I never thought I would say this, but I love making black and white Color Grid quilts. I thought for sure I would miss all the other colors.

The interesting thing for me is that I probably never would have made a black and white quilt–and now I want to make a dozen–if two things had not happened.

One, when you are student of Nancy Crow’s, she frequently has you start a class by making a black and white composition. I have never liked this assignment–and I have yet to succeed at it.

Two, when I was in Philadelphia last spring to attended the opening of ArtQuilt Elements, I met Nancy Bavor  who is the curator of Collections at San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.  She liked the piece I had in the show, so I showed her some photos of my most recent work. She looked at my work very thoughtfully and said, “You need to go back to working with prints.”

Yikes. I knew she was right. I’d been thinking about it but had no idea how to get there.

Back in my studio. I continued to hear her voice in my head. I tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t go away. The idea of adding the additional element of print to my work was just too intimidating for me to consider.  Finally, I hit upon a solution.

I decided to eliminate the color but add the print. It worked! From there, I went on to complete a Color Grid in neutrals, and after that there was no looking back.

This past week, I completed my second black and white Color Grid quilt. When I first started making Color Grids, I would make a complete quilt only to realize I should have used a blue instead of a green. Now, I make this smaller version. If I feel good about the smaller version, I’m hopeful that the larger, repeated version will be successful.

Some Color Grid quilts have medallion centers and some do not.

Here is my current favorite method for creating those medallion pieces.

Once you get the medallions cut out, its time to piece the grid to fit around the blocks.

I don’t think I will ever tire of piecing the grid to the blocks. It’s the point where I finally get to see the quilt!

Many years ago, I let Fletcher, our oldest son, name one of my early show quilts. He named it Spinda after a Pokemon. Since then, Ozzy, son number two, has been offering up names–he picked TRANCE for this one, and I think that is about right.

As I was making the quilt, I was thinking about snow at night. Some of the names that crossed my mind included Midnight Snow, White Out, and Snow Fight. But when I got to the end of the quilt, I realized that those were names for future black and white quilts. I am particularly excited about the idea of White Out.

Too many quilts. Sew little time.

It is Friday which means you should visit Nina-Marie’s Blog and see what other artists have been up to this past week.

Thank you for stopping by, and I hope you have a wonderful weekend planned. I will be in my studio stitching sweaters.

05 Apr This entry was published on April 5, 2013 at 12:26 PM. It’s filed under Quilt Stories and tagged Cutting Medallions, TRANCE. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.