Chasing Backgrounds - Woven Tumbling blocks

Et Voila!

Here is the finished Journal Quilt. My favourite colour turquoise blue. I think for this one it is enough, I won't try to take it further. It was about the experiment. I think it might make too much of a statement to work as a background unless your foreground image was a silhouette.

I quilted along the tops and bottoms of the 'sides' of the blocks. Then looked to see what else to do. However, that made the lighter tops of the blocks float nicely which really helps with the optical illusion concept. So, I have left the lighter fabrics as is. Because they were cut on the bias, they won't fray, so can cope with being left unquilted.

Next month I may try the silhouette idea with the first woven piece I did when I started this. There are 2 more blue pieces to do. With the plan I am working to, they should be fruits. We will see!

I might try to get ahead so I don't have to fret over how to fit it in during December.

Chasing Backgrounds - Woven Tumbling Blocks

Well, What I was attempting to weave took a few more adjustments. I was trying to weave a tumbing block pattern.
Last night when I showed where I had got to, I had the weave right, but not the angle.

I called in the Resident Mathamatician who helped me work out that it needed to be a 45 degree angle.

By this time the 3rd strip was frayed to beyond endurance, so I searched through my newly organised fabric and found this piece which had been a clamp resist dye sample at a tie dye workshop I did sometime back.

This time I cut it into bias strips, thinking to reduce fraying.

Okay it does, but it also stretches and narrows the strip so that you don't get precise angles. It works for this trial version. If I were mad enough to do it again, I would draw angles on the interfacing first. I think if I did it again, I would use turned fabric tubes, so as to avoid stretching and fraying.

However, the plus about using this fabric is that when it is cut, the dye patterning creates a mottled effect which creates a more natural look of the light bouncing off the blocks! Cool.

Somehow it was easier for me to do the weave spaced out. If you squint, you can see the blocks in there.

Now that I knew the pattern, I was able to easily weave the inbetween strips to complete the whole piece.

The interfacing under it all was cut about 1 inch larger on all sides than A4. I am glad, the edges get rather confusing and floppy. Because of the weave, the strips don't touch the interfacing in as many places as a weave which is plainer, so it is more likely to shift about. So, after I had pressed it to fuse the strips down, I centred and pinned an A4 piece of paper down and then used the edge of it for a guide to stitch and hold it together.

I trimmed it 1/2 in outside of the stitching line. I will trim again when it is quilted. The quilting might cause it to shrink a bit.

You can see that the blocks aren't precise. Using tubes might resolve that. It was very hard to snug the strips up to the last set when on the diagonal. However for my purposes...a journal quilt... it was about learning how to do what I wanted to do so I could determine whether I wanted to do it again.

And so after all that. I Googled ideas for how to quilt this. Being woven it is very loose. Something to keep in mind should I choose something like this as a background. Google kept thinking I wanted a pattern for actually making the blocks. One of the links that came up was an e-how tutorial about how to do a woven tumbling block.

Oh.

and sure enough, get the second strips woven on the diagonal at 45 degrees.

Ah well. I learned this all on my own - with a Certain Young Man's help.

The photo that accompanies the e-how tutorial does not resemble a tumbling block quilt though, so it might be hard to get your head round.

The quilting will happen tomorrow. The throat isn't so bad as yesterday, but the voice is coming and going. So to bed.

Chasing Backgrounds - woven

I am Chasing Backgrounds again. I thought I would see about weaving the background. I will show a few steps another day.
Here is a variation on a plain weave.

I have fused this and could choose to use it in some way...perhaps with one of the fruit on it?


But what I want to do is get a weave that gives the look of the cubes or tumbling blocks. I saw one somewhere. I have had a few versions
plain weave diagonal

attempt to change it to what I want, but end up with a diagonal version of the first photo.

and at last I think I am getting there.

There is room to weave the 3rd strip through diagonally the other direction.

It is not helped by the fact that one of my fabrics was just the right colour, but being from a bit chopped off a dress I altered for someone, it is shredding all over the place. I am going to have to choose another option for the cube affect.

But that will be tomorrow. I have had a sore throat all day, so off to bed. Probably from going up to London on Friday...as my son says 'It's really bad to travel by tube.' Well, not always. But I guess when you have already gone past overdoing it, it is easier to catch something.