The Easter Quilt: Welcoming Spring

Phlox announces Spring in my garden

Spring is a season of light, warmth, and color, new growth, mystery, and surprise. It's a time of change, but not the dramatic rupture. Instead the gradual, careful, day by day unfolding of beauty and unimagined possibility. e e cummings captures this in his poem "Spring is like a perhaps hand":

Spring is like a perhaps hand 
(which comes carefully 
out of Nowhere)arranging 
a window,into which people look(while 
people stare
arranging and changing placing 
carefully there a strange 
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps 
Hand in a window 
(carefully to 
and fro moving New and 
Old things,while 
people stare carefully 
moving a perhaps 
fraction of flower here placing 
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

Cumming's poetry is known for its blending of traditional and modern. He experiments with syntax, intentional misspellings, and playful suggestion. To my mind, this is a lot like modern quilting. The careful hand of Spring also reminds me of the quilter's hand, moving a fraction of a block just so, shifting these lines an inch that way, changing the color just a shade, perhaps, and soon, before our eyes, the whole landscape has transformed.

Spring Bunnies

My Easter quilt began with a single piece of fabric:

Furoshiki Cotton fabric 20" x 20" - a Japanese wrapping cloth

This wonderful fabric was designed as gift wrap. But it just begged to be featured in a quilt. The playful bunnies wanted room to frolic. I had read that modern quilters like to use white fabric backgrounds and aren't afraid of negative space. I am personally allergic to negative space and always mess up white fabric, but I had seen some really beautiful examples of minimalist modern quilting that I greatly admired, so I thought this would be an opportunity to ease into the concept.

The rejected design

I chose a simple frame-effect for the blocks. Once they were complete, I needed to arrange them. My first, very unmodern arrangement looked like this:

This was clearly no good. I needed to play with the syntax and misspell some words. I had left over strips of solids and blue batik from making the blocks, and began to experiment with arranging them as a frame around the frames. Here was the second attempt:

Arrangement #2

The second arrangement seemed much better to me. But about halfway into the construction of the quilt top I realized that I had designed a sideways quilt. That is, if this quilt was going to fit on a twin bed, as I hoped it would, my frolicking bunnies were facing the wrong direction. This happy accident required a redesign on the fly and helped me to break out of the 3x3 grid pattern I had inherited from the original fabric.

Here is the bunny side of the completed quilt:

To be honest, it's not my favorite creation - the fact is, I still don't like negative space. I like the original fabric better! I gave it a try, and I'll keep experimenting. Quilting with pastel colors was also an experiment for me - I gravitate toward bright, pure colors. But these tints had a calming effect on my spirit. And to remedy my discomfort with all that empty space that could have been filled with color, you'll see in the next post what I concocted for the back of this Spring confection.