River of Light, Beautifully

 

This is the River of Light quilt. It's a wonky rail fence inspired by Sujata Shah in her book Cultural Fusion Quilts (?). The blocks are designed to be sixteen blocks four by four. I thought, why? Then I rearranged them in long diagonals, and had a lot of fun making them crazy, irregular and over-the-top. It's definitely over the top, but when something heads in that direction, you'd best let it go. (In the photo above the quilt is sideways.)

This is such a fun quilt.

I made the backing with leftover bits from the front and from my stash. I love the back too.

This is an example of a beauty shot that didn't look like it was going to work when I saw it in my camera. I took only one photo. I figured I'd need to come back earlier in the day to get the shot I wanted, but the more I looked at it afterwards the more I liked it.

After I take beauty shots of my quilts outside I always bring them home and run them through the washer and dryer to make them soft and wrinkly. More than once I have discovered a tick on a quilt, so I never put this off. At any rate, the photo above is the three Color Catcher sheets that came out of the washing machine AFTER I washed the quilt. Now I wash every single piece of fabric that comes into my house before I bring it to the studio, so that this happens ought to be reason enough for everybody to wash their fabric first, and then when the quilt is finished, use Color Catcher sheets whenever a quilt gets washed. While these used to be easy enough to find at the grocery store, in the last few years I have bought mine on Amazon.