Blue Chips

This quilt, which I call "Blue Chips",  made its debut in blogland when my friend, Teresa, featured it on her blog, Fabric Therapy in May of 2011.   I am a great procrastinator when it comes to finishing quilts. Today I sewed the last stitch on the binding.  ( I still have a pile of both quilts and flimsys that need to be ushered to the next step, so this finish barely makes a dent. Nevertheless, it is progress!)

This is one of those quilts that truly evolved. I started with the idea of making pillow of "shirt-stripe boxes",  a pattern by Kaffe Fassett , in his book, Passionate Patchwork.  This is a pattern I really like.  I produced a bunch of the 3.5 inch squares, but quickly came to the conclusion that I didn't want to go on.  Matching the lines, which makes this pattern so effective, runs against my liberated tendencies.  It became more work than I wanted to do.  Consequently, these squares were set aside.

Sometime later, I decided to do something to use a bunch of blue and white fabric that had been sitting in my stash for at least 9 years.  Again, the above Kaffe pattern was what I had in mind.  Having looked through several of Kaffe's books, I realized he has effectively used the same block layout to make quite different quilts. Large squares were partnered with smaller squares, etc.  So I gamely cut squares of different sizes from my blue and white stash. The result was mush.  It was very hard to look at all the busy-ness that resulted.  In poking around my scraps, I found the shirt-box squares I had made.   Ah-ha. They helped some, but something more was needed. 

In my mind, blue and white evokes Delft tiles.  Yes, that was what I wanted.  Now I needed to separate the blocks with "grout".  But, I didn't want nice neat lines of sashing.  Shortly before all of this, I had been poking through Quilt Mania, #78.  It featured a quilt by Pamela Goecke Dinndorf (Aardvark Quilts), which was a mosaic of simple tiles with wedges of grout.  Another ah-ha moment.  I could be as liberated as I liked!  I pretended that I had bought rejects and broken chips at the tile store, as that is all I'd be able to afford, anyway. 

I tied this quilt with white perle cotton #8.  I am a hand quilter.  There are a lot of irregular seams, which would make hand quilting difficult. Furthermore, any quilting (other than in the ditch)  would be lost in the busy-ness that is already there.  And, I didn't want to delay the completion any longer.