#47 Geometrics

#47: Geometrics
Finished: 11/25/12
Techniques: Partial Seams, Circular Quilting
Size: 28 x21"

Description: My stash of fabrics is sorted by types: florals, nature, solids, batiks and mottled, novelty, and geometrics, to name a few. What I call 'geometrics' are those fabrics containing stripes, plaids, ginghams, polka dots, diamonds and anything else with repeated geometric patterns.

At times during this year when I've been stuck for an idea, I've often just started looking at my stash hoping for some inspiration from the fabrics themselves. That's what I did in this case. My eye landed on my geometrics and I knew I wanted to do something with them. I plotted out a design of interwoven strips and added a few squares of others to round things out. Although it may look like some of the fabrics weave in and out, this mini-quilt was entirely pieced. To avoid breaking up the strips and to avoid sewing Y-seams, most of the piecing was done with partial seams. Considering the intricacy of all the design, I feared I might become confused as to what seam to sew next. And when I tried to plan it out in advance, it was confusing. But when I actually started sewing, I didn't get confused at all. It went very smoothly, much to my own amazement. The only difficult parts were the couple of places where there were very small pieces to piece.

Although there are some fabrics with tiny dots, there aren't any fabrics I would consider to be polka dots. None of my polka dot fabrics fit in with the color scheme. So when it came time to quilt, I decided to quilt with circles. I used different thread colors for each circle, but in hindsight it might have been better to have used only one color, green. Oh well. I drew out externally tangent circles with a pen that disappears when ironed. I used plates, glasses, lids, and other round kitchen objects to draw the circles. Then I quilted using a triple straight stitch. The circles drawn from plates left too much area un-quilted, so I added internally tangent circles to fill in. I think the quilting looks like bubbles.