Just back from a glorious weekend away..2 days feels like 2 weeks of refreshing! Have to download over 150 photos and write up blogs, tho…so one more about the Koi quilt, then will take a breather from that. Until then..here you go… the quilt is turning out great! more soon…

About a thousand years ago when I started writing about this quilt (if you’re not sick of it yet), I mentioned that I needed to get this done in a short time frame. But, I wanted it to be really cool, too. I have found that two places are really good for creative musing: the shower and working out. Well, this time I was working out at the YMCA on the rowing machine, where you are nearly sitting on the floor. As I looked up at the high, high ceiling and the lights, I thought about what it is like to look up from underwater and see the sunlight blinking through the water. The appearance of the surface of the water is completely different than from underneath.

So, I took the leftovers from fusing the top, and made a back! I used the two “rejected because they were too busy” batiks and used them here because (a) the “piecing” was simpler, and (b) you can see overhanging trees and vegetation from underneath the water. Here it is:

Remember that long ironing board with all the fused pieces of fabric on it ready to use? Well, I fused up another yard of fabric in addition to that, then a 1 1/4 yard piece of my hand-dyeds. Here is all that is left after doing the background of the front and the back:

Then I thought: wouldn’t it be cool to show the under side of the fish on the back. Ahem. So, I’m going to do that! I need to make the three fish and two fish-portions from the underneath view and quilt them. I’ll then position them on the bottom and stitch in place by machine. The outline of that stitching will then be the outline of the fish on top. I’ll applique the tops of the fishies in place and fuse up the fins and tails, then (finally) quilt the fins and tails (on both sides) at the same time! Sound convoluted? Yeah, to me too…… at least it sounds convoluted when I write it out. But I promise it’s gonna be really cool! More soon!

The fish I was so smitten by were the ones known as butterfly koi. While surfing the web recently, I learned that some koi collectors look down their noses at the butterfly, not considering them “pure, true koi.” Oh well…. I think they are glorious! But even the regular ones are wonderful, too. I’m not as wild about the red/white combinations, or the nearly-all black ones that seem to be prized in koi circles… I love the yellow and the gold and the ones with the feathery white fins. So that is what mine are!

I took this photo last summer, when we were in Sarasota visiting Paul’s Aunt and Uncle on vacation. The hotel had a pond as well as the beach… I think there may be more than just this one quilt… when I have more lead-time, I want to do another one with the reflections of the overhanging palms…..

I LOVE Misty Fuse, a fusible web developed by quilt artist Esterita Austin and sold by her at her website (tho that store is temporarily closed), through Keepsake Quilting (among other places), eQuilter.com and your local quilt shop. Misty Fuse is an incredibly fine, light fusible web that leaves a soft hand to the fabric and can be used at low enough temperature that you can fuse sheers, tulle and other cool stuff without melting the sheer fabrics.

I searched through my stash of sheers (sales at Joann’s are a good time to stock up). I used mostly these:

I made some highlights for the water with the blue, then used the cream and bright white for the fins, with a little bit of the matte gray, too.

Here is the selection of sheers I used for the koi after I fused them up. That red/orange stuff was truly vile…and I knew it would be perfect for flames; it is also perfect for koi! I’ve overlapped some so you can see the layering and transparencies. For the “regular” koi, I used the copper on top of the vile red/orange print. For the butterfly koi, I used the white, cream and pale gray. I ended up not using the gold or red at all, and used the aqua only for the water highlights.

Because I am a wicked tease, I’m only going to show you one of the koi right now! I plan on quilting the water, then doing something on the back (more on that soon enough), appliqueing the fish on the top, and fusing and stitching the fins last of all. So imagine this handsome fishie with some fun threadwork on the fins:

Despite the fact that the background is fused / raw edged, I wanted turned under edges on the koi. Several posts ago, I showed quilting the fish individually. After that, I carefully trimmed the backing fabric and excess batting away from the underside of the fish. The fish on the top shows the fish, trimmed… it looks lighter where the stitching is because (a) that’s where he is painted (that thin wash of metallic paint) and (b) because the green mat is now shadowing through the seam allowance. Those two tiny black things you see are his pupils, done in thread.

As with all appliques, you clip the curves. Unlike most typical applique, I decided to fuse-baste the wide seam allowances in place (faster than thread!). The lower fish shows the seam allowances fused down. Each fish is about 20-22 inches long (that’s ummm… how many cm’s? 55-60 cm? 39 inches to a metre, so a bit more than half) , maybe the width of four knuckles across at the widest point.

The last photo shows one of the quilted fish pinned to the background (so I could mark placement). Obviously, this fish needs fins and a tail. That’s tomorrow’s post! But let’s just say I’m happy!

The front is now as complete as it is going to be before I begin quilting. Here it is a step or two farther along than the last time I blogged about it:

And here it is ready to square up:

Usually I don’t finalize the edges of a quilt until it is nearly done… assembly completed, quilted, and ready to finish the edges. Many times that is because I don’t know what shape I want it to be in the end… I tend to resist proper rectangles and straight edges. However, this quilt needs to be done (and in record time!), so I made a decision before I began that this one would have straight edges, 90 degree corners, and no curvy outsides or other peskiness (at least of that sort!).

The dark line you see is some fuzzy yarn I was using to mark the edges on the design wall and make sure everything looked good, the angles were correct, etc., before marking with chalk and then trimming.

Tomorrow I’ll show what I did next with the koi…..

Hmm…wonder what unsuspecting visitors will arrive via Google searches for koi ponds based on that title? As all my great regular readers know, I’m working on a koi quilt. The good news is that it is going well (bless fusibles!). Over the past four or five days, I have managed to make good headway on the background for the front of the quilt.

Here’s a tease…the fused fabrics laid out and draped over my big-board:

At first, I had planned to cut gently curving strips as I did for my journal quilt, from last year (this one is still touring with the 2006 Journals exhibit … not sure where it is due to go next, but they usually “come home” in about September):

Then I decided that I wanted to get that rippled-y look from a gentle breeze skimming over the surface of the water. I remembered Pauline Burbidge‘s water pieces, and snagged her book off my shelf, but it didn’t quite have what I wanted. So, I taped two long strips of paper together, since they were almost as wide as my desired size (I m shooting for a finished piece 40 inches wide…if it is 39, I can’t enter it in Paducah!). Then, I sketched “ripples” in pencil. When I had them more or less where I wanted, I used a black felt tip to make them easier to see, then colored in every other one to keep from getting too confused during construction. Here it is with just the outlines:

Then I started with the cloth. I fused up a whole bunch of cloth … either 12 or 18 inch full width pieces (picture at the top of this post). I picked the one I wanted to be a dominant color, one of my hand-dyes with little visual “busy-ness” (in the center of the board). Instead of making a whole bunch of pattern pieces (can you say boring and tedious?), I placed the fused cloth on my work table, put Saral Transfer paper on top of that, then the big pattern piece on top of that. Using a plain old pencil, I traced over the outlines of the section I wanted, which transfers a chalk-like substance from the Saral to the cloth (it brushes off easily). Then, out comes my trusty 18mm rotary cutter (the little one, with the blade the size of a dime…maybe 1 cm. across the whole thing for those of you not in the US) to cut along the lines on the top edge, and just below the lines on the bottom edge.

Here are the first few pieces cut and up on the wall–at the very bottom of the photo, you’ll see the big pattern draped over the edge of the table where I’m doing the tracings:

As you can see, I started from the middle and worked up and down from there. In the next photo, I’ve added some more pieces:

Then I decided I’d better test the whole thing by placing the koi on it and making sure this idea for rippled water would “work”:

Thankfully, it does! So, back to more cutting. In the photo at the top, you’ll notice two of the batiks are more multicolored than monochromatic. I had intended to use them to accent the rippled edges, but once I got things going, I decided that they would be “too much.” So they won’t be on the front. The back, maybe…. stay tuned. I still don’t know what’s going to happen entirely on the back (that’s a tease!).

The next post about the quilt will be in a few days…also want to post a book review AND get a whole bunch of work done. So, off to the studio.