Friday, June 17, 2011

Keeping My Promise

When I first revealed my Oceanic Supernova quilt, I mentioned that I'd followed Kati's Slash and Sew tutorial for the back. I promised a process post, and a process post ye shall have!

I wrote in my last post on quilt backs that my process for pieced backs involves randomly piecing stuff until what I have is big enough to fit the quilt. I start with something - a one-metre cut of fabric, some scraps, whatever - and then attempt to figure out how much I have to expand/piece together to make it measure to the desired size.  Any extra "interesting" bits are most commonly the result of measuring what I *think* is the final backing and realizing it needs an extra bunch of inches in width or length (or both). That phenomenon happened with this quilt back, as well. Measure twice and cut once, folks.

This photo summarizes my "process" for piecing the back of Supernova:

Backing Mosaic

I started by stacking the big scraps in two vertical columns, more or less trying to alternate lighter and darker values (photo 1). Then I stitched the scraps together, and sliced a piece off each column (photo 2). I played around with the arrangement of the new columns - some skinny, some wider (photo 3). As you can see from the final arrangement (photo 4), I added some more yardage of solid blue (Kona Caribbean, I believe), rotated a skinny+wide column pair and when the backing STILL wasn't big enough, I added in the orange Heather Ross Giant Octopi print. Serendipity, I say - I love the splash of orange on the back.

6 comments:

  1. Your blog is clean, bright and fresh - love the font too

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  2. This is great! I am starting to think about the back of one of my quilts and this was really helpful. Thank you :)

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  3. I love how this back came out! I'm a sucker for blues and oranges together. Thanks for linking to my blog.

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  4. That orange was meant to be, off measurements or not.

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