Thursday 12 January 2012

TGIFF! - Turning Back the Clockwork Orange

Snowstorm today so 
Clockwork Orange
posed for pictures 
in the basement
Welcome to TGIFF! Today, I'm turning back the clock to 1999, when Santana's "Smooth" was topping the charts, when Jean Chrétien was Prime Minister of Canada and Bill Clinton was President of the United Stated, when companies were preparing for the Y2K Bug, when people were stocking their cupboards and filling their bathtubs just in case the world felt apart at the seams when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999. That is when I started today's finish.

I shared this poor quilt's story back in November when I pulled it out of the On Hold pile and finished the top.

Here's the finished Clockwork Orange!
Beige and black rail fence panel offset
in a black background with
orange striped accents. 

From Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr's book, Quilts Made Modern, I learned that the technical problem with my rail fence fabrics are their figure/ground relationship. On fabric, the figure is the illustration and the ground is the background. Because my fabrics all have similar figure and ground colours, they read as one when pieced together even though they have different scales. I needed more contrast or different colours between them for the rail fence to work properly. Good to know!
The back made of leftover fabrics.

The back is pieced using the remaining blocks and fabrics from the rail fence. Love the back! I was thrilled to use up all the Millennium text fabric and glad that there was a bit of the clock fabric left over for other projects.

Detail of the free motion
quilting of the full cog.


For the quilting, I used straight line quilting in black and orange thread for some of the border, some free motion 'hardwood floor' quilting in the rail fence area, and some free motion overlapping 'cogs' on the black around the rail fence area. I did a few full cogs and quilted some details inside them. Very happy with the cogs and straight line quilting (done with my walking foot), less so with the hardwood floor area (it's hard to do free motion straight-line quilting over so many seams!).

It's the first time I tried bamboo batting and it's also the first time I washed a quilt before taking pictures. I don't know if there was something in the laundry or if it was just the batting, but there was some serious lint/bearding issues when this came out of the dryer!

Quiltography: "Clockwork Orange," by Michèle-Renée Charbonneau, Ottawa, 67" by 88", 2011.

While it's not my favourite quilt, I am doing the happy dance with how it finished and I'm very glad it is off the WIP list!

Finishing Clockwork Orange is also what I pledged to finish this week for Amy's One Week One Thing Challenge.
Amy's Creative Side

Your turn, party people!



17 comments:

  1. So pleased for you, that you got this finished MR. Turned out great and I love the red in it. Great FMQ too !

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  2. Aren't finishes the BEST? I love your Clockwork Orange quilt almost as much as i loved your 1999 retrospective!

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  3. Great finish M-R! Loving the dash of orange. :)

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  4. Yeah!! Well done! I love the orange too and like how it's offset. I'm willing it to snow here but the sun is actually out today!!

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  5. That's a great quilt - the orange is a perfect foil for the black and white!

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  6. Hi M-R! Thanks for stopping by my blog too. I love your 'Clockwork Orange' piece -- both front and back. Great tip on balancing scale and contrast for an effective rail fence. Have a great week!

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  7. Absolutely stunning quilt. I love it:)

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  8. Hey....thanks for stopping by....I will def. show it next week. just finished quilting it last night; about to take it out of the frames....

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  9. silly me.....left without saying how nice your quilt looks....I love black

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  10. It may not be your favorite, but I love it!
    I bet you are so glad that you pulled it out and finished it.
    I will try not to have one on the shelf to finish for years LOL

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  11. I like your quilting. The colors in the quilt look just right to me.

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  12. I really like the way you set the pieced part off center in the quilt. Too bad the fabrics are so similar, we don't get to see all that work. :( Those borders lend to great machine quilting space and you sure did use it! Good job with the FMQ! It looks fabulous! I have yet to try bamboo batting, but I do know that wool batting beards alot too! Have a good weekend!

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  13. Hi I like the quilt too, and am interested that you can recall those details of when you started it. I bet you remember where you got the fabric too!

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  14. M-R, I love this Quilt! It was in part the reason I decided to try to make our twisty quilt modernish! I am simply impressed with your stitching! Very nicely done! I had these great goals of starting FMQ challenges all over the place, but it just hasn't happened, way to go on the FMQ!!

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  15. Good for you! Great quilt and it must feel so satisfying to finish it up!

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