Quilt Reveal: Web of Life

 

It's time for the annual Dust Off An Old Quilt Book Blog Hop! I have been participating the last few years and have always enjoyed it.

I have been participating the last few years and have always enjoyed it.

For this hop, I dusted off my Red & White  Quilts Infinite Variety book.  The book features all the red and white quilts that had been in an exhibit at a museum. I had seen the quilt on the cover before the exhibit and the book and had already been fascinated by it. 

My friends and I had done some calculations on how to make this quilt. I had done some research and had even found some instructions about how to make the quilt. I bought a 9 degree ruler. The quilt can be strip cut, but you have to cut the triangles in one direction. The smaller triangles are in the center and the larger triangles are on the outside.  This means you waste half of the triangles. I wondered what the other half would look like if sewn together.

My first worry was whether I am capable of making a checkerboard like that neatly, the regular "squares" much less the tiny points in the center. I decided to make a sample block. In this one, I decided to make it so that I can use all the triangles. I made a strip set with a light on one side and a dark on the other side. I then cut triangles, moving the ruler up or down depending on what color I wanted to be the smallest.

This won't help me reduce waste on the optical illusion quilt, but it does give me a good idea about how difficult this quilt might be if I make it on a bigger scale.

This block may look familiar to you. I started it a long time ago, in 2010. I then added a backing to hide the raw edges. I added it to a gray background, but I didn't like the way it looked, so I abandoned it. I hadn't put it on my list of quilts because I was just playing and hadn't started the Optical Illusion quilt.

During the 15 Minutes to Quilt Challenge in December, I took off the gray background and made a quilt sandwich with a white background. I then had to leave the quilt alone and move on to my next UFO for the next day's video. 

But since it was so close to completion, I didn't put it away, and worked on it in the spare bits of time I could find.

I decided that instead of centering the spiderweb to the rectangular quilt, I wanted to have the spiderweb be a little bit higher and add something else to the bottom.

I traced out a design from another book of quilting patterns. I appliqued the spiderweb and the designs to the quilt sandwich, and decided to add a word. 

What word? Web of Intrigue? Web of Lies? Web of Deception? I looked it up, and the first word I found was Web of Life. Sounded good to me. It was late at night by that time and Life is a nice short word and therefore easy to applique, so I decided to choose that. I found a font I liked and traced out the letters.

Man did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we also do to ourselves. Adapted from Chief Seattle

 

Then I fused the letters on and quilted them down.

I hope you enjoyed seeing this quilt finished. You've waited a long time for it! The video for this quilt should be out on Sunday on my YouTube channel, Quilt and Color.

Here are the people who are participating in the blog hop this time. 

Karrin's Crazy World

Quilting Patchwork Appliqué

High Road Quilter (that's me!)

Beaquilter (our wonderful hostess!)