I was interviewed on Mark Lipinski’s Creative Mojo earlier this week. Mark was great and he even likes Modern quilts now! YAY! If you want to listen to it, click here (it’s the April 23rd show). At the end we were talking about making quilts with fabrics other than cotton. The Silk Bricks quilt in my book is made of silk dupioni and linen. The silk was a breeze to work with. I didn’t have to do anything to it – however, everything in that quilt is cut on the straight of grain so that helps. The only thing I found necessary for the silk was a lint roller!! The linen was a bit of a pain. I used regular linen used for garment sewing because I loved the look of it. Even after starching it, it still loves to shift. The biggest issue with the linen is the quilting. It really misshapen it. By the time I was finished with the quilting, I had a 3-D quilt! So, I blocked it. I had to avoid getting water on the silk – I used a lot of reds and they all were prone to bleeding. I just laid an old towel over an insulation board, sprayed the linen until it was pretty wet and then pinned it down everywhere. Here are a couple of pictures of the blocking.

Waves Before Blocking

Lots of Pins!

In the end, it’s nice and flat and I still love the look of the linen. However, if I was a beginner, I’d consider using Quilter’s Linen instead!

When I originally conceived the idea for my book, Accentuate the Negative, I never envisioned it as a book about how to quilt negative space but rather a book about how to make negative space and use it to its fullest. I have come across a few comments from quilters that are interested in the quilting. Given that, I’ve decided to write a little about the quilting of each of the quilts. I’m going to start from the back of the book and work to the front! So, first up: Mod Roses.

The background of this quilt was generally quilted with an all-over, simple meandering leaf motif. Nestled in the leaves are quotes about roses – there are six quotes on the quilt.

Each improv rose is framed as is each of the pieced leaves. I just did SID around each of the frames and chose to leave the frames free of quilting. As far as the roses, I just quilted wiggly-concentric circles starting in the center of the rose and working my way out to fill the space. The leaves in the rose blocks just got a little swirl and SID around the outside. I filled the background with horizontal and vertical lines – that was my only rule. I didn’t use any rulers, and everything is randomly spaced.

I filled the background of the leaf blocks with pebbling.

Kansas City Star’s My Stars is sponsoring a book giveaway on their facebook page. They are giving away four sets of four modern books – my new book, Accentuate the Negative is included in the set as well as the book that I was in last fall, Classic Modern Quilts! All you have to do is ‘LIKE’ their facebook page! To make it more convenient, just click this image, or the button on the right side of the page. Good Luck!