Thursday, January 27, 2011

Mondrian Mini



So, this weekend I finally got around to doing a project I'd been wanting to for a while now.
Nothing terribly amazing, but it was fun.


Last year, in 1st grade, my daughter's art class discussed different artists and their styles.  One of the artists they talked about and tried to emulate was Piet Mondrian.  She created the work you see here on top.  Seeing as I love anything my daughter does, I enjoy Mondrian's work, and have this new quilting thing going on, I figured what the heck, let's quilt it.

You can see, I tried to copy her work as closely as possible.  Measuring everything out and adding seam allowances, while not that hard, was a great exercise.  Below you can see a bit of my over thinking things...

Jay

Saturday, January 22, 2011

A blog huh?

Ok, well here's our first post.

We've been talking about setting up a blog for a while now, and when my buddy set one up the other day, it was inspiration for me to finally get to it.
You Quilt?
The name comes from the response I get from people when they find out I've started quilting. Most of the time though, it is followed by "How cool." or "I wish I could do that."  And, I must admit that I get a kick out the brain cramps I cause the ladies at the fabric store!
Who are we?
We're Angela and Jay. We have a daughter, a dog, three cats and all the chaos that we can handle.
We like to quilt. Ang did first, she's does other stuff too, which I'm sure we'll get to here eventually. After thumbing through her books and magazines for a long time, I asked her to show me how to get started.
What you won't find here: Artsy pictures of our meals.  We probably won't post mouth watering, "Doris Day filter" effect photos of our workspace either. (It's a mess and will probably stay that way) But, knowing Ang, I'm sure there'll end up being some cute pics of the cats.
:)



My first quilt.

To start things off, my first quilt.  This was modeled on the project  "Around the Block" by Rebeka Lambert from the book Pretty Little Mini Quilts.  Her project called for 9 blocks, I scaled it down to four.  
This ended up being a great quilt to start with because the piecing was very straight forward and gave me a chance to play with colors and patterns.  And the inherent wonkyness allowed me not to beat myself up if things weren't perfectly straight.  They weren't supposed to be! That was very liberating, especially when trying a totally new craft.  Besides, I always kinda like things that are a bit out of whack, like me.

A lot of credit needs to go to Angela for not only letting me in her stash, but showing me how to use the sewing machine, and for coming down to the basement when she heard colorful expletives of frustration.

Jay