Since I'm leaving tomorrow

For the Houston trip, I might as well say a bit about the third quilt I've had there that won a prize.  I don't have a pic of it at that show, but the one above was taken the next year at our local quilt show.  It was in Houston in 1999.  Some time before that, I had bought one of the Dover coloring books that had interesting geometric designs in it.  There was one that looked as though it was bulging out of the surface.  I had taken a class from Caryl Bryer Fallert on how to get a pattern from a page onto a large surface by using an overhead projector.  I took the Dover book to Kinko's and had them make a transparency of that page.  My boss at the hospital said it was okay with her if I clocked out after work and then used the overhead projector in our conference room on the unit.  So one night I brought a roll of freezer paper, a lot of tape, and some Sharpie markers to work.  After clocking out, I set about taping freezer paper together until it was the size I wanted, then put the transparency onto the overhead projector, fiddled with it until it was showing up on the freezer paper taped to the wall, then  marked the lines onto the freezer paper.  When completed, I took the finished freezer paper pattern home and started drawing Storm at Sea blocks into the spaces.  Some of them were rather peculiar shapes, especially the ones out in the border, which looked really interesting to me.

After getting the pattern drawn, it was time to pick out fabrics for the quilt.  I had found a fabric that looked like a stormy sky, going from a light greenish/blue to a very dark from one edge to the other.  I decided that if I used the light at the top and gradually got darker until it was the darkest at the bottom, it would resemble fabric pieces hanging over a stormy sky background.  For the blocks, I dug out a lot of blue-green, blue, blue-violet, violet, and a bit of red-violet batiks.  I cut one block at a time off of the big pattern, cut it up, and then strip-pieced batiks on the block pieces that needed them using something I'd learned in a workshop with Ricky Tims, and used the storm fabric for the other parts of the block.  This took some time, as you can imagine, but eventually the blocks were all sewn, and sewn together.  For the back of the quilt, I had another colorway of the sky fabric on a nice day and a piece of water fabric.  I quilted it from the back, using hologram thread in the bobbin for a sparkly look on the quilt top.  The quilting design is from a spiral template.  The spirals overlap, some seeming to be behind the others.  I quilted it with my Pfaff 1475 CD with the built in walking foot.  I'm going to have to take a better pic of the quilt for my next post, when I tell you about the award ceremony in Houston that year.