Thursday, April 15, 2010

Finished but no name


I have been working on this quilt since sometime in the fall -- or, really since early last summer when R. and I were at a wonderful quilt shop in Barnstable where she found this Amy Butler fabric and suggested it would work as a Maxine Rosenthal type one-patch [basically a Stack-n-Whack, a la Bethany Reynolds] quilt. I was then in the throes of making my first such quilt which is very different from this. It has a dark black/deep green background with magenta flowers. This was chosen especially to be a very different experience. It was -- not in terms of sewing but in terms of the visual experience of making it. The kaleidoscopic hexagons are very different than and far less blendable than in the other quilt.
For this one I decided to leave two ends uneven against the darker border batik and then to further emphasize the structure, I used extra hexagons on the border in two corners. As I said to R. the other day when I had finally finished quilting it with hexagons all over, including on the fairly wide border, I like it better on the floor than on the bed. When I am as close to the surface, as on a bed, I am too aware of the quilting and the pattern does not blend very interestingly. When I look at it from farther away the patterns do blend interestingly. It is full bed size and I grew very weary of sewing the hexagon quilting. I am sure I do not want to make a quilt any larger than this, not even if it is made of quilt-as-you-go blocks. The quilt has a hexagon that is mostly the plain cream sewn on the back and needs to be written on with it's name, and the usual data. I haven't been able to think of a name yet. I'm cogitating. Suggestions would be welcome.

I'm also cogitating whether I should decide to be a bit more Type A in the future and keep a log on my sewing table of when I start quilts and maybe how many hours I spend on them. I've never been that kind of compulsive and this is far from a business so I don't need to know but my quilts seem to be getting more complex and time consuming and I'm getting more curious about just how long they take.

1 comment :

Evelyn said...

It looks really beautiful! I love how subtle the colors are. I'm terrible at names too, but when I look at this, I think 'creme de menthe' or Andes mints. ;-)