I found a series of strips of fabric from other projects tucked away inside one of my fabric baskets. I found a few more baskets that I hadn’t stiffened up yet, so after I added columns to them, I got to ironing out the strips, and doing some planning. There was that quilt design I did a while back, wasn’t there?
Oh, right… This one: the one I did for Melek Taus. (It’s still for sale). The process is pretty easy. First, sew five strips together, cut into squares, and then pair the squares with each other at right angles. Then sew the edges of the squares together, and cut diagonally through the center and corners. Unfold the four sections, and get four squares from each pair of striped squares. The resulting blocks are going to have three stripes in one direction, and three stripes in the other. Not bad.
In general, these kinds of quilts are fairly easy to produce once you know the procedural rule that generates them. The challenge is always trying to guess ahead of time if the color palette you’ve chosen is the right palette — for a child, for a client, for a friend, for a general sale. This one, made of pre-selected strips from a Jelly Roll (usually 40 strips, two or four strips of each fabric and variation in a collection, and often 2 1/2″ wide though sometimes 1″, 1/2″, or 6″ wide).
The resulting quilt top is about 30″ wide by 42″ long. By adding a 3″ border around all four sides — Solid black? Another patterned fabric, maybe a blue to counterbalance all the black? — I’d extend the quilt to 36″ by 48″, which is almost but not quite a crib quilt. I could add a 5″ border at top and bottom, and that would bring me to 36″ x 52″, which is a crib quilt suitable for a toddler or other young kid under school age.
Or it could be a wall-hanging. I’m not sure who would want it to be a wall-hanging. But it could be done. What form would you like to see this take: Baby quilt, as is (plus batting, backing and binding)? Crib Quilt? Wall-hanging? What appeals to you?
I think it’ll get turned into a Crib Quilt in the morning.
