Sketch Book Looks

On May 10, 2010, at 11:38 AM, Cherri wrote:

Kristen,

How ya doin'? Nice weekend, right?

I NEED ( read curious, must know)a block update. Please. How many have you made now?

I have 36 made now, as I took a bit of a break this weekend. :) I have about 85 sketched out, which includes the 36 I've already done. Sometimes I think I'll never think of another block, but something always seems to come along. I'm going to do another set of nine (which is how many colors I have now) and then take another photo.

I have some small bits of solids I could bring for you at the next PMQG meeting, if you need or want them. Just let me know.

Yes, yes, yes! I would love this.

I am putting together my asterick quilt. The oversized blocks that are to be the top 2/3 of the quilt are a piecing challege as I want them to be at different angles and to appear randomly falling.

As I am Miss Straight Lines, I am very interested to see how this is going to turn out! Sometimes you just have to let things percolate for awhile. Those asterix blocks are pretty fun!

Kristen

At this point in the process, I was getting pretty serious about sketching out ideas for blocks, and I was worried that I would never be able to come up with enough block ideas.

Initially, I paged through the modern quilt groups on flickr, thinking I would make a sampler quilt that was an homage to modern quilting, and included blocks commonly seen in modern quilts.

Here is my highly scientific analysis:

1. The quilts pictured in modern quilting groups do not have a wide variety of blocks.
2. The blocks that are present often rely on variations in color, rather than shape.

I did not exhaustively research all modern quilts, which is a nebulous self declared category, so take from those observations what you will. I didn't get many block ideas from this research. Blocks I did see a lot of in modern quilting were block like the Bento box, disappearing nine patches, half square triangles (usually in one type of pattern), snowballs, and simple combined squares.

I spent Mother's day with my dad and his girlfriend, and started numbering my sketches. I was interested in deconstructing various blocks, to see how many ways one type of block could be expressed in a 4 x 4 grid. I was most surprised at how versatile the half square triangle was.

At some point, I lost my black pen and started in with red. I also stopped thinking in terms of blocks used in modern quilts. I realized that if I was going to make it to 169 blocks, I had to be open to any type of block that could be made in a 4 x 4 grid.

If I could draw one further conclusion about the modern quilt groups, it would be that there is a serious celebration of the fabric itself, and many of the quilts made are to highlight fabric, and to show it off. This is slightly at odds with the idea of a sampler quilt, which, in my mind, is more about the different geometric patterns that are possible in a 4 x 4 grid, so I do not feel comfortable saying that this quilt is especially "modern".

I would only call this sampler modern in the sense that I am a person who is alive today, and I am making this quilt right now without the intention of matching any pre-existing style or pattern. This isn't to say that I haven't drawn from the incredible wealth of quilting history, because oh lordy I have. I feel very lucky that I live in a time that all of quilting history is accessible to me at my fingertips. I'll worry about labels later.