Dining With Mr. Jefferson

We travelled to Virginia a few months ago to visit friends, but we also made time for a few tourist stops. One of these stops was a tour of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home. In the dining room, our tour guide explained that the walls were originally painted with an expensive and ostentatious chrome yellow color, and the room was recently restored to that color.

There were also some blue and white dishes on display. I didn't take photos during the tour, but here's a photo from Jane Canapini which represents my inspiration well.

I was familiar with the Something Blue fabric collection by Tilda Fabrics, so the dishes immediately brought this collection to mind. I thought combining these fabrics with a solid bright yellow could make for a fun quilt.

The first step was to find a yellow fabric that was similar to the chrome yellow paint in color. An internet search for chrome yellow turned up a suggested hex code of #FFA700; I fed this code into Steph Skardal's QuiltySolid app and found Riley Blake's Confetti Cotton in Ducky to be a good match.

I chose to go with a simple traditional pattern. 9-patches on point is a very common design, but it came to my mind thanks to an antique quilt in the collection of the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art in Tuscumbia, Alabama:

I opted for 1.5" squares in my 9-patches though, and used the yellow for the larger alternating squares while keeping white in the 9-patch backgrounds.

I used a variety of white solids, and added some blue fabrics from my stash to mix with the Tilda prints.

The backing is another Tilda print from the Something Blue collection.

I initially made a label using the name "Mr. Jefferson's Kitchen," but fortunately my wife pointed out the scene was in the dining room, and not the kitchen, before I finished sewing on the label. Then after finishing the quilt, it occurred to me there might be good title ideas in the Hamilton musical. If I had thought of it in time, this quilt might have been named "I Gotta Be in Monticello."

This quilt is not my typical style, and I'm not sure what I will do with it. With its simplicity, I don't think it is a show quilt. Still, I'm quite pleased with the colors and the resulting quilt.

Caroline's Sketch #498

Caroline Hadley is an Australian quilter who publishes a weekly feature online in which she shares a digital mockup of a proposed modern quilt design. Her designs are always fun and intriguing, and a design she shared back in January really caught my attention. That was her Sunday Sketch #498, seen here on Instagram or here on her blog.

With Caroline's permission, I decided to make a quilt based on her drawing. I drafted my own templates for the curved shapes, and cut them from acrylic using our library's laser cutter.

I created my own digital mockup to try out different color combinations based on available fabric lines. I settled on Windham's Artisan Cotton, using Raspberry/Light Pink, Light Green/Chartreuse, Dark Navy/Blue, and Poison/Green. Some other options I considered:

The Artisan Cottons are crossweaves which I really enjoy.

I didn't realize until I was leaving the quilt shop with the background fabric and saw it in the sun that the Poison/Green is actually an orange/green crossweave. I might have chosen something different if I had known that, but I think it works ok. It does show up differently depending on the light and the viewing angle; and I didn't attempt to keep all the fabrics oriented in the same way so the color can show differently from piece to piece.

The other fabrics I used do not have as much contrast between the two yarns, so their orientation is not obvious.

Caroline's design is a variation of an Irish Chain. Except for the borders, it simply alternates two blocks. I chose to make the blocks 12.5" finished; the quilt itself is about 62 inches square after quilting and blocking.

I used walking foot quilting through the yellow and magenta pieces. The rest is a combination of free motion and ruler-based quilting.

I filled most of the border with a 0.5" diagonal grid.

I finished the quilt with a facing. The backing is a Heather Givans fabric; it's a paler yellow but it also has bits of magenta and blue.

I appreciate Caroline's allowing me to "borrow" her design. Be sure to check out some of the other designs in her series.

Peachtree Curves

I took this photo of a spiral staircase at the 2023 QuiltCon in Atlanta, at Peachtree Center. I thought it might make a good basis for a quilt. (A 2019 workshop with Michelle Wilkie probably helped plant this idea in my mind.)

It took a while to figure out how to draft the "steps" portion of the design. I finally came up with an approach using Affinity Designer, starting with concentric circles and radial lines. I then applied some distortions to roughly replicate the image.

The finished quilt is 52 inches by 70 inches. I had the pattern pieces printed on large-format newsprint (at PDF Plotting). This one sheet of the pattern is 33 inches by 47 inches:

The "steps" use large-scale paper piecing. The largest curve uses fabric cut to 19 inches by 7.5 inches for each step. I found I got better results using a walking foot with the large paper pieces; otherwise the seams wanted to pucker a bit.

I had a happy accident as I was mocking up various color combinations. I unintentionally filled a set of steps with a gradient, and I thought the result looked pretty cool. This led me to consider Jennifer Sampou's Sky Ombre fabrics for the steps. The remaining fabrics are Essex yarn-dyed linens and Kaffe Fassett shot cottons.

The mix of fabrics, along with the curves and various dense quilting motifs, produced quite a distorted quilt. I had to block it before trimming to square it up, and still had to trim about an inch from the bottom.

For the back, I used a Tim Holtz wideback print I had purchased on sale with no particular project in mind. I finished the edges using a facing, and included the original photo inspiration on the label.