Singing the blues and greens

I bought a Fat Quarter bundle of Kona solids (fabrics with no surface design, just solid color) at the quilt show in February and decided to put them together with a quick, easy pattern. I chose another one from blueundergroundstudios.com, this one called In and Out.

While I worked on it I kept resisting the powerful urge to add a bit of hot pink, orange or red to the palette, which to me seemed too tame; too “yawn.” But I disciplined myself and managed to finish the quilt, sticking to the original colors.

As I put it together I kept casting around for a quilting design to do on it and finally decided this was the perfect quilt to attempt an idea that my artist cousin had suggested years ago to me, but which I laughed off at the time as a little too out-of-the-box, or radical.  Her idea being — to write one of my stories on a quilt. At the time I wasn’t able to bridge the two worlds of Quilting (working with fabric) and Writing (working with words.) The two worlds of Concrete vs Abstract.

While I didn’t write a story on this one, (maybe next time!) I did start out writing synonyms for “blue” and “green”, then did some free association with what those colors suggested to me in nature and ended up with a sort of poem at the end.

I’ve always loved the look of notebook pages filled with handwriting. To me it means someone is doing both a lot of thinking as well as being faithful (even obsessively!) to their muse. So this quilt was great fun to quilt (instead of the usual angst and stress I experience) because the writer in me finally got the marry the quilter in me! I wrote on the whole quilt top to bottom, side to side, almost without effort.

In fact, it was joyous.

My only dilemma — a small one! — was whether to go back over it to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I decided to do one and not the other. It took me about 45 minutes to run the quilt through my sewing machine for about an inch and a half of straight stitching to cross the 15 or 20 t’s and about an hour after that to tie off those threads and bury the knots.

And I ended up being grateful for the quiet color palette. And also amazed at how legible my penmanship is when done with a big heavy quilting machine as opposed to the penmanship in my pen-and-ink journals. Those are almost indecipherable.

So I’ll definitely use this method of quilting again. I felt so free. Free to be me! Who knew that my two creative worlds could be bridged … and so easily.

p.s. Kevin loves it too and said “You should keep this one!”  So it’s going to hang on our red wall for awhile. Until he and I are both ready to part with it.