Quilts from the Past

I have been scrapbooking lately and while going through pictures on my computer, ran across these quilt photos. It is a blended quilt I made in 2004 for my nephew using Japanese fabrics as a focal point. If you are not familiar with blended quilts, they were made very popular by some books by Sharon Yenter and Marsha McCloskey several years ago and also many fabrics were designed specifically to use for them. Toiles are especially good but with this quilt I decided to try many types of fabrics so there are old, new, plaids, batiks, Japanese, etc. I was pleased with the way the quilt turned out.

It was quite fun auditioning fabrics on my design wall to see what would work best for the 'look' I was after. Rather improvisational in a way as I had no idea what the quilt would look like when finished yet I just kept playing until it looked right in my eyes. I had a plan as far as the layout and blocks and size, because I took that from one of the Blended books, but I had to fill in all the blanks with my fabrics.

I once put some blended quilts in a judged show and one comment I had from one judge was that some of the stars were 'lost' in my quilt. Well, that is part of the blended look. You do not have the distinct separate blocks as in a traditional quilt yet these are drawn from antique quilts. We wonder, did they just run out of fabric? Did they purposely like the look, what were they thinking?

I personally like quilts that draw my eyes in and make me try to figure out what is going on - sort of like a mystery I suppose. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the view. Makes me want to get back to my blended stash. I like to read Ann Champion's blog where she posts "quilts from the cupboard", so this is a similar thing, quilts from my past. Seems I have many more past than present right now. Happy Quilting!