Hope

This quilt began with the backing. I had this Alexander Henry fabric featuring Frida Kahlo for a couple of years. Or so. I just searched online and saw it was released in 2016. So maybe a bit longer than two years.

One day in the fall I pulled it out of the stack and looked through my solid fabrics. I kept looking at the fabric, trying to think about shapes for the quilt and settled on something improv. Then put it all away because Christmas was coming and so were bags of t-shirts from a few people I know.

After I finished the flannel quilt, I looked through my cabinet and pulled these fabrics back out. I dug out my copy of The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters by Sherri Lynn Wood, took a deep breath, and started. I chose the Patchwork Doodle project from the book, mainly because I liked her finished version but could also see how I could tie in some of the shapes and the colors I had chosen. She has you make short groups of different shapes, kind of like doodling on paper, and then seeing what becomes of it. I began with that two along the top--as a set of 4 patch squares that I then cut apart and made into this piano key looking strip. I made the rail fence strip, and then the half circle blocks. At that point I was starting to want to think through the composition a bit before I sewed those together. I liked them side by side, thinking it looked like the colors of a sunset. I played around with them a bit and then looked back at the inspiration fabric. That is when I finally noticed the little flag she waves. Esperanza. Hope. And that became the theme of this quilt and all the rest of what I did. From the half circles and rays signifying the new chances we get every day with each new sunset and sunrise. The bright glowing colors much like how hope seems to glow inside us once we latch on to it. And the hope of spring. I'm sure there was more. And truthfully some pieces of shapes were less "hope"  and more based on what fabrics I had left to use and the space I needed to fill. I had great hope that it would all fit together!

I could tell toward the end that all that I wanted in the quilt top was going to be slightly longer than the backing piece, so I used the last larger pieces of the fabric to make a stripe ruffle at the end. Sometimes that would be placed 1/3 down, with a cut in the backing, but I really did NOT want to make some random cut in the backing and lop off a head. Already have enough weirdness at the bottom with the purple hair meeting the stripe. Of course looking at that now, I could have cut just a bit off of the main fabric and avoided that. Lesson learned.