CONTRAST, CONTRAST, CONTRAST

Tuesday night was the reveal party for our guild challenge. The rules were that the quilt had to be 24 inches and had to include at least 2 forms of contrast.

When I first started thinking about this project, I asked my husband (who is a scientist) if he could think of contrasts that occur in science. He thought for a minute and said “The only one that I can think of is “Waves” and “Particles”. My answer was “dont think any further…that one is perfect.”

When I got ready to work on it, I was SO excited to find the blue and yellow tie-die print fabric on my shelf. I have NO idea where it came from, but I immediately knew that it was going to be the basis for the piece. I photocopied a section of the fabric and cut it into squares so that I could play with how to put it together to make the wavy pattern. I then cut the fabric squares and sewed them together.

As I was trying to plan the borders, I saw the Caryl Bryer Fallert gradation fabrics that were left over from the “Peacock” quilt and thought they would look nice in the piece. I also realized that the dark and light could be another of my contrasts. Once I decided to put the center square on a wonky point, I ended up losing a lot of the contrast because I cut off the darkest and lightest parts!!

The final step was quilting the piece. I wanted to do some trapunto work on it, but didn’t have a lot of time to spend, so I tried a technique that I have read about on some of the blogs that I follow. You use two different battings….the bottom one is a wool batt and the top one is a polyester. Supposedly, as you stitch LOTS in the non-trapunto areas, the wool gives it a good base and the polyester puffs up. I may not have done enough stitching to get that full effect, but at least it did give a bit of puffiness to the top.

The double decker “sandwich” was wonderful to quilt on, but I found it really hard to make the edges stay flat. I may take the facing strips off and add a few more quilting lines to the final border and see if I can flatten it out some more.

On a fun note, my quilt was selected as the favorite in the guild, and I won a prize consisting of fabric and other fun goodies.

As is always the case, I truly enjoyed the process of making a quilt to conform to a set of parameters. I find it to be a freeing thing!!! I have also learned that in these situations, I seem to work better when I wait till the last minute. The BEST challenge pieces that I have made have been done in the day or two before it was due!!

On a work note, I am working hard to get all of my ducks in a row before income tax season gets started…..so far so good!!!

Bye for now……..