Venturing out

Thank you all for the nice comments about my most recent quilt! This has been a real voyage for me, so I appreciate the positive feedback.

In my design workshop, we were asked to choose a picture off of a table that was spread with postcards and photos from magazines. We were told to choose quickly, instinctively, and based solely on the color palette. As I'm trying to get away from my usual brights, I selected this picture:



Although I didn't realized it when I grabbed the photo, once I took a close look at it I learned that it was an image of a quilt by Karin Lusnak, taken out of Quilters Newsletter magazine (Oct. 2003). The golds and rusts and browns just aren't in my usual palette at all, so I figured this would be a challenge for me.

Then, we were challenged to work from our chosen picture to interpret our own way. Although I hadn't realized it at first, the picture I'd chosen was really a simple nine-patch quilt, with alternating nine patch blocks and plain blocks! Not obvious at first, huh?

Well, I turned to my Electric Quilt software, which is perfect for this sort of design. I was able to scan my fabrics in and design with the actual fabrics I intended to sew with. How cool is that? (I recently upgraded to EQ6 and it makes scanning fabrics and creating one's own fabric library really easy.)

I decided to work with a modified 9-patch block alternating with half-square triangles to see where that got me. I had such fun trying different variations on that incredibly simple theme! I think I ended up with over 40 variations. For a while, I fiddled with the idea of extending the square-lines into the border, like this.



Then I decided it was stronger and bolder without that border fussiness, and I went back to one of the first designs:



So, that was my roadmap for sewing. I've never done that before, designed something so fully before cutting a single bit of fabric. Not surprisingly, things changed with the look of the real fabric and the large scale (the final quilt is 60 by 60 inches), and as I just saw what needed something different as it went up on the design wall.

And that brought me to this.



I've yet to bind it, but it's done enough to show to my design class tomorrow. I'm really pleased with it, as it did take me somewhere I wouldn't have gone on my own.

I've not settled on a name for it yet. Maybe "out of the box," because it is, for me. Maybe Desert Twlight, because that's what it makes me think of. I'm not sure.