Pandemic Porch Quilt Show, Days 11- 12: A Batik Chandelier and a Millenium Quilt

Day #11: "Chandelier, Shaken"

This quilt is improv paper pieced, using batik fabrics.

Closer: 

Much closer:

A little to the left: 

Finally, from the back - I like the way the light creates a stained glass effect!

It was pure fun, with minimal measuring. The techniques I used (though not this actual pattern) are in my booklet, "Modern Paper Piece Log Cabin Triangles," in my etsy shop, CathyPstudio, here.

UPDATE: This quilt was just awarded Best Use of Color in the Innovative category, in Mancuso's Visuals #2 Pacific International Quilt Festival. All the winners are here.

Day #12: A Millenium Quilt

This large quilt (74" x 93", it almost hit the ceiling) is made of 2,000 squares, cut 2.5".

A little closer:

Center: 

Backstory: In the late 90s, a huge fad emerged among online quilters: Millenium quilts, to be made from 2000 different pieces of fabric. People set up swaps, and packs of squares were also sold online. 

When I first read about this fad, I thought, "What a terrible idea!" But after a couple of days, possessed by the audacity and community of it, I jumped in. 

I'd been quilting for almost a decade, so I had a significant fabric stash. I chopped 2.5" squares out of everything. Then I went to my upholstery sample books; old clothing; and basically, any fabric I could scrounge anywhere. 

Even then, I was still about 500 fabrics short. So I gave up on my dream of not repeating fabrics, and filled the corners in with squares cut from two different fabrics that were printed with millenium-related words in different languages. These are the mostly black fabric and the white-and-black fabric below. 

I was well into the project when I started reading that some quilters were using this project to affirm their Christian faith, which makes a great deal of sense. But since I'm not Christian, and I didn't want to leave my descendants wondering, I put the Hebrew calendar year - 5760 - along the bottom, and stitched into it an essay explaining the quilt and the millennium mishegoss that was taking place at that time! 

You can't lay out 2000 squares this size on any design wall smaller than the side of a barn. So I (and pretty much everyone who made one of these), constructed the quilt in blocks. Each of my blocks are 5 squares x 5 squares, totaling about 10 inches after stitching. Within each block, I placed the lightest square in one corner, moving to the darkest in the diagonally-opposite corner. To honor the traditional log cabin arrangement, I placed a red square in every center. I set the blocks in rows of 8 across, and columns 10 down -  that's 80 blocks, times 25 squares, gives you a 2000-square quilt that measured 72" x 93"!

The back features a whole lot of weird stuff, including this inexplicable M&M millenium fabric....

...which posed the profound question, "Is it Over Yet?" There are also a couple of delightful commemorative tea towels, from a trip we'd recently taken to London:

...and a tea towel from a sweet little amusement park we'd brought our little boy to in England, Paulton's Park. 

Plus this flea market find, curtains showing movie stars of the mid-20th century.

Until my pandemic porch quilt show, I had never photographed  this quilt flat before. The most I've ever seen of it at one time is on a full-size bed. Seeing the entire thing gave me a completely different sense of what it looks like! That's one more reason you should consider hosting your own porch quilt show! 

[The first installment of my porch quilt show, Days 1-5 is here. 

Days 6-10 are here.

The next installment is here. 

If you'd like to keep up with the show in real time, I'm posting it on Instagram, at https://www.instagram.com/cathy.perlmutter/] 

Mini-Quilt Challenge: Connecting With Hard-to-Love Colors

A personal question: How do you feel about this color scheme?

It was the palette for Curated Quilts magazine's recent "Connections"  mini-quilt challenge.  My first reaction was "ugh!"  They're calling that color in the upper right, in the picture above, "mustard." And the middle bottom is named "moss green." But it struck me how similar they are to the colors of my late unlamented 1960s childhood kitchen, avocado green and harvest gold, which themselves are euphemisms for "overripe avocados" and, I am sorry to say, "upchuck tan."

Still, I liked the "connections" theme. Plus, the whole point of challenges is to force you to do something new, and often, uncomfortable. So I made this 10" square piece:

Everything that isn't white is an applique. The star on the upper left hangs out beyond the edge (thanks to a yellow felt backing):

How did I get to stars? The first things "connections" suggested to me was people holding hands. That made me think of linked paper dolls. Then I thought about linked 5-pointed stars, with touching points. So I grabbed some scrap paper (the informational paper that comes with batting), and did a back-and-forth fold,

 ...and folded that strip back-and-forth into squares...

 Drew a rough star....

 Cut it out, leaving tips intact...

 Unfolded it and out came this....

I was intrigued by the shapes between the stars, so I repeated the exercise, but this time in my graphics program - drawing a star, and flipping it to make rows, then flipping the rows to make columns,  just as I'd done by folding paper, but more accurate. It printed out like this:

There were four distinct shapes: the stars (in yellow, below); the "lozenges" in brown; the teal diamonds; and then, what I thought of as "joined pentagons" - the shapes in light lavender, which look like two pentagons joined at their bases.

This struck me as interesting! Plus I could fancy it up a bit more if I fit smaller 5-sided stars into the pentagons (in pink), and four-sided stars (in turquoise) to break up the big lozenges!

I assigned every element a color from the challenge's official choices. Then I printed out the pattern page, which without color looked like this:

I traced the shapes onto paper-backed fusible web, then pressed the pieces to the backs of solid-color fabrics. Cut out the shapes, and fused them, at an angle, on a 10" x 10" white background square.  I appliqued each shape with the neatest zig-zag I could muster (as opposed to mustard.) All the white areas are background fabric, except inside the mustard lozenge below. (Just thinking about mustard lozenges makes my throat hurt.)

I added a single lighter green star as an afterthought - 

It represents the birth of fresh, new baby avocados to take the place of aging avocados elsewhere on the quilt, and in the unrenovated mid-century kitchens of America.

Check out how a lot of talented quilters turned this color scheme from somber to fascinating, at the bottom of this page. There are some really great quilts! And I'm growing fonder of the palette! (Except mustard.)