Angular Momentum
73” by 68”
My daughter, The Monster, named this quilt. She also helped baste it and held it for the photo shoot. Let me tell you, having teens has its advantages! Another one of those being the ability to sit and sew for extended periods of time without having to wipe a bum, get snacks, or fix the TV. Things sure have changed!
What hasn’t changed, however, is my love for all things Improv. It never will, it is totally my Love Language.
This particular quilt began life as a bit of play in 2017, the summer of 2017. One of the blocks in here actually inspired my Shiver quilt! I finished the quilt top itself in the summer of 2019. And I put the last stitches of the binding in just before the end of 2020. All in all, that’s pretty quick for me!
The entire quilt was an exploration of just a few improv techniques, led by a study in triangles. I made each block of the quilt with only two contrasting solids. I really did not think about how they might all look together, only how the two colours looked side by side. Selections came from my small stash of solids. This meant I was limited to what was on hand. Sometimes blocks are as big as they are because that’s all the fabric I had, sometimes I felt the composition of the block was good so I stopped.
The whole thing ends up being an exploration of positive and negative in colours as well as value. This makes you see different shapes or lines. (Is that a dragon’s tail or a zipper?) Playing with scale within blocks and among the blocks keeps it from feeling same same across the quilt. As does changing up the technique all over. There is so much to see, so much to study as you look at this quilt.
When it came time to quilt this I had a very specific free motion technique in mind. I spent a while doodling it on paper to make sure my brain understood how to make it work. It’s one thing to have the look in mind, quite another to translate it through the needle. Although it was terribly time-consuming, every minute was worth it. I LOVE the way it turned out. You could absolutely scale up this pattern so it isn’t quite so dense.
My go to thread on a quilt like this - multiple colours without a singular story - would be an olive green, but I had none. We’re still staying home so I picked something from my thread stash instead of shopping. Pink it was! I was pleasantly surprised at how well it performs in this quilt, never really being bossy, allowing the texture to be front and centre. The pink I used was Aurifil 2479, really nice medium pink.
For binding, that pink thread definitely influenced the fabric choice. I know a lot of people might have picked a single solid here. Or maybe a black and white stripe. Both would have worked. I also did not have enough of either. Besides, I wasn’t feeling those options anyway. That pink thread inspired me to look in my pink stash and as soon as I rediscovered this stripe I knew it was perfect. Unexpected and bold, but it doesn’t steal all the attention. You know me, I like the contrast on a binding.
The back came together with some panels purchased at a store close-out a handful of years ago and some of my own Tag Fabric. The pink kind of glows here, doesn’t it?
My plan is for this quilt to be a teaching sample, stay tuned for those details. In the meantime, it is already in heavy rotation in the house. My son grabs it when he wakes up in the morning for snuggles with me or the dog. It’s also keeping me warm now that winter truly arrived as I read on the sofa. The whole thing is such a shot of necessary colour right now.
That’s 3 quilts finished in a month! Who am I?
PS
Lest you think I am some kind of a machine, check out the full glamour of quilting literally in the middle of a blanket fort over the Christmas break.
