My beloved bride and I have had the occasion to travel to Battle Creek from time to time over the last couple of years. That city isn't one of our usual destinations, but time changes.
While visiting Cereal City, we poked our noses into the usual collection of stores and found a couple that sold fabric. I realize this must be a shocking development in my tale.
We found this black and white checkerboard.....or is that chequerboard...pattern at one store and I grabbed several yards of it. I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I grabbed it nonetheless. As you can see, the lines for the checkerboard do not run parallel or perpendicular. The pattern sort of looks like someone dipped their fingers into the wet pattern and moved things around just a bit before the colors dried.
For a while I was playing around with a tessellation quilt pattern. M.C. Escher happens to be one of my favorite artists. He experimented heavily in tessellation patterns using wood block printing techniques as well as the usual ink and/or painting modes. You can learn quite a bit about M.C. Escher and see many tessellations here.
I was going to use pattern called Tessellating Stars by Gyleen Fitzgerald. You can see the general pattern here.
The trick I was going to pull on that pattern was to start with all of the stars being white at one end of the quilt and all of the stars at the other end being black. Then I was going to fade the entire thing from white to black...or vice versa for the contrarians among us....by randomly changing the blocks in each star from white to black. I thought that the checkerboard pattern might make that process more interesting.
As my 3.87 regular readers can attest, I've been working on other quilts and thus didn't really have to commit to anything for some time. But then Shane's quilt was finished and I was ready to start something new.
At about the same time, I found a different tessellating pattern. The pattern named "Under the Sea" was originally developed by Sandi Irish. My well seasoned quilting lady-friends tell me that the other name for the pattern is "snail". Her design started with one fabric in the middle with the colors gradually shifting with each concentric ring. The example in the Fons and Porter magazine I was working from used a type of fabric known as batik. The fabric looks a bit like someone put droplets of water on the colors that caused the colors to run or fade like a watercolor. You can see some examples of batiks here.
Sadly, my link to a photo of Ms. Irish's work has gone dark. However, you can read the entire article and see her quilt in this electronic version of the magazine.
Instead of using so many colors with such a gradual color shift, I decided to be bold. If one can be bold with only two colors in the entire quilt.
My version of the quilt is below. Click for a larger view.
The interesting thing about this pattern is how it appears to spill out over the border at each corner. In reality, the border runs underneath those corner pieces that are instead sewn into position as appliqués. I usually detest appliqué work. But I put up with it this time. Here is a larger view of the corner pieces. Click for a larger view.
This quilt goes to our youngest son, Josh. Although he may have to wait until after the county fair is over. I might enter this one just for kicks.
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