Dancing Jewels Tinkering

 

Sometimes you (well, I) make a quilt and I put blocks up on the wall and I can already tell that no matter how I arrange the blocks the quilt is going to look good. I do tinker because if I put the blocks up in an orderly fashion, then sometimes I have blocks made with the same fabrics together in one area of the quilt and I really want them distributed throughout.

So after not a lot of tinkering I had this, above, and while I liked the arrangement of the colors and fabrics, I really wanted to make the shapes "dance," so I went back and rotated many blocks.

Here is the result, and I have decided I will sew this together. 

I did not want it to be "perfect." I did not want to make the secondary shapes blend into each fabric gradually. Sometimes there is a break. This is because  I had fabrics of different values and I wanted to spread them all around. I didn't want the quilt to look forced or overworked. Part of the charm of this whole curved seam thing is that the blocks are unique and unexpected, and if you're headed down that road, you have to keep going. I wasn't going to make unique and unusual blocks and then arrange them in a traditional manner.

I make a lot of quilts with geometric shapes. It's one of the things I like best about quilts. I love the surface design, the narrow "picture space." What I mean by that is if you look at a landscape painting, you might see a foreground, a middle ground and a background. Lots of space between near and far. A narrow picture space means the design is basically two-dimensional and is "flat." This quilt is like that. 

The blue Macnas quilt also is made from essentially two colors and one alternating shape, but it doesn't feel like the purple and orange quilt. The quilts are about the same size, but you don't have a sense of a flattened picture space in the blue one. It feels like you have more space to breathe. 

I think the difference is the value. There is a big difference between white and dark blue, but a much smaller range of values between the oranges and the purples. So the purple and orange quilt seems very much "in your face."

Pretty interesting, huh?

Anyway, I love the sass and the verve of the Dancing Jewels quilt. It isn't at all what I thought it was going to be when I started, and I wasn't at all sure it was going to work, but everybody who sees pictures of it responds instantly with at "WOW" or "I love it."

Works for me.

Coincidentally, today is the Nephew's birthday!