It was finally time for another quilt challenge this past weekend. I had previously packed up a travel quilt challenge kit for my friend, when she temporarily moved home, not knowing how long she'd be gone, when she might return, or whether we'd get any quilting done, but I packed out up just in case. I made myself a matching kit, so we could complete challenges with the same supplies.
We picked out a set of eight 5" Northcott solids to use as our only fabrics (obtained from the Northcott booth when I was at the Syracuse quilt show — at the bottom of the above picture). We also had access to a limited amount of backing and bonding fabric.
We did our usual random number generation, but with the limited supplies, the first few things that came up didn't really work, so instead we just picked half square triangles as the technique. Since we're both well versed with half square triangles, this challenge was more about design and colour choices.
As soon as we decided on half square triangles, which are actually squares, my brain went straight to the squaring the square problem, which it's a math problem that is near and dear to my heart because of it's connection to Bill Tutte. However, we were working with a limited amount of fabric and a limited perimeter, and I can only make hsts so small, so I wasn't quite sure what I'd do. Then wikipedia gave me my inspiration - the Mrs. Perkin's quilt problem. It's about splitting a larger square into smaller squares, with a quilt being the context. How could I not use it as my inspiration?
I didn't have time to do a math problem and a quilt challenge in one weekend, so I cheated and googled some solutions and picked out one I liked. I cut out the squares, and colored them as hsts and played around with the rotations of the squares. I split the fabrics into 4 darks and 4 lights, though the split wasn't quite that clean. I thought about doing the pairings for the hsts as 2 lights or 2 darkness, since I felt like the squares were the important part of the original design, but ultimately I decided the challenge was half square triangles, so I should honour that. So instead I did each hst as half dark and half light, and then played around with orientation.
One thing I needed to plan was to make sure I had enough fabric to make the triangles I needed. Another thing I needed to plan was the sewing order - since the design wasn't nicely segmented. I managed to come up with a plan that just involved one partial seam that got finished last. It went fairly well, but could have benefitted from not being on the 1" square.
I didn't really have a quilting plan when I started, and was going to just quilt a few single line squares in each of the squares, possibly some big stitch quilting. However, the day I was going to start quilting, I got a quilting email that showed a quilt with such intricate filler quilting and I was inspired. I decided to fill in some parts of the square and leave some parts of it as the solid fabrics. I had to do some testing to try to find filler designs that I could handle and looked good in the small space they were filling.
At this point I attached the binding. I wanted to use the edge of the squares as a guide for where to quilt, and I didn't trust myself to remember the seam allowance. Plus with that amount of quilting, I thought it would be useful to attach the binding while things were still square.
I started with the light fabrics, and stitched on them with dark threads. I used my darkest thread on the darker two of the lighter fabrics, and a slightly lighter dark thread on the lighter fabrics (so the contrasts were about the same amount). I started with my walking foot and made the outlines, and then switched to my free motion foot to fill things in.
I got all the light fabrics done and was quite happy with how things looked. However, it was too late to continue working at that point, which was good because it gave me time to think. Originally I was going to quilt the same sections on the dark side of the square, but flip the quilting styles (if there was more than one). A night to sleep on it led me to the decision to invert the sections that were quilted.
I was really happy with the choice in the end. I think it was the perfect balance of accentuating the half square triangles (which was the challenge) and the full squares (which was important for my design).
