There I was, confronting a snarling brown-and-green large-scale floral behemoth. Seriously. If it was an inch, it was 4 1/2 yards.
I remember thinking it was gorgeous when I bought it, eons ago. I must have been depressed at the time.
Really, it's good quality stuff, and rather elegant in a Morticia Addams sort of way. But since the local funeral parlor wasn't planning to re-upholster, I was going to have to quilt with it. I needed a plan.
Searching through my stash, I found a promising companion fabric: a floral with reds, blues, purples and greens on a background the color of coffee with a lot of cream. Sounds colorful, doesn't it? Nope. The miniscule spots of color were overwhelmed by a sea of tan with an overlay of tiny black dots. I had 3 1/2 yards of it.
The two fabrics seems to have some kinship. I checked the selvages. Sure enough, they were both reproductions from the 1840s. It must have been a bleak decade.
Ugly or not, the pair had the first essential element of a good quilt: strong value contrast. I was starting to think that this might work.
I cut ten 13 1/2-inch squares from each fabric, then sliced the squares twice diagonally to make quarter-square triangles. A total of 40 triangles from each fabric.
To be continued.....
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