A Quilt for Sherwood

Sherwood and I have never met.  Never shared "meat space" as the cool kids would say.

Back in the early-ish days of the Internet, there was a thing called Usenet.  There were a myriad of groups representing a broad range of interests.  In particular, there was a group called rec.arts.comics.strips where people that enjoyed comic strips got together to discuss comic strips.

You might call us "strippers" but we preferred the term RACSals.  Or I did.

Sherwood was there.  As was I.

We didn't agree on a lot of things.  Mostly we disagreed about politics.  We both loved comic strips.

It turns out that we shared a number of other interests such as photography, blogging, and a bit of Irish ancestry.  

I'm not one for calling someone a "friend" at the drop of a hat.  I am not Clintonian in that way.  Sherwood will groan and think "oh that Dann" if he ever reads this.  Some of you kids won't get it without taking a deep dive into the ancient American period of history known as the 1990s.

Despite those disagreements, we shared enough experiences over the years that I consider him a friend.  We are connected on Facebook where we touch base from time to time.

Courtesy of my love of comic strips, I have a significant collection of fabrics featuring the characters from Charles Shultz's "Peanuts".  It is not a small amount of my inventory.

I needed a new quilting project at roughly the time that Sherwood retired from his career as a professor of astronomy.  Retirees take naps.  Naps frequently require quilts.  And we both appreciated comic strips.

Viola!  Inspiration!

I am a big fan of Joe Cunningham and his "rock the block, album style" process for making quilts.  You can take his class (pattern-free quilt making) online and learn four different quilting processes.  I think his perspective regarding quilt design is interesting.

I've made one other quilt using that process for Baby Rose.  That quilt used a stack of fabrics that varied by color, but shared a general visual texture between the various colors.  They all had an imprinted bubble pattern.  They all had color shifts that were similar in process even if they differed in colors.

Sherwood's quilt uses several fabrics that differ quite a bit.  Most of the fabrics have Peanuts characters.  Most of them include some shade of green.  But there wasn't really enough to tie them together in the same way that young Miss Rose's quilt came together.

Color selection aside, I also learned a bit about strip design when using the "rock the block, album style" process.  Joe's process is to use random-width strips.  The only important feature is that the strips have parallel edges.  Then you sew the strips together to make a wide panel.

The rest of the process involves cutting these new panels across the seams into more strips.  These new strips are assembled into strips, cut into smaller strips, and finally assembled into squares.

Take the class to get the details.  It is worth the price.

With all of this slicing and dicing of fabrics, a narrow strip used in the first panel of strips can be a pain in the arse.  It will probably get sliced and diced down into a very small piece indeed.  

Every quilt is an opportunity to learn.  This time I learned to value a bit of restraint when selecting the number of fabrics used in a quilt and to avoid using narrow strips when building panels.

With all of that said, I like the way the quilt came out.

Sherwood's quilt - click to embiggen

Sherwood's quilt - click to embiggen and check out the stitching pattern

Sherwood's quilt - laying it out - click to embiggen

A modest update.  I always ask for a photo of the quilt with the recipient for my little bit of posterity.  Sherwood was kind enough to provide a few.  The first one is himself and his quilt.  The second two show some details of the quilting pattern used to nail the whole thing together.  

For the record, I had someone else do the pattern quilting.  I made the top and did the binding.

As above...click to embiggen.