The Swirly Quilt

The Swirly Quilt

The swirly quilt was created out of ignorance. This was the second quilt that I had made and my knowledge base consisted of the three dimensional shapes that I had attempted in my first quilt. I knew how to make baby blocks. This is three diamonds that are sewn together to make a hexagon. When I started the design for this quilt, I used what I knew; that was three dimensional baby blocks.  

What I was trying to achieve was a swirl. I did the pattern by finding hexagon graph paper and used Paint to put blobs of color into each hexagon space. This was done many times. This is the final result. The pattern is not glorious, but it is was good enough to follow, to create this quilt. 

The idea for the quilt was to have colors of the rainbow, radiating from the center to the edge with ever deepening tones. There are a few hundred different colors in this quilt. 

The most difficult part was deciding how to do the center. This is what the center looks like. Each color was given a triangle and the six triangles were sewn together to make the hexagon. The reality is that you don't actually see this on the quilt, and if I had known better I would have just had a multicolored block in the center,

As you can see from picture above, this was all hand pieced. I love seeing quilts in the sunlight with the paper still inside. I have learnt to remove paper as soon as possible as when you do it in one sitting, there are always papers that need to be removed when the quilting is happening. I also hand quilted this.

The most joyful part of doing this quilt was that I needed to source all of the fabric needed. The previous quilt was made with the few fat quarters that I had collected over the years as well as the fabric from my husband's old cotton shirts. My fabric stash was bare, and I needed to source fabric in each of the tones that I was thinking of using. I was able to source some hand-dye fabric and I tried to find two fabric for each color graduation. My stash was born. I now have a problem with keeping my stash under control. An addiction to fabric and notions is one that I enjoy, and I don't want to go to any meetings about it either.

The general feel was supposed to be a garden. There are many flower fabrics, as well as critters that you find in a garden. Once I had done the "garden" I built a wall around it to keep the flowers in. This is how I worked out what the border should look like. 

 Looking at it now it could have been a box keeping chaos at bay.  This could have been used by Star Trek as a vortex transporter.

 Here is a bit of the quilting from the border. I added flowers that could be growing over the bricks.

Here is the quilt with the border.

Please vote for this quilt. It really is a silly one, but it does try it's best. This is still the best quilt to sleep under in summer as it is light and breezy and brings the garden and brightness inside.
The brightness is always fun to see in the bedroom.


Look how well it actually achieved being a swirl. The picture on the left was the inspiration for this quilt.

Thanks to Amy for holding this awesome festival.