Orange and Green and Black, Oh My!

This quilt had plenty of detours and course reversals. It started with my desire to use some of my hand-printed orange fabrics. But what else?

I auditioned blue but decided on green. (What a combination! Nothing like my previous choices.)

I spent quite a while working with these strong prints and trying to use them at the largest possible scale.

It was challenging, especially since I didn’t have a lot of green fabrics.

I had a lot of trouble using the green fabric with circles “as is.” It was a very strong motif, but I didn’t have enough greens to go with it. So, I decided to cut it up. (See an entire blog post on that.) And I added a strong piece of black and white.

About this time I remembered my admiration for quilts I’ve seen with lots of tiny pieces. I like the busy-ness of them. I didn’t want to do all that piecing, but wondered if I could achieve a similar effect with my print fabrics.

It was definitely getting interesting.

I really didn’t want to cut into the black and white, but realized that I would need to. Here, those pieces are close to one another.

I thought they needed to be separated in order to space those high-contrast pieces around a bit.

Yes. Better.

Then, I basically started over. I first placed the black and white pieces, knowing that they would draw the most attention. Then, I did the same with the black, shown in-progress below.

Finally, I was moving along. (Later, I removed most of the right column and most of the top row.)

I’m getting close now. Soon, I’ll be ready to start quilting.

What do you think about a name? Maybe “Recalculating,” or “Detours?”

Ellen Lindner