So lately I've had lots of thoughts of stripes in my head.
Red Pepper Quilts has made a very cool quilt called
"In A Spin" made of striped fabrics cut into triangles, then reassembled into squares so they form a square-in-a-square design. Go look at the quilt, my description is completely inadequate!
Meanwhile, it's the season for new TV shows, and my eye was caught by a trailer for CBS's new
show, The Defenders. OK, so it wasn't really the show that caught my eye, it was the wallpaper. In the trailer, there's a moment when one of the main characters is sitting in front of what looks like wallpaper made up of squares of purple stripes arranged in a checkerboard pattern, so that it's all the same purple stripe, but adjacent squares alternate between vertical and horizontal striping.
Please see my totally inadequate screen shot of a dark corner of the office; the wallpaper looks more brown here, but it was the best I could find on short notice that didn't include any characters. I'm hoping CBS won't go after me for reproducing an image of their show's wallpaper without permission.
So anyhow, the wallpaper immediately reminded me of this purple stripey fabric I have in my stash, and I thought it would be possible to re-create the effect of the wallpaper by cutting squares of striped fabric, and making the checkerboard pattern with the alternating vertical and horizontal stripes. But I thought that would make a pretty boring quilt; I guess it's wallpaper for a reason. However, this got me thinking. I have more of this striped fabric in other colors: red, magenta, orange...the blue I used up on the back of the Coffee Birds quilt, but I have plenty of other striped fabrics in a rainbow of colors.
What would happen if you made a quilt top from striped fabrics, alternating horizontal and vertical stripes, like so:
and then added in a "woven" look I've been thinking about (I'll get to that inspiration quilt in a minute) by, say, having all the horizontal squares in the top row be a red striped fabric, and then the horizontal blocks in the second row be orange. Meanwhile, there would be columns of vertically-striped fabrics, represented here in shades of blue and green. (You'll have to forgive my limited color palette; I currently have a grand total of 12 colored pencils. But you get the idea.)
Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I've been mulling over a quilt from Oh, Fransson! that I've been wanting to play with since I first spotted it. It's the
"Stacks" version of her "More Simple Modern Baby Quilts" pattern (scroll down, there are three versions of this quilt, and it's the middle one!). As she describes it, it's like a coin quilt, "but the stacks are "woven" together." I'd really like to post one of her pictures here, but can't figure out how to contact her for permission. Anyhow, follow the link, and look at the middle picture of the
"Stacks" version of the quilt.
When I first saw the "Stacks" simple modern baby quilt, I immediately envisioned this quilt in a wild-and-crazy color combo I've been wanting to try: purple and green coins, with an orange background. (I know there's a technical term for a purple, green and orange color scheme, but at the moment I can't seem to locate my color book.)
However, when this old idea collided with my new obsession with stripes, I ended up with a quilt concept that is made up of bits and pieces of all of the above. Now, I do not own a copy of Oh, Fransson!'s pattern, and therefore do not know how it is made. But what I want to do is a little different; I'm inspired by the woven effect, but want to put it together differently.
I'm currently imagining a quilt made up of 10" blocks (finished). The background (light blue solid in Oh, Fransson's "Stacks" quilt) would be a warm peach solid. The woven bits would be made by
strip-piecing blocks as in Old Red Barn Co's first quilt-along (like the first quilt I ever made, for my sister Button); five strips 2.5"x width of fabric would be sewn together, and then cut into 10" squares. The five fabrics in each strip set would all be purple (or green), and the stripes come from having all those strips of fabrics lined up next to each other. It's after midnight and I feel my description is a bit incoherent, so I drew a (pretty crappy) picture to illustrate:
It differs from Oh, Fransson's quilt in that, instead of the strips that form the squares running perpendicular to the direction the "weaving," they're parallel, thus adding the stripes I've been craving to an inspiration quilt I've been admiring.
I also think I'll play with the block size and number of strips; I'm thinking maybe smaller blocks with fewer fabrics per strip set (3?), and having more than three "woven strips" in each direction. I think it would be cool to perhaps have four or five, and that way I could include one blue stripe in the purple direction and one in the green direction. Dunno. Still playing with ideas. Any and all suggestions/comments welcome!
OK, back to bed. Maybe now that I've gotten this quilt out of my head and onto paper (or the internet, as the case may be) I'll be able to sleep.
~Phosphorelated
Largely gratuitous hexagons included for those of you who aren't interested in grad school rants. It's what I've been up to while I've been lying on the floor, metaphorically speaking.
