Celebrate Your Differences: Project Quilting Off Season Challenge

"Celebrate Your Differences," 17" x 17"

Quick recap of the challenge "It's All In Your Initials":

1. You may use as many fabrics as you want; just no more than 3 or 4 colors.

2. You may not add any other colors to your piece except when embellishing. Embellishing isn’t required but it is always fun.

3. Project may be any size, it doesn’t have to be a quilt, project must have a name.

4. In your story, list your initials and your color choices. Be creative!

 

My initials are PKG so I used Purple, Green and Black.  The purple and the green should be obvious, but why did I use black?  My background is in graphic design and when designing something that will be printed in full-color, we use the color system CMYK which stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and black.  I can only assume they used “K” for black because using “B” would make people think blue.  So black really was the first color I thought of to use with my “K”.

I thought it would be fun to use some of the fabrics that I won from Project Quilting last season. One of my prizes was a set of Hoffman Bali Batik bundles from FabricFascination. I got the Grasshopper collection which conveniently was mostly greens, blues and purples. I picked out some of the greens and purples and then added some green hand dyed fabric that I won from DyeCandy.

I came up with a design that used fabric in 2.5” strips since that’s how wide the batiks were.  I decided to use the black fabric as squares going from one corner to the other diagonally, but I wanted to add something special to them so to be different, one of the diagonal squares is a green/purple batik instead of the black.  I knew I wanted to keep the connection so I planned on outlining that square with black.

I added a thin black "flange" when I put on the borders so it's only attached at the borders and not to the body of the quilt.

My original quilting idea was much different than I ended up using.  Once everything was pieced, I got out my threads and while I did have several greens threads, I only had one spool of purple and it was variegated.  I like using variegated thread but with a small project that will be quilted with a straight stitch, it’s hard to see the colors change.  And I didn’t have a variegated green so I thought that might look a little odd for one to be variegated and the other not.

 

I then thought I might do some seed stitching with needlework floss but found that I didn’t have much green and didn’t seem to have any purple.  Where has all my purple gone?

Back to idea number one but instead of stitch-in-the-ditch or some random curves going from one side to the other, I thought it might be nice to sew a quarter inch from the seam and use purple thread on the green pieces and green thread on the purple pieces, so I took the black thread off the sewing machine and started to put on the purple when I noticed how well the black thread showed up against the fabrics and I quickly threaded the black back into the machine and did the quilting.

I used my favorite facing technique for the binding and then got out my large supply of beads and yarns and ribbons to decide how I wanted to embellish this quilt.  None of the yarn or ribbons felt right so on to the beads.  I did have several green and purple beads but most of them got lost in the colors.  

I just couldn’t decide how to use the green and purple beads so I stared sewing some black seed beads around the special square to outline it.  And since the beads were sitting out on the quilt waiting to be sewn, I noticed some had rolled onto the black quilting lines.  I really liked how they looked placed at random intervals, they were small so they didn’t overpower the piece, but they were large enough to be noticed.

More about Celebrate Your Differences

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To see the other entries, go to the It's All in Your Initials page.