One pile of fabric nets 2 quilts
Please take a look at two new quilts I finished on the weekend, Navigating the Colorado will go into the Art Quilt Gallery and the second one will go into the Childrens Quilts Gallery as Childrens #27 on my Quilts4U website and Quilts for Special Kids.
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I started out with 2 yards of a terrific purchased lemony green batik, a batik look hand dyed fabric I made years ago plus about a square yard of narrow stripped fabric sewn from some hand dyed cotton in the 3 primary colors.
First I made the Childrens quilt using up some conversation print fabrics. My Childrens quilts often start with a center medallion and evolve outwards from the middle. The same center outwards process was used in creating Navigating the Colorado with the same same batiks and stripped fabrics.
By the time the art quilt was finished, I knew what it had intended to be and was able to sew some interesting quilting lines to enhance the “rafting down the Colorado, landing on beaches, getting sight lines” theme and to fill in some large unquilted areas. Basically what you see is a maze of river rapids, shoals and smooth waters zig zagging its way through some canyons. Since I live in Arizona, river rafting on the the Salt River or the Colorado of the Grand Canyon is a big deal especially in the summer. The title just jumped into my mind and that was that. My geologist brother’s input was, are the hundreds of little circles of the batik the bubbles of water when you fall off the raft into the river?
I sewed radiating “compass” lines in the corners and in a few other places and I also machine embroidered N-S-E-W in the center square in gold thread. It’s amazing how much vitality narrow diagonal stripes can add to a quilt. Towards the end of the second quilt, the amount of batiks and stripped cotton was just about depleted which made for more creative solutions to be able to finish. The binding on both quilts is my own batik look mentioned on paragraph 2.
It was fun working two quilts in a row with the same fabrics and a similar look. The creative energy “just flowed” from one to the next, especially with all the bits of batiks and stripes lying about ready to insert somewhere. Making the two for one concept seems like a good conversation generator. If anyone reading this post has their own two for one story with photos, I would be really pleased to post some more examples.
The other handy thing about just having made 2 quilts in this way is that I don’t have any leftover fabric to figure out what to do with.