The Second Quilt For Ellen

Soft, dark colors.  Lots of grays with blues, purple and black.  That was the description of the colors that Ellen sent me for the second quilt I’m making her for Christmas.

But I struggled with the idea of soft, dark colors.  I kept seeing a pale faded quilt in my mind.  So I pulled out all the gray fabric I had in my studio, found what looked like to me a soft dark blue and soft dark purple.

Then I went to Carroll’s Trading Post in town and found a gray pair of pants and shirt.

Back in my studio, I stood staring at the fabric I had scattered on my floor, waiting for it to tell me what to do.  That’s when I thought of the black and gray square I pieced together last year for another quilt and never used.

I had a feeling it would be a good starting piece.  All I had to do was find it.

It was on top of my shelf in between a stack of old quilts.  I removed a strip of fabric off the top that didn’t seem to work anymore, laid the square on my floor and began building around it.

The first pieces of fabric I sewed on were the gray ones with the curvy lines.  I like how they softened the original square.

And that square on the bottom next to the blue is actually a purplish-gray color, that works with the warmer grays, even though it looks beige in the photo.  It is truly faded.  It came off a quilt top that I had hanging outside my studio at Old Bedlam farm.  Tomorrow, in the daylight,  I’ll get a more accurate photo of it.  It has some wonderful fade marks on it giving it a flowing texture.

There’s’ something figurative about the center of the quilt, the three circles on the center strip like buttons, the gray and white curves like shoulders and arms.   So much movement at the center, I could see surrounding it quietly.