Arabesque

And here she is, all pretty and toute finie!

I couldn’t be happier and more over the moon with this finish. Who knew it would end up so pretty, and, as people have commented and I agree, that it looks as if it was planned from the get-go!

This is not the case—it was designed each week on the design wall according to whatever prompt was given by one of the hosts that week. This is a Stay At Home Round Robin, the brainchild of Gail @quiltinggail who, during the pandemic and the lockdowns, wanted to connect and sew with others online. A round robin is a quilt where you start with a centre and then build around it, each border that surrounds the centre having a different design element. With Gail’s approach, she and five other hosts gave the theme or prompt for each of the six rounds.

Here is how it evolved from the first orphan block I made waaaay back in the very early 2000s.

Top left: orphan block; top right: round 1 Snowball blocks; bottom left: round 2 HSTs bottom right: round 3 stars and round 4 slashed squares

Top left: round 5 quarter log cabin blocks, top right: round 6 kite blocks beginning plan with floral border fill which echoes round 1, bottom left: combining rounds 5 and 6 with leaf blocks using the kite block for the centre point, and bottom right: flimsy finished by filling in the outer border with the echo of the inner pink and cream border

Arabesque Development over the past three months with links to the posts

Round 1 - Make a King's Crown block or a block that starts with the first letter of your name: Snowball is mine

Round 2 - Incorporate HSTs

Round 3 and Round 4 - Add stars and Add slashed square blocks (I combined the two prompts into a 6" wide round. 

Round 5 - Add quarter or half log cabins

Round 6 - Add kite blocks

Why Arabesque? Well as I was working on binding it, I let my mind ponder a name. I wanted a romantic feminine name because the quilt definitely has that vibe. The author of the memoir The Mango Tree, which I'm currently reading, has a great first name: Annabelle. It resonated but I still let my mind meander...and in flowed Arabesque. It has lots of meaning for me: it's the name of a beautiful piano piece by Robert Schumann ( here is a link where it is played by Vladimir Horowitz) that I played for my grade 10 Toronto Royal Conservatory piano exam, it is a beautiful ballet posture, and, when I looked it up, according to the Collins online dictionary it is "a type of curvilinear decoration in painting, metalwork, etc, with intricate, intertwining leaf, flower, animal, or geometrical designs."  Perfect!

I started off quilting it with flowing lines à la Lorna @SewFreshQuilts, but after six passes, I couldn't get the flow to look like hers, despite a secret way of quilting it that worked (mostly) once before. Sigh. I spent more time ripping it all out that first day, than actually quilting. Before I got too far with ripping, I 'felt' the floppy flowing feathers (gosh that's a good alliteration not originally intended!) design,

Wednesday evening

and just went for it, and loved it. Yep. Finished ripping, and the next day, yesterday, off I went.  Lovely soft texture.

However, a few of the elements needed a little custom quilting. 

The leaves got veins.

Ha! I just realized that photo caught my quilted in trademark initials at the bottom corner, though they're sideways because when I lifted up the lower corner to get a shot of the leaf detail while I was outside , I didn't even see them.

The navy floral (same fabric as the original vintage block - all used up now) got a little dot to dot.

Here is the back, another vintage fabric I snagged probably on a quilt guild shop hop somewhere in Alberta on sale. When I saw a sale fabric I loved, I would buy a few metres (this one had three) aiming to use some on the front and the rest on the back. It was a way to build my colour palette for the front, using a theme fabric, which is really still a great way to build colour palettes. But that's not how this SAHRR quilt evolved which tickles me. My today self thanks my past self for always thinking of my future self!

Here is the label. Isn't that backing just absolute perfection? The burgundy and blue label fabric too!

Swirled up on a patio chair, waiting to be snuggled under, maybe while reading a book in the spring sun. A few people have said this could be a pattern, and I am going to take that under advisement!

Interesting fact: there are no less than eight burgundies in the quilt!

Quilt Stats:

Size: 51.75" square before quilting
Fabric: stash and scraps

Batting: Pellon 93% cotton with 7% polypropylene scrim

Backing: Maywood Studios

Quilted: on Avril, my Handiquilter Avanté: 99 801 stitches

Threads: pieced with various on my Bernina; quilted with So Fine 402 polyester, navy Aurifil and fuchsia PolyX polyester; Bottom Line in the bobbin

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