Funky Pickles

This is Funky Pickles, an idiosyncratic take on a pickle dish design.

 

This project was inspired by an antique quilt in the collection of the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art in Tuscumbia, Alabama.

The antique quilt has a number of elements I found to be quite quirky, and I tried to incorporate most  of them in my quilt. However, rather than cutting the octagons as a single piece, I chose to divide this section into four pieces to reduce the number of Y seams.

Multiple blocks in the antique quilt have a mix of fabrics in them. For the most part I used only a pair of fabrics in each block, but there are a couple with some variety in them. I copied the placement of fabrics in this block in particular:

Here's my version (just imagine it rotated 180 degrees):

I'm not quite sure how the original border was constructed; it almost looks like a straight strip of fabric might have been sewn to the outer curves then coaxed into laying flat. I chose to keep the general idea of a narrow, plain border but I followed the curves to produce a scalloped edge.

I drafted my design in Affinity Designer, and used our local library's laser cutter to make my own acrylic templates. (Clear acrylic is difficult to photograph!)

I also used the laser cutter to make drawing tools to mark quilting lines 1/4", 1/2", etc., offset from a template, and to cut a larger circle to use as a ruler to quilt curves in the octagons.

Fabric selection began with a fat quarter bundle of Seth Apter's Storyboard fabric; I added a number of fabrics by e bond, and a variety of other fabrics. The background, backing, and binding are also from Storyboard.

Some of the blocks have low contrast thanks to the busy fabrics. I think this adds to the quirkiness.

Here's a more conventional block:

Barbara Black told me the original quilt looks like the creator tried to draft their own pickle dish design and didn't quite know what they were doing. Mine might come across like that too -- but I'm pleased with the result.