Sewing With Nancy

"Column Quilts" are ideal projects for quilting newbies and fresh concepts for those of you who have been sewing for a while. During this three-part series I'll show you how to replace traditional quilt blocks with sleek columns of fabric. Let's begin with the Heartbeat Column Quilt. The design bears a vague similarity to an EKG. Like of ribbons of the heart the peaks and valleys of the fabric provide a pleasing movement. The stitching may be quick but the pleasing result is long lasting. "Quick Column Quilts," that's what's next on Sewing with Nancy. Sewing with Nancy, TV's longest-airing sewing and quilting program with Nancy Zieman is made possible by Baby Lock, a complete line of sewing, quilting and embroidery machines and sergers. Baby Lock, for the love of sewing. Madeira, specializing in embroidery, quilting and special-effect threads because creativity is never black and white. Koala Studios fine sewing furniture custom-built in America. Clover, making a difference in sewing, quilting, crafting, and needle arts for over 30 years. Amazing Designs and Klass needles. The Heartbeat Quilt behind me is perfect for a baby quilt a lap quilt, or a tummy time quilt to put on the floor for your baby to roll around with to cover up on the couch just for watching television. It's pretty bright. We've made this intentionally for a baby. We have nine different colors of fabric and the background. You can make it with prints. You can make it with coordinates. We just like the bold coloration combination. You see a variety of widths of strips. In this particular quilt we cut widths from 1-1/2" to 4-1/2" and many different widths in between. I'll give you the directions on how to do this. You'll see that what's on the top is also on the bottom but in a little different configuration. But before we go there, let's talk about the fabric. As I mentioned, it's nine fabrics. You could have eight. Really, the choice is yours. You just make the quilt as wide as you'd like with as many fabrics as you have. We always like to start by pressing the fabric with a spray starch or a spray starch alternative. It gives it a little crispness and it helps in the cutting process with the rotary cutter. Just give it a little spray and press it flat. Take some time to do this. You'll be pleased with the results and the fabric will not ravel as much or fray as much. So, spend some time. The yardage that you need is really quite minimal. For the smaller quilt maybe you only need 1/8 of a yard to a 1/4 of a yard of each color. It's a perfect scrap quilt to choose. I'm going to fold this in half. You'll need, for this size quilt two to three of each color, again, in various widths. I'm going to square the first edge, so that's all squared up. Then 1-1/2", 2-1/2", 3" just keep track of the widths that you've cut. I'm going to cut a 2-1/2", and now I'm going to cut a 4". Smaller than 1-1/2" is really too small to work with. Then I'll cut 1-1/2". So you cut strips from around nine colors eight colors, whatever you'd like. Then cut the same number of strips out of the background fabric, so that you have an equal number of widths of the background fabric to fit the color of one of those nine colors. The sewing is simple. You're going to meet right sides together. Stitch the top edges together, just chain stitch. As you can see here I'm stitching one color combination then another, and then another. You stitch until all of your colors have been attached. But that's not quite enough. After you stitch one end then with keeping right sides together you go to the other end and stitch the opposite end and then again chain stitch, sewing all your ends together so that after you sew one end, you have all these circles. When you chain stitch it, then you have to cut it apart. You end up with a lot of circles like this circles of fabric. This is what I'm going to be working with to create the EKG pattern that you see behind me. This is the part where you get your scissors. You don't do any measuring. You fold it in half, just so that it isn't equal. You don't really want it equal. Then cut the background fabric and then cut the accent fabric. The top layer, placed on your board or your table. I don't think you have a board like I do. Place it on your board. And the top layer, place on a stack. Then get your next color, fold it in half but not exactly in half. You can see my colorations. Then cut. When we were making these for the first time kind of designing, Sharon, who works with me was a little apprehensive about doing this. I said I don't think you can make a mistake. Then take this piece and set it aside with the other fabric. I'm just going to keep on keeping on. Fold it in half, fold it in half again, and cut. Now the arrangement that I'm going to come up with right now may not be the arrangement I'm going to end up with but you just keep cutting until you like what you see. I think I'm going to try blue next. Whatever you have on the top, the other half, of course will be on the lower half of the quilt so you need to vary it so they're not all equal. We need a pink in here so let's find a pink that's been sewn. There's an orange. I have enough fabric here! Here's my pink, I knew it was here. Now, you can kind of do like what I'm going to do now. Just audition it first. Let's see, oh, maybe I need something about this height. After you've made the first couple of cuts remember to do that little audition trick. Then maybe, at this point I can use a lighter color. Maybe this lighter color would go. Wrong way-- Oh right there. You see I have a variety of widths of colors. The length of this heartbeat has changed as well. You'd keep going across. There's about 18-20 cuts on the quilt that's behind me. I'm giving you a range because if you cut a lot of narrow pieces you'll need more strips, obviously. If it's a lot of wide pieces, well, you get the picture. So after you do this arrangement and you'll have many more than I have then see if you like it. You know, test out some colorations. If you want to separate those two pinks. I don't like that those two are too close together. I'll try this. Whatever the case may be, lay it out until you get an interesting pattern. Then, meeting right sides together sew the strips in pairs. These two together. These two pieces together. And these two. Sew along the edges. After you press the seams, sew the pairs together. Here's a small sample of what I would like to show you what happens. Here's my one-half of the quilt top. It's a small sampling but you can see the interesting effect. Now that I have half of it do the same thing with the other half. What samples have been left over I lay it out in the opposite direction. Then place down the next piece. I think you get the idea with the bright colors toward you instead of away from you. They're the lower half of the quilt. Do the arrangement. As I'm putting this here, we have two-- Oh, that's not going to work. So, just move it around. You do not want to, of course, have the same coloration as the first half of the quilt which undoubtedly you will not have. You just keep laying these out as many as you used for the top half of the quilt. After cutting those, and making the arrangement I think you see what's going to happen. You lay them out, sew them in pairs and then put the pairs together. Finally, after pressing the seam allowances you meet the two halves together. Do lay them out. Lay out the top with the bottom before sewing the bottom half together to make sure you like this arrangement and so that you get an interesting EKG of fabric. It's a fun way of working with scraps of fabric. Make sure you have plenty of the background fabric. We do like to, in this instance, press the seams open because you don't have to worry about shading the fabric. Then, added to an interesting background fabric then you have a quilt top. It's not limited to a baby or a lap quilt the Heartbeat Column Quilt is ideal for larger sizes as well. Using gray, white, and black prints with a neutral background the quilt design takes on a modern look. To adjust the size of the bed quilt just vary the number of the strips the width and the length of the columns. Simply by changing the color of the fabrics you go from a heartbeat EKG look to a night scene of a city. I think this is really stunning in these neutral colors lots of prints instead of just solids. We also changed the width. This is a double to a full size bed quilt. Instead of cutting the strips 1-1/2" to 4" wide they start at 2-1/2" and go up to 6-1/2". You just have to make certain that if you have two strips that are 6-1/2" wide that you cut two strips for the background that are 6-1/2" wide, plus a little bit more. I'll get to that as we go along. If you just want to see the arrangement again here's a 6-1/2" strip of this negative look of a leaf on a white background. It's complement is found on the other side of the quilt and it's a longer section. The same principle applies. You're going to be sewing a neutral strip to a print strip in a tube and then offset the cutting at the folds. This wider width works great for prints. We're working with a guy print here. We have some atlases, some maps kind of fun looking with a gray background. But I want to talk about, not only prints but making the quilt longer. Since most fabrics are 42" wide, cotton fabrics and you put two together, the longest you'd get you know, you'd have to lengthen it a little bit to get a king or a full, or even for a double bed. So what we like to do is add an extra part of a strip. For a full to double each of the neutral backgrounds is going to have a 42" plus it's going to have a fourth of a strip. Here's a strip that's folded in half and folded in half again, quarter marking it. You don't even have to mark it, just simply cut. Then cut the other fold. This is a fourth of a strip, approximately ten inches. Let me see if I can get that in the right fold, here we go. Then this section, as I mentioned about ten inches is stitched to one 42" length. There you go. There's one for the double and the full. For the queen, you're going to use a 42" this is folded in half. Then the next piece, just fold it in half not in fourths. So, it's a strip and a half. The hardest part, it seems for me today is to cut the folds Just cut that fold. So again, cut it in half and you get one and a half. Then the same principle applies. Cut a section. I'll cut it right about here, and then again at the fold and you have your sections. Only I forgot to hold onto it! The background will be just slightly longer giving you the length you need for your longer bed quilt. After you've pieced all these together the same principle I showed you earlier. You can place it on of course, a batting and a background fabric. For the background fabric, we used leftovers. We had lots of black and white prints. So, whatever we had leftover we just pieced and pieced and pieced together until we had a large enough section to make the backing of the fabric. Characteristic of a modern quilt rarely do they have borders, so we didn't add borders. It was a fast way to put together the column quilt. This speedy queen size quilt is designed with a very easy lesson in color coordination. Simply find a print you love for the narrow columns and choose five colors from the print to use for the columns colors. The interruptions, well, they're horizontal strips. Stop the lengthwise movement while creating a very artistic design. I designed this quilt on graph paper with colored pencils. I decided how large I'd like to make it, a queen size. I drew out the dimensions and started filling in the colors. Knowing that strips of fabric are generally 42" long I used that as the basis to create the quilt. It's about as simple as you can get to get something very large and dramatic. Here's the print that I chose. You can see the polka dots have lots of colors in them. I chose five colors from this for the columns of this quilt. When you look at the quilt behind me and you look at these strips on my table they're not at all the same size. The strips on the table are half the size that I used in the actual quilt, so keep it in mind. You'll have to use your imagination a little bit that these strips are not really what the numbers say. You can certainly vary the sizes of the columns. But the sizes that I worked with and are printed in the book that accompanies today's program the pink that's on the outer edge is 7-1/2" then the orange is 4-1/2" 10-1/2" is the biggest one for the turquoise 4-1/2", my little note tells me for the red. Then the green in the middle is 7-1/2". These colors mirror image with the green in the center then it goes the red, turquoise, orange, and pink that you'll see as I stitched along and put the strips together. That polka dot print is cut up into many, many, many narrow strips that are 3-1/2" wide. The 45" strips are all sewn together. It's kind of mindless sewing. If you're going to be putting these strips together enjoy it, actually, because you can kind of think as you're sewing and daydream a little bit. You keep sewing these strips together. After sewing half of it, as I mentioned, I repeated it. Then the red comes again, then another turquoise. That whole length is called a strata. Layers of strips put together. You can use the same pressing techniques that I detailed earlier using a spray starch or a starch alternative. Press the seams open that's kind of my new favorite way of working with quilts. Then we're going to do a little trimming, a little cutting. Give me a moment to unfold my fabric. So here's my whole strata this first strata that has been sewn together. I have another one hiding underneath here so let me just straighten it out. This section, in reality would be 42" in length. Here's a close up of the quilt behind me the middle section. It's almost 80" wide and it's 42" in length. It takes up the majority of the quilt. You have created about half of the quilt by sewing these strips together. After you've sewn these together you're going to sew another one identical to this. It's underneath this one, and it's not quite laid out as smoothly as I'd like, so give me a moment. You're going to cut this one apart. You're going to cut it into smaller sections. They're going to be 17"-18" in length. This is normally 42" in length so this would be 17" and 17" and then you'll have a little bit left over that you don't need. So this section, let me pull this up is going to be placed on the bottom and top of the quilt. The middle, it's called an Interrupted Quilt the middle has a green section book-ended by the print. Then we would simply put the big section in the middle. I can't even fit this half-scale one on here. Let's take a look at the finished quilt the Interrupted Columns. The horizontal column goes across that quilt giving it some impact. Then those shorter sections, the 17" lengths are below this interrupted column section. Let me look at this one. It's a lot of fabric. But you make a queen size quilt and any pattern is going to have a lot of fabric. But this time, you didn't do a lot of stitching. At the very end, I put a border around this area to kind of frame it a little bit and had it professionally quilted by my friend Sue, who's a long-arm quilter. It was dramatic to make, starting with that print and working with big columns and a lot of straight stitching. When you think of quilts I'm sure the first image that comes to mind is a patchwork design cut and sewn from cotton fabric. Today, my Nancy's Corner guest makes traditional patchwork designs

but from a very different medium

cold, hard steel. Here to tell us about his art is Nathan Winkler of a steel company who lives in Fort Payne, Alabama, who joins us via Skype. Welcome to Sewing with Nancy, Nathan. Thank you, Nancy, it's a pleasure to be here. This is a fascinating story. Instead of fabric and thread you work with steel, barn board and tacks. Tell our viewers how you got started. Well, what actually happened is I went on a brief trip up to Iowa in the winter of 2010 with my mother. And since I was already doing recycling of the barn wood just tearing down barns locally here where I'm from I just naturally noticed the dilapidated barns around the landscape up in that area. Actually, that's how I first saw my first barn quilt by just paying attention to seeing the different dilapidated barns. It's just something that stuck with me. Later on that year, about in August, 2010 I decided to go ahead and traditionally start painting some pieces that I'd come up with off the Internet. I liked it, but I didn't really like, you know how it has to be really perfect, with the taping of the lines, and all. So I was looking for another medium that would really match my personality and style which is unperfect. I happened to just run across a piece of tin from a barn that I'd tore down recently before that. It started up with that. So you recycle the tin. You flatten it out and then you cut it. It's already flat. A traditional barn roof has a piece of, it's called 5V metal. It's got five small ribs and it's got nine-inch flat spaces on either side of the center rib. So I cut those out is how I get a flat canvas to work from. That's how I get the canvas. So the patchwork pieces are the steel or the tin. Then you use part of the barn wood, as well. I do, I use the material off the sides of the barn to wherever I get it from. I rip those down and I make a really simple, you know, frame to go around it, and it seems to work. I enjoy doing it. I love it. They're really attractive. I like quilt designs, and obviously, you do, too. What's your favorite? Do you have a favorite patchwork design? I would say that I like collaborations or collections. I like to do things that have meaning to them and some kind of background history. I really like all the patterns out of the Underground Railroad series by Eleanor Burns. I was actually given that as a gift when I spoke at a local quilt guild here. The Stitch or Two Sewers in Hamerville, Alabama gave me that as a gift. When I started looking through that book and just really seeing the cohesiveness of that whole design. The Drunkard's Path is probably my favorite pattern to do but that whole series is really intriguing to me. I really enjoy that. We use a lot of stitches but you use a lot of tacks, don't you? Yeah, like say on the Drunkard's Path there's probably on a 2' x 2' piece, there's around 400 tacks. I have to pre-punch those as well before I ever put the tacks in, so yeah, it's a process. It's labor intensive. I love the rust that comes through the patina of the tin. You don't really paint the steel at all, do you? I don't do it, unless it's requested, which is rare. I love the different rust patterns. They actually become like fabric to me. The way I see fabric just the different designs the rusts makes as it ages. It just really, I love that. That's my color palette, is really the rust palette. Tell our viewers about the vision that you have for a quilt trail in your area. Yeah, it's something that's not really known around here. I've already been promoting for about the last year on getting a quilt trail started in Mentone, Alabama which is up on Lookout Mountain. You know, it's a process and I've already probably given away, you know before this ever happened I've been doing this for three years and I've probably given away way more than I've ever sold. So, the town of Mentone is dotted with my pieces. So that, from three years ago that was my vision three years ago. I kind of started by just giving them away and getting them out there for people to see and try to get that momentum started. It's slow, but it's coming. I'm getting some other feedback from some other people that have done quilt trails in their area, which is helpful. I hope it just goes and gets big. I think it will, Nathan, and I'd like to invite you to come to our studios in a couple of years to tell us about how your vision has expanded. Thank you for being our guest. I have enjoyed it, Nancy, thanks so much. If you'd like to know more about the Steel Quilt Company you can go to our website, nancyzieman.com. You can re-watch this interview or any of our 70 past programs. Click on Nancy's Corner and find more about Nathan. As always, thank you for joining us. Bye for now. Nancy Zieman has written a book entitled "Quick Column Quilts" that includes instructions for 13 quilted projects and all the techniques featured in this three-part series. It's $18.99, plus shipping and handling. To order the book, call 1-800-336-8373 or visit our website at sewingwithnancy.com/2804 Order Item Number U8743 "Quick Column Quilts." To pay by check or money order call the number on the screen for details. Visit Nancy's website at nancyzieman.com to see additional episodes, Nancy's blog, and more. Sewing with Nancy TV's longest airing sewing and quilting program with Nancy Zieman has been brought to you by Baby Lock; Madeira Threads; Koala Studios; Clover; Amazing Designs and Klass Needles. Closed captioning funding provided by Pellon. Sewing with Nancy is a co-production of Nancy Zieman Productions and Wisconsin Public Television.