Court House Steps Complementary Tints Color Study Quilt

Court House Step Complementary Tints Quilt. 40.5 x 48.5 inches (Photo bombed by Waldorf doll Molly Mae)!

Here’s my Court House Steps color study quilt from my previous post.

I’ve done a number of quilts this year which I have quilted by echoing the blocks. It’s easy enough to quilt around the blocks on a small quilt with a walking foot, but I decided to do free motion quilting on this one.

I thought about putting a spiral or a loopy daisy flower in the green center block, both free-motion quilting designs I do a lot. But what else would work well? I took two books by Angela Walters off my shelf to see what inspiration I could find.

I found the four-petal leaf motif in Shape by Shape: Free-motion Quilting with Angela Walters in the chapter on Squares (and Rectangles). It’s Square 7 in the book. I don’t do well with free-motion straight lines and this design requires the quilter to “travel” along the edge of the block to get to the second side of the X. There is nothing precious about this quilt, so I decided to go for it! My traveling lines did improve as I quilted more of the blocks, but none of them are perfect. But you know what? This leaf design has a really organic feel and I like the the fact that all the quilting in that central block is slightly irregular. And I love that you can tell it was sewn by a person and wasn’t a computer driven design.

Still puzzled about how to quilt the bars around the central square I took a look at another of Angela Walter’s books, Free-Motion Quilting with Angela Walters. i haven’t looked at the book in years (published 2012) so I was pleasantly surprised to see a has a chapter on quilting Square-in-a-Square and Log Cabin quilts. And most of the log cabin quilts in the chapter have Court House Steps blocks. Perfect! She offered a number of suggestions but then I noticed one quilt with a bar that had a lazy cruved line with an occasional loop. I like loopy lines. And with swirls in Tula Pink’s “Measure Twice” fabric in my border, that struck the right cord. Angela only had an occasional loop in her quilted curve so mine is different because it is mostly loops!

Angela is well known for quilting every square inch in a quilt, but I like to leave open areas to let the quilt puff up a bit after it has been washed. So quilted all the hot pink bars and left the light pin bars open. There is straight line walking foot quilting around each of the Court House Step blocks, so everything really is tacked down adequately!

This was fun. And Molly Mae says she likes it!

Color Study: Complemetary Tints in a Courthouse Steps Quilt Top

As promised in my last post, here’s what I did with that Courthouse Steps Pattern that wasn’t right for the fox fabric. However, this design is perfect for a color study!

It’s been a long time since my series of 4 color studies. (Click to see the first color study. The next 3 follow with a gap of one post right after the first). But it’s been on my mind to do another color study and I have had this stack of two pinks and the light slightly yellow green in my do-to-queue since last summer.

Red and green are complimentary colors—exactly opposite each other on the color wheel. Pink and light green are tints of red and green so they are compliments. A tint is a hue (color) that has had white added to it. Complimentary colors tend to be visually a bit eye-popping, and this quilt is definitely that!

Fortunately, Tula Pink was thinking along the same color lines when she designed the “Measure Twice” fabric for Free Spirit Fabrics which is my outer border. It’s also the backing for this quilt. Her fabric really helps to make sense of my color choices.

So how does that light baby blue inner border fit into this color scheme? It doesn’t! I auditioned the green and the hot pink as the inner border, but neither made me happy. The light blue fabric was sitting in a stack nearby and I just picked it up, tried it out, and loved it! In this vibrant quilt, that light blue border is the only place the eye can rest! So that’s why I added to the quilt.

The fox and gnome fabrics from my last post are stewing on a back burner. I haven’t figured out how best to use them! They will reappear eventually!

Using Electric Quilt 8 to Look at Fabrics in a Quilt Design

This new quilt for new quilt I’m planning is totally outside my comfort zone! It’s orange and it has large loud flowers! I don’t know what got into me. I clearly fell down the proverbial rabbit hole looking a fabrics online!

Here are the 3 fabrics I chose: Left to Right

• “Magic Forest” by Sarah Watts, Cotton + Steel, a division of RJR Fabrics

• “Front Yard” from Home Sweet Gnome line by Sarah Watts, Cotton + Steel, a division of RJR Fabrics

• “Enchanted” Kaffe Fassett Collective for Free Spirit Fabrics

I designed the quilt at top in Electric Quilt 8, using a Courthouse Steps version of a Log Cabin block. It’s such a traditional block, that I really can’t say that I actually did any designing.

The most challenging part of the design was importing the fabrics into EQ8. I hadn’t imported any fabrics for a long time and so I was basically starting from scratch. First I imported my fabric photos into the Image Worktable of the project I was working on. The photos come in HUGE— at the width of yardage. So each fabric photo needs to be “scaled” to match the actual fabric design using the icon in the Edit Options Box. Finally the fabric can be added to the fabric library for the quilt worktable you are working on by using the “Add as fabric” icon in the Worktable Tools Box located just below the Edit Options Box (NOT just clicking the add to sketchbook icon in the left margin). Once I understood the process and the sequence, it was easy to do. But it took me a while to figure out how to do that.

Inputting the fabric was definitely worth doing. The fabrics lined up next to each other look like they play very well together. in real life, they look like thy are light/medium/dark and should have ample contrast. But once I added the fabrics to my quilt design, I’m really not seeing that contrast. The quilt just look muddy. This is clearly not the right pattern for these three fabrics.

Here’s what the quilt design looked like with using colors/fabrics build into EQ8. This design really dances using fabrics with better contrast.

The good news is, I do have another fabric collection that will work with this courthouse steps pattern.

As to the fox/flower/gnome fabrics, I need to add some more colors to that set to give more contrast. I’m currently thinking it might be a good improv quilt….maybe with some portholes. Time will tell.

While I’m mulling that over, I’m going to go cut out the other fabric I’m using for this pattern.

Fox and the Four Seasons Crib/Lap Quilt

"Fox and the Four Seasons" quilt!  This crib or lap quilt was made using my "Fox and the Four Seasons" quilt panel and "Tossed Apples and Dots", both fabrics available for purchase from spoonflower.com.

The quilt design is the log cabin pattern known as Courthouse Steps. Since the fox is always getting the rap for stealing from the farmyard, using Courthouse Steps is an amusing design choice!  (Quilting humor)!