This was the first Christmas since I retired, and one of the things I’d really wanted to do after retirement was begin to make--rather than buy--as many gifts as possible. I certainly bumped up the total this year from previous years, but oh my goodness it takes a long time to make things. This project was the most time-consuming, but it was also the most satisfying and the piece I’m proudest of.
Here’s the back story. My dear sister and her husband built a new home last year, and I had the idea early on that I’d like to make them a quilt for their new space. So this became a combination house-warming/Christmas gift, finished less than a week before Christmas. My first inspiration was the colour scheme my sister had chosen for her living room in the old house: a warm cream leather sofa and armchair offset by deep red cushions and a deep red chair and cushions and an afghan to pull it all together. The new house has a warm pine cathedral ceiling, a grey stone hearth, and dark ebony wood shelves either side of the fireplace.
The second inspiration was my fascination with a pattern that seems to be called “Japanese x and +,” a traditional-looking block from a Japanese designer named Setsuko Inawaga, who entered a stunning quilt using this pattern into the Tokyo Quilt Festival in 2011. You can see that quilt here: it’s the second one down, labelled with the quilter’s name. (If you’d like to try it for yourself, I’d recommend this tutorial from the “badskirt" blog.) I’ve seen many quilts that use this block, but they nearly all use a bright, scrappy variety of prints with intense colours, often by Kaffe Fassett. What would happen, I wondered, if I used a much more restrained palette, one that would look well in my sister’s new living room?
So last summer, I plunged in. This was a scrap quilt, as so many of my quilts seem to be. I got out my neutrals bin (which, fortunately, I hadn’t yet reorganized, which meant that after this quilt was finished, I had many fewer scraps to cope with as I reorganized). I pulled all the creams, beiges, and greys (from very light to charcoal) that looked as if they might fit. I needed more warmth, so also pulled everything that ranged from a warm cream to a deep gold. And I raided my bins of dark scraps for all the deep and/or dark reds I could find.
The cutting table disappeared under the mounds of scraps. As I went along, I realized that whereas I would normally welcome strong prints in a scrap quilt, they weren’t going to work here. See that batik in the bottom left of the photo above? I rejected it: the scale of the print and the introduction of a complement (the green) made it too distracting for this quilt. Instead, I focussed on tone-on-tone, small-scale prints, and solids.
Each block in this pattern contains seventeen pieces, in four different fabrics. Constructing the block requires four sessions at the sewing machine, with pressing sessions in between.
Going back and forth between sewing machine and ironing board so many times with each block seemed a crazily inefficient way to proceed, so I began to make the blocks in groups of three or four at a time. I made up “kits” of cut pieces for each individual block and at any point in my sewing day seemed to have at least a dozen blocks around the machine in various stages of construction.
The aesthetic of this quilt evolved as I went along. My sister’s new house is elegant, restrained, classic in its lines and details. I wanted the quilt to reflect those traits. And as it came together, I found that rather than a Japanese mood, I was creating something that seemed more European, perhaps specifically British, and traditional. Perhaps even heraldic. But I didn’t see that happening with just half a dozen blocks together on the design wall.
But with more blocks, a strong, clear statement developed. This was one of those times where what began to take shape on the design wall was a big surprise: I hadn’t imagined anything as bold as this when I started.
I began with an entirely random arrangement of the blocks and oh my, it just didn’t work. Dog’s breakfast thoughts went through my head. By the time I took the photo above, I’d made the major design decision of the whole project: the blocks would alternate deep red diagonals with light cream and grey ones. In the bottom right corner you can see three rejected blocks, where the diagonals were a medium grey. I tried, but I couldn’t make them fit. (Something else that didn’t fit was the collection of gold and silver prints to the left of the mockup above: from a distance, they read as green, an example of what happens when the scale of a print is too small for the purpose. Those prints all went back into storage.))
“Put them around the outside, as a border, why don’t you?” said my dear husband. I put these three up on the right side of the mockup above, but it didn’t look right. I sort of regret that I didn’t persevere and push on with this idea: maybe more of them in place would have given me a better result. I guess we’ll never know . . .
By this point, I was well into my groove. I made more blocks, and more and more, and dug back into the bins for more scraps. And even boldly raided the yardage in the colours I needed, bravely cutting into large pieces of fabric to round out the variety of prints I wanted to have in this quilt. (Sometimes I think this is the only way I’m going to cut into my yardage collection, since I tend to stick to my scrap bins when making quilts.)
Many weeks later, I had this. You may notice that the upper part of this arrangement is much warmer than the bottom part. I know I’ve mentioned before that my halogen lights make everything on the upper half of the design wall much warmer than what’s on the bottom, but what’s going on here is more than just a matter of lighting: not until I looked at this photograph did I realize that my warm/cool balance was off. I had to move things around a fair bit to bring some of the warm blocks into the bottom half of the quilt and some of the cooler ones up into the top half.
This is the final layout I decided on, before I began to sew the quilt together. I wonder whether you can see some of the decisions I made that create symmetry and secondary designs in this quilt:
- the only exception to the alternate arrangement of dark red and light neutral diagonals is the cream centre block, with its grey central cross
- surrounding that block are four gold diagonal blocks, each with a dark red centre cross, and in the corners, the same colours reversed
- the strongest design line is the light cream and grey diagonal line that runs right around the quilt from the centre block on each side; can you see the diamond shape in the lightest value diagonals?
- there are more such subtle symmetries, involving the placement of background colours, for instance, but you get the idea.
The whole point of paying such close attention to value and colour was to create as much structure, on one hand, and interplay among elements, on the other, as I could. I wanted this to be a quilt that pleased the eye even if it wasn’t apparent WHY it was pleasing.
Sewing this one together was a bit of a nightmare, I don’t mind telling you. This is not a forgiving block when it comes to inaccuracies in either cutting or sewing. Each block slots together with its neighbours in many different places and any discrepancies, at least in a stark and highly contrasting value scheme like this one, are very apparent.
I had to adapt my 12-1/2 inch ruler to get the trimming exactly right. See the bits of green masking tape on the ruler? They mark the guidelines (at 3-1/8) inches that allowed me to trim each block so that it was completely symmetrical. I’m not so precise a sewer that this task was easy, but it was one of the most important steps in putting this quilt top together.
The trimming alone took a long time. Here you can see that I’ve trimmed the blocks in the right column, but have the other six columns still to go. The pink slips of paper on the blocks tell me the position of the block in the arrangement. This was not a quilt where mixing up the placement of the blocks wasn’t really going to matter. It was going to matter.
After these 49 blocks were sewn, it was time to take a long look at what I’d done and decide whether the quilt was complete or needed something more. Dh said it was complete; I said it needed something more. It’s my quilt, so I added a border. After which dh said he thought I’d made the right decision.
What I love about this deep red border is that it corrals all that complexity and interplay among parts and somehow turns it into a harmonious whole.
Frankly, I LOVE this piece. It’s entirely unlike anything else I’ve ever done, and I think it came out brilliantly. I love the restrained palette, the wild orderliness, the mix of prints, the way the disparate elements work together, even the rigid repetition and symmetry of the block elements.
The last step before sending the quilt top off to my long-arm quilter was to choose a backing. This primitive-looking print, while perhaps an improbable choice given the traditional look of the front of the quilt, worked beautifully in terms of colour and value and scale of print.
I sent the top to be quilted by Miriam March, of Whispering Pines Quilt Studio outside Rock Creek, and she, bless her, finished the quilting in time for me to fetch the quilt home and get the binding sewn on in time to take it with me to my sister’s new home for my Christmas visit.
I was hoping to finish off this post by proudly showing you photos of the quilt in its intended surroundings, artfully draped over the cream leather sofa, beautifully accented by the deep red chair, and the natural finishes I told you about at the beginning of this post. But I forgot to take my camera (or my computer, which is one reason why you had to wait another week for this post). The photos I took with my sister’s phone, and which she painstakingly emailed to me, are too small for the blog. You’ll have to wait till I get another chance to travel to stay with her.
But it’s done! She likes it! It’s being used! The scrap bins are slightly less full! I’ve got "Japanese x and +" out of my system, for the moment! I’m happy.
Actually, your sister LOVES it and happily shows it off to any visitor who crosses her threshold. Thanks so much, Anne 🙂❤️
Posted by: Anne's sister | 01/08/2018 at 08:10 PM
You are very welcome, sis. It was a lot of fun to take this project from conception to completion, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
Posted by: Anne at Shintangle Studio | 01/10/2018 at 03:50 PM