Why I Love You!

 OH! I love answering questions!

FOUR YEARS AGO... I was working on the first of the Zebra quilts. The block on the right is 18" square (with seam allowances, 18-1/2"). At the time, someone asked me if I could make them smaller, so the block on the left is made with 2-1/2" strips and sews up to be 16" square. Doesn't look like a tremendous difference, but...

When you put it next to the others, there is a BIG difference. What I really liked then, and still like now, is the BIG graphic quality of this. Meaning it is very "design-y" (as one of my college classmates one said of something big and bold.)

When Karen asked yesterday if I could make the blocks of the RWB quilt smaller to be more efficient, the answer is both yes and no. Yes, because, yes you probably COULD get two (smaller) blocks where I can only get one of the larger ones. But it would only be EFFICIENT if you USED the leftover blocks to make something.

Ultimately I did not choose to go with smaller blocks, and part of that was how big the finished quilt would be. The other part was I loved the BIG IMPACT the scale of the diamonds provided.

My Zebra quilts are made basically three big 18" blocks across by four down. Before adding a border, they are in the neighborhood of 54" x 72". If you made the blocks smaller, even 2", then this layout becomes 48" x 64". Not, in my book, big enough to be a real quilt. A quilt that size will NOT cover me up, and a too small quilt is kinda dumb. (Ever wonder why I don't make "lap quilts?" Because where I live in New England it gets COLD, and if I want a quilt to keep me warm, warming up half my body ain't gonna do it.)

To make that quilt BIGGER, you would have to add an additional 16 inches. So now you have 64" across, but to balance the design, you also have to add 16 to the height, and that makes 80 inches. Now you're getting into a quilt size that begins to be unwieldy. I mean, if somebody you're making a quilt for is over six feet tall, and is "big" then a quilt like this might be OK, but to me that's just too big.

If you only made five vertical diamonds across (the one above is six) then you can get a quilt 56" wide, but the design above would have three and a half diamonds across, and that's just dumb. 

It could work for a Ribbons quilt, like this one, because one more (or less) vertical row won't affect the design right to left, but to add another 16" vertically would make a quilt 56" x 80" and to me that's just stupider. The top of a queen sized bed is 60" x 80". Why make something that won't cover that? And for the Ribbons quilt, I'm not sure the lovely wiggle you see above would work with another row below it. And you'd have half green triangles instead of whole ones, and that might look weird.

Bottom line: Scale matters.

I DID, however, figure out how to make the quilt more efficient. Make TWO! I can't be the only quilter who has ever been asked to make TWO quilts that are the same. Or damn close. With not a lot more fabric, and a bit more time (and very clear directions) "you" (or somebody) could make two quilts at the same time. 

Really!

You can read my original logic here.

Oh, Comments

In the comments of yesterday's post, Linda wanted to know what I did with all the little triangles. I assumes she means these, that I have marked with X's.

They ended up HERE. In the wastebasket. I am not the kind of person who obsesses about using every last square inch of fabric to make scrappy quilts. I'm not going to live forever and I'm not going to waste my time making quilts I don't care about. Besides, I don't have room to store this stuff.

Suzanne, NOPE! I am NOT going to sew a "faux flange" of beige on the edge of my binding for this quilt. There is such a thing as using too many tricks, and this quilt has got enough going on without adding something just for the sake of adding something. If it isn't bringing something special to the party, then why bring it?

Rebecca, You want these triangles SMALLER? With as much busy-ness as there is going on here, we really don't need more. More CAN be better, if you are good at juggling, but sometimes MORE is TOO MUCH.

And yet I am fully aware that this quilt, with it's high energy bright colors and high contrast, and big busy blocks, really pushes up against TOO MUCH, so my job is to make sure I don't go overboard.

Last year, when I was first working on the Zebras quilts, I wondered the same kinda thing, and tried making a big block 16" square instead of 18" as they are here. You can read my thoughts at that time.  I think the scale of these blocks - 18" really makes an impact and if you make them smaller, they lose that impact that I like.

Now if you know me, you know I love contrast, and IMPACT. So if you want to make these smaller, knock yourself out. I like them BIG. But also remember what I tell whenever I get to talk to quiltmakers. "I want you to make YOUR quilts, not just copy mine." So if you want to make one like this, and you want to make it smaller, go right ahead, you won't hurt my feelings.

I sewed all the other strips together, and set some of them on the design wall to see how they'd look. I'll have to play with them some more to see.