Refiner's Fire

The project I'm sharing today is unique in a few ways. To start, the Instagram photo of the blocks on my design wall is my MOST liked photo of all time... like beyond double. Go figure. Also is the fact that it was made for a challenge with very specific guidelines. It's a black and white plus one challenge, though any mix of prints and solids was fine. But the finished size had to be 40" square. So those guidelines were more than I usually work with.



To add to all that, this piece was created for the Women of the ELCA (which I am) Tenth Triennial Gathering in July. The theme for the challenge is simply "all anew". That prompted me to think of a new day and a rising sun, though as I created this piece on my design wall, along the way it became more of a refiner's fire. And that's what I see in the finish.



To begin, I gathered all sorts of black and white prints and solids from my stash, and as I went, added in the gold as my "plus one." Using the stitch-and-flip method was very random, and I'd make several 3 1/2" blocks, find a home for them in the quilt layout, and go back and make more. It was all very fluid and in the moment, as well as an exercise in value as I moved from the black to the gold to the white.

For quilting, I chose to again use my three colors - Aurifi 50 wt #2692 (Black), #2140 (Mustard), and #2024 (White). I began with upward angled spikes in the center section with the Mustard, filled in below using Black, then added downward angled spikes in the upper section in White thread. Though I marked the very first row of spikes with my hera marker, all the rest were improvisational but approximately 1/2" apart. This design was really enjoyable for me to quilt and I'm sorry it didn't photograph better for you.



One little complication with my design and not knowing how much shrinkage would occur with quilting resulted in my piece being slightly smaller than the requisite 40" square. I solved this issue by trimming the quilted piece to exactly 40", which just happened to be barely outside of the edge of the fabric. Ie. about 1/8" to 1/4" of batting showed around the perimeter. Thus binding needed to be both cut wider and sewn more than 1/4" from the edge. But it all worked out! And finishing at 3/4" wide, I think the wider binding frames the piece nicely.

So I'll be sending this quilt off to Minneapolis soon and I hope to eventually see photos of it in the show as well as other quilts representing the theme. I can't say I've used my craft to create something faith-based before, or actually based on much other than my creative whim. So that was an added aspect to this project and good food for thought along the way. According to Merriam-Webster, one of the definitions for "refine" is:  to make improvement by introducing subtleties or distinctions. I hope that in adding another dimension of myself, I did that here.

This project was on my 2017 Q2 Finish-A-Long list!

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday!

See all entries here.