Sneak Peek of the Black and White Quilt

Champagne and Chocolate
The Vermont Quilt Festival opens tonight. I really wish I could be there for the Champagne and Chocolate Preview. One can never have too much champagne or chocolate!

Anyway, I'll uncover this post at 7:30 tonight, the same time the Preview opens. I will be at the VQF tomorrow to check out the 200 contest quilts -- including my own -- and additional collections of contemporary and antique quilts. Here's a second sneak peek of the quilt I entered into the VQF contest. I do not expect to win any prizes but it sure is fun to get it out where people can see it. It's a crazy log cabin with improvised 4.5-inch blocks.

Colors
When I first offered to make this quilt, I asked the recipients what colors they wanted. Their answer was "black and white." My heart sank as I had been stashing blacks for a quilt for myself. Eventually, I realized I simply needed to buy more black fabric. No big deal, right? Plus I needed to add whites. In the end, I could not resist throwing in a few more colors.

Size, Label, Fabrics, and Pantograph
The size specification was "not too big -- but big enough for a nap on the couch." Here's a shot of the label and part of the border. The fabrics for the blocks and binding are quilting cottons, batiks, and one printed corduroy. The solid border is a Kaffe Fassett overshot -- sometimes it reads as gray, sometimes green; it all depends on what's next to it. Fassett's overshot has a lot of stretch in it and thus required a second border of traditional quilting cottons to bring everything back into control. The long arm quilting was done by Deb Randall using a panatograph called Sydney.

I hope to get a quality full-length shot of the entire quilt tomorrow and a a few more next week when I deliever it to its new home. I'll take a few shots of the matching pillow that has been waiting in NYC for it's companion quilt for an untold number of years!