this quilt is called a kiss for paul.
paul is my dad, who passed away in october 2015, after a year long battle with pancreatic cancer. this quilt will always remind me of my parents, and mostly, of my dad.
i started working on this quilt, doing the crazy, improv piecing when i was down in florida, staying with my parents, about two christmases ago. i was sitting around bored and decided to go to the local joann's for quilty provisions. so a lot of the fabrics are new, and most of them aren't fancy stuff. maybe there's some denyse schmidt? that yellow on yellow calico? i'm not sure.
the X block i used throughout this quilt is from victoria findlay wolfe's book, 15 minutes of play, and really, the piecing technique is also borrowed from that which she details in said book and in her workshops. the craziness of made fabric, as a concept, has really resonated with me, and i've used her method to make a lot of made fabric over the last few years. i'll always and forever be indebted to victoria for her aesthetic and technical inspiration and encouragement in that regard.
so, why didn't i just use one color to frame each X throughout the whole quilt? to that, i say, why should i? i like the idea of surprises in a quilt, and i've come to believe that surprise in art and, by extension, quiltmaking, is what gives a work life and energy! why not throw in some blue green fabric somewhere, even if it appears nowhere else in the whole quilt? why use all the same yellow fabric throughout? why not use a fabric that has texture, like a flannel? why cut fabric on the straight of grain? why not cut it off grain? why are there so many damn rules? why not break them and see what happens for the hell of it? so what if it doesn't work out. and what does "working out" really mean? beauty (and ugliness) are in the eye of the beholder.
why does it remind me of dad? my father was a super snappy clotheshorse, and wore color fearlessly. he stood out in a crowd. maybe some of the blocks in this quilt do too. maybe the whole damn quilt does. i'm down with that. it's how i roll.
this quilt was longarmed by frank palmer, of orlando, florida. note all the opposing lines in the Xs and the blocks that hold them. lines for days.
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incidentally, this quilt has a lot of purple in it. purple happens to be the color for pancreatic cancer awareness. it wasn't intentional, but in retrospect, it's fitting.
RIP, daddy.
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i found out this afternoon that it was accepted to hang at Quiltcon 2016, in pasedena, california.