I wasn’t supposed to go to Festival of Quilts this year, and I certainly wasn’t going to submit a quilt to the exhibition. But here we are: I am doing both. :-)
Long story short: when I decided that I would go to FoQ there was about two weeks until the exhibition submission date. Could I make a quilt top in that time?!
Yes, I could! But only because I already had a bunch of these small square blocks. I think I had around 250 of them. I started making them 1-2 years ago, as an in-the-background project to use up fabric scraps.
I needed to make some “stacked coins” strips for the centre of the sections with the small blocks because otherwise the quilt math wouldn’t math.
Weirdly, though, neither of the two opposite stacked coins were the same width although you’d think they would be. Right?! If you look at the full picture of the quilt, perhaps it is not immediately obvious, but once you notice… It is what it is, I did not have time to figure out why. And probably no one will notice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also had a bunch of wonky log cabin blocks, although I did have to make a few extra to add particular colours. And just a few days before I decided to make the FoQ quilt, I had been playing around with the braided blocks next to the central panel.
Again, to add a wider selection of colour, I made some blue braided blocks as well as the orange and green ones I had already made.
Then I got the idea that there should be corner blocks that were different from the other blocks so I went with the simple diagonal strips one. For the two corner blocks nearest to the centre I made single colour diagonal strips and for the outer two I mixed up the colours. Not entirely sure why but I think it worked out well. :-)
The back is one half of a double sided duvet cover. Because quilt fabric is expensive and if you look out for sales, and you’re not too perfectionistic, you can buy duvet covers for a fraction of the cost. I think I paid £12 for the duvet cover. And since I only used one side, I have backing fabric for another quilt. :-)
It took me a while to decide what to do about the binding. Or maybe I would face it? In the end I found this light green spotted fabric in my stash but then I thought that would be a bit boring so I dug even deeper in my stash and added some sections of the striped fabric. I think I have had both fabrics for at least 15 years. Maybe they were waiting for just this purpose…
Just the quilt top… I think I knew almost straight away that I wanted some kind of message on the quilt, this is what I came up with. Generative AI (well, AI in general) makes me so mad. The theft of human work, the impact on nature (the theft of water, especially), and how lazy it makes people. Two years ago, people could write their own emails, now they ask a slop machine to do it for them. Yuck.
I called the quilt “I Don’t Want AI Everywhere”.
The quilt is wonky and far from perfect but I am ok with that. It just shows that it was made by a human. :-)
I’ll be at FoQ on the Sunday so do say hi if you spot me. I may be lurking by the quilt to hear some reactions to it. :-D
