Stacking, Whacking and Poking

A Pile of Groovy Fabric: Feeling Groovy, Robert Kaufman Fabrics

Believe it or not, this picture took me about 4 hours to create. It is 8 pieces of fabric cut to represent the same repeat and then meticulously stacked and pinned so that the repeats lay exactly over the top of one another. And yes, it's a set up for another quilt style that I am experimenting with as a result of another class I am taking at Quiltology. Clearly I have fabric projects on the brain these days.

What this picture represents, is the set up for a set of quilt blocks out of this book:

Yep. I'm taking a workshop on "stack n' whack" quilts where the stacking and whacking results in quilt blocks with kaleidoscopic effects. In this case, the base block that I will be working with is the LeMoyne Star. By creating a series of diamond shapes using the exact same location in a fabric print repeat, it's possible to create these blocks and get some incredible results.

The fabric I picked for the project is called "Feeling Groovy" and it's a Robert Kaufman fabric that I purchased from Quiltology. I selected it for three reasons:

• It has a diverse, dense print with a lot of color and a lot of variation
• I am going to do a crib sized version of the quilt, and I wanted something bright and happy that would be crib compatible
• I just fell in love with it when I thought about how it might look in my baby's room

That first element is actually the most important. In order to get good results from the stack n' whack process, it's important to pick a print that has a lot of variation and doesn't have a lot of "white space" so that your resulting blocks will have a lot of variation and interest as well. The second and third aspects of the decision are really just a matter of personal taste, and the fact that I don't really have the time right now to tackle another large bed-sized quilt. Not to mention that washable cotton items seem like more practical things to make for my August arrival than do wooly things at the moment.

The first part of the class involved identifying a fabric we wanted to work with, some contrasting fabrics to complete the blocks with, and learning how to cut out the fabric repeats so it would be easy to set up the stack we were going to whack from. It also involved learning how to do all the pinning so that the fabric stack would be exactly lined up and would stay in place when the whacking process began.

Flower Head Pins: An Essential Tool for the Stack n' Whacker

The pinning process* resulted in me gaining some greater understanding about why one would want to spend money on flathead pins to go along with some good sharp jabs in the fingers Flathead pins like the flower pins in the picture above, lay flat against he fabric and don't get in the way when you put a ruler over the top of them to set up your cutting. Since ruler control is pretty important when you are going to rotary cut through 8 layers of potentially expensive fabric, the extra cost of these specialty pins is worth it.

Homework for the next class was for us to get our stacks pinned together and whacked and to start working on cutting out our background fabrics as well, so that we could work on laying out our final designs in the next class and start getting a few blocks put together. The whacking process took a few tries for me to get comfortable with, but once I understood my tools and some basic dimensions better, I was able to create the 12 sets of diamond shaped pieces that I need to create my stars.

Up next: playing with the stars... creating kaleidoscope images in fabric.

* This process is interesting, but doesn't lend itself too well to blogging about it. The simplest way to describe it is that you run a set of pins through defined areas in the fabric to get the fabric pieces to align and then you use other pins to get things locked down and remove the first pins. And you do this at grid intervals all across and down the fabric. There's a lot of shaking and smoothing involved in the process to get things to lay right. It's all relatively easy, but pretty time consuming, especially when you are starting with a print that has a large repeat interval, as this one does.