Musings of a Menopausal Melon...mmmquilts: Project Quilting 17.5 Circadian Rhythm

This week's PQ challenge was 'My Complements' where we were asked to make a project using two complementary colours. Here is my quilt, which I named Circadian Rhythm.

I just love it! Read on for the story of how it came to be.

I started by pulling out a favourite book from 2000.

Not only does it teach colour theory, but it also has several quilts to make following the lessons within the book. I turned to Opposite Colours, and found Butterflies are Free which caught my eye, illustrating this colour harmony but with an accent. It uses blue-violet and yellow-orange with an accent of red-orange.

Peeking out is a colour wheel I made in a class I took from Judy Villett at Earthly Goods in Edmonton in 1998!

I liked the quilt, and the colour palette so off I went to my stash. The sun, moon and stars fabric was near the top of the dark blue pile. This is one I've had for well over a decade, maybe close to two, and have only used a bit here and there. This was my starting point. Sun and Moon complement each other too, right? It didn't take long to add a yellow, and some purples in the blue-violet and blue and violet ranges. Next I looked in EQ8 for this block, which doesn't have a name in the book. There wasn't anything, but in the Five-Patch category was one that was similar, so I added it to my PQ Sketchbook, deleted a bunch of lines, added in those I needed, resized the block, which was 7 ½" finished in the original quilt, to 15" finished, and coloured it accordingly. Cutting ensued.

I could have simply framed the centre square with rectangles, but that would have wasted precious fabric (the blue dotted print was not plentiful) so I made a trapezoid template to spec, and added ¼" seam allowances, easy. The above photo was taken after I'd made my first block, using the zigzag darker blue-violet print. It didn't have as much contrast against the blue frame, so I went back to my plastic drawers of 'under ½ yard' stash and found the marbled one which I really liked. Made a second block.

And agonized. For hours, I kid you not. Walked away at night, came back the next morning, asked MacGyver for his opinion, put it into my new Hey.Cafe Quilters...Not So Anonymous! café group and asked what they thought.

Sidetone: Hey.Cafe is a Canadian-made version of FaceBook, I guess how it used to be (I've never been much of a user and completely off since I quit being an IB ambassador) without the rage, without ads, data is stored right here in Canada, and it's free. Anyone can sign on, though apparently some states have passed draconian laws that won't let their citizens use other country's sites. Since Tod Maffin did a post about it, it has had thousands sign up. Consider joining the quilters' café...

The more I'd looked at them both, the more I was okay with the first block, though I still preferred the second one. But truth be told, I did not want to rip out that first block, and I did not have enough of the white background to make a fifth block. "Should I go with two of each?" I'd asked the café members. Sandy, who shares my last name, though hers was her maiden, not married, name, said that's what she was thinking, and the more I considered it, the more I liked it, because it made your eye move around. To preserve the marble blue-violet, of which there was barely a fat eighth, I used my 3 ½" HST template to cut the triangles as you can see in the cutting photo.

Next was finding an accent. I tried red-orange, orange, burnt orange, salmon (which, btw, looks terrific in my EQ rendition, probably because I put lavender in the marble or zigzag triangle patches). None of them felt right, until I went back into the blues pile of yardage and found this.

It's not this bright in real life but you get the idea of what a cool fabric it is.

Cool fabric indeed, though I've never used any of the .5 metre sitting all these years. It's another I'd bought with the idea of background for kaleidoscopes. I wanted just a zinger of sashing, so cut 1" strips to finish at ½" and had the idea of the pop of gold in the centre. Then I did a ¾" finished inner border of the same fabric.

Next I agonized (and I'm not exaggerating) over borders. More hours and walking away and asking MacGyver for thoughts. I'll spare you (and I didn't take photos) of all the iterations of blues, purples, blue-violets, medium blues, as well as the sun, moon and stars fabric, etc., etc..

In the end these two led to the top. There are three fabrics in the border: the aurora borealis, the blue ombré and the marble blue-black. The top measured 37 ½" square.

In keeping with the amount of agonizing I did over fabric, a fair amount ensued over what backing to use, and whether or not to use up the remaining aurora borealis, or sun/moon/stars fabric. When I pulled out Effervescence, and saw that it was the exact right size (but for a corner square about 3" which I carefully pieced in). that was it. I loaded it after cutting it to size with barely any breathing room as I wanted the border of that backing to fall perfectly at the bottom of the quilt back.

Straight lines went in the borders to help them flow together with large, about ½" spacing swirls in the quilt centre. I ditch-stitched in every seam of the four blocks except for the star points, and along all the sashing and inner border.

You can see the selvage in the photo above, yep that close, though sadly I'd loaded the top about ½" too high (better than running out of backing however!) so the lower bubble of every other dangling bubbles is gone. It still looks pretty stunning imho.

Even MacGyver said, "Oh wow," when I showed him Sunday morning.

I bought that bubbles fabric at a quilt show in Port Charlotte, FL, about nine years ago, just absolutely loved it, with no idea as to what I'd use it for. I'd used a bit of it in a couple of small projects (no clue what, maybe makeup bags?) because one top side had a 3" piece cut out and the opposite had a 2 ½" short strip cut out. A little y-seam filled in the one corner which gave me the width I needed since I trimmed the top 4" off.

Two choices popped out at me from the stash for binding, but this one, a gorgeous Hoffman Fabrics print, yet another percolating in the stash for years, bought as a potential binding for some quilt, somewhere, was the one.

I've taken a photo three times but I think the waves and silver sparkles wreak havoc with the camera focus! Sorry for the eye weirding out it causes here.

The sun, the moon and even the stars have long fascinated and captivated me. I follow the moon cycles, and I'm a sun lover from, well, birth, ha. As I finished up the binding Sunday morning after teaching yoga, which saw me getting up at the ungodly hour of 5:50 aka 6:50 on Daylight Savings Time, which meant in the dark, the name came to me. I love being woken up by the sun, and feel best when I do, so DST irritates me deeply, not just figuratively, but literally. BC has decided that this is the last time they are moving their clocks, and they will remain on DST permanently now, not going back to standard time come fall. I think that's wrong; they should have stayed on standard, as Saskatchewan and Yukon do. I sincerely hope Ontario will get some initiative, listen to its people, and remain on standard time one of these years.

I took a photo on the grass in the sun. The light blue Aurifil I used for the swirls blends in well over the quilt centre.

I used Essential Persian Blue for the ditch stitching, straight line quilting, and binding.

I have enough of all the fabrics but for the white, to make another though with slightly different borders, which I plan to list in my Etsy shop.

Quilt Stats:

Size: 37.5" square

Pattern: based on Butterflies are Free from the book Color Magic for Quilters
Fabric: Centre squares - Solstice by Nana for Balson Hercules Group; gold - Mercury by Alison Glass for Andover Fabrics; blue frame is Winter and Holiday Jewels, blue-violet corner triangles is Freefall and blue-violet star points is Shadowblush all by Benartex, zigzag blue-violet is unknown, white background is unknown, sashing is Imprints by unknown, Aurora Borealis in the upper borders is unknown, the ombré is Aurora collections by Takako for RJR Fashion Fabrics, and the bottom border is a cotton screen print style 568 by Benartex; binding is Kaleidoscope Style by Hoffman International Fabrics.

Batting: Nature's Touch 100% cotton by Pellon

Backing: Effervescence by Robert Kaufman

Quilted: on Avril, 38 880 stitches

Threads: pieced on my Bernina with Essential; quilted with Aurifil 2715 and Essential 21144; rayon by Floriani in the bobbin.

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