This is a fun project Peter and I have been working on together. It started when I was sitting on the porch watching some neighbours hanging out their rugs to dry over their porch railing. I thought the tile pattern on the rugs looked like a fun quilt block design, so I grabbed my notebook and sketched it out.
Of course as a printmaker I was stuck in the usual rut of a grid-like small pattern repeat, until Peter took the pencil and started shading the tiles in the shape of a large four-petalled blossom. Then he said, “this is the quilt I want on our bed”.
He later sent me a photo of a dogwood tree on campus, with the blossom colour we’re putting in the quilt.
Here is the colour sketch of one full repeat, with a map to the blocks that make it up. These blossoms will be quite large, at least the size of a vinyl record, and tumble in a repeat over the whole quilt on a background of mixed indigo fabrics.
And here is a test block I made just to try out the scale for the blossoms. I’ll try for better precision in joining the pieces on the real quilt (these pieces were torn in rough strips rather than cut carefully). I tend to prefer simple variations on basic blocks like snowball and log cabin, so this is probably the most fiddly quilt I will ever make.
The actual quilt will be mostly indigo, with a slightly off white achieved by simmering the cloth in coffee, and a hot pink from cochineal and sappanwood.