Stripe Love

A few weeks ago I mentioned that my design wall for the first four months or so of the year was devoted to a commission.  I ended up working on two ideas for this commission simultaneously, one of which I finished (at least the quilt top) while the other is still in progress.  It turns out that the quilt-in-progress is the choice, so I thought I'd show you the finished one.  There's a bit of history to this quilt, so I'll tell you how it came about.  I always like to read about the process other quilters go through when turning a spark of idea into a finished quilt, so thought you'd like to hear about mine.  But first, just so you aren't kept in suspense, here's the big reveal.

The initial impetus was a pair of photographs I was given to suggest the kinds of colours these clients are drawn to.  The photos were both of autumn leaves, one set yellow-gold, the other red, against a brilliant blue sky, starkly contrasted again the shadows which read as deep black.  Because we'd already talked about it, I knew that the clients wanted something like the quilts I'd been making after a Nancy Crow workshop in 2010.  And that meant that I knew I would be starting with strip-piecing.  The focus of the Crow workshop was strip-piecing and even after making four quilts to develop my ideas that the workshop had prompted, I knew I was a long way from exhausting the possibilities even of the limited design principles I was using.  So I began making stripes.  

During the workshop, Crow gave us a number of assignments that required us to cut and sew arrangements of lines and shapes first in black and white and then in colour.  Some of the formulae she dictated were very precise, others quite vague:  I won't repeat them here because I know she has been the victim of copyright infringement of her teaching materials in the past and I respect her right not to have her material repeated without her permission.  I'm not telling you anything here that she hasn't published in interviews or her books.  Crow urged us to make each arrangement as beautiful as it could possibly be.  I thought that what I came up with was horribly ugly, predictable, dull, and unlikely to produce an attractive quilt.  It seemed to me that my constructed fabrics looked like the ties belonging to uniforms of minor boarding schools in the UK.   (Another class member said all of hers looked like upholstery.)  Here's part of my collection hanging on my design wall at the workshop, labelled with torn-off post-it notes to show which formula I'd followed.

See what I mean?  Don't these look like something produced by someone who's afraid of colour?  In the end, I did make a quilt I was proud of, finishing it within twenty minutes of the deadline on the last day of the workshop.  But I punched up the colour quite a bit for that one.  In later months, I made three more quilts using fabrics I constructed during the workshop, which I'll show you another time.  And I'm still using those fabrics.  But about eighteen months ago I decided to try again to construct fabrics that I considered to be beautiful, rather than limiting myself to trying to use up constructed fabrics left over from the quilts I'd already made.  I devoted a lot of time to the project, at least a couple of months, but in the end I had a whole new series of constructed strip-pieced fabrics, most of which I loved.  

I'd been working on one idea for this commission for a couple of months when on a whim I decided to start a second idea using these constructed fabrics, old and new.  I threw them up on the design wall without trying to arrange them at all, but setting them close together to try to get an idea of how blocks of these strip-pieced fabrics might look set against one another, horizontal stripes bumping up against vertical ones, and vice versa.  Here's where I began.

As you can see, I've taken out of the mix all the constructed fabrics that don't jive with the rich, saturated tones of the original photographs.  The discards are arranged by themselves on the bottom right corner.

So I put those ones back in their cupboard and concentrated on the remaining possibilities on the design wall.  And I was excited right away.  I loved how the strong colours were playing off one another and while the arrangement here is pretty chaotic, I thought I had something to work with.

By this time, I knew that the constructed fabric second in from the left, at the top, would be the centre point of the quilt, at least from a colour point of view:  it had exactly the combination of primary colours and deep tones that I liked in the photos I'd been given.  So I knew it would take more of a central role than it did in this initial arrangement, and to move it toward the centre, I added a top border of vertical stripes, something punchy to set off those retiring greens below it.  Oh!  Oh!  Things were getting better and better!  And the quilt design took shape from there, working from the upper left corner down to the lower right, with many, many changes and auditions in between.

Part of the excitement of a project like this is watching as previously-underloved elements suddenly acquire huge importance in the context of other elements.  When I first finished this second set of constructed fabrics, I decided that both the black and blue striped fabric in the bottom right corner and the wide green and narrow blue striped piece above it were failures.  But in concert with those rich reds, golden yellows and hot pinks?  Suddenly they had a crucial role to play.  

From here it was a matter of playing, auditioning, accepting, rejecting, rearranging, reconsidering, what ifs, photographing, back to playing, in what began to seem like an endless cycle.

 

Until at  last, at last, it was all sewn together and DONE!  The quilt top is almost exactly five feet long and three feet deep.  I took this series of photographs not to publish here but as a design aid:  it's amazing how much easier it is to see flaws through the camera lens than with the naked eye.  The fact that I now have this series showing the progress of the design is a bonus.

It was a breezy afternoon:  right after I took this shot, the whole thing blew off the fence.

The bluebirds weren't bothered by the photo shoot, as you can see below.  That's the male at the birdhouse; the female is inside.

Harmony, balance, vibration, rhythm, contrast, repetition:  these were the design principles I was trying to keep in mind as I worked.  I wanted the eye to follow distinct paths around the quilt, coming back again and again to find something new to notice.  This one is quite unlike anything I've made before, and perhaps I'll never make another one like it, but I'm extremely happy with how the process evolved:   I started with the germ of a thought and ended up with something entirely new to me.  And thank you Nancy Crow.  I can't say enough about my admiration for her as an artist and as a teacher.  She is uncompromising with her students, but from poring over her books I'm aware that she is just as demanding of herself.  I learned how to really work at making art by spending a week working with her, and how not to settle for something that's acceptable but to keep going until it's as good as it can possibly be.  After that, call it done and get on to the next twenty quilts.

So there you have it.  One quilt top finished, one quilt's process explained.  The next step is consider how to quilt it.  There is already so much going on in this design that I can't imagine a complex quilting pattern will enhance it, so I'll probably keep it simple and allow the quilt top itself to shine.

After all that stripy intensity, I thought you might like to rest your eyes with this:  these hops have an incredible colour, an acidic green that sparks beautifully against the deeper green of the grass.

Happy June.

Comments

[Donna Sheppard]

Love your new piece. I have a collection of strip piecing from my Nancy Crow adventures. I thought some of mine looked like beach ball fabric. I would love to experiment with some of mine. Really like the way you photograph your art.

[Anne at Shintangle Studio]

Thanks, Donna! I appreciate your comments about the quilt and about my photography. If I've given you the spark to experiment with your own strip piecing from Nancy Crow's workshop, that's great. I'd be interested to see what you come up with.