No. 12

No. 12

30.5" x 31"

No. 12 in the wild

This beautifully painted utility box in my neighborhood seemed the perfect complement to my little quilt! I wish the artist had signed their work. It is a perfect blend of garden themes in the intersection of representative and abstract works!

The idea for this one came from the color palette of No. 11.  I wondered what a quilt would look like with the HSTs made from the color gradients of the background for No. 11. I reduced the selection down to 12 colors in each color path because I wanted to make a smallish quilt. 

Then I started cutting out the squares and arranging them on the design wall. Here is the first layer of brown to greens. 

Now to add the layer of warm fabrics in the other direction on top. Each block will have a different combination of colors, no two will be the same.

As you may have guessed and what has become apparent to me, is that each combination will make 2 identical blocks. So this quilt and No. 13 will be inherently tied together by sharing the same blocks. This will give me an opportunity to try more than one idea with this color palette! So fun!!

Here are the trimmings from all the blocks. I love how colorful they are!

Here's the very first idea arranged the way I thought I would like. Except that it didn't really sing to me. It is lovely, but I was still wondering what else I could do. 

So, I tossed all the blocks to the floor, and picked them up randomly and placed them chaotically...

Also nice, but it doesn't really give me that meadow experience I was hoping for.

Third try was the final outcome where I rotated every other line of blocks so that the colors blend into diamonds. It is appealing and so saturated with color, it jumps off the page!

Next the basting and quilting.

To finish up the quilt, I opted to use the yellow from No. 11 that was not included in this selection of colors. It is a nice bright edge for this quilt and I like the way it refers back to No. 11.

And last, a detail photo!

Next week, I will share with you No. 13 made from the same selection of blocks. It looks VERY different from this one.