Orange Raspberry Quilt finish

Orange Raspberry quilt finish 29' x 57' 

This was a small quilt project I made as a gift. It's for a friend from my college Printmaking classes at Pratt Institute who has a new home of her own she acquired last summer. It is her first home which Keith and I went to visit during our big road trip last August. She has a big collection of artworks and had reserved a special place for one of my quilts. While we were there we measured the spot she reserved, intending for me to match up the space to fit the finished quilts I have at home. It is a place of pride by the wood stove in an alcove right in the center of the living room. I suspected right away that my finished quilts are a little bigger than what would fit in this space but I kept quiet because the idea to create a custom quilt suddenly leapt into my head.

left or right of the wood stove spaces reserved for a quilt

The 1930s bungalow front porch

I began this quilt with orange fabric because of the reactions to my finished quilts she had given while visiting Washington, DC and I know she likes orange.  I wanted to experiment with several new techniques. The fabric colors I limited to orange, orange-red solids and a raspberry stain magenta print. I began with several blocks from the improv workshop with Denyse Schmidt last summer that I decided not to put in my bigger all orange quilt. It took off from there making new blocks by whacking those improv blocks up to making new ones.  Then I began using a new technique of the eighth inch strip stripe inserted in a block which I discovered on Instagram. This is an example below. 

these colors are closest to the real quilt colors. 

While working I was thinking about handsome mid century chair's upholstery color and dots and the lines in the architect's modern garden features as references to fit this angled improvisational quilt design with round dots and triangles of hand quilting on the finish. 

orange dots on pink mid century chair

garden view 

It fell together quite fast since it is small and I had a lot of fun playing with the colors and pieces to create the top. Once the top was assembled I used an art quilt technique to put the three layers together. Instead of a binding tape around the raw edges, I used an envelope or pillowcase technique for the first time. It worked quite well and gave a nice finish without a tape frame. 

The quilting was fun. I used a contrasting pearl cotton size number eight with big stitch to show the piecing off and followed the angles then added circles to reflect the chair's dots. As you may notice the quilt colors are different in each slide. While photographing these close value oranges and high contrasting magenta I learned it confuses the camera. In some lights it looks like yellow and purple but that is not the way it looks in person. I marked the slide that comes closest to the real colors.

I gifted the finish to my friend just after Christmas when she came to visit and it was such a surprise and I gather she is very happy. She went right home and hung it in the space she showed me she wanted to display an original quilt last summer on our visit. Bonus shot includes one very interesting cat named honeybee passing by the new art work and she is the reason this collector doesn't think she can take home a quilt to use on  her beds since miss Honeybee sleeps on them. I liked the cat and wonder if there is a color quilt I could make that wouldn't show her fur? 

Finished Orange Raspberry Quilt 12-21-2015 

size 29" x 57" all cotton 

hand quilted with pearl cotton #8

label on the back