Designing, Constructing and Photographing a Quilt
Early this year I joined my Modern Quilt Guild chapter, the Triangle Modern Quilt Guild. Though I started quilting at the beginning of 2021 I had not been involved with a guild previously, and indeed had no friends in my daily life who quilted. Like many pandemic quilters, I found instructions, inspiration and connections online, specifically through Instagram. However, as all artists will be keenly aware, virtual connections and online inspiration can often be more harmful to one’s creative practice than helpful. FOMO, rabbit trails and doom scrolling can quickly derail all personal creative drive and leave one with too many images, lots of half ideas and half finished projects, and the sense that one will never be good enough to have a voice of one’s own. With these concerns in mind, I hoped that having a physical community would calm some of the storm of ideas.
I am grateful that this sense has been correct in my case. The Triangle Modern Quilt Guild has provided challenges that avoid overwhelm. I am inspired by my fellow quilters, rather than intimidated by them. And the real quilts displayed during show and tell provide a vastly different experiences to the IG highlight reel. Care, craftsmanship and time are all on display, conveying a sense that real life has its periods of productivity and its lulls as well, and that is part of its rhythm and beauty. Therefore, when the guild presented our challenge for the year, Color Outside the Lines, I was inspired to take part in it. The specifications were simple: the quilt must be your own design, and must use a color or colors you don’t normally use, or you must use colors in combinations or hues that are outside your comfort zone.
My heart sank initially on hearing the challenge, as I instantaneously knew that the color I had to use was red. Red is a color that I have avoided working with in my quilts generally. It always seems so harsh and loud compared to the tones I like to work with. However, last year I started a quilt with pumpkin orange as the background, a color I previously detested, after seeing an antique quilt that used it to great effect, so I knew that the possibility of falling in love with a once hated color was possible.
I started with the Maple Star Block as my design. By adding space in the center of the block and making the half-square triangles into quarter circle blocks I completely altered the original design to make it my own. I decided to make a nine block quilt and determined the dimensions of the pieces. I had a time finding a template for quarter circle blocks that was trustworthy and settled on QuiltingJetGirl's Drunkard’s Path Templates as I trust anything Yvonne designs. I then set to work cutting and placing pieces.
Each piece had to be added to the wall one at a time. I had an idea of the color flow that I wanted across the face of the quilt - dark to light, with red blazing through the center like a fire - but the individual pieces had to be added and rearranged one at a time. My intention, for some months, had been to make a quilt depicting the idea of a vision, either of God or of the angels, like depicted in the Hebrew scriptures such as the burning bush, Elijah on Mt. Horeb or Isaiah’s vision in the temple in which he saw both the glory of God and the angels. I prefer traditionally pieced quilts to figural ones, so I wanted my wash of color in this quilt to depict the idea and sense of overwhelming darkness, fire, majesty and glory, without actually making a picture of it.
Every block of this quilt is different. Each piece was cut from my scrap bins. Every piece of this quilt is a left over from something else, that either I or someone else once made. There are fabrics in this quilt going back four years, to the beginning of my quilting journey. Every combination of pieces, as I pulled it down, made my heart sing a little. I was feeling the magic of creating something that felt completely “me” and yet was stretching me and growing me at the same time.
The piecing of this quilt was a combination of more challenging than usual, and also more gratifying than usual. Curved piecing is still a stretch for me. I have done it only a few times before, and these were smaller curves than I normally work with. However, with five pins per block, they all turned out as near perfect as possible. I was also blessed to be piecing with Aurifil thread for the first time ever. I used 50wt in color 2314 Beige. The smoothness with which the machine moved was wonderful and made the challenges inherent in piecing a quilt that has to be made one small section at a time much less tedious.
About the time that I finished the quilt top, my husband’s newest book of poetry, Carnets came out. While perusing it with him one evening I came across this line, “Angels must be like red maples in Autumn.” I immediately knew that this was the name of my quilt. All that I had dreamed and imagined and painstakingly pieced bit by bit was summed up in that line.
The quilt indeed felt like angelic cognition that Augustine talks about in his commentary on the first chapter of Genesis. And it felt like Elijah in the storm and on Mt. Horeb. And it felt like Moses before the Burning Bush. And most of all, to me, it invoked Isaiah in the temple. And all the while it said, “Angels must be like red maples in Autumn.
Jack and I took three trips to photograph this quilt properly, so the photos of it are varied in light as well as location. I think that the different moods are appropriate for this quilt, as the variation in colors within the quilt is brought out differently in different light situations.
I am looking forward to quilting up this one in a particularly exciting set of motifs with my walking foot. These should help to increase the sense of movement and drama in the quilt top and make it into a true piece of art that I will happily hang in my house. Perhaps someone will want it to hang in public somewhere too. That would be gratifying.
