Finished!
I have finally finished the "William Morris" quilt I started playing with sometime early last year. Wow, that long ago huh? It has been a bit of a rocky path but I think the end result is something rather lovely, even if I didn't plan it to look this way in the start. That's what I love about quilting, it really is an art form in the way the colours and shapes have to speak to you and have room to have a life of their own. You can impose some sort of structure or idea but they will have their own way in the end...This is a good example of this.
The quilt started as a layer cake of Moda William Morris prints. I liked the idea of having a small amount of a wide range of fabrics to give variety but it turned out to be a bit of a curse. First of all I am a perfectionist when it comes to cutting and while layer cake squares are meant to be 10" square it turned out that there was quite a bit of variation (we are talking 2/8 or 3/8 of an inch here) in size it meant I had to do quite a bit of easing in the seams to make things square up as much as possible. On top of that it took me a while to get my head around what were the light fabrics and which were the darks. Initially I was too inexperienced and handled things a bit gauchly resulting in the great unpicking of 2010 and a pile of large triangles sitting forlornly in my "to do" box. I had made the triangles too large and tried to be too "matchy" with my lights and darks which resulted in too little variation all round.
When I came back to it a couple of months ago I started from scratch, pressing and then cutting each triangle in half so I got 4 triangles from each square instead of 2. I then set about pairing lights and darks more randomly which meant what was light in one pairing might be a dark in another so I got into the zone with this and accepted that was what the fabric called for. I had in mind a pinwheel block with light and dark contrast as I wanted some movement in the overall design. This is technically what I made but the interesting thing was when I arranged the blocks on my design board the pattern which jumped out was more broken dishes than pinwheel. Something about the darks being more forceful maybe? Anyway, I went with it and the final quilting follows the diagonal lines rather than emphasising the straight ones.
The biggest hurdle was the border. I had initially sewn all of the blocks together to form the quilt top with the intention of putting a border or double border around the outside but when I auditioned fabrics for the border it really killed the movement and flow of the eye around the blocks. Weird. No matter what colour or pattern I tried the result was a failure. Apart from cream, which sort of worked but only as a narrow border and that just looked odd on such a bold quilt. Until I placed it one row in and making the outside rows of blocks the outer border. Which meant unpicking the outside blocks...*sigh*. Looking at the result though I think it was really worth it.
The back of the quilt is unusually plain for me, actually made from a single bed sheet it is a perfect match for the darkest blue in the front. I thought about piecing a back which has sort of become my signature but I think it would have been overwhelming as the front is so detailed. Similarly for the binding - I picked the most neutral of the Morris tones (the creams) and made a binding from strips of that. Once again I had auditioned blues and initially even considered a repeat of the cream border as binding but that somehow restricted the flow again and so I rejected it.
So now it is done. Finished in a way I had no vision of to begin with, which is kind of odd but nice. Ready to gift to my father for his birthday. :)