Unquiet Dreams

I finished Niece #2's coming-of-age quilt, officially titled Unquiet Dreams, back in early December, but thought it polite to hold off showing it here until Herself got a chance to see it.  She's had it for a few weeks now, so now it's ready for public inspection.

In terms of design (which I wrote about here) I think it's about as close to unique as you can get with parallel strips at this point in the history of quilting.  In terms of construction, it's a mitigated disaster.  You can tell that I had terrible problems with cutting on the bias and in getting my geometries lined up properly, and that great bowing in the lower left-hand corner would cost me my quilting license among some serious practitioners of The Craft.  The mitigation is that it was intended and received as a quilt for use; it is (despite its look and title) pretty soft and snuggly, with a very cozy flannel back.  A very cozy, cherry-red flannel back.

Along with the color palette, the quilting was to Niece #2's specs.  I used my own "doodle" style of free-motion machine quilting, which with a seam-spacing of a little under half an inch renders a very comfortable texture.  That the quilting is in the form of a single uninterrupted line of extreme convolution and length is also an invitation to the obsessive-compulsive in all of us.

The Specs

Serial Number: 58

Dimensions: 61" x 92", with unfortunate deformations.

Batting: Purpose made medium-loft, 50% cotton, 50% bamboo fiber.

Backing: Red mottled flannel.

Begun: September, 2010

Finished: December, 2010

Intended Use/Display: Gift.

The Quilt for Niece #2: Design Development.

Last week, I talked a little about how I interviewed Niece #2 about her quilt preferences in order to come up with this plan for her graduation quilt.


(I didn't mention that I drew the above while thinking with Caspar David Friedrich's The Wreck of the Hope on my mind, mostly because I forgot but also because people sometimes look at you funny if you mention art-historical influences for quilt designs).



Anyway, with the basic concept in place, the next step was to figure out the relative widths of the strips. One option was just cutting them all to the same width and fudging the angles, but we're talking about Niece #2 here and I wanted to shoot a little higher than that. To help me get the geometries right, I used simple graphics software to overlay a more exact pattern over the original sketch.

This seemed pretty good, but I wondered if I could create a sense of depth by making the top "shard" with thinner strips. I came up with this:

I checked with N#2, and she agreed that this second version was better.

After that came the torturous application of high-school geometry, as I experimented with different strip widths. Ultimately, and despite the numbers on the above mock-up, I decided that making the vertical black-white strips 3.25 inches wide will yield the right size of blanket. That makes the stripes of the three shards, from bottom to top, 2.9, 2.3, and 1.45 inches wide, not exactly measurements that are marked on your standard quilting rulers. Cutting the fabric involved quite a bit of eyeballing, with some help from this "annotated" mockup:
At this point, I have lots of strips cut long, and a vague hope that I'll actually be able to tie all those weird angles together. Maybe it will be easy? But I totally doubt it.

A Quilt is Born

When Niece #1 graduated from high school, I set a precedent to launch all four of my favorite young punks into adult life with, you know, a blankie. Now it's #2's turn. I sent her a collection of my quilts (with a few of Rebel's thrown in for good measure) and had her tell me what she liked and didn't like.

Things that N#2 like include stripes, asymmetry, and a look inspired by modernism. Sweet! They also include black and red, which are the only two colors of fabric that I do not have coming out of my ears. For the first time in a couple of years, I will actually have to buy short lengths of fabric. But that's OK.

After some fussing with graph paper, I had two designs I liked. They are not something I myself would want to sleep under -- hence the working titles -- but hey, I'm not Niece #2.

UnQuiet Dreams #1



UnQuiet Dreams #2



N#2 has given the nod to the second -- as I'd hoped! -- so at some point I will be moving into fabric acquisition mode. Probably it will become "UnQuiet Dreams," dropping the "#2", and "UnQuiet Dreams #1" will disappear into the vast literature of quilts that never happened. But who knows?