This morning, after letting the dog out just after 4am, it took a while to get back to sleep, and thinking around my Pandemic Pattern series and the grids I love so much, I realised there are possibilities here to combine traditional block layouts with motifs instead of different fabrics in the squares for 9 Patch, Trip Around The World or something else …. I’ll have to explore techniques, as I rather like the idea of some hand-drawn looking images – and I do still have at least ~5750m neon threads 🙂

I made this diptych, “Sweat Of The Sun; Tears Of The Moon” in 2071. It didn’t make the cut for some exhibition I entered it into and the only place, so far, that it’s been shown is the quilt festival at Gramado, Brasil, where I taught in 2019. I love it, so much so that I took a row of 4 blocks of the sun side for my most recent business card image. It’s a simple design, and the above link shows how it evolved from a quick little demo.

Possibly because with the Pandemic Pattern works I’ve done lately, I’m ready to work with some larger shapes for a while. I’m considering something using this design large enough to go on our dining area wall, which needs a 220cm – 225cm wide work.

To think of colour possiblities and the larger scale it’s easier to go to black/white. 225cm doesn’t sensibly divide by 6, so making rows 7 units long, would give 7 x 32cm finished units – 224cm, close enough to what’s there now.

Possibilities include:

• The current hanging on that wall is black and gold. I could replace it with something using black fabrics marked with gold dabs and marks, and do some cream or other plain light colour with black markings; then cut half moons and the other segments out of those and assemble, before quilting in gold, bronze or coppery metallic.
• I have some lovely colours from purple through red to orange – and could then quilt in neons.
• I could make it in earthy colours and quilt in cream.
• I could make it in dark black-grey neutrals with quilting in neon green and yellow.

Anyway, that’s in the future – there’s still a fair bit of work to go on the black/light gold applique one which I’ve taken up again to finish while I make one or two neon samples each day. And though we’re all set to receive our covid vaccinations between this week and mid June, we’ll be living with the pandemic and the limitations it’s brought for some time to come, at least.

Moving right along with sample making, I was thrilled to discover my nylon will bond with MistyFuse (r) to the polyester green fabric (of which I have some black and a medium grey) The nylon has a backing layer of something that makes the fabric weatherproof.

This means that hand appliqueing segments of design will be much faster, because they won’t need to be pinned or stitch basted into place, and stitching won’t make the surfaces wrinkle. Also, whether to remove the stitching that you can just see in the zig-zag segments below, is no longer an issue. Even though the fine orange neon thread is a precise match to the nyon, that process leaves holes which, though they can be closed, are really time consuming to ease back into place. Pljus, pins are hard to work around when you’re hand stitching. So all in all, a happy discovery which makes a largish piece perfectly possible.