Saturday 14 March 2015

Trying to figure out what to do with silk half square triangles

This morning I actually slept in.  Yay!  When I did wake up at 7:30am, I realized that today my daughter and I had dentist appointments.  Well there goes a good chunk of our morning.  As I was left with only a hour to myself before we had to go, I decided to sort through a box of silk material I had been given.  It's a fair size box of silk material that I do not know what to do with.  

In the box there are many different colours/patterns of silk fabric and more than half of it, probably 3/4s of the box is half square triangles.  The pile that I took out this morning is the brightest of the bunch.  Within these piles there are three different fabric patterns. 


I found out that when working with silk in a quilt, it is always best to use interfacing.  This helps to stabilize the silk and make it easier to work with.  There is definitely going to be a need for mega patience while working with this.  Just trying to lay the pieces onto the facing was a bit tricky.


Once I stabilized the silk I trimmed them all down to a consistent size.  The person who cut these, used scissors and so with the nature of silk the cuts were quite wavy.  Now they are trimmed and ready to use.  I just don't know yet what I want to do with them.

Do I want to keep the colour families different for each there own quilt, or do I want to combined them together to make a larger quilt.  I plan to go online and see if I can find some patterns that appeal to me.  If I find nothing, I will resort to the pattern Scrap Triangles page 78 of For the Weekend Quilter, edited by Rosemary Wilkinson.


I've had this book for quite some time now.  I've made a quilt out of it already.  There are even some quilts in this book that are made of silk.  The one I chose isn't, but the one I made before was, though the one I made I did out of cotton.  The pieces in the quilts are a bit larger, so that you could at least finish the top in a weekend.  There are some basic patterns that would also be good for a beginner. 


While writing this post, I think I already committed to this quilt.  I forgot about the pattern.  I like it, but want to make it a little less bright.  Which is ok, as the silks are mainly dark but muted colours, outside of the pile that I took out this morning.  I will make up a small section to see how easy or difficult this will be to make out of the silk.

But for now I will put things away as I still have some things to clean up first, like finishing the Pleated Log Cabin quilt.  Today after the dentist and driving my daughter to work, I was working on the label for it.  Each line that is written take almost an hour to stitch up, so as of now I finished three rows and have another eleven hours work on it.  I have approx. five hours of binding to do on the quilt itself.  Maybe I will work on the binding while we watch a movie tonight. 

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