Unknown Journey

When the Seattle Modern Quilt Guild announced their binary quilt challenge, I immediately thought of my stack of Kona solid greens, and picked out several to use. Fissures was still fresh in my mind, as was the lovely texture of Chinese Checkers, prompting me to order some Andover Textured Solids and Pellon Bamboo Blend Batt.

I knew right off that I wanted to make a quilt with alot of negative space. In addition to Fissures and Chinese Checkers, my thoughts for this quilt were influenced by my recent Crazy Rainbow, so before I did anything else, I started crazy-piecing the greens like, well, crazy.

For the pieced portion of the quilt, I was thinking of a journey. Life's journey. What some readers saw as "sticks", I saw as paths on that journey - with different lengths and widths, intersecting randomly along the way, and each made up of interesting and disorderly, yet beautiful, little bits. So I let the fabric "journey" travel across the width of the quilt and it became a panel.

All I did to finish the quilt top was to add wide swaths of solid above and below.

Though I debated ever so briefly about matchstick-quilting this one, its size (38"x42") determined that wouldn't be a great idea. Instead, I went with my original thought, which was to do wonky spirals, a la Fissures.

With an Aurifil 50wt #4653 (Limeade), I first spiraled within the boundaries of the pieced panel. 

For the bordering panels, I marked lines extending the "paths" and spiraled within those areas with my basic Aurifil 50wt #2000 (Beige). As a final touch, I did matchstick-quilt within the lines of the extended paths, and I really like that added detail. 

It was a bitterly cold day when we took "Unknown Journey" out for a photo shoot yesterday. Though the settings were fun, the lighting doesn't show off the details as clearly as I'd like. Though in retrospect, that seems fitting for most of the journeys we find ourselves on, now doesn't it?

Linking with Fabric Tuesday and Finish It Up Friday.