UrbanAmish Lesson 2 • Roman Broad Stripe or Rome Can Be Built in a Day

Photo of centurion courtesy Luc Viatour via Wikipedia Commons.

The Romans were no slouches at decorative touches as you can see by this photograph of a Roman Centurion at a historical reenactment in Boulogne, France.
I've paired him with one of Pamela's Roman Broad Stripe blocks that looked particularly good with his outfit.

In this lesson we are going to explore an UrbanAmish variations on the Roman Stripe. I've based the Roman Broad Stripe on the traditional Roman Stripe Amish block, a block often seen presented in the configuration shown to the right.



This has always been a very appealing block for me specially in the Lightning configuration. While the small band of stripes in the traditional block is quite appealing for colorwork . . .


Red and green play with my Holiday Splendor Christmas line in a traditional Roman Stripe.


. . . I found myself wanting the bold lightning effect AND the visual impact of larger scale graphics while putting a new line idea through it's paces in a virtual quilt design. I tinkered with stripe proportions and came up with an UrbanAmish variation. Here's the virtual quilt that gave birth to the proportions and dimensions of UrbanAmish Roman Broad Stripe.


Quilt design by Yolanda Fundora: Roman Landscape

An aside: For the life of me I cannot find why the traditional block is called Roman Stripe. (Any quilt historians out there please chime in through a comment if you know the answer so the unenlightened may be illuminated.)

To have an UrbanAmish Roman Broad Stripe adventure you must download the following:

UrbanAmish Lesson #2: Roman Broad Stripe

To download, click here.

UrbanAmish Lesson #2 Templates for Roman Broad Stripe.

To download, click here.

As you already know if you have read previous posts: UrbanAmish lessons are fully tested on a laboratory volunteer.
Pamela is never harmed in the process but I was a bit afraid she might hurt herself in her enthusiastic response to this lesson.

She produced 4 individual Roman Broad Stripe Blocks.

These two configurations take the 2-unit block for a spin:



These are one-unit lightning configurations. (To be further illuminated you must read the lesson.):



And while her brain munched on those she came up with a design that incorporates her two favorite Roman Broad Stripe configurations:
Lightning and Double"K". She calls this "Urban Baby Quilt," saying, "Urban babies wear black and go to art museums."



Pamela adds:

I made my four sample blocks from an early version of the lesson. In this version, fabric B was supposed to contrast to A in value, hue, and texture, and fabric C was supposed to be similar to B in value and hue, while similar to A in texture. For instance, in my blue block, all the fabrics are turquoise and cobalt blue. A and C have curly lines, while B has straight lines, making the two groups contrast in texture. B and C have more cobalt (and black) than turquoise, while A has more turquoise than cobalt, making these two groups contrast in value and hue.

The earlier version of the lesson was fun and rewarding, but it was HARD to find fabrics that went together in exactly the right way. The new version is much easier to follow, and will give you blocks that look just as good.

Urban Baby Quilt is not quite legitimate because there is too much contrast between B and C. I don't care! I loved these fabrics too much.

I am fortunate to have most of Yolanda's fabrics in my stash. My green block uses the Holiday Splendor focus fabric from her current Christmas line with Blank Quilting, and shows that it doesn't have to look like Christmas. The palm trees in my yellow block come from Yolanda's older "Playa Sur" line. And the red fabric in the baby quilt comes from Yolanda's older "Textura Graphica" line.

Our shared quilt studio in the midst of a Roman Broad Stripe lightning brainstorm. That's Pamela's current color wheel quilt design on the back flannel wall and part of her lovingly organized fabric stash.

My Travels with Miranda

A fortnight ago I had the pleasure of making a business trip cross-country with a new acquaintance. By the end of the 6-hour plane ride, I knew we were going to be fast friends.
The next couple of days at the presentation and during the trade show we were on our way to a life-long friendship.

A lot of you know Joan Hawley, of Lazy Girls Design. I have long admired her bag designs visually and follow her very informative blog every Monday morning. However I had never had my hands on one of her designs to use.

I'm by nature an impatient and demanding bag user. I want a bag to have everything I need, whenever I need it with a minimum of rooting around. I want it to be able to carry all my reading and writing materials, my iPhone, second pair of glasses, wallet, passport case, camera... the list is infinite. When I want anything I want it fast. I want to be able to put down the bag and have her stand up by herself. And above all I don't want the shape of the bag to distribute the weight so badly that my arm is sheared off at the shoulder when carrying it. Miranda by far exceeded all my demands and even anticipated a few I didn't realize I had.


Stuffed!: iPhone, wallet, glass case, my idea corral (see "Stripes Rule!" post), quilting magazines , two books, travel pillow, passport case, and a Runaround bag you can't see because of the angle.

Joan had made me a Miranda Day Bag using the sienna & black colorway of my Sketchbook fabric line that debuts at the coming Spring Quilt Market. We were doing this with the idea of co-promotion at the trade show I was traveling to.

I was carefully wrapping up Miranda into my suitcase when I took a closer look at her and realized that she looked perfect for that long plane ride. So I unstuffed my usual bag and arranged everything into Miranda. Already I could tell Miranda was not just another pretty face. Here was a bag that knew what it took to go the distance.

As it turned out we had an extremely productive and satisfying trip. Miranda garnered compliments all the days we were there and has continued to do so back on the home turf accompanying me on my shopping expeditions. She can even carry my 12" Macbook!


Back at home at the studio meditating upon a successful trip.

And Miranda also loves her little sister Runaround which she carried lovingly and safely all the way across the USA and back. Check out the zipper and thread tutorials Joan has posted starring Runaround also in Sketchbook fabrics on Joan's Lazy Girls Design blog.

And for the readers among you:

You can see this is one of the books that I carried on the plane with me.
Mauve: How one man invented a color that changed the world by Simon Garfield.
Check out the review on Amazon for details. It's a real page-turner for anyone concerned with color. I whipped right through and so has Pamela, my dedicated UrbanAmish pupil. (And she doesn't even get extra credit for it.)

As background for the book shot I used Pamela's current Color Wheel quilt project.
Visit her website if you haven't yet. She has some very exciting color ideas too. (See sidebar for link.)

UrbanAmish Lesson 1 • Indian Hatchet

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Ruby Short McKim in her book One Hundred and One Patchwork Patterns published in 1931 in Independence, Missouri writes of the Indian Hatchet Block:

"Warlike and treacherous as the name may sound, we guarantee this to be one of the most peacefully simple blocks to put together of all the old-time patterns. Many a little girl has learned to sew on Indian Hatchet blocks, although a mother perhaps supervised the cutting."

It seemed fitting that in 2009, ( 78 years later) we begin our exploration of Urban Amish design principles with this block, one that was already considered old then.

Pamela Zave, my partner in this enterprise is an art quilter. Here is one of her Color Wheel Quilts called Sunlight, Citron, Saffron, Ochre. You can visit her website which is listed in the sidebar of this blog.


I'm a professional fabric designer and license my designs to Blank Quilting. I have also co-authored two books with quilter Barbara Campbell, Fuse It and Be Done and Holiday Quilts.

Pamela has been an art quilter since she took up quilting in 2003. She has stated to me in our myriad conversations about quilt designs not to have a deep love for traditional blocks. I, on the other hand, have an intense love for them.

Since embarking on these lessons, she has developed an affection for particular blocks. All the actual blocks that are pictured in the lessons are hers. The fabrics used are from her own stash. Her stash has quite a few of my own fabrics since she raids my storage area whenever she wants. Above all, though, she has an incredible collection of today's contemporary fabrics all beautifully categorized by color family.

Her enthusiasm for the lessons in fact is so great that she is often, if not always, the instigator for the next Urban Amish lesson. (She has also been heard to exclaim: "Urban Amish! Not for the squamish!" I've threatened to make her a tee shirt with those very words.)


Our method for the lessons is as follows:

1. I give Pamela a set of templates for the block we are exploring. All our units are 16" finished size, much larger than the great majority of traditional blocks. Click here to download your own set of templates for Lesson 1.
2. Along with the templates I give her an Urban Amish fabric formula. Click here to download the formula and your own visual guide to Lesson 1.
3. She goes to her stash and tries to come up with a successful Urban Amish block that is pleasing to her eye while at the same time complying with the fabric guidelines.
4. She gets graded for her efforts and receives a "report card" with comments.
   

We want the Urban Amish lessons to help you accomplish several things.

• Give you a way to be comfortable and successful using today's larger scale contemporary fabrics. Traditional blocks date back to a time when quilting was done with scraps. The pieces in the blocks are usually small. Small-scale prints or tonals such as batiks work fine within this context. Since the resurgence of interest in quilting in the late 1970's, more and more fabric designers are working exclusively for the quilting industry. Fabric designers naturally don't have the scale constriction and design fabrics larger in scale driven simply by love for the fabric itself. However this natural inclination of the fabric designer sets up a dilemma for the quilter. Quilters also respond to the beauty of these bolder fabric designs and find themselves bringing them home. At times, however, these fabrics languish in the stash because traditional blocks at traditional sizes don't quite accommodate the design of the fabrics. Our simple solution is to think big, i.e., change the scale.

• Give you a way to make beautiful, contemporary quilts with a lot of graphic impact and appeal in a lot less time. This is a natural outcome of the shift in block scale. The downloadable lesson will give you many variations on using the Indian Hatchet blog in effective quilt designs.

• Give beginning quilters an easy and practically foolproof introduction to quilt design.

• Give quilters who buy my fabrics an insight into the way I design my fabric lines and suggestions how to be creative with them. In Lesson 1, I use my new fabric line, Sketchbook, by Blank Quilting for Spring 2009 to put the Indian Hatchet block virtually through its paces.

Even though each lesson only requires Pamela to produce one 16 1/2" block design she frequently produces two or three because they are so much fun.
We end this post with some eye candy. Here are the two blocks units that Pamela ended up with. (A block unit is made up of 4 Indian Hatchet blocks.) Be sure to download the full lesson so you can get the Urban Amish fabric formula she followed.



I hope this first lesson is helpful and above all as fun as it is for Pamela and I to put together for you. Please send us your own Urban Amish experiments. We would love to see them. Remember: Urban Amish! Not for the squamish!

Sketchbook, my new fabric line from Blank Quilting will be available in Spring 2009.