Spliced Lines Sewn into Eighty-Eight Squares: Homage to Ellsworth Kelly II

Work on this quilt has been going slowly, but I have been making progress. The photo below shows the quilt top, batting and backing layered on and pinned into the carpeted floor in our large guest room. This is where I'm basting the layers together in preparation for quilting. The silvery line at the bottom of the photo is the piece of straight metal I bought some years ago to help me mark quilting lines. This time I used it to help me get the inner black border pinned down in straight lines.

Below you can see the basting stitches I've been putting in. These big red stitches will hold the layers in place as I do the machine quilting, and then will be pulled out. (I would usually baste with safety pins when doing machine quilting, but I didn't want to add further weight and bulk to this large quilt.) In a method learned from Suzanne Marshall, I sit on the floor and put in the lines of stitching. I only do about an hour a day, listening to music. I've been at it for a couple of weeks, and it will take me another several days still. Then on to the quilting!

Going back a step, it took me a while to prepare the backing for the quilt. I like using a fabric wide enough that it doesn't have to be pieced, and I have plenty of white fabric that width that could be dyed for the backing. Dyeing the color I want is usually easier than purchasing fabric, because there are not many quilting stores within easy reach, and I rarely buy fabric online because it's impossible to know the actual color from what you see on the computer screen. I also enjoy the challenge of dyeing the color I want, so the process began. I have a lot of experience in dyeing grays, with lots of samples to choose from, but not much experience with tan, which is want I wanted for this quilt. Yes, I have my invaluable sample book from Carol Soderlund's "Color Mixing for Dyers" class, but the samples are only 1" square, and for something as subtle as tan, it's difficult to assess from that small bit. Then when one of my first trials came out greenish instead of tan, I realized that my dyes were several years old, and red is usually the first to go. So, new red ordered, and the trials continued. Five samples are shown in the photo below, laid on top of the natural linen used in the top. I had started out aiming for a medium value like the ones on the far left and right, but decided that a lighter value was much better--less important to get a close match to the hue of the linen.

The next photo has pulled the fabrics that were 2nd from left and furthest right above; they are two values of the same hue.  The one on the left is what I chose, so it's what you see peeking out behind the pieced top in the first photo in this post.  It's quite a lovely "oyster white" kind of color, and I can imagine finding other uses for it.

Of course the big question remains of how to quilt the quilt, what pattern of stitching to use. With a number of leftover blocks, I did some sample quilting some months ago. The photo below shows the sample quilted and washed. I like the idea of keeping the black lines untouched, so the quilting will be done in the spaces between the lines, basically echoing the shapes. The lines are spaced more closely together in the top four blocks than in the bottom two; the plan is to go with the wider spacing. The long side pieces, trials for the wide borders, are done with wavy vertical lines, sometimes intersecting.

Well, that's been the quilting plan for a while, but as I look at the sample again now, I'm thinking I should do one more trial before a final decision. It occurs to me that simple straight-line quilting might be better, either just horizontal lines (which I've often done on quilts), or a grid of horizontals and verticals. Yes, this would mean crossing the black lines many times, but it's possible that a medium-value neutral thread would not show up very much. So, there will be a pause between basting and quilting while I do one more trial. If you have any thoughts on this, do let me know!

Once the quilting is done, there's one final decision--what kind of binding to put on the quilt. I considered a black binding or a linen one, but have decided on a faced binding done with the same fabric as the backing. A faced binding is seamed to the front for a finished edge, but then pulled around entirely to the back so that nothing shows on the front. I like the idea of the large borders of the quilt, that will hang over the sides of the bed, to be just plain linen, with no "frame." (I've done several quilts with faced bindings; here's one.)

I came up with a new name for this quilt. The small work of Ellsworth Kelly that inspired my design was called "Brushstrokes Cut into Forty-Nine Squares and Arranged by Chance," so I've done a riff on that. I left out the "arranged by chance" part, because there was a lot of thinking involved in how I placed the squares. And I wonder, did Kelly really leave the 49 squares exactly as he first laid them down by chance? 

Earlier posts on this quilt:

January 25, 2022

April 29, 2021