I like it, I like it a lot.

Crispy said...

I really really like this piece and the name is perfect, I can almost hear the water lapping at the beach.

Crispy

Bella Linguini said...

Happy belated Canada Day!
I have been wondering about the convergence quilts but have been too lazy to get to the library and see if they had any of the books. And the name for your quilt is perfect! It really does look like a lovely sunset on water.

Rebekah said...

what a cool technique! It really shows off your batiks well. (I think you're being too hard on yourself wit your fabric selection)

Suzzy Q said...

That works for me!