Nightingale, Redux

 

This is the original black quilt, that started me writing the tutorial for what I came to call the Nightingale quilts. You can go read the whole story here. You actually should go read it, then come back. I'll wait.

I'd always known the quilt was different, but I often wondered if others might like to make one. When at the end of 2024 I decided to make another one, my friend Susan jumped right on the bandwagon, and made one of her own. She has some terrific insights here, and you can go read that too, if you want.

What really stuck with me however, was her comment that "you could be blind and make this quilt and it would still be beautiful."

I think she's right, and I kind of want to go back to that thought, because I have another idea. (You knew that was coming, didn't you?)

I think the reason these Nightingale Quilts work is because they are all about color and pattern, and not patchwork. The unifying thing is the black background. It's consistent, and colors really pop when surrounded by black. This is. because the light that hits the quilt reflects the colors back to your eyes, but the light that hits the black doesn't reflect back at you, it is instead absorbed. This allows the brighter colors to really shine and show off.

In this quilt, what you see first is the COLORS, and THEN you see that the quilt is made of many different fabrics, and THEN you realize the thing is PATCHWORK, and there is no obvious pattern. The patchwork is subordinate. The quilt is actually made of squares and rectangles, and it doesn't matter one bit if the corners of each block line up or not. How radical is THAT?

I wrote in the tutorial that I think it is the easiest quilt on the planet to make - all you need to do is use fabrics that have colors on a black background. IN THEORY, you could do this with fabrics with a consistent color as a background, but in REALITY, it is very difficult to find a lot of colored fabrics with (for example) THE SAME blue background. Or red, or yellow, or whatever other color. The effect would be slightly different with a color in the background as colors are affected by the colors that surround them. Black shows them off to great advantage, other colors, not so much. 

Susan and I were talking recently and she says that everybody who sees her Nightingale quilt "goes nuts, they love it so much," and she can't understand why the tutorial is not flying out of my Etsy shop, the way Lynne's Liberated Birds does.

Well, I was thinking along the same lines. The original black nightingale quilt (above) lives on my bed, and I've been sleeping under it for over 20 years. The quilt is made the way my grandmother made them, with no batting. It is tied, not quilted. On my bed it lives on top of the top sheet and under the wool blanket, so nobody ever sees it but me. One day recently as I was making the bed I noticed some of the edges were wearing. Maybe I should make another one?

But you know me, I like to push ideas around.

What if I made a white one? It isn't as easy as it looks. Sometimes you can get away with a slightly off white background, and sometimes a fabric looks like one thing online and then in real life it's different.

So I searched through my stash, and then did a bit of shopping. The fabrics arrived yesterday and they all took a trip through the washer and dryer, then I ironed them.

I love the dragonflies, but there seems to be too much gray in the background. I'm not sure about the butterflies in the upper right either.

Three of these seem to be out, one might be back in, but I'll bet it's not the one you think.

I originally thought the big print at the bottom wouldn't make the cut, but I am not sure. The second one from the right at the top is out. Too much gray in the background, although it looks fine in the photo.

These all fit the brief, but the bright blocks at the bottom left don't really "read" as print on white. Since I don't want any one fabric to jump out and grab your attention, this may not make the cut, but only time will tell.

These will all be in the quilt, and since this is a quilt that benefits from MORE fabrics rather then fewer, I've got another half dozen or so on order. And I haven't cut the ones I am on the fence about.

Remember, what I want is a "party of color," or a happy colorful dance of color across the surface of the quilt. I do NOT want to emphasize the patchwork or even the individual fabrics themselves.

In Drawing we call two adjacent shapes that share the same color or value along their shared edge to have "lost and found edges." In traditional patchwork you do not want that, because you want the edges to define the shape, like the difference between one block and another. In this quilt, I very much want those "lost and found" edges, because the colors will blend from one block to another and carry the viewer's eye across the surface, discovering things to look at, and to bring delight.

My goal is to surprise and delight the viewer.

Stay tuned.

Blue Ice Becomes Making Waves

 I always tell my students to push beyond something that they think looks good.

Breaking apart the central medallion style of one version yielded something interesting.

The nice thing about digital photography is that you can take pictures to store an interesting variation for future review. I really liked this, but didn't want to make a lot more blocks to fully explore the idea so I cheated (improvised). 

This is not my design wall. I took pictures, then printed them on paper, made copies, cut apart the blocks and started playing.

By the time I got this far I knew it was a design I would sew together.

This arrangement is a bit too "regular" for my taste. I will have to break it up a bit more, but that shouldn't be a problem.

I'm still wrestling with how to arrange the fabrics, but I know I don't want something with this much contrast. When I feel ready, I will go in the studio and start cutting up fabric. It's been cold lately and being in there when I am cold is not much fun.

AT ANY RATE...

I can hear some of you.. "BUT LYNNE, you were thinking about long rectangles, and blue ice. This is squares and it looks like waves of water..."

And this is when I tell you to STOP BEING SO DARN LITERAL and to GO WITH THE FLOW. Just because you started with one idea, doesn't mean you're married to it. You should see what happens when you play. You find a new direction and follow that. It is called being creative. Do I know where this will lead? I do not. Do I worry I will screw up? No. What if it doesn't work? I will fix it. I will come up with another idea and try that. Does this frighten me? No. Will I waste fabric? That depends on your definition of waste. If it helps me figure out where I am going and I end up making a killer quilt, working up to that idea will not be wasteful, so my answer is no. Your fabric isn't doing you any good on the shelf.

WHAT I WILL PROBABLY DO... Is just play with these ideas, and then put them all away and start cutting fabric and making blocks and putting them up on the design wall and go from there. I don't want this to be overworked and too fussy.

Loose Ends!

1. The replacement 3' x 4' mat arrived today.

2. I will never, ever, ever use EQ to design my quilts. I can design quilts without it. Besides things look different on a design wall to scale that a computer image cannot duplicate.

3. The fabrics for the 58 Carats quilt were collected over a period of 30 years. They come from different designers, different manufacturers and many of them are in the 10 - 30 year old range. They are not available now, and most certainly do not come in "a set." There are Philip Jacobs, Kaffe Fassett and Tula Pink, along with a host of others I do not know. Most are unavailable now.

4. The Waltzing Matilda quilt will eventually live with a friend in Sydney, Australia.

A Man, a Plan, a Canal... Panama

On the design wall.
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Translated into fabric. I -try- to get the edges on the straight of the grain, but sometimes I just get tired.

Four panels trimmed. The yellow and green are sewn together. The two green asterisks should have been farther apart, but they are OK. The overall "feeling" of how they float together is more important than following my guide to a "T."
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What I have sewn into panels is colored on my guide.

What it all looks like on the design wall. There is one thing I don't like and will change later.

*Gail, that seam you saw on the edge of that panel is there because I tend to leave these bigger than I need them. It allows me a bit more flexibility when I start sewing them together. It's always better to have too much fabric than too little. (Ask me how I know this.) I will do the final trimming down to size when I start sewing them all together.

*Mickey, I live alone. If the house is clean, the dishes are done, the bills are paid and Millie is fed, the litter box is clean and the laundry is done, then I head into the studio and sew. Working in the studio is what I love to do best, so you seeing me "work fast" is really me using all the available time I have to do what I love.

* "A man..." is a pangram palindrome (Thanks, abelian. I really did know that but it slipped my mind). It reads the same backwards and forwards. It also loosely describes my process, and so I thought it was a fitting title to today's post.

 

Flight of Fancy Wrap Up

Before I show you the next thing I'm working on, I thought I'd answer some questions and comments I've received since I started the birds quilt.

 First, the scale. Here is my hand next to a typical bird block. These are not small.

 For my readers outside the US, the ruler above marks the size of the block in centimeters.

Here you can see the size in inches.

I'll make the bird bigger, if I want to accommodate a particular print.

The birds aren't my creation. I don't know where they came from. I saw a photo somewhere in 2009 or so, and figured out how to make them on my own. I have a tutorial for them here. It's pretty basic, but you should be able to work it out on your own. In this photo you can several of the triangles I used to make the bird wings. I always find fabric that looks "wingy." The tutorial gives you a way to look for "wingy" stuff.

I don't mind hard work, but I hate doing "busy" work, or what I call "stupid work." So when I know I'm going to make a lot of birds, I make a big strip of  "legs" and then just cut off what I want.

And if you think I cut a strip of fabric 3/4" wide for a 1/4" finished leg, you are crazy. I sew a wide piece to the white, then trim some off, as you can see in the photo above. It makes for a much cleaner edge, and it's a lot easier to iron. No burnt fingers!

 I don't make the beaks all the same size. (That would be boring and predictable, which isn't very interesting to look at.) Sometimes I want them small, and sometimes I want them bigger. I always "audition" different fabrics, and then test where I want them to go.

I never use plain white as a background for my quilts. (In fact, I don't use solids at all.) I always use a variety of White on White (WOW) fabrics. You can see them in the Black and White Crayons quilt, above. This quilt, by the way, will be in AQS shows in Daytona Beach FL, Phoenix AZ, and Lancaster PA later this year. This quilt also has six black and white birds, which just goes to show you how flexible they really are.

 Pat, years ago I bought a very large cutting mat, 48" x 96", but I cut it down to fit on my worktable and had this long piece left over. It's useful for cutting long things. It's the green underneath the panel above. The long ruler came from one of the "big box" hardware stores (Cees: that means it's a GIANT store.) Sometimes the best tools don't come from a fabric store. And the great big 45-45-90 triangle right next to the ruler on the lower right came from an art supply store.

Because I "fussy cut" fabric for my wings (to get them to look just the way I want), people always ask if I cut a piece right out of the middle of a piece of fabric.  Well, yes!

I find it amusing when I see bloggers show off how many empty spools of thread they used in one year. I sew ALL my quilts using medium-gray thread. I buy a giant spool of it at the quilt shop, and it lasts about a year. I keep a little container near my sewing machine with 20 bobbins pre-wound with this gray thread. It's not fun to have to stop in the middle of a seam and wind a bobbin.

Before I forget, the finished flimsy measures 62" x 78" (or 157 x 198 cm).


I should probably also mention that I do not use any patterns or templates when I make my birds or letters, and they are NOT paper-pieced. It should go without saying that all my quilts are completely original and designed by me, and no, there won't be any patterns for my quilts. Ever.

However I have absolutely no problem sharing any and all information about how I make what I make, and why I make the choices I do. And you could never get all that in a pattern.

Besides, I think you should make your own quilts and not anybody else's. You all get yourselves dressed in the morning without help, you can make your own quilts too. It's not rocket science.

If I missed anything, leave a comment or email me. I'm always happy to hear from readers. You all help and inspire me more than you know.