red/black/white quilt

I was asked to make a red and black quilt with white for friends to sign names on. Great! Red and black are wonderfully dramatic. The idea is a very traditional one, signatures of friends. But I was stumped, not being artistically trained, about how to balance three strong colors pleasingly. Various ideas flitted through my fevered brain and I began leafing throuhg my shelf of books and my box of archives magazines ... when in utter doubt copy someone else's good idea. Seems a good maxim to me. Though I would attribute it if the picture had had an attribution to pass on.

Thus I arrived at a wonderful picture of a "hole in the barn door" or sometimes called "churn dash" pattern just like in this picture. I loved it, it felt right in all respects. Better yet, I had a black with a tiny white vine pattern on it that greys it down enough to make it subtle and I had a delicious cerise -- yes, truly cherry red, probably my favorite shade of red -- and I had a slightly ecru extra wide with truly ecru little leaves on it. So nothing is the harsh solid that I often dislike using.

Some portions could be strip pieced for speed, relatively speaking, especially the little four-patch squares and part of the churn dash pattern. But really, most of the piecing was sweat shop work which I have spent the week doing and am glad to have finished. I am not going to do the quilting, it will be sent to a long arm quilter. So this is a picture of the top spread out on my bed. I think it will have a wonderful traditional quality when it is all quilted and even more when there are signatures in the white spaces. This is the best kind of UFO, one that will get finished without my further work. Like many productions, it was a lot time chaos of imagination and then not so long in the making.