I know, it’s been a few weeks since I last posted here, and you’re long overdue for an update. After a trip to the coast, and another to Kamloops, my normal posting routine is entirely undone. But I’m back in the saddle now, and have lots to share, so much that I’m not going to try to get it all into one post but spread it out a bit.
First up is a quilt top reveal, a frothy little number to celebrate spring. Or perhaps to try to encourage spring to appear, though this strategy isn’t working so far. Regardless, I'm calling it "Spring Medallion."
Years ago I found some strips of fabric in the scrap bin at Poppins Quilt Parlour in Penticton, just a dozen, but I liked them so well that I pieced them together. Here’s what I ended up with. It’s about eighteen inches long and a foot wide.
Pretty, but not very inspiring. I don’t really do “pretty,” so this soft, harmonious arrangement of warm greens, pinks, and oranges posed a big design challenge. I was determined to do something with this piece of constructed fabric, but it’s been years, literally, since I first contemplated this challenge. A first step, which I took a long time ago, was to construct a companion piece in similar fabrics. This piece is quite a bit smaller, about 9 inches square, so the colours appear more intense here because the photo is a closeup. You can see the last tiny bits of the floral-on-white fabric that appears twice in the first piece: I was determined to use every scrap of it.
And that’s where these two pieces sat, coming out into the light of day every six months or so, spending a few hours on the design wall, and then disappearing again into my bin of pale and pastel fabrics.
And had it not been for the job I set myself of organizing my scrap bins, they might have sat there a great deal longer. But I began my scrap bin overhaul by turning to the pale bin and so found these two pieces tangled up in all the other pieces stuffed into the bin. Up they went onto the design wall, and a vague idea began to take shape.
The next step was to ferret through the bin and choose everything, every other scrap, that I thought might work with the two pieces I’d already made. The design wall disappeared under a flurry of scraps. Not all of these fabrics were right, of course. That deep pink was too saturated, and the roses at the bottom were too greyed out for the light, clear colours I was working with. (Pay no attention to the three sketches also on the design wall: they’re ideas for a different project.) The turquoises on the left seemed far too bright, far too different from everything else, but I knew I had to add something to the mix to avoid drowning in a sea of peachiness, so they stayed up on the wall.
Fabrics came and went. The roses had soon gone, replaced by other possibilities.
My first composition decision was that this would be a medallion quilt, a hymn to spring, and my second was to use the second pieced section as the centrepiece. And without thinking too much, I grabbed that floral turquoise piece, a fat eighth that I thought I’d never, ever have a use for, and made it into a crisp border for my centrepiece. Then, to give myself a sudden and crucial change in value, I added a second border, this one of a slightly-greyed blue on white print. And then another—to me—surprise: a much deeper green than I thought would work with those pale hues in the middle.
And then I stopped and had a good think. That other strip-pieced bit of fabric called out to be used. See it waiting to the left of the centre unit?
I knew that I wanted to use my other strip-pieced fabric close to the centre of the quilt, where it would have pride of place, but it was so small that it took some thinking—and then some courage—to cut it up and arrange it into the next border. Obviously I didn’t have enough to go all the way around the centre, even at this early stage, so I eked it out with similar fabrics from my stash, echoing as much as I could fabrics I’d already used in the centrepiece.
Once this stage was finished, I felt a huge sense of relief: I’d used both the pieces I really wanted to include in this quilt, and from now on I could just play. I’d established the colour story and now I could focus on variations. I had just enough of that turquoise floral for another border (the width of the border was dictated by the amount of fabric I could eke out of the remaining piece, not by any aesthetic decision). And outside the turquoise I put a striped piece that had come from a scrap bag I bought at the CQA show in Kamloops years and years ago (I have no idea why I can remember this so clearly). The strip was just long enough to border two sides of the centre, so I very carefully sliced it in two down the middle the long way and sewed it on. I think this might be my favourite fabric in the quilt, not least because it’s unlike anything I’ve ever put in a quilt before. I absolutely loathe shades of salmon or coral and never dreamed I’d be thrilled to use that colour. Go figure. Building a quilt this way is a mysterious process.
At this point, I hit another wall. It took a day to decide that I needed still more turquoise at this stage, something to add some weight and definition to the quilt thus far. I auditioned fabrics, and I was sure that the spider web fabric on the left was the answer. In the end, though, it went back into the bin: it was slightly too green and slightly too pale.
At about this stage, I made another decision: I wanted to include some traditional piecing in a block I hadn’t ever used before, something to add a new design element and yet give me the chance to repeat fabrics and add in as many of the others hanging on the design wall as I could. So I took them all down, threw them into a small bin, and took them with me to my monthly sewing meeting of the art quilting group I belong to in Grand Forks.
I’m a big fan of Gwen Marston, a quilter who’s been improvising with traditional quilt blocks for many, many years, long before the modern quilt movement grabbed hold of the idea. And Churn Dash is a traditional block she often returns to, so I decided to use it here for the first time. It’s simple, yet has a graphic strength that I thought might work well to offset the muted values I was working with. So I spent a day with my art quilting friends making churn dash blocks. (Please ignore the two bright star blocks in the upper left corner: they belong to yet another different project, one I’ll show you another time.) When I got home, I roughly placed the churn dash blocks outside the auditioning turquoise fabrics I was auditioning for another border, and I thought, “yes, that’s going to work."
As you can see, I was also piecing random strips of pastel fabrics: the strip sets at the bottom of the photo above were meant to echo the short strips around the centre medallion. And I was still making churn dash units. I even made some log cabin-ish units like the one with a pale blue centre in the upper right above, thinking I’d mix them in with the churn dash blocks.
But I still had to decide on the next turquoise border. I ended up using a fabric from a collection of Kaffe Fassett prints that my dear husband gave me for Christmas. I really hated this fabric when I first saw it, and I never thought I’d be able to use it in a quilt: too loud, too garish, just too plain weird. But here, it worked, despite the intense magenta background. It’s hard to believe what a crucial role scale plays in the way surface design works: had this design not been as small as it is, I probably couldn’t have used it here. But it was strong enough to give me exactly the firm definition I was looking for at this stage in the composition. (Sorry about the poorly lit photo: the bottom is getting quite a lot of sunlight from the high window to my right).
The blocks multiplied, more auditioning fabrics appeared on the design wall, others disappeared, the strip sets grew longer.
As you can see above, my churn dash units weren’t all the same size. This is an inevitable outcome of working improvisationally rather than measuring. I even made some wonky ones, where the widths of the bars in the blocks are different and not entirely straight. I love mixing it up like this, adding in unexpectedly weird bits to the orderly arrangement of traditional quilt elements. Fortunately, I’d done enough improvisational quilting to know I had only to add filler strips to make all the bits fit together.
It’s not perfect, but perfect wasn’t what I was aiming for. I love all this asymmetry and surprise in unexpected places.
After all this busy-ness and all these different fabrics, I knew I needed to go back to borders to corral all that was going on visually. So I repeated the sequence of fabrics I used for the first three borders around the centre: a border of turquoise, followed by a wider border of pale blue on white, followed by a narrow border of green. I had very little left of any turquoise fabric in the same value as I’d used to this point, so I had to piece the turquoise border outside the Churn Dash blocks. This was one of those occasions when running out of fabric proved to be a good thing: I like the pieced turquoise border much more than I would have a border in a single fabric.
Can you see that the proportions of these three outer borders roughly match the proportions of the first three in the centre?
All was well at this point. Then I nearly took a wrong turn. I slaved away making strip-pieced units to echo the ones I’d used near the centre of the quilt, enough to go all the way around outside the green border. It took days to make it all. And when I had enough, and had mocked it all up on the design wall, I wasn’t sure. I called in the local aesthetics expert (a.k.a. dh), who said definitively that it didn’t work.
He was right. Truly right.
Too busy, too chaotic, too much distraction from the centre of interest. So down it all came, every bit of it. Instead, I opted for a wide final turquoise border in a deeper hue. Once again, I had to piece these borders. I chose the most saturated turquoise fabrics from among my Fassett prints and chopped and reassembled them and pinned them up over the quilt top to see how they looked.
I thought they looked great, so I sewed them on. I love the way that the deeper, dark turquoises in the final border make the rest of the quilt top appear to be floating on top, and the way they become a solid, emphatic frame for the whole composition. Yay.
And there it is. Done! The finished top is about fifty inches square. I know it’s not a great photo, what with the light bouncing up from the floor onto the bottom right corner of the quilt, while the rest of the design wall is rather dark. If we ever stop having rain, rain, and more rain, I’ll take a better one for you.
Ah. Finally. I wrote the above last night. It stopped raining just long enough this morning that dh and I were able to get outside with the finished quilt top and pin it to the newly-sided shop wall. Ta da!
Don’t the warm colours in the board-and-batten (milled right here at home from our own wood) bring out the warmth in the quilt top fabrics? I love a board-and-batten wall (where boards are laid over one another alternatively, so that each board on top hides the gap between the boards below). Dh sided the barn this way and it looks lovely years later.
One last thing. I didn’t have enough of any particular fabric to make a backing that worked well with the colours and values in the quilt top, so I pieced a backing from fabrics I had in my stash that I couldn’t otherwise see a use for. I’ve long admired pieced backs that my friends have made and decided to go that route myself for this one. The result is slightly peculiar, I’ll admit, but remember that it’s the BACK. All I wanted was to create a back that would look as if it belonged, should the quilt be viewed in a tumbled heap so that both sides show at once.
The floral centre is an Alexander Henry fabric, and this is the last little bit of it. I had lots at one stage and used it for two other quilt backs. Now I rather wish I’d used it on the front of a quilt. Oh well: it’s only fabric, after all. I put together (I refuse to say “curated,” which has become the word of the moment in anything to do with collecting objects of any kind) quite a combination of prints, don’t you think? Florals large and small, plus a bold plaid on the diagonal? Never mind. I like it, and I think it’s going to look great once the quilt is finished.
There. That’s one part of the past month in my life accounted for. Stay tuned for other developments that are in the backlog of blog posts.
Anne,
It's so good to see that you've got your quilting mojo back. I like your happy new quilt!
Posted by: Myrna Charlton | 04/26/2017 at 07:46 PM
Thanks, Myrna: Yes, this is the first new quilt top in a year, so I'm pleased that this one came out well. My last finished quilts were all for the Tiptoe through Nature show at the Grand Forks art gallery: doesn't that seem like a long time ago? The show went up just about this time last year.
Posted by: Anne at Shintangle Studio | 04/27/2017 at 11:09 AM
I love this quilt Anne, it is really an ode to spring! And the pieced back so much more fun than one solid colour. Thanks for taking us through the decision making and construction with you.
BTW is there a library raffle quilt underway this spring?
Posted by: Jill | 04/27/2017 at 09:54 PM
I'm glad you like my spring quilt, Jill! And I'm glad you like the back: I wondered if perhaps it was a little too out there, but it makes me happy. And yes, there is absolutely a raffle quilt in the works for the library this spring. We're just a little behind in the process. It's at the long-arm quilter right now and I think we have to wait to get it back (probably next week) before we can take photos. It's called Romeo and Juliet by Judy Martin, if you want to Google it to have a look. We're using completely different colours.
Posted by: Anne at Shintangle Studio | 04/28/2017 at 01:58 PM
Another gorgeous quilt! I love the loosey goosey style of this and the happy colors.
I'm so happy to have met you and got your blog address.
Posted by: Jaynie Himsl | 10/04/2017 at 08:22 PM
Jaynie, thank you so much for visiting and commenting and for your encouraging words. I really appreciate your making it a point, at last week's retreat, to tell me it's time I start to enter quilts in the CQA NJS. I'd already decided that this was the year to take the plunge, but it means a lot to me that you think the same. I'm very glad to have met you and I'll say again that I think your leaf/river quilt is a stunner.
Posted by: Anne at Shintangle Studio | 10/05/2017 at 10:15 AM