Project Quilting 11.4: Birds in the Air

This week's Project Quilting challenge theme was Birds in the Air. To participate, we had one week to start and finish a quilt that used or reinterprets this traditional block at least once somewhere in our project. This season, I am having lots of fun focusing on wholecloth quilted ideas that celebrate thread play and stitching, so I was unsure how to proceed with the block requirement. 

Birds in the Air Traditional Quilt Block (rendered in Electric Quilt 8)

Feeling stumped, I decided to get some fresh air and leashed up the pups (aka Studio Assistants) for a morning walk. There is a wonderful TED Talk by Marily Oppezzo that highlights the benefits of walking on creativity. Consistent with the findings from Marily's research, less than halfway into our walk, an idea popped up for incorporating this block into a wholecloth quited color wheel. Once home from the walk, I jotted down a very rough sketch with some notes for distorting the Birds in the Air block into diamonds to create a LeMoyne Star or Hexie Star. 

As you can see from the sketch I had envisioned all the large triangles on the outside or inside of the diamonds...but sometimes technology intervenes. Oftentimes, I use Electric Quilt 8 software to explore new design ideas and different colorways. For this particular design, I created a quilt using the tumbling blocks quilt layout and went to set the Birds in the Air block into each of the diamonds. While I fully expected the block to stretch into a diamond, I was completely surprised by the alternate block layout that was generated as I set the block into the subsequent diamonds.

In my head I had only envisioned one orientation or division of the block and started to rotate the blocks to match my original plan. But here EQ was offering a much more dynamic design...so thank you EQ!!

While attending a quilting retreat weekend in the Truckee/Tahoe area with some friends back in September, one of my friend's projects called for olive colored thread for the quilting. While we each packed an extensive collection of threads for this weekend get away, none of us had any olive colored thread and the closest quilt shop was a 45-minute drive to Reno, NV. She had some chartreuse green which was too bright. Another friend had some charcoal grey which was too dark. Something clicked in my brain and I wondered if it was possible to load both threads through the top of my machine and through the eye of the needle to create a blended olive color. Curious, I made up a small sandwich and borrowed a size 100/16 Topstitch needle along with both the green and charcoal grey spools of thread to experiment with this idea. Below left you can see the results of that first experimentation with the blended grey/chartreuse combo stitched out in the top left half, followed by the chartreuse only thread in the bottom right half. 

This week's challenge was the perfect opportunity to revisit this technique and continue my experimentation of loading two threads through a 100/16 needle on sewing machine to yield all new colors and values.

As many of you know, I do not trust many of the marking pens/pencils that are often used for marking a design onto a quilt top. Instead, I prefer to use a combination of freezer paper and/or blue painter's tape. I began by drafting a diamond-shaped Birds in the Air block onto freezer paper (and testing to make sure all 6 diamonds would fit onto a fat-quartered sized quilt sandwich.  

I placed my acrylic plastic template over the freezer paper template and used a dry erase marker to find the optimal travel plan for stitching out all the lines. The freezer paper template was cut into half and loops of tape held it into position for me to stitch around each diamond, before removing one half of the diamond to then stitch the center line. The smaller lines were achieved by aligning strips of painter's tape between marks on the ruler tape and lines marked on the remaining half of the freezer paper template.

Once the blocks were all outline stitched, I changed my machine needle to a size 100/16 Topstitch Needle and began the fun of filling in each of the triangles with different thread combinations!!

Each diamond block is stitched in with different thread combinations to yield:

• Hue aka Pure Color: Only the Color Thread (ie. turquoise) is stitched into the large triangle
• Tint: Color Thread + White Thread into small triangle closest to center
• Tone: Color Thread + Grey Thread into the middle small triangle
• Shade: Color Thread + Black Thread into small triangle closest to the binding
• Plus the white, grey, and black threads were used individually to fill in the large border triangles

Some takeaways from this experiment:

1. Only 9 spools of threads yielded 27 different colors (hues, tints, tones, and shades!!)
2. I wish I had just a slighly lighter value of grey thread so the tones (color+grey) would differentiate more from the shades (color+ black). At one point I explored a medium grey but it was too close in color and value to the background fabric so it looked almost identical to the large color-only triangle. I ripped out that one section and returned to the same dark pewter grey that had been previously used.
3. Some thread colors yielded more variation when combined with the white, grey, and black threads. I suspect this has more to do with the value of the thread color vs. the color itself. While I tried to select medium values for all 6 thread colors, some colors are naturally darker in value (ie. purple), whereas yellow is almost always lighter in value.

And yes, my head is already swirling with future thread mixing experiments!!

Here is the full line up of Aurifil 50wt threads used in this experiment:

• White #2024
• Dark Pewter #2630
• Black #2692
• Fuchsia #4020
• Neon Orange #1104
• Canary #2120
• Emerald #2865
• Turquoise #2810
• Medium Lavender #2540

A Flight of Thread Duos & Delights, Finishes 11" each side, 22" wide, 19" tall

My quilt title was inspired by tasting flights featuring a group of 3-8 wines, beers, or perhaps industrial strength margarita swirls served at one of my favorite local restaurants!

And I couldn't resist showing off the quilt back showcasing the same 9 threads used in the bobbin, stitched onto white.

Be sure to check out all the fabulous Birds in the Air interpretations made this past week as part of Project Quilting!!