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end of the line was my friend Lili. She was kind of excited and
explained that she was finally finished with the house and wanted
me to make her a special quilt for her bedroom. Thus began the
story of the creation of the quilt - Lili's Stripes Galore.
Stripes
Galore
Country, where she bought an older home. It didn't have quite
enough room so she decided to have it enlarged and since the
home's previous owner had a very strange sense decor, she also
decided to completely redecorate every room.
She hired contractors to do most of the work, but, she, being an
artist, did all the color selections and repainting herself. It took
her a couple years to get it all done. Her bedroom was the last
to be completed, but, the day she called, she finally had 95% of
the house finished the way she wanted it.
Everything was just perfect, except for her bed. It needed a
special quilt that would be colorful but not overly bright. And it
should be earthy in tone to match the theme of the rest of the
room. She had an idea of what her quilt should look like and
called me to make it for her, so we made plans for me to visit.
I went to her house and she and I drew out the design of the
quilt. It turned out to be made of one hundred and forty three,
nine inch blocks, arranged in thirteen rows of eleven blocks
each. The blocks would be made of earth tone striped material
cut so that the block appeared to be made of multiple sized
boxes.
fabric to make the top. After visiting five different quilt shops
spread all over Lancaster County, we came back with thirteen
different colored striped fabrics, that fell into the earth tonal
range Lili wanted and a thick batting she wanted to use to make
the quilt puffy like a comforter. The easy part of the quilt was
done.
The next phase of the project required the making of the one
hundred and forty three blocks, eleven from each fabric. Each
block is made of four triangles cut from the fabric in a way that,
when the triangles are sewed together to make a square, the
stripes in the fabric match on each triangle to make little
squares within squares as shown in the image of the block
above.
Cutting the material correctly to make the squares was bad
enough, but now the blocks needed to be laid out so that no two
blocks of the same color touched on any side, and all colors
were randomly distributed over the total surface of the quilt. I
tried combination after combination but kept coming up with
situations where two block of the same color touched or the
colors weren't evenly distributed. I became totally frustrated.
My husband heard me complaining and came to see what was
wrong? I explained my problem and he suggested I let the
computer make the distribution for me. First, he had me
number all of the one hundred and forty three blocks with sticky
notes. Then he created this neat little computer program that
randomly selected the colors and placed them in the order they
would appear in the quilt. He ran the program and printed out
the color pattern. All I had to do was find the location of each
piece on the picture and put it in its place on the floor. I visually
checked over the resulting pattern and moved four pieces to
redistribute a couple colors and wow, the layout was done.
Lili and I had decided, that since she wanted a thick puffy quilt,
I would machine quilt it. I divided the top layout into nine
sections to sandwich them and then machine quilted each
section. I used two different colors for the backing and them
sewed the nine sections together as if the quilt was just a very
big nine patch quilt block. The blocks were bound together with
a matching light green fabric, which was also used to bind the
total quilt. This gave the quilt a reversible quality.
Lili was really pleased with the resulting quilt, and it has its
place of honor on her bed, in her newly decorated room.
Christ Church Travels With Foxy